In praise of Heroic power-scale play

[PhoenixPhyre]

Think there's some trouble defining terms here. People are trying to simultaneously define the power scale of both the system, the setting, and the story and coming into conflict because it's relatively easy to find examples that don't line up on all three simultaneously.

I don't think anyone would really debate that as a setting, WH40K is gritty. It literally codifies grimdark and even if you had a mythic quest to save an entire world, another nightmare factory could steamroll the place literally the very next day and nobody in the wider setting would even notice.

That doesn't mean that you couldn't pull the camera in and tell that mythic story from the point of view of the boots on the ground for whom the stakes actually do matter, and tell a mythic story in the gritty setting.

By contrast, I don't think there's much debate that Star Wars is a fairly heroic setting, what with it being a big sweeping space opera/western/samurai/swashbuckling/pulp/war story. And yet, Rogue One is a story about the desperate struggle of a bunch of freedom fighters who all die just to give someone they don't even know a fighting chance at saving the day. And the one person from the bigger heroic setting who shows up stars in what is essentially a one-minute-long slasher film from the perspective of the normies he's up against. Pretty gritty, particularly in contrast.

You're never going to fit anything into some sweeping theory that sums up every facet of it into a single word. So a better set of conditions might be called for here.

I was mostly talking about game styles. As in "how does this particular table play. And what kinds of stories and settings do they use." Not of systems (although some systems do some styles better than others as a general rule). And certainly not fictional stories as a whole. Or even settings as a whole.

And I've given up on grand unifying theories. These were more of definitions so I could sum up the things I like in a few words. Loose conversational shorthand, if you will.

The mechanics are the game telling you what is important. If the game doesn't tell you that the social stuff matters, you really can't fault people who don't care for it. If you want social stuff to matter, make it matter.

This is exactly the mechanics first and foremost attitude I dislike. For me, mechanics are helps. Tools to make some actions you're doing a lot easier. A shared language. Not anything truly indispensable or necessary. Just useful at times. And ignorable the rest. Games that try to force the mechanics into primacy, that demand that they be played in certain ways are games I dislike. Don't tell me, Mr rule designer, how I must play. Give me a box of tools, some prefab toys I can use or not, a framework to agree on, and then get the heck out of my way. I and my table will decide what matters to us. We don't need the rules to butt in and try to force us one way or another.