Adult-me might well enjoy it for what it is. Teenage-me wasn't overly impressed, but in hindsight that may be because of the guy running it; he was all about being edgy, but his sense of humor wasn't as good as he thought it was.
That's curious because I find Traveller and Eclipse Phase to be quite mechanically different with entirely different emphases - you don't get any notion of rules to design starships in Eclipse Phase, for example, and their are none of the randomised tables for generating characters, or any other stuff we see in Traveller. It may be a perspective thing, but like I say, I see a whole bunch of palpable similarities between AW and MB by comparison.
See, for me, the opposite is true. I think a plain text layout would have made the game suck pretty hard. A big part of the charm for me was the DIY hand lettered thing. I was almost like a comic book that also happened to be an RPG. I see how that approach would be divisive though, for sure. The experience of guys trying and failing to be as funny as the author is something I know well.
That's probably the best thing to focus on. What are these similarities?
I think that's maybe only true of AW in retrospect. Baker had written other stuff with the same sensibilities previously, so it's not as though he was breaking new ground even for his own stuff. Now it certainly seems like a 'statement' of some kind, but I'm pretty convinced some of that has to do with the subsequent explosion in popularity of the PbtA engine.
Well, the answer to that is that art is subjective, and it is certainly the case that AW has tried to incorporate a certain tone and attitude into the physical design of their game too. There is, at least, an iconic cover which is what a load of people were wearing on T-shirts in the last conference I attended.
- The relative (and unusual) small size of the books.
You don't think the tshirts are a product of what the game is now rather than what it was designed to be when it was published? The fact the art is subjective doesn't really change the fact the AW isn't an art book by any definition of the term. Does it have design principles? Yes. Are those pretty specific about story telling? Again, yes, but are RPG mechanics art? You'd have to say yes if you want to make the argument you're making.
It will.
Well there are lots of Powered by the Apocalypse games out there that make the archetypes optional, and definitely plenty of OSR games where the Classes are not optional. Remember that the notion here is that both games are representative as examples of their respective movements - and we are looking for categorical differences that make one thing indie and the other OSR. The fact that there is an attempt to define Archetypes in one game and Classes as being somehow distinct is an aspect, to me, about how the differences are more superficial than anything else. They both use these archetypal devices to assist in designing characters.
Well, Mörk Borg has only four stats, rather than the 6 stats of TSR-era D&D, and it doesn’t use Saving Throws, THACO tables or Weapon Proficiencies. Character Classes, as pointed out above, are optional. It doesn’t have Races or Levels. It has Armour rated by damage reduction dice, rather than setting the difficulty to hit. While there are obvious influences from OD&D, there are plenty of differences while you could also suggest that Apocalypse World has been influenced in design from OD&D too. It too essentially uses Classes (they just call them Playbooks instead), and isn’t skill based at all, for example.
That’s just repeating what you said before. Look, we *all* know that Mörk Borg sells itself as OSR - you don’t need to point it out to us again. I explained this myself in the first post on this thread. And to the point of Apocalypse World and Vincent Baker statements, its kinda moot because every single RPG out there, at one level or another is based on D&D. The point is the detail. You are failing to address the points raised in my last post - there are clear differences between Mörk Bork and OD&D, as there are clear similarities between Apocalypse World and OD&D.
Well, no. It’s pretty much a central part of what the thread is about. I know ‘cos I started it! You could however, make the claim that you were the first person in the thread to specifically make mention of Trad vs Indie.
Nah, you are just repeating the same point again and ignoring the detail. The question is whether there is any substance to the claim that the Indie/Narrative and OSR game movements have categorical differences, primarily based on the examples of Apocalypse World and Mörk Bork. That is why comparing the detail of similarities or differences is the whole point here.
The whole point of OSR is it is based on OD&D, and besides, the fact that it is based on OD&D has already been stated. You are not saying anything that hasn’t already been stated and acknowledged by everybody this thread, so what you are saying is irrelevant at this point. It’s a strawman argument.
If you can’t address the points, then *that* is a flimsy argument. The fact that you haven’t addressed the points means that they hold.
Again, you are just repeating yourself - and its a strawman argument. Nobody has disputed that the writers' intent and the manner that it is marketed is based on OD&D and is a self described OSR game, but there are still easily identifiable differences with OD&D - which I have presented to you and you have continued to fail to address.
Vampire, Mythras, Warhammer, GURPS and D6 all have fully integrated skill-based systems. Most of them don’t have anything resembling Classes - Vampire’s Clans are archetypal at least, and certain editions of WFRP organise their Careers into Class groups, but they still aren’t really the same thing. Both Apocalypse World and OD&D are essentially based upon archetypal Classes, with discrete ability groups based around them and no established skill systems. So actually, there is more in common between Apocalypse World and OD&D than some of the other examples here.
Well, no, for the reasons cited above I do not accept your scale of difference. You are just asserting this proximity chart without real evidence.
No it’s not because the notion here is that there is more in common between roleplaying games of various movements than categorical differences. They all have their roots with D&D however, and to deny the influence of that source for any RPG is silly.
Thanks for the best wishes, but actually, as before in other threads, I don’t think your arguments really amount to anything more than ignoring evidence presented and simply asserting contrary statements.
You're probably not going to find it.
With massively different mechanical implementations. If you zoom out to this high level then every difference is superficial. Traveller and Mythras both "have skill systems", GURPS and Vampire both "have combat systems". PbtA and Mork Borg both "have archetypes". However beyond these very high level statements there are really no commonalities.
Well of course there are games longer than both of them. Apocalypse world and Mork Borg are still massively different in length. Mork Borg is unusually short and text light, where as Apocalypse World is of the same rough length as Cepheus and similar.
Yeah. I think the closest thing to a statement you could make is "this is a game Vincent Baker wanted to be playing when he wrote it" and... surely you could say the same about any game not created as work-for-hire?
If you you don’t want to continue in the debate, then why continue? And you did use a strawman argument, which was the only reason why it was pointed out.
Well, I have been pointing out clear similarities in the thread, and the point is that that they are there. If these two brands are clustered around a common set of ideas, then I am asking what they are?
So rather than stepping away from the debate that you don’t want to be involved in, you are just going to keep adding snark?
They're mechanically similar because in both you roll dice to beat a number? That's the vast majority of RPGs. Any level less vague than this will produce obvious differences if you just read the class descriptions.
I bet it won’t be your last word though, eh? It hasn’t proven to be so far, and it wasn’t me who claimed he was walking away from the argument because he wasn’t interested. It is not me that is coming across as hostile and petulant.
So, following on, the significant difference between Indie/Narrative and OSR is that you use 2D6 to beat a target number verses D20s and other polyhedral dice? Hit points, while older as a method are still an incremental measure of damage. The Classes in MB also have class-specific abilities. They also have Omens, which allow for re-rolls and an element of narrative control. Admittedly, you do tend to have a lot more tabular rolling for random results rather than collaborative negotiation over the set up of the game. So is this the fundamental difference, I ask, between OSR and Indie/Narrative?
That could well be the case, and I think the contribution of Swedish games to the RPG hobby has been absolutely massive in the last decade or so. They’ve probably come up with the most interesting games, while in an example like Kult: Divinity Lost actually bridged cultural gaps between so-called traditional and indie game design. Mörk Bork is actually unusual because it self identifies as part of the OSR movement, whereas a game like Mutant: Year Zero which created an entirely original approach to mechanics didn’t make any fanfare that it was part of any bigger trend.
You have managed to completely miss the core difference in the base mechanics. PbtA uses a success/partial success/failure model that indexes partial success as the most common result. The use of 2d6 is done on purpose to make that the most common result. That's a completely different teleos of play than you see in D&D type games. The rest of the PbtA mechanics hand on and emphasize that key difference.
I never mentioned that, but I think the clustered nature of the 2d6 is necessary to get the spread AW wants.
By incremental I meant in AW it just goes up by +1 each time where as in MB it's random with armour soaks. The vast majority of RPGs have numerical HP in the sense you're talking about here. Again I don't think it's a major similarity.
Well as I said above I don't think there is some rigid and fixed delineation between the two, nor does there really need to be. If there was it'd probably mean design had gone a bit stale. I'm not too into attaining the pure essence and separation of both types of games, since I like both.
