Quote from: John Morrow;567067I think seeing the leading brand that defined the hobby knocked down to second-rate status by an upstart because fans would rather play an older version of the rules rather than the new edition is a pretty heavy piece of damage to a brand that's been essentially synonymous with the hobby since it started.

Yes, but who's fault was that?

Quote from: John Morrow;567067First, role-playing is a group hobby rather than an individual hobby.  More choices further fracturing an already small hobby into incompatible subgroups is not the way to keep a social hobby alive.  More choices are not necessarily a good thing if the dispersal of the audience between the choices produces insufficient density for any choice to maintain it.

Strangely, I haven't seen multiple options fracture the boardgame groups I participate in.

You make it sound like RPG players want to stick to a single game. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if the choice of game is Pathfinder or D&D4, then it's not my game, so why do I care? I'll never be participating as a player, and most likely those players will not be participating in the RPGs I run or play.

If only we had one true RPG to bind us all together.

Quote from: John Morrow;567067Second, the more serious problem is not fracturing the player base but saddling the standard-bearer and traditional gateway game into the hobby with the idea of "coherency" such that the 4th Edition offered little to nothing to anyone other than the niche it was specialized to cater to.

I feel the same way about AD&D, D&D3, and D&D3.5 as well. In fact, I think AD&D ruined every setting forced to work with it other than things like Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms (you know, D&Dish settings). And d20 did much the same thing to an even larger array of settings.

Quote from: John Morrow;567070Do you understand what coherency means in Forge theory?

Yes, but coherency =! D&D4 being a boring sucky gamist RPG

Quote from: John Morrow;567070No, it's not narrating a result.  It's stating an intent.  Intent does not equal a result, no matter how much you desperately want to claim they are the same.

So?

Lets say it IS an intent. I've been calling it an intent. You roll for an action when you're trying to achieve an intent. And sometimes a player will simply state their character is taking an action, and not KNOW it's an intent until the GM requests a roll.

Quote from: John Morrow;567070You'd be great fun on a jury, arguing with the judge that there is no difference between attempted murder and murder because you think having an intent to do something is the same as actually doing it.

Actually, intent DOES matter in the United States legal system, and it's the difference between things like Manslaughter and actual Murder. Also the ethical difference between Murder and Attempted Murder goes away for me the minute the victim is injured in the attempt. So yeah, I would argue with the judge that the whole reason to lock up murderers and attempted murderers is because they're BOTH just as dangerous to society.

Regardless, an RPG is a fictional work, with fictional characters. And the difference between doing something and attempting to do something is nothing more than what the group decides is true about the fiction.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;567119'Impossible for chaosvoyager' != 'impossible for anyone else.'

Perhaps, but you have yet to explain your techniques on how you do it.

Trade secret?

Quote from: Black Vulmea;567119A trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco can go by a number of routes and involve different methods of travel, but it's still a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

An end point?

Dirty storygame.

Quote from: Benoist;567126If the sequence of events isn't linear but dynamic... then it's not a linear adventure, is it?

Careful, you might make him even dumber

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567061OK, but if the players' actions affect the direction of the adventure, then it isn't a 'Linear Adventure'.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;567119I think I lost a couple of IQ points from reading that sentence.

Quote from: Benoist;567126Please repeat for me your definition of a linear adventure. I suspect there's some difference in the way we define these. To me it's an adventure that is, well... linear, that is, it includes a sequence of events for the PCs that go like this: PCs are confronted to Event A. Then they talk to NPC1 in Scene B. Then from this they might learn about NPC2. Meeting with NPC2 gives a piece of information about who's behind Event A. Et cetera. That's a linear adventure, to me.

Upthread I described a linear adventure similarly - scene-scene-scene-conclusion.

But I don't think that's actually the definition of a linear adventure so much as the most common way it's presented in roleplaying games. A linear adventure is more about operational progress from a discrete starting point to achieve an explicit goal or end which is frequently external to the player characters, that is, the goal is imposed upon them by someone else. It is often structured as scene-scene-scene-conclusion in order to ape a story's rising and falling action, conflicts and crises, and climax.

Burned Bush Wells is an adventure which takes place in the eponymous town during a hard winter. There is a conflict between two factions, a powerful businessman and his crony marshal and the other business owners of the town. Sequential events in the adventure detail the steps taken by each faction to overcome the other, concluding with one faction or the other winning, depending on the involvement and actions  - if any - of the adventurers.

BBW can be viewed as scene-scene-scene-conclusion, but it can also be viewed as a timeline which exists independently of the adventurers; the adventure makes only very general assumptions about how the adventurers will respond, if indeed they respond at all, to the sequence of events. It's entirely possible for the adventurers to bypass all of the events, side with either faction, or progress from starting event to ending event in order.

The events of the adventure unfold linearly - a thief, helping the doc, a shotgun wedding, and so on - moving toward a conclusion. The events are even dropped at the player characters' feet. But what BBW doesn't do is presume the adventurers's responses to the events, and it loads up the referee with enough information to wing it if the adventurers try something completely different, and it even gives advice to the referee on how the events change based on adventurer action and inaction during previous events.

I hope that helps to clarify.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567141Perhaps, but you have yet to explain your techniques on how you do it.

I gave three examples from published adventures that describe how to do it.

Please, try to pay attention.

Quote from: John Morrow;567070No, it's not narrating a result.  It's stating an intent.  Intent does not equal a result, no matter how much you desperately want to claim they are the same.  You'd be great fun on a jury, arguing with the judge that there is no difference between attempted murder and murder because you think having an intent to do something is the same as actually doing it.  Please report for post-modernism poisoning detoxification because you've got a terminal case of post-modernism poisoning and don't even seem to know it.

Or, to use an Olympic-themed example: It's akin to claiming that Olympic diving would be the same sport if the divers got to dictate what scores the judges give them.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;567105You don't accept the premise that if you're doing something which has nothing to do with playing a role that you are not playing a role while doing that?

No. You said "If you are manipulating mechanics which are dissociated from your character — which have no meaning to your character — then you are not engaged in the process of playing a role."

I think you are begging the question. What does manipulation of mechanics have to do with playing a role?

QuoteYour definition doesn't seem significantly different from mine. What is the actual action of "pretending to be a character" and how does it differ from "making choices as if you were the character"?

Nobody actually makes choices as if they were the character. If they did, their choice would be to go back to the farm rather than enter the deadly dungeon. Let's not be silly about this. Pretty much anybody who engages in any pen and paper tabletop game makes choices based on what is best for the game and what they think would be fun - or, what will win them gold and XP - not "as if they were the character".

"Pretending to be a character" is exactly that: taking on the persona of somebody who you are not. It's rather simple.

QuoteOr are you arguing that any game in which you talk in a funny voice while rolling the dice is a roleplaying games? And do you understand that if that is, in fact, your argument that you are arguing that Risk and Monopoly are roleplaying games? And do you really not understand how that robs the term "roleplaying game" of having any meaning whatsoever?

You can certainly play Risk and Monopoly as if they are role playing games, by pretending to be a military dictator or a property entrepreneur respectively. Not many people do that, though - except in a very abstract sense. Which is why, by and large, those are not considered role playing games.

Do you understand why this doesn't rob the term "roleplaying game" of any meaning, but actually just attributes to it its actual meaning in terms of the English words of which it is comprised?

QuotePeople feel strongly enough about these issues that it broke the commercial back of Dungeons & Dragons and is forcing Wizards of the Coast to completely reboot their product line.

Gimme a break. People stopped playing D&D because they couldn't agree on what role playing games vis-a-vis story games were? It had nothing to do with the rise of video games, the general decline in social activities in the West, the growing competition from other leisure activities in general?

Outside of the echo chamber of internet forums like this, absolutely nobody in the universe gives a flying fuck about this issue.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;567119A trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco can go by a number of routes and involve different methods of travel, but it's still a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco

But if it involves many different methods of travel, it's not linear.

Having an assumed goal -- whether it's "reach San Francisco" or "kill the cultist leader" -- doesn't make a scenario linear.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;567119Now add a time-sensitive mission to it that the adventurers must complete against the background of that timeline.

That's still not a linear adventure.

Including a timeline in the situation you've prepped doesn't make the adventure linear (unless it's the train schedule the PCs have to follow in order to stay on the railroad tracks).

Quote from: NoismsNobody actually makes choices as if they were the character. If they did, their choice would be to go back to the farm rather than enter the deadly dungeon. Let's not be silly about this. Pretty much anybody who engages in any pen and paper tabletop game makes choices based on what is best for the game and what they think would be fun - or, what will win them gold and XP - not "as if they were the character"

Great insight there, Noisms.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567141Strangely, I haven't seen multiple options fracture the boardgame groups I participate in.

And I suspect that the boardgame groups that you play don't play the same game week after week, right?  I've been part of a Cosmic Encounters group that played that same game every day at lunch, streamlined down so that it could be completed in an hour.  There were some editions that were quite suitable for play that way and other editions that were essentially useless for playing that way.  And you'll notice that Monopoly hasn't changed a whole lot since the 1930s and Chess and Go players play those same games over and over without pining for innovation.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567141You make it sound like RPG players want to stick to a single game.

No, my point is that they want to stick to a recognizable sort of game.  Ask your board game club to switch over to Chess, Poker, Advanced Squad Leader, or perhaps even hopscotch for a few weeks and see how much buy in you get.  There are boundaries to what people want to do when they play a "board game" or "role-playing game".

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567141Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if the choice of game is Pathfinder or D&D4, then it's not my game, so why do I care? I'll never be participating as a player, and most likely those players will not be participating in the RPGs I run or play.

And that's really the crux of the matter, isn't it?  You don't really like traditional role-playing games so you'd like to see the hobby dominated by games more to your own personal tastes, regardless of how many many other people don't like it.

Years ago, I met someone who told me that James Wallis, the author and publishier of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen didn't much like traditional role-playing games either, and he tried creating experimental storygames like Munchausen, which he called "A Role-Playing Game in a New Style", because that was more to his liking.  So this all happened before Ron.  James Wallis just didn't know that the secret was to start a cult first.

People who actually do like traditional role-playing games can see that, at some point, the goal is to make a game that's not a traditional role-playing game, designed to engage the players in something different than traditional role-playing games do, generally at the expense of the things that people who enjoy traditional role-playing games enjoy and actually want in their games.  It does look very much like people want the name "role-playing game" but they don't actually want to play a role-playing game and don't actually like actual role-playing games very much.

So why should anyone care what other people do?  Because the size, health, and direction of the hobby affects what people can buy and the pool of players and GMs that a person can potentially play with.  

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567141If only we had one true RPG to bind us all together.

The hobby had that, to a large part, in D&D, which was a near universal experience in the hobby for quite a while.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567141I feel the same way about AD&D, D&D3, and D&D3.5 as well. In fact, I think AD&D ruined every setting forced to work with it other than things like Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms (you know, D&Dish settings). And d20 did much the same thing to an even larger array of settings.

And do you think you reflect the majority of the hobby or a niche taste?  Do the games you play sell on Amazon and sell in the tens of thousands of copies or do you find them on Lulu selling a few hundred or maybe a few thousand copies?

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567141Yes, but coherency =! D&D4 being a boring sucky gamist RPG

It does == D&D 4e being a specialized "gamist" game at the expense of other mainstream styles of play.  Yes, you can argue that D&D had been moving in a "gamist" direction for a while, but D&D 4e embraced it with such gusto that it alienated just about everyone else.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567141Lets say it IS an intent. I've been calling it an intent. You roll for an action when you're trying to achieve an intent. And sometimes a player will simply state their character is taking an action, and not KNOW it's an intent until the GM requests a roll.

A player that accepts that the GM can step in at any time and call for a roll understands that all of their statements of action, including movement and speaking are provisional upon the GM accepting that it happens which means that the player does not control the final result, the GM does.  Changing that power relationship seems to be the whole point of storygames, so I find it difficult to believe that you don't grasp the difference.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567141Actually, intent DOES matter in the United States legal system, and it's the difference between things like Manslaughter and actual Murder.  Also the ethical difference between Murder and Attempted Murder goes away for me the minute the victim is injured in the attempt. So yeah, I would argue with the judge that the whole reason to lock up murderers and attempted murderers is because they're BOTH just as dangerous to society.

Do you believe that both deserve the same punishment, which they would if the two were actually the same thing?

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567141Regardless, an RPG is a fictional work, with fictional characters. And the difference between doing something and attempting to do something is nothing more than what the group decides is true about the fiction.

I like the way you reframe the issue into storygame-ese but please spare me the post-modern nonsense.  It has to do with who in the group decides what actually happens.  Storygames assume that the players want narrative control and that they want to decide what happens to their own characters.  Let me clearly state that I have no interest in deciding whether my character succeeds or fails when they attempt an action where the character does not have a choice over whether they succeed or fail.  I don't want to do it and would avoid any game that forces me to do it.  And there are plenty of traditional role-players who feel the same way.  It defeats the whole point of playing for many people, for several different reasons.

When I play, I not only have no interest in having ultimate narrative control over whether my character succeeds or fails at uncertain tasks but intensely dislike being forced to make such decisions while playing.  It not only isn't why I play, it's detrimental to the reason I do play.  And it's detrimental to the reason why many other people play, too.  As an optional mechanic that can be ignored by everyone or by individual players at their own discretion, mechanics like Fate Points, Fudge Points, Hero Points, and so on can offer something to those who want to decide what happens to their character without demanding that everyone else who plays the game do the same thing.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;567144Upthread I described a linear adventure similarly - scene-scene-scene-conclusion.

But I don't think that's actually the definition of a linear adventure so much as the most common way it's presented in roleplaying games. A linear adventure is more about operational progress from a discrete starting point to achieve an explicit goal or end which is frequently external to the player characters, that is, the goal is imposed upon them by someone else. It is often structured as scene-scene-scene-conclusion in order to ape a story's rising and falling action, conflicts and crises, and climax.

Yeah see I don't agree with that definition. By that yardstick, if the objective imposed on the PCs in one way or the other is the determining factor of what is a linear adventure or not, something like S4 is a linear adventure. I don't think that's true.

I think the linear adventure is defined by its structure, that is, its development is linear, from one event to the next to the next to the ultimate conclusion. But I also do believe there might be ways to present a linear adventure in such a way as to stress on the GM that it does not necessarily imply a railroad, if each component is developed as a most-likely-development and includes caveats, advice to deal with situations where the PCs get off the expected path of development, which in my mind is something to be welcome, something that should not be dealt with using illusionism (switching scenes over so that they are played anyway whatever the players choose to do), but should be explicitly talked about in the adventure along with ideas on where the adventure could get the PCs from there.

There's certainly a fine line there from the point at which you have a linear adventure developing the most likely course of development of the game along with advice and hypotheticals covering alternate courses of action, and the full-fledged sandbox that explores various contingencies equally to present a toolbox the GM uses to run the game. Does it mean that developing linear adventures in such a fashion is basically a waste of time, or counter-productive, when you could instead develop a fully fledged-out sandbox that develops all these paths of development equally? Maybe. Probably. I'm still pondering this.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;567144Burned Bush Wells is an adventure which takes place in the eponymous town during a hard winter. There is a conflict between two factions, a powerful businessman and his crony marshal and the other business owners of the town. Sequential events in the adventure detail the steps taken by each faction to overcome the other, concluding with one faction or the other winning, depending on the involvement and actions  - if any - of the adventurers.

BBW can be viewed as scene-scene-scene-conclusion, but it can also be viewed as a timeline which exists independently of the adventurers; the adventure makes only very general assumptions about how the adventurers will respond, if indeed they respond at all, to the sequence of events. It's entirely possible for the adventurers to bypass all of the events, side with either faction, or progress from starting event to ending event in order.

The events of the adventure unfold linearly - a thief, helping the doc, a shotgun wedding, and so on - moving toward a conclusion. The events are even dropped at the player characters' feet. But what BBW doesn't do is presume the adventurers's responses to the events, and it loads up the referee with enough information to wing it if the adventurers try something completely different, and it even gives advice to the referee on how the events change based on adventurer action and inaction during previous events.

I hope that helps to clarify.

Hm. See there to me you are describing a sandbox with courses of action unfolding if the PCs do nothing whatsoever. The assumption is that the PCs will do something at some point that will change the timeline and it is from there the responsibility of the GM to adjust the events so that they respond to the PCs input. It's not a linear adventure in my mind.

Quote from: noisms;567361Nobody actually makes choices as if they were the character. If they did, their choice would be to go back to the farm rather than enter the deadly dungeon. Let's not be silly about this. Pretty much anybody who engages in any pen and paper tabletop game makes choices based on what is best for the game and what they think would be fun - or, what will win them gold and XP - not "as if they were the character".

"Pretending to be a character" is exactly that: taking on the persona of somebody who you are not. It's rather simple.

Quote from: silva;567424Great insight there, Noisms.

It's no wonder you guys don't understand what we're talking about. You are literally describing yourselves as color blind: it's all the same thing because to you, there's never been a situation in the game where you took decisions from your character's POV exclusively, assuming that alternate identity immersed in the game world and its specific circumstances, so naturally for you anything that is third-person POV including storygames is a role playing game. QED.

You don't see the difference between red and green, because you've literally never experienced those colors, by your own admission. So when we are describing them to you we come off as "silly".

Quote from: noisms;567361Nobody actually makes choices as if they were the character. If they did, their choice would be to go back to the farm rather than enter the deadly dungeon.

So nobody in the real world does dangerous or heroic things.  They all chose to stay home instead?  Free tip: the secret it to play the sort of character who would climb Mount Everest or run into a burning building to save people, not the sort of character who rolls over and goes to sleep when they hear a neighbor crying out for help.

Quote from: noisms;567361Let's not be silly about this.

Yes, let's not.

Quote from: noisms;567361Pretty much anybody who engages in any pen and paper tabletop game makes choices based on what is best for the game and what they think would be fun - or, what will win them gold and XP - not "as if they were the character".

I don't.  I've had a character die a rather pathetic and unheroic death from an addiction that was entirely the result from playing in character.  The GM even asked me if I wanted my character, a character I was having a lot of fun playing,  to die that way and I was OK with it.  I had another character in a D&D 3.5 campaign that essentially removed himself from the game before the last session, a session I would very much have enjoyed playing in, because it was what the character would have done.  Earlier in that campaign, I did make some choices based on what was best for the game, but I deliberately did so for the benefit of others, not because it was my own preferred approach to playing.  And I had yet another character flee from a PC and NPC for reasons that I didn't fully understand until later because I was so thoroughly in the character's head that the character was having subconscious reactions to the in game events.  

So speak for yourself.  

Many of the people I've played with over the years also played that way, to the point where some of the people wouldn't say how badly wounded their characters were in combat to avoid the other players having their characters step out of character and act on out-of-character knowledge to save them.  And I've also seen players walk out of their room when things were happening that their character wouldn't know about to help firewall that information from the character.  In fact, I've also seen players rebel against a GM who offered script immunity to a degree that was detrimental to verisimilitude because they'd rather their characters die and missions fail than the verisimilitude of the in character experience be broken.

I suppose I should also point out that it's not that difficult to find GMs on message boards griping about players who ruin their games because they insist on doing what their character would do rather than what would be best for their story, the enjoyment of the other players, or to defeat the challenge in front of the characters.  

Quote from: noisms;567361Gimme a break. People stopped playing D&D because they couldn't agree on what role playing games vis-a-vis story games were?

No, they stopped playing D&D because the game stopped making sense from an in-character perspective, for reasons that look "coincidentally" like the Forge coherency argument or perhaps simply because the designers don't have a clue about how a lot of people actually played the game.

Quote from: noisms;567361It had nothing to do with the rise of video games, the general decline in social activities in the West, the growing competition from other leisure activities in general?

So why Pathfinder is outselling D&D despite all of those factors?

Quote from: noisms;567361Outside of the echo chamber of internet forums like this, absolutely nobody in the universe gives a flying fuck about this issue.

Oh, people care.  They might not read message boards or care to think about or discuss the issue.  They just stop buying the books and maybe stop role-playing entirely.

Quote from: noisms;567361Nobody actually makes choices as if they were the character. If they did, their choice would be to go back to the farm rather than enter the deadly dungeon. Let's not be silly about this.

You're the one being silly.  The history of civilization is written by men who didn't stay on the farm and decided to see if in fact you did sail over the edge of the earth.  Why?  Because they didn't know.

All you've really done is proven, as Ben has said, you've never had an in-character moment in your total gaming experience, so yeah no big fucking surprise you can't see a difference between 1st and 3rd.  That part of your imagination just doesn't get used.  

Sucks to be you I guess, but now you can fuck off and let us insane people who can imagine things outside ourselves have our hobby kkthxbai.

Quote from: Benoist;567428It's no wonder you guys don't understand what we're talking about. You are literally describing yourselves as color blind: it's all the same thing because to you, there's never been a situation in the game where you took decisions from your character's POV exclusively, assuming that alternate identity immersed in the game world and its specific circumstances, so naturally for you anything that is third-person POV including storygames is a role playing game. QED.

Sadly, I fear D&D is in the hands of designers who have the same problem.

Quote from: Peregrin;567100Ain't nothing wrong with that.  If someone actively hated on all (or a lot of) pop-culture, it would say more about them than pop-culture.

But if you read what a lot of the people pushing storygames have written over the hears, they actively hate on traditional role-playing games, and it shows.  Don't feed me haute cuisine and call it McDonalds in an attempt to trick me into eating it.

Quote from: Peregrin;567100However, the difference is that pop-culture changes and evolves.  Aesthetic tastes and needs change with society.  A lot of people in this hobby don't want that.

While I agree that there are people who don't want any change, D&D 3.x was pretty enthusiastically embraced.  That system was designed to offer something to everyone, even though I don't think it succeeded fully in balancing those interests.  D&D 4e was designed to cater to a specific style of play and to produce a narrow type of game to the detriment of other styles of play and other ways of playing and it tanked.  It didn't lead a mainstream shift in the role-playing culture.  It stepped away from the mainstream and lost audience as a result.

Quote from: John Morrow;567430So nobody in the real world does dangerous or heroic things.  They all chose to stay home instead?  Free tip: the secret it to play the sort of character who would climb Mount Everest or run into a burning building to save people, not the sort of character who rolls over and goes to sleep when they hear a neighbor crying out for help.

Ditto.

Quote from: John Morrow;567430I don't.  I've had a character die a rather pathetic and unheroic death from an addiction that was entirely the result from playing in character.  The GM even asked me if I wanted my character, a character I was having a lot of fun playing,  to die that way and I was OK with it.  I had another character in a D&D 3.5 campaign that essentially removed himself from the game before the last session, a session I would very much have enjoyed playing in, because it was what the character would have done.  Earlier in that campaign, I did make some choices based on what was best for the game, but I deliberately did so for the benefit of others, not because it was my own preferred approach to playing.  And I had yet another character flee from a PC and NPC for reasons that I didn't fully understand until later because I was so thoroughly in the character's head that the character was having subconscious reactions to the in game events.

I tried to commit suicide as Ernest Wheldrake, my longest running character, I don't know how many times (one time as really "suicide", others while doing things that were so insane I should have died a dozen times over).

Once I was disgusted at myself because we had helped the Doge of Venise have a child after two thousand years spent as a corpse, a vampire, which destroyed her in the process. I was keeping the child with another PC (the actual Marquis de Sade, Toreador) and she grew really fast and I started having feelings for her which didn't seem parternal to me in nature. I considered myself a monster, a pervert who was poisoned at the core by the blood that had given me eternal life, and went to the Piazza Saint Marco to offer myself to the sun. No caveat, no "it's cool for the game" bullshit. I was in character and I was going to end my unlife. I was saved at the point of final death by an NPC and for a while it actually annoyed the hell out of me. Me as a player, AND me as Wheldrake. Then unlife went on, other things got in the way, and the personality of my character and his outlook on the masquerade changed.

Another time I went to the Vienna Chantry of Clan Tremere to challenge Etrius to the death. I honestly don't know how I made it out of there alive. I was SO PISSED at Etrius I wanted to gut him no matter the consequences (I was the Toreador Justicar at the time, despite being a Lasombra Antitribu... long story). That's another facet of Wheldrake's emotions he wears on his sleeve (he was modeled after the poet/namesake/nom de plume, and a mix of the romantics and the idea they had of knighthood, basically. He took a life of his own from there). I survived there again when I was expecting to die. It was one of the best game I ever played, not because I wanted it so as a player, but because it was fucking EPIC and it was all in character. It was brilliant.

Anyway. Yeah...

Quote from: John Morrow;567430So speak for yourself.

Ditto

Quote from: John Morrow;567430In fact, I've also seen players rebel against a GM who offered script immunity to a degree that was detrimental to verisimilitude because they'd rather their characters die and missions fail than the verisimilitude of the in character experience be broken.

That's me in a nutshell (see my initial reaction to being saved on my suicide attempt on the Piazza Saint Marco above).