Recent content by pemerton

Duellist; fog; Gruxu; nandies; lost!

We did get in a session last Sunday. With two player present we had two PCs: Fea-bella the Elven Dreamwalker, and Telemere the Elven Ranger. Telemere's player provided the prologue, and thus was relieved of Exhaustion. The Elven duo decided to travel from the Forgotten Temple Complex...

Free-form roleplay seems like it involves fictional position. LARPing is different, because at least a fair bit of the position is actual, not fictional. In Diplomacy, too, the position - of having alliances or being betrayed - is actual and not fictional. I dunno. There seems to be a lot of...

Yeah, this was my first thought for a non-combat, non-adventure RPG. But then I had a second thought: Wuthering Heights. The rules are pretty short, and pretty simple, and free here <wuthering heights> or here <https://www.oocities.org/soner_du/files/wuther.pdf>. In my experience, a good...

Burning Wheel has its first version a bit over 20 years ago - I don't have a copy. The version that brought it to prominence is Revised (2004). But since then there have been two more iterations - Gold (2011) and Gold Revised (2019). It's that last version that falls within a modern/contemporary...

Burning Wheel and Torchbearer come pretty close in terms of rules elements, and have versions/editions that fall within the time span.

I can't comment on anyone else, but when I think of roleplaying, I think of what is distinctive about the play of a RPG from the perspective of player participants. And that is: *The player's "moves" - both what is permitted, and what will result from it - are shaped by the player's fictional...

I'll bring my receipts even if it takes me 10 years!

This seems relevant, at least: D&D General - Ben Riggs interviews Fred Hicks and Cam Banks, then shares WotC sales data.

Robin Laws has an essay in the Over the Edge rulebook, called "The Literary Edge". It includes the following passage (on p 193 of my 20th anniversary edition): Role-playing game changed forever the first time a player said, "I know it's the best strategy, but my character wouldn't do that."...

If the best move invokes the player's fictional position, then no. It is a player's fictional position, as mediated by the (imaginary) circumstances in which their PC finds themself, that makes a RPG a role-playing game.

Seems plausible! But there is also a strong normativity around "munchkin", "optimiser", "power gamer" etc. As if trying to make moves that the game permits, in order to succeed at the game, is some sort of departure from ideals. That normativity didn't exist in the early days of RPGing!

"Simulationism" - in the sense that the players of a RPG should have no aspiration beyond experiencing the fiction, as some combination of mechanics and GM narration present it to them - seems to have become a predominant orientation in the early-to-mid 1980s, and to have continued, perhaps in...

"Fictional positioning" means that the players' position - the moves available to them in the play of the game - depends upon a shared fiction. Most games do not have fictional positioning. Whether or not the play of a game tells a story isn't relevant to it having fictional positioning. Eg the...

I don't think that JRRT's work suggests that "the world sucks, people suck, etc". His work is optimistic, and that optimism is theological. Because it is theological, it is sceptical about the power of merely human agency; but that is not the only agency at work in the world, as JRRT sees it...