thread: 2010-08-19 : One of my favorite GenCon conversations
On 2010-08-27, Simon C wrote:
Jonathan,
I think what you're talking about (the move away from fictional causes in Trad. and Non Trad. games), is an interesting historical quirk. In both cases, it's about unease with unreliable currencies, but for different reasons I think.
The non trad. scene inherited a distrust of GM authority which made it unpopular to rely on the judgement of a GM to influence the outcome of a conflict. There was such a movement away from the idea of GM controlled story that the idea of the GM having any influence over outcomes was discarded.
In the trad. scene, I think the distrust of unreliable currencies comes from players who are invested in a strongly competitive mode of play, where the GM just "deciding" that you get +2 or -2 or whatever feels like it's cheating them out of what they're entitiled to. Imagine in chess if your pawns could move an extra space if you described them doing something cool, or if you couldn't capture pieces if someone declared they were atop a hill. Weird and disruptive of the agenda of play. I've only really seen this in 4E though, and maybe the new Warhammer game.
