ChrisRevocateur wrote:
And that's one of the reasons I don't play PFS or any other living campaigns either.
Fair enough!
ChrisRevocateur wrote:
In no place did I attribute the cause to the format, only that the format has those issues. Someone said that the kind of digital tools I was speaking of in the original post were akin to playing MMOs, and I was refuting that, on the basis that those digital tools do not restrict storytelling or roleplaying, nor do they create a shared world with respawning quests or continuity issues.
Also fair, and I do regret bogging down the thread in yet more of this tangent, which I think does distract from the much more interesting ideas engaged in at the start of the thread.
ChrisRevocateur wrote:
Now, what assumptions am I making that aren't true?
My comment there was mainly in light of the original comment, which seemed to make some assumptions about the current feel of things without, clearly, having any actual experience with those games:
"Sounds to me like that makes it even more true than before. Now, not only do you "save" the town only to have the next person come through find it in the exact same predicament that you just saved it from, but while you're running around buying stuff and talking to townsfolk after rescuing it, there's someone else running around the same town at the same time, trying to save it from flames and Horde that don't exist to you. Major disconnect there. Coherent story = gone."
As noted, you don't have another person running around town at the same time after you saved it. Many MMOs, these days, have a system that works quite a bit harder to preserve that coherency and help you feel the impact of your actions on the setting.
Additionally, you later blamed this on the limitations of the system, and that you couldn't get around this shared-universe issue without substantially more robust economies/ecologies/AI/quest systems. But, as I was trying to point out, many of those elements aren't really what causes the breakdown in experiences, and it is just as capable of occuring in a tabletop RPG as an MMO.
Anyway, it is certainly fair to find that element disruptive and prefer to avoid games that allow for it. I just wanted to clarify what I felt the best comparison actually was.
