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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC9Nwn0BgVc

you mother fucker

OVERWHELMED BY POOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOI

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why

Mac, did your account get hacked?

poi?

For casuals a narrative system, or at least a more freeform system is good because that's how you initially imagine roleplaying games. "You can try anything; just do what you'd do if it was real life," and then they try to do somethng and get entangled by 500 rules. But once you learn the ropes it helps give definition and consistency to the game. I like both.

GMs /should/ run what they like, since if they don't like the game then it's going to suck for everybody anyway. The trick is just having players who also like the same stuff.

But yeah, no amount of rules will save you from bad players/GMs. The most important part of the game is having the right people.

I'm all for story steering rules over probability simulation rules. In my opinion, the latter foster a very specific and unhealthy kind of metagaming - the number-crunching, min-maxing kind. Also, simulation rules are usually harder to handle by casuals*, which I consider a bad thing (although some elitists/basement dwellers think the opposite).

*It's not that casuals don't understand the rules. It's more like, they often have no idea of the chance of success of any particular course of action. That hinders their participation.

As for the GM versus collab approaches, both are fine (just make sure the biggest jerk doesn't end up as GM). Having played both kinds of games, I've made this observation: Collab games can get inconsistent when players want to steer the story in opposite directions (the dreaded tug-of-war). We ended up house ruling to avoid that. On the other hand, GM games with a competent GM always ended up being the kind of games the GM wanted them to be. Which is good, except when that's not what a player wants it to be. So the tug-of-war is still there, only that the GM side always wins.

More generally: if your group all play nice, any system will work, or no system at all. If they don't, you're pretty much fucked no matter what you go with. It's all damage control. In traditional games, keeping shit under control is the GM's job (but god help you if he's one of the jerks). In collaborative games, it's everyone's job. My advice: Don't play with jerks. Also, don't be a jerk.

It's not an explicit brand or anything. Just an approach to game design. The Forge was a community of game designers founded about 15 years ago to generate theory about how to make new kinds of RPGs that have mechanics which focus on pushing a specific kind of game experience. Nowadays their separation from traditional RPGs is mostly complete, and they managed to popularize their ideas to the extent that a lot of newer indie games from that point on were influenced by that ideas. Though you still get problems when they try to come back and make traditional games like D&D more Forge-y.

A good example of a game where the mechanics themselves help create the kind of experience the game is focused on is Dread. It's a game version of a slasher film, where your characters try to escape their grisly demise. Whenever your character wants to do something, you pull a block out from a Jenga tower. If it falls, your character gets horribly murdered. So you feel the anxiety the game is trying to make you feel just from having to pull the block out.

Interesting, I have actually never heard about forge games, they sound more like party games than PnP RPGs tho.

Originally Posted by Christemo

Please do, Siriel's were great so I think these'll be the same.

Yeah, I was thinking something similar. Although I have to reconstruct it from memory rather than using an online game.

Please do, Siriel's were great so I think these'll be the same.

Yeah, do it.

Do you dare? I dare you to dare. You might even say that I myself dare to dare you to dare yourself.

*Inception noise*

Do it, sounds like it'll be funny.