Post originally by Scott Knipe at 2003-09-09 16:17:26
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MFP,

My take on it is that MLwM employs genre conventions in a couple of different ways.

One is to help out those players who may be in unfamiliar territory. I know, this is a genre that most of us have some experience with. Even so, there's no guarantee that understanding of a given genre and its tropes will produce a story within it. If a designer wants to create a game to tell such a story, he damn well better have a way of ensuring that that story gets told, and that means system. Anything else is a crap-shoot. You might end up with something resembling such a story, but just as likely you'll end up with, well, crap.

The other reason for mechanical reinforcement of tropes, and the more important of the two, is as creative constraint. This, I suppose, is what people balk at. But far from being a straightjacket, this sort of constraint focuses and directs creativity. A friend once described it this way - creative constraint is the difference between a sonnet and free-verse poetry. Few people would argue that most sonnets are superior to free-verse poetry*. The reason being, the artist has to work for it, find a way to make it fit, and in the process, think about what it is he's saying. Same thing with MLwM.

You're right that rpgs aren't books, or movies, or tvs. Each of those things communicate imagined events in very specific ways. In an rpg, the imagined events are largely, if not exclusively, created by what the players say to each other. The point, then, of the game and its system must be to get the players to say the right kinds of things to each other. MLwM achieves that brilliantly.

- Scott

* This isn't a challenge. If you legitimately prefer free-verse, more power to you.