Quote from: Simlasa;818192I'm still not getting why I'd want that... just seems like adding rules and jargon for stuff that doesn't need rules and jargon.

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Why bother?

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I don't see how that adds more fun... it actually sounds fucking annoying and nitpicky. Complicating something for no good reason.

Alright?  I mean, I'm trying to explain it for people like the OP who might be interested, not sell it to people who aren't buying.

Quote from: jhkim;818230I don't own the game and haven't read it, but I have played it at a gathering. Maybe the GM was straying from the system as written, but I found that the game was more jarring to immersion than just spending story points (as in Savage Worlds or Cinematic Unisystem). Things that affected this:

1) The split of scenes into procedural and dramatic. Just having explicit "scenes" as part of the mechanics makes it so, along with the idea that there is a point to each type of scene.

2) The split of the tokens into yellow, green, and red made it very explicit that as a player, I should get ahead by choosing to fail on some things.

I don't think there's much behind trying to binary divide RPGs into story game vs. traditional. However, Hillfolk's DramaSystem did seem to involve a bunch more out-of-character activity than many other games that have plot points or similar mechanics.

I don't know how much this ties in with Gumshoe, but number 1 was what I kept struggling with when I ran Esoterrorist. It wasn't anything you couldn't ignore, but I was trying to run the game as written to get a genuine experience of the system and the book assumes scene structures. Personally I do have to admit, structuring play around scenes makes my brain kind of fizzle out a bit, I just don't think that way when I play. However I will say, at least with Gumshoe, we could easily have just ignored that entirely.

Personally I am not troubled if some RPGs use this approach and if there are folks out there enjoying it. It isn't the sort of thing I find myself hoping for in a game, but I am willing to try such a system if one of my players really wants to give it a go. If Hillfolk is anything like my experience with Gumshoe, I expect there will be bits of it that really impress me, and bits that just don't resolve issues I have with systems or go against my natural style of play.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;818250I mean, I'm trying to explain it for people like the OP who might be interested, not sell it to people who aren't buying.

I very well might be inclined to buy... if I had a good impression of what sort of new experience it brought to the table.

To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't have anything to do with the Gumeshoe system other than that it was developed by Robin Laws. It's supposed to emulate dramatic TV shows like Game of Thrones or the Wire. While it's a story-style game, to hear Robin talk about it, his focus was mostly on figuring out how to emulate those dramatic TV shows rather than as some sort of generic replacement for all role-playing games (e.g., he doesn't market it on his podcast as a cure-all replacement like Fate often is sold). I've got zero interest in it but that's just me.