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Faylar said:
Uh-huh... okay then
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You dont think that's a wonky ad hominem? Huh. I thought it was pretty plain. I'd actually really like to hear why you disgaree with me.
 
Aha! We have reached a moment a rapprochement. I knew we would . :grin:
 
Arminius said:
Venger Satanis Venger Satanis ?
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No idea what his "priesthood title" refers to and whether it includes any spells, so it's a "maybe":thumbsup:.

Fenris-77 said:
You say that because you want there to be a divide or a difference between the two. You want there to be two camps. That allows you to take a side and for other people to be incorrect. I'm here to tell you that shit won't fly. Lots of games exist in the middle
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CRK already admitted that many games exist in the middle. See his comparison of WFRP to Shadowrun.
But then there are examples of games that exist at one or the other end, too. So please don't behave like there aren't enough examples of any possible position on the scale, including "No Narrative Mechanics In The Boxed Set Unless You Put Them There Yourself":devil:. So to claim that all games are parts of the "scale" is misleading. For fans of some games, there could be a scale or a two-camps classification and their classification wouldn't change:shade:.

And there's always two kinds of games, The Right Ones and The Wrong Ones. Of course, they're defined by AsenRG liking the former and not liking the latter, and while those that like The Wrong Ones aren't necessarily in the wrong, AsenRG has to wonder what has gotten into them:grin:!


Faylar said:
If we take metagaming out of the equation, then we all stand on the same footing and can all use the same characters or skills equally. That is what I am getting at.
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No.
IOW, please re-read my previous post, including the example at the end. The social player could have gotten away with a Skill-1 character and still achieved the goal that our Skill-3 asocial (IRL) player failed at.

So, you are a tactical genius, but if your character has the intelligence of a post, it has no business running group tactics. If you do so, you are metagaming. I have no problem with players playing to their skills, but we should not set them up for failure if they decide to do otherwise.
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I'm not setting them up for anything, though. They're doing a great job setting themselves for failure, however!
 
Fenris-77 said:
You dont think that's a wonky ad hominem? Huh. I thought it was pretty plain. I'd actually really like to hear why you disgaree with me.
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Naaw, I'm good, you are too dismissive and condescending for my tastes.
 
Fenris-77 said:
You say that because you want there to be a divide or a difference between the two. You want there to be two camps. That allows you to take a side and for other people to be incorrect. I'm here to tell you that shit won't fly. Lots of games exist in the middle
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Now who’s playing ”find the agenda” and assuming things about the other? You can’t ding me for saying TJS was incorrect, you said so yourself.

You admit these mechanics can be easily defined, and you admit games can have them or not have them.

What you would call a game without such mechanics vs a game structured around them? You’re a student of game design and you can’t come up with adjectives to explain such a difference?

Do you think calling Traveller a Narrative RPG is accurate?
Do you think calling Cortex+ a Narrative RPG is inaccurate?

If so, then tell me what you would label them as.
 
CRKrueger said:
Now who’s playing ”find the agenda” and assuming things about the other? You can’t ding me for saying TJS was incorrect, you said so yourself.

You admit these mechanics can be easily defined, and you admit games can have them or not have them.

What you would call a game without such mechanics vs a game structured around them? You’re a student of game design and you can’t come up with adjectives to explain such a difference?

Do you think calling Traveller a Narrative RPG is accurate?
Do you think calling Cortex+ a Narrative RPG is inaccurate?

If so, then tell me what you would label them as.
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I dont think it's an either or kind of proposition. The identification of a mechanic isnt the same as being able to define a whole system.
 
Faylar said:
Naaw, I'm good, you are too dismissive and condescending for my tastes.
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It was serious question. I'm always willing to admit that I may have misread or misrepresented something.
 
Fenris-77 said:
It was serious question. I'm always willing to admit that I may have misread or misrepresented something.
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I'm not interested in a tit for tat.
You win... whatever... I'm just not interested in engaging you anymore right now.
It wouldn't go well if I did. My mood is souring.
 
Are we titting for tatting? Oh well. I thought we were having a vigorous dialogue about how to define narrative versus simulationist games.
 
Fenris-77 said:
I dont think it's an either or kind of proposition. The identification of a mechanic isnt the same as being able to define a whole system.
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So if someone said “Traveller was a Narrative system” or “Cortex+ isn’t a Narrative system”, you wouldn’t disagree except to the existence of the labels themselves?
 
Fenris-77 said:
You dont think that's a wonky ad hominem? Huh. I thought it was pretty plain. I'd actually really like to hear why you disgaree with me.
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Well, characterizing something you mentioned as “not particularly useful” as “unimportant to you” is a pretty infinitesimal foul.
 
CRKrueger said:
So if someone said “Traveller was a Narrative system” or “Cortex+ isn’t a Narrative system”, you wouldn’t disagree except to the existence of the labels themselves?
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Thats not the right question. I really, honestly, don't think its that's simple. Some games might have more or less narrative mechanics, but I dont love the labels. I dont love them because it generally comes wih a lot of negative baggage and not all that much hate actually useful to describe the system. So, sure, you can say that game X is maybe mor narrative than game Y, but unless you want ot get granualr about the specific mechanics it's not that useful a division. 'Narrative' isn't just one thing it's a lot if different things.
 
CRKrueger said:
Well, characterizing something you mentioned as “not particularly useful” as “unimportant to you” is a pretty infinitesimal foul.
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Someone can make a rhetorical division of parts that isnt useful. Nothing to do with me, just about what we're discussing. You'll notice I haven't said anything about what you or I like? It's not personal, I'm not upset, we're just talking gaming.
 
Arminius said:
The terms being thrown around here have a lot of baggage, especially when you switch from “narrative” to “narrativism”.

I find that Justin Alexander makes the distinction well at https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/6517/roleplaying-games/roleplaying-games-vs-storytelling-games

But then you have to accept the concept of “dissociated mechanics”, which upsets a bunch of people. Also you have to not react emotionally to the labels, and just pay attention to the distinction.
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Yeah, never could figure out why that idea of dissociative mechanics bothers so many...
 
It’s basically the same thing as Actor stance vs Author/Director stance, in Forge terms. I don’t know if that would make it any more palatable to the people who hyperventilate over it.
 
Fenris-77 said:
Thats not the right question. I really, honestly, don't think its that's simple. Some games might have more or less narrative mechanics, but I dont love the labels. I dont love them because it generally comes wih a lot of negative baggage and not all that much hate actually useful to describe the system. So, sure, you can say that game X is maybe mor narrative than game Y, but unless you want ot get granualr about the specific mechanics it's not that useful a division. 'Narrative' isn't just one thing it's a lot if different things.
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The negative baggage is up to the people, and I, personally, am not planning to abandon a useful (to me) distinction just because someone else might have strong feelings on the matter:shade:.


Faylar said:
Yeah, never could figure out why that idea of dissociative mechanics bothers so many...
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Some don't like the label.
Other don't like being told that they fall under the label, even when what they're doing clearly falls under it.
And others wish all games that fit (entirely or mostly) the label would never have existed:thumbsup:.
 
Arminius said:
It’s basically the same thing as Actor stance vs Author/Director stance, in Forge terms. I don’t know if that would make it any more palatable to the people who hyperventilate over it.
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It just seems kind of silly to me. It identified with a terminology something that bothered many people about the direction of games, and specifically 4th edition D&D. What difference does it make if you disagree with it, its a thing for many others despite protestations otherwise. It's also a rather well written bit. The only think I can think of is that its a distaste born more for the author than the content.
 
Faylar said:
Yeah, never could figure out why that idea of dissociative mechanics bothers so many...
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I think Justin intended his use of the term dissociative mechanics to be fairly neutral but found it was subsquently overused and abused in the edition wars over 4e and other games. He addresses that in his follow-up essay.
 
Voros said:
I think Justin intended his use of the term dissociative mechanics to be fairly neutral but found it was subsquently overused and abused in the edition wars over 4e and other games. He addresses that in his follow-up essay.
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Ahh, that makes sense. An associated bias.
 
Brock Savage said:
Pardon my ignorance but can someone explain the whole traditional versus narrative thing?
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Once upon a time there was a web forum called The Forge, run by one Ron Edwards, which devoted itself to developing "RPG Theory". Edward's approach to RPG Theory was based upon the premise that the majority of people playing Roleplaying games weren't having any fun playing Role-playing games. Edwards believed this was because RPGs were "incoherent" - they promised one thing, but their mechanics did not support that thing (Edwards go-to example was that White Wolf games used the "Storyteller system" but that system did not support "creating stories"). This premise is summarized in the essay "System Matters" (The Forge featured a lot of essays).

Edwards' solution was to attempt to create a lexicon that definitively classified rules, approaches to rules, and playstyles for RPGs, with the idea that a correct method of game design would be to chose exacty one playstyle to focus on and then include only rules that were similiarly classified as supporting that playstyle. He and his fellow adherants at the Forge began by taking the Threefold Model developed on usenet that had gained popularity, switching around all the meanings of the terms, and then, over the course of several years, adding more and more terms with more and more baroque explanations.

Meanwhile, there was a very outspoken poster who frequented RPG forums in those days going by the name Nisarg who idolized both Hunter S Thompson and traditional Dungeons & Dragons. As this was years before the OSR, posters on forums tended to look down on, and be contemptuous of, D&D in those days. And Nisarg, being the sort of fellow who smoked a lot of weed and got into a lot of online fights, got very angry about people's pretentious attitudes towards D&D. And as Edwards was not only one such person who was basically constructing a pseudo-scientific theorywank that "proved" D&D was badwrongfun, but also was getting a lot of attention for it, Nisarg declared Edwards his arch-enemy. Nisarg saw himself as the righteous protector of all that was good and pure in RPGs and people who actually gamed, and Edwards as the personification of all the worst aspects of pompous theorywanking RPG forum-goers. Nisarg thus launched a personal civil war upon the Forge.

To this day, I'm still not entirely sure if The Forge was even aware of this.

Meanwhile The Forge had finished it's bastardization of the threefold theory to come up with the terms "Narrativism, Simulationism, and Gamism". And from that point on, every gamer on every forum of the world would completely misunderstand the counter-intuitive explanations Forge Theory offered of these terms and utterly misuse them for all eternity.

An RPG that had Gamism as it's design goal is meant to be a game-game. The Forge members didn't devote much attention to this, it was just sort of tut-tutted as the domain of Power Gamers, D&D-playing relics, and those awful gamers who didn't take RPGs as seriously as they deserved and just played to have fun.

An RPG that had Simulationism as it's design goal sought to model a specific reality or genre, and became associated with those players who talked about stuff like "Immersion". Edwards and co didn't care much for this at all, and eventually backtracked and decided that Simulationism as a goal didn't actually exist, and that all those posters on forums who talked about Immersion were just liar-liars pants on fire.

Which left the major focus of the Forge's attention, and those people who adopted the theories, on Narrativism, those games whose goal was to provide a satisfying narrative experience. I'm not sure who first dubbed such games "Storygames", but the name stuck and its usage spread.

Cut back to Nisarg, who naturally decided that since the evil Forge liked these Storygames, they in turn must also be evil, and in fact were part of a plot to destroy the hobby by being all narrative and stuff and not being real roleplaying games, because they weren't D&D.

Around this time there was a small forum devoted to a Youtuber named Spoony who was associated with the Nostalgia Critic and that group (there's a whole nother cycle of drama there, but that's a story for another time). Anyways, Spoony got tired of running this forum and decided to hand it off to someone else, and Nisarg was like "I'd like a forum", as by that point he'd been booted off most every other forum**. And so Nisarg took over this forum and re-branded it "The RPGSite", and Nisarg, now having a platform for his gaming ideologies, went super saiyan and transformed into his Final Boss form - The RPGPundit.

Pundit thus declared that "storygames" were all the RPGs that weren't really RPGs, and written by people he disliked from the Forge, and were attempts to destroy the RPG hobby . For years and years posters pressed him for an actual definition of a Storygame so they could figure out the distinction between them and "actual RPGs", but RPGPundit refused to offer one, so eventually people just accepted that "Storygame" was just any game Pundit didn't like.

Other people thus came up with their own definitions of Storygames, some of which made sense, and others didn't*, and anything "not a storygame" became, by default, known as a "Traditional game".

Meanwhile, eventually, Edwards and Co reached maximum Theorywank, and declared The Forge "finished" and "a success". No one was sure what The Forge had succeeded at except causing decades of online arguments about RPG terminology, but Edwards then shut the doors of the forum, turned out the lights, and passed away into legend...or, well, into Google Plus at least.

Then the OSR happened, and suddenly instead of looking down on and tut-tutting D&D, a bunch of people started posting about how awesome D&D was, especially the old D&D. Because Pundit had been doing this for years without any thanks, he initially resented the OSR and called them a bunch of posers.

And the OSR basically ignored him.

Then, abruptly, years later, Pundit declared himself the leader and spokesperson of the OSR.

And the OSR continues to ignore him.

And then, in a move that (in my headcannon at least) was meant to be the ultimate troll of Pundit, Edwards abruptly declared that he and the Forge had created the OSR.

The OSR ignored him too.

Cut to now, now, and we have people who continue to abuse Forge terminology (declaring games "Simulationist" or whatnot) and we have a hundred different individual definitions of "Storygame" floating around. If you see anyone use that term at any point, the best course of action is to ask them their definition of it, because chances are they will more than gladly pour out their personal manifesto on what that means (presumably while masturbating furiously*).

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And thus the definition of "Traditional Games" is , ultimately, "whatever that person doesn't think is a storygame".



*I have my own definition of Storygames, and I will gladly share it if requested.
** - Actually inbetween Sppony and Nisarg the forum that became TheRPGSite was known as "Nutkinland", but that's another story
 
TristramEvans said:
Around this time there was a small forum devoted to a Youtuber named Spoony who was associated with the Nostalgia Critic and that group (there's a whole nother cycle of drama there, but that's a story for another time). Anyways, Spoony got tired of running this forum and decided to hand it off to someone else, and Nisarg was like "I'd like a forum", as by that point he'd been booted off most every other forum. And so Nisarg took over this forum anf re-branded it "The RPGSite", and Nisarg, now having a platform for his gaming ideologies, went super saiyan and transformed into his Final Boss form - The RPGPundit.
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Wait... Nutkinland was a Spoony Experiment/Noah Antwiler forum? Really? I had joined it after I left RPGnet, but a couple of months before Pundit took over to turn it into theRPGsite and I had never heard that connection.
 
Gabriel said:
Wait... Nutkinland was a Spoony Experiment/Noah Antwiler forum? Really? I had joined it after I left RPGnet, but a couple of months before Pundit took over to turn it into theRPGsite and I had never heard that connection.
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I gave a (very) abridged version of the history, but it was something like "Spoonyland" (Spoonyverse maybe?) before being Nutkinland
 
This reminds of when I was at Uni. Some people in my role-playing club decided to organise a Muppets LARP and it was all they could talk about for weeks and everybody seemed to be really into it.

It was just one of those..."huh, I really don't get gamers at all" moments.
 
I think TristramEvans TristramEvans summation of a lot of the situation hits on a lot of the reasons there are issues:

Definitions of what is "narrative" vs "traditional" are in no way consistent, and there is a LOT of bad blood between people who are in each "camp".

Honestly, I like games I would say fit on both. I'm a huge fan of like Cortex, but I also really like Jovian Chronicles (seriously the 1e of this game has the best space movement rules for mechs/ships, it is so good). I am more of a "find the game that fits what I want to do" person, and I find that games on both sides of my personal definition of both will fit the bill sometimes. (Also I think that games are definitely on a spectrum between the two, and there isn't some clear hard line of what is traditional vs narrative). I imagine a lot of people on this board think I'm in the "narrative" camp, but really I'm in the "I just like RPGs of all type" camp.

I just imagine that the fact that I dislike certain SPECIFIC, very popular, traditional games (like I'm not fond of old school D&D, and I specifically have an obsessive and probably irrational hate of ThAC0), makes people think somehow I'm anti-traditional. (As an aside, I also don't like FATE either.)
 
EmperorNorton said:
I think TristramEvans TristramEvans summation of a lot of the situation hits on a lot of the reasons there are issues:

Definitions of what is "narrative" vs "traditional" are in no way consistent, and there is a LOT of bad blood between people who are in each "camp".

Honestly, I like games I would say fit on both. I'm a huge fan of like Cortex, but I also really like Jovian Chronicles (seriously the 1e of this game has the best space movement rules for mechs/ships, it is so good). I am more of a "find the game that fits what I want to do" person, and I find that games on both sides of my personal definition of both will fit the bill sometimes. (Also I think that games are definitely on a spectrum between the two, and there isn't some clear hard line of what is traditional vs narrative). I imagine a lot of people on this board think I'm in the "narrative" camp, but really I'm in the "I just like RPGs of all type" camp.

I just imagine that the fact that I dislike certain SPECIFIC, very popular, traditional games (like I'm not fond of old school D&D, and I specifically have an obsessive and probably irrational hate of ThAC0), makes people think somehow I'm anti-traditional. (As an aside, I also don't like FATE either.)
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You don't like FATE:shock:?
 
TJS said:
This reminds of when I was at Uni. Some people in my role-playing club decided to organise a Muppets LARP and it was all they could talk about for weeks and everybody seemed to be really into it.

It was just one of those..."huh, I really don't get gamers at all" moments.
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Did even a single of them achieve the bouncing-in-all-directions way of movement that the Muppets practice naturally:grin:?
 
TJS said:
This reminds of when I was at Uni. Some people in my role-playing club decided to organise a Muppets LARP and it was all they could talk about for weeks and everybody seemed to be really into it.

It was just one of those..."huh, I really don't get gamers at all" moments.
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I... don't suppose you have the ruleset? No reason. *Shifty Eyes*
 
AsenRG said:
You don't like FATE:shock:?
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It is that kind of game where I WANT to like it but then when I played it just never seemed to work right. Like in theory the rules should do what I like, but in the end I think I just didn't really like the fact that 90% of the game part of it is just the FATE point economy.
 
AsenRG said:
Did even a single of them achieve the bouncing-in-all-directions way of movement that the Muppets practice naturally:grin:?
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I don't think I was there. Or maybe I was, a vague memory of people running in and out of the room wildly springs to mind. Perhas I've blocked it out. I'm sure I didn't participate. I think some of us may have ended up playing a different game while this was going on all around us.

Black Leaf said:
I... don't suppose you have the ruleset? No reason. *Shifty Eyes*
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I'm not sure but I assume it was an adaption of whatever rules were usually used for White Wolf LARPS.
 
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