thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-07, Andrew Norris wrote:
I'm trying to articulate my thoughts without putting words in anyone's mouth, so please read this charitably and assume I'm not.I can't find the exact post (it's somewhere on the old site), but I remember Vincent giving a kind of mission statement for this blog. Something about how he's interested in roleplaying games that make thematic statements, and sure, there's other kinds of roleplaying games, but that's where his focus is. I tend to read all his posts in that light.
So if somebody (like John Kim) believes that celebrating, exploring, and extending the source material for its own sake is valuable and gratifying, I say, yeah, we know, lots of people do that. That's not an issue. We just want to do something else.
If somebody wants to instead figure out how to take a seed kernel of ideas and themes and spin that out into a setting and situation that deals with those themes, where do we go to get that? How does a prepublished setting help us?
I cringe to use the "S" word, but I guess I just can't see the point of defending Simulationism in one of the few places on the planet that's said, "Okay, we're going to talk about a lot of things, but one we're definately not interested is Simulationism." And Vincent shouldn't have to put a disclaimer in front of every post on his blog that says "These are my opinions, how about we discuss their implications instead of arguing they're false."
I apologize for the lack of constructive comment here, folks, but I'm hoping we can get past "Whether or not we agree" and to "Assuming we agree, what do we do next?"
