“but we’re definitely trying to aim for our own little niche.”

That one sentence, to me, clarifies a lot of what Silvervine goes for and I’ll look at it with a more ’story-telling’ eye.

Cool John!

the game.

The way I see it is DND is excellent for crunch based adventure. If that is what you want out of a game you are going to play

that. I play DND on sunday with a Geshtalt Swashbuckler/Rogue/Duskblade Changeling, and I love it

If we weren’t offering something different with our experience, something that isnt’ in other games, then there is no reason to play our game over theirs. The same can be said in comparison of any gaming system I think. White wolf offers great focused characterization in the themes of its games. If I want to play a vampire or a werewolf in a complicated political dance, and I often do, I’ll be right there in the WoD. If I want to cobble together some very odd settings then I’m grabbing 2 gurps books off the shelf and combining them into what I want, per Robin Laws.

I can see where that vibe might be gotten, but part of the reason that the first chapter is written that way is to show that there is a different experience to be had here. Emphasizing what makes us unique to our audience. I don’t think we do better than another style of play, but we’re definitely trying to aim for our own little niche.

which means that it’s not the GM blabbering on and on and on about the story as I’ve seen WoD GMs do when I was at the McGill’s gaming Club in the early-mid 90s.

As for the cinematics part, so far I think it means 2 things:

1) If you can think of any skills or situations that would make your challenge roll easier, tell the GM and he’ll help you with cool bonuses (Lower the difficulty and grant extra dice rolls to meet the difficulty, more on this in the next post).

2) If you want to do something cool that has no impact on the actual metrics of the game, go wild.

As for the ‘better’ claim… they don’t actually go out and say it, but I get that vibe from the choice of adjectives to qualify Silvervine…

But the cinematic parts, where you get bonuses or whatever by doing things in cinematic ways, definitely encourages players to take the active narrative role.

As for styles of play, however, shared narrative works equally well for dungeon crawls as it does for politics.

Doe the game emphasize one of those play styles over another? Or just the shared narrative style over a GM’s narrative?

If it’s the latter, I find it a lot less objectionable than the Planescape example, though I still don’t like it if they are claiming it to be a “better” way, as opposed to just a different way.

I look forward to seeing the comparison with GURPS………