Why D&D?

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Most games do all three of those things at once in some mixture. That's why I think the forge labels are goofy. They might describe a particular mechanic fairly well, but I think they fail in some significant ways to define entire rules systems in a useful way. YMMV.
You missing the point. It is not about the game it about the campaign thus what the referee and players focus on. If the GROUP focuses on collaborative storytelling then they are playing a storygame irregardless of the rules they are using. It may well be that they use a game that not well suited so they keep switching until they find something they works with how they want to do things. But this is not uncommon among different groups irregardless whether they are storygaming, wargaming, or roleplaying.

What makes a game about anything is about how much work it saves the group when they make up something fun they want to try. I see a good argument that Fate would save work for a group interested in running a storygame campaign compared to OD&D. But there nothing to stop that group from trying to use OD&D. It would lack the dice game, and keeping track of chips that many games that bill themselves a storygames like to do. But it highly likely it would have a lot of metagaming going on in order to make OD&D work as a storygame.

Just as if you used OD&D as a wargame you would be ignoring the sections about the PCs being free to do whatever they want with their characters in favor of completing scenarios. Likely based around clearing out a dungeon level or a section of wilderness. Victory would be defined as the players surviving that scenario. Not unlike how Shadowrun Crossfire or Gloomhaven works.
 
If the group is focused on collaborative storytelling using the mechanics of a game? Then you are playing a narrative system.

If the group is focused on pretending to be character having adventures in a setting the you are playing a roleplaying system.

If the group is focused on achieving victory conditions in a scenario the you are playing a war game or board game.

It not complicated unless the referee or group can‘t articulate why the hell everybody is there for.
While I have my differences with Ron Edwards, and I think he has trouble articulating what he wants to say, the above is actually one of his main points, that what matters is what the hell everybody is there for. And that if people aren't there for the same thing, or the game system is pulling against them, then that incoherence will make for less fun play. And yea, maybe he fumbled the transition from the terms used before and his GNS terms, but I think what he was getting at made sense if you could let go of any previous investment in the terms (which I didn't have not having been a part of the internet groups that were discussing game styles before the Forge).

I also NEVER read him as against D&D. I think he poorly worded his essay on "fantasy heart breakers" such that people read that or at least the title as against D&D, but actually he wasn't even against what the folks were doing. He was disappointed that some many good ideas got lost because the person with the idea felt they had to publish a polished RPG book at a time before the ease of distributing electronically. So people would invest all this money and effort into a book that then wouldn't even sell enough to cover costs. That's the heart break.

Then there's the brain damage essay... Again, poor choice of words, but he was lamenting all the people thinking they were creating story who were just dancing to the GM's puppet strings telling the GM's story and thus damaging their own ability to actually make story. I think almost all of us here are against that style of play (some games popular for that style of play in the 90s called themselves story games which has absolutely nothing to do with the "narativist" games that came out of the Forge).
 
I think you're missing the point, actually. Most tables I've been at, and most players I've played at, use a huge mix of stances for how they play/run games, even within the same campaign. Hell, they could use multiple stances even in the same decisions.
Yeah. I think it works fine as a rough threefold axis for judging what sorts of game and gamer would probably mix well and starting that conversation, but beyond that it's usefulness drops quickly.
 
Yes the Pundit thought the OSR was a punch of posers. However your otherwise excellent story omits how this all came about. So back in 2009, the OSR pops up on theRPGSite's radar and comes to a head in this epic thread. Note that I was a participant in this. The summary of his complaints that he was hurt that he hadn't gotten the recognition he deserved for writing Forward the Adventure! And now a bunch of plagiarizers and copiers are getting all the kudos.

His point isn't entirely wrong, though... at least, not IMHO. I struggle to understand the point of most OSR games, given many of them are too slavishly trying to replicate whatever version of D&D the author likes (1e, OD&D, B/X or whatever)... with their dinky house-rules tacked on. Given the ready availability of the original games, why not just play the originals?

Of course, that doesn't make F:tA the genius game he thinks it is... it's decidedly ho-hum.
 
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To quote my favorite Facebook page: this is terrible data presentation and we’re rejecting your paper.
 
Brian Gleichman and it was Age of Heroes.

And I have a copy. :smile:

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He never replied to me after I acquired it.

What it like?.
Dense very very dense. The RPG that it is more like in terms of quality and complexity is Dragonquest not bad but an acquired taste. It been a while so I don't remember all the details. But here is a review.

Heh.

I was kinda sorta the straw that broke Gleichman’s back over at the ‘Site.
 
His point isn't entirely wrong, though... at least, not IMHO. I struggle to understand the point of most OSR games, given many of them are too slavishly trying to replicate whatever version of D&D the author likes (1e, OD&D, B/X or whatever)... with their dinky house-rules tacked on. Given the ready availability of the original games, why not just play the originals?

Of course, that doesn't make F:tA the genius game he thinks it is... it's decidedly ho-hum.
I don't actually disagree with him on that specifically. I massively prefer the subset of the OSR that takes D&D as a base and uses it to do their own thing - Mazes & Minotaurs, Esoteric Enterprises etc. I'd go as far as to say that the originality of the Dragon Warriors community puts the OSR to shame.

The difference is I'm not marketing a game as OSR. That's what leads to the mockery.
 
I think you're missing the point, actually. Most tables I've been at, and most players I've played at, use a huge mix of stances for how they play/run games, even within the same campaign. Hell, they could use multiple stances even in the same decisions.
You are describing how players act during a campaign. I concur with your point, roleplayers and storygamers will use a wargame to run certain aspect of their campaign, wargamers will get into acting as a character while playing out a scenario especially if it is part of a detailed grand campaign. Last night, August 1st, my group metagamed the last 5 minutes as the referee was under the weather and needed to leave in order to rest coupled with the fact that he wanted to get the next obvious part of the campaign going at the beginning of the next session. Something we the player didn't have a problem with as that what we intended on doing before embarking on the current adventure.

Campaign do have a primary focus, something that the group does most of the time.True hybrids where you can't tell are in experience as rare as a pure campaigns. They exist but most have a primary focus and then a mix of whatever the group find is fun.

My point was in reference to the idea that you can always tell what is a group is doing by the rules they are using. It could be true as some system are expressly designed to make certain styles of play easier to run while ignoring others. But I found that is not a reliable indicator. Only by observation can you peg a campaign as X. And even then it will still be a mix.

Finally while it is the first time I mentioned this part of my views on this threads, I have mentioned this numerous times on other threads. I am not an absolutist.
 
You missing the point. It is not about the game it about the campaign thus what the referee and players focus on. If the GROUP focuses on collaborative storytelling then they are playing a storygame irregardless of the rules they are using. It may well be that they use a game that not well suited so they keep switching until they find something they works with how they want to do things. But this is not uncommon among different groups irregardless whether they are storygaming, wargaming, or roleplaying.

What makes a game about anything is about how much work it saves the group when they make up something fun they want to try. I see a good argument that Fate would save work for a group interested in running a storygame campaign compared to OD&D. But there nothing to stop that group from trying to use OD&D. It would lack the dice game, and keeping track of chips that many games that bill themselves a storygames like to do. But it highly likely it would have a lot of metagaming going on in order to make OD&D work as a storygame.

Just as if you used OD&D as a wargame you would be ignoring the sections about the PCs being free to do whatever they want with their characters in favor of completing scenarios. Likely based around clearing out a dungeon level or a section of wilderness. Victory would be defined as the players surviving that scenario. Not unlike how Shadowrun Crossfire or Gloomhaven works.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm not missing anything. I dont think they're useful definitions for campaigns either, for a couple of reasons. One, much like rules sets, most games are some sort of mixture of two of those, and very rarely strictly one or the other. By setting the labels at either end of the spectrum and insisting things are either one or the other I think you get more arguments than you do useful description.

Two, I think ignoring the rules sets used to run those campaigns is a strange idea. The rules are what sets the basis for the table compact and play choices of a given table. The style of campaign doesn't happen in isolation from the rules.

Really, I think the issue here is that the charge of "you just dont understand' is commonly leveled at people who actually just dont agree with a given position. It's quite possible to be fully conversant with Forge theory and also think that's it's not terrible useful or informative. I'm not d
Saying that knowing what you like and what mechanics support that isnt useful, I just dont think forge does a particularly useful job of unpacking that idea.
 
While I have my differences with Ron Edwards, and I think he has trouble articulating what he wants to say, the above is actually one of his main points, that what matters is what the hell everybody is there for. And that if people aren't there for the same thing, or the game system is pulling against them, then that incoherence will make for less fun play. And yea, maybe he fumbled the transition from the terms used before and his GNS terms, but I think what he was getting at made sense if you could let go of any previous investment in the terms (which I didn't have not having been a part of the internet groups that were discussing game styles before the Forge).
If he was talking about group pyschology perhaps having read his essays there are two main issues I have with his general thesis.

1) As I stated in my reply to EmperorNorton EmperorNorton most have a primary interest but then otherwise are a mixed bag of whatever they like.

2) He places the rules on an unwarranted pedestal, play styles don't result from playing a specific set of rules, it result from how a group uses a set of rules. It may seem like a distinction without a difference however there are numerous groups known to use only part of systems often kitbashing in other systems, along with rare groups that seemly run campaigns with ad-hoc rulings and the occasional aide including the first roleplaying campaign, Blackmoor.

My counterpoint his theory of game design, is for author to clearly but tersely states their view of a setting or genre. Then as they write out each section, devote some word count to tersely explain how it makes running a campaign with the setting or genre easier. That would consistently provide the information for a group or referee needs to decide whether it would be useful and fun to included it as part of the campaign they want to run.

Note I don't say what the actual topic or play styles are to be run. This principle can applied equally to wargames, roleplaying games, or storygame. What matters is the clear explanation of what the focus is, and how individual mechanics are useful to that focus.
 
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm not missing anything. I dont think they're useful definitions for campaigns either, for a couple of reasons. One, much like rules sets, most games are some sort of mixture of two of those, and very rarely strictly one or the other. By setting the labels at either end of the spectrum and insisting things are either one or the other I think you get more arguments than you do useful description.
So what you are saying that when you observe a group playing a campaign you could not make a determination whether they are mostly focused on collaborative storytelling, pretending to be characters having adventures, or trying to win a scenario by achieving victory conditions?

Two, I think ignoring the rules sets used to run those campaigns is a strange idea. The rules are what sets the basis for the table compact and play choices of a given table. The style of campaign doesn't happen in isolation from the rules.
You are right the campaigns are not isolated from the rule. What I have observed is the players pick the rules they like because that the kind of campaign they want to have fun with rather than the reverse.
 
His point isn't entirely wrong, though... at least, not IMHO. I struggle to understand the point of most OSR games, given many of them are too slavishly trying to replicate whatever version of D&D the author likes (1e, OD&D, B/X or whatever)... with their dinky house-rules tacked on. Given the ready availability of the original games, why not just play the originals?

Of course, that doesn't make F:tA the genius game he thinks it is... it's decidedly ho-hum.
There is something to be said for playing a game that is still supported with original content.
When you've done a thing to death but still love it new content or fresh takes may be all thats needed to reenergize it.
 
So what you are saying that when you observe a group playing a campaign you could not make a determination whether they are mostly focused on collaborative storytelling, pretending to be characters having adventures, or trying to win a scenario by achieving victory conditions?
No, what I'm saying is that I think the Forge definitions, and indeed whole approach, is not one I find particularly useful for the task at hand. Mostly because at their core I think they represent a false dichotomy. I dont think theres are hard set of two kinds of player or campaigns that divide easily along those lines, especially the first two. Campaigns aren't, generally, one or the other of those two, mostly they're a mixture of both. So if the definitions fail to usefully describe what they purport to describe, then its perhaps not surprising that I find them lacking.

I think that talking about RPGs, play styles, and design philosophy is both useful and interesting, I just dont think the Forge offers me any tools I care to use for that project. I find the information you get from an inquiry to RPGing from a Forge perspective is limited and in many cases trivially obvious.
 
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GNS is bonkers because:

A) the three main categories are badly chosen. It's like classifying all animals as "mammals", "non-mammals, winged" and "non-mammals, not winged". Technically, the division is correct. From a practical point of view it doesn't tell you anything useful. In GNS case, it's not even technically correct.

B) the main premise of the theory is that you can only follow one of the three agendas for any given "instance of play". What is an instance of play? Asked a billion times, never defined. And the reason is all too easy to see: as soon as you define an instance of play as a given time interval, the theory becomes immediately falsifiable ("3 hours? ok then I can certainly pursue multiple agendas in 3 hours. 10 seconds? ok then it might be true that for any given 10 seconds I can only follow one agenda, but what's stopping me from switching agendas every ten seconds?")

C) there's a whole lot of player instances, desires, modes of play, call them whatever you want, which are never ever considered in the theory and yet *THEY HAPPEN TO ALL RPG TABLES ALL OVER THE WORLD*. What is my agenda when I'm cracking OOC or meta-jokes while eating chips? And now tell me it never happened at your table...

Humans' psychologies are complex. Even while playing RPGs. Hell, maybe *especially* so when playing RPGs. The idea you can neatly categorise everything into three simple folders which also happen to be conveniently defined to push your own gaming ideology while belittling everybody's else is ludicrous.

I'll give one merit to Edwards: the increased focus and clarity in narrative approaches in RPGs would have probably came later if not for the Forge (although all its best results came from other designers and not from him). But in exchange for this, he poisoned the well for RPG theorists for 20 years and counting now.
 
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
Hm. That was about the time that I dropped out of role playing games - around the time that the intersection between RPGs and the interwebs got big. At the time I found the TML to be full of tedious fanwank. I'd say don't get me started on OTU canon, but it seems to be amateur hour in comparison to the blood feuds that the OSR has generated.

There was a time when I said I was irrationally indifferent to the OSR; this makes me suspect that indifference to the OSR has actually proven to be quite a successful life choice. In hindsight I think I'm better off having completely missed out on this.
 
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Yeah. I think the original Threefold can be useful, especially if you see it as either a specific GM decision or game mechanic. As a way of describing a RPG, not so much.

With GNS theory, the idea that the three goals are mutually exclusive is so baked in that it's near impossible to reject that without rejecting the whole model.

In both cases I'd criticise them for not separating simulation from genre emulation.
That’s a really good point.

Rules that are there for the purpose of collaborative storytelling are not the same as rules for reinforcing genre. Both are meta concerns, but they are not the same type of meta concern. Similarly, simulating a setting isn’t anywhere near the same thing as simulating genre. Pundit makes this error just like Edwards did.

It’s been forever since I read it, but I liked FtA! and Pundit had a point. Stuart Marshall and the rest weren’t game designers, not really. They were editors who deserve credit for the balls to be the first to challenge WotC with the OGL. Of course his problem with them was pure Ego, it is the Pundit we’re talking about, but he was very early to the “old school inspired new game” party.

I liked Gleichman even when I was arguing with him.
 
GNS is bonkers because:

A) the three main categories are badly chosen. It's like classifying all animals as "mammals", "non-mammals, winged" and "non-mammals, not winged". Technically, the division is correct. From a practical point of view it doesn't tell you anything useful. In GNS case, it's not even technically correct.

B) the main premise of the theory is that you can only follow one of the three agendas for any given "instance of play". What is an instance of play? Asked a billion times, never defined. And the reason is all too easy to see: as soon as you define an instance of play as a given time interval, the theory becomes immediately falsifiable ("3 hours? ok then I can certainly pursue multiple agendas in 3 hours. 10 seconds? ok then it might be true that for any given 10 seconds I can only follow one agenda, but what's stopping me from switching agendas every ten seconds?")

C) there's a whole lot of player instances, desires, modes of play, call them whatever you want, which are never ever considered in the theory and yet *THEY HAPPEN TO ALL RPG TABLES ALL OVER THE WORLD*. What is my agenda when I'm cracking OOC or meta-jokes while eating chips? And now tell me it never happened at your table...

Humans' psychologies are complex. Even while playing RPGs. Hell, maybe *especially* so when playing RPGs. The idea you can neatly categorise everything into three simple folders which also happen to be conveniently defined to push your own gaming ideology while belittling everybody's else is ludicrous.

I'll give one merit to Edwards: the increased focus and clarity in narrative approaches in RPGs would have probably came later if not for the Forge (although all its best results came from other designers and not from him). But in exchange for this, he poisoned the well for RPG theorists for 20 years and counting now.

The problem with GNS was that it didn’t try to classify mechanics or games, it tried to classify people and agendas while gaming. Any person could play and enjoy all three types of mechanics and agendas at once over the course of a game session, not to mention a dozen other agendas not mentioned.
 
The only real thing I have seen come from these debates is a lack of diversity in game design from forum goers.
Someone comes up with an idea and people immediately rush to categorize the idea and then either condemn or estole the idea purely on the classification they assign it instead of the merit of the idea itself. It injects tribalism into game design and that is no different than trying to enforce one artists style on another artist's work.
It's not just this example here either, its more too... Page count, amount of crunch, amount of fluff, etc... It's pretty much every aspect of game design, we have very polarized and tribal opinions. If you hear about a game that has a page count of 300 in their main book, some will immediately balk at that and declare the game to be shit without learning anything more... That is ridiculous. It's not even judging a book by it's cover at that point.

While most of us argue over what makes good RPGs, many publishers ignore us and sell good RPGs anyways because the non forum going gamer simply doesn't know or care about the theory tribes and will go about their merry way despite us.
 
No, what I'm saying is that I think the Forge definitions, and indeed whole approach, is not one I find particularly useful for the task at hand. Mostly because at their core I think they represent a false dichotomy. I dont think theres are hard set of two kinds of player or campaigns that divide easily along those lines, especially the first two. Campaigns are, generally, one or the other of those two, mostly they're a mixture of both. So if the definitions fail to usefully describe what they purport to describe, then its perhaps not surprising that I find them lacking.
Back in the day there was something different about how folks used D&D and the first wave of RPGs to warrant calling them something different and not just another type of wargame. Just as today there something different about when people deliberately set out try to do collaborative storytelling with the rules of a game.

If you can't distinguish between storygaming, and roleplaying, how are you distinguish between wargaming and roleplaying? Or do you don't think that places like Wargamevault versus DriveThruRPG should exist and that all the separate shelves and categories are bullshit and that it should be just mashed together and sorted alphabetically.
 
The only real thing I have seen come from these debates is a lack of diversity in game design from forum goers.
That like complaining about chess game focusing on chess. The title of this forum is Roleplaying Games another is Board and Miniatures Game. Do you go over there and complain that they are not consdering roleplaying in their game design? Why it tabletop roleplaying has to be the exception.

I think that collaborative storytelling through the use of game is an interesting idea that better served by being it own thing so it can develop the tools best suited its focus. Just as twenty years ago a new wave of ideas called Euro games and revitalized interest in board and wargames when everybody thought the category was dead.
 
If you can't distinguish between storygaming, and roleplaying, how are you distinguish between wargaming and roleplaying? Or do you don't think that places like Wargamevault versus DriveThruRPG should exist and that all the separate shelves and categories are bullshit and that it should be just mashed together and sorted alphabetically.

While you can broadly distinguish between the two, I don't think it's always clearcut on the divide between wargames and RPGs tbh. Where does the map combat in Gangbusters fit in? How about En Garde? Where do megagames fit into this?

It's the same with the difference between storygames and roleplaying games. Yes, there's some that are firmly in one camp, but there's a lot of games that contain both elements.

I'd also see it as less like the divide between RPGs and wargames and closer to the difference between Ameritrash and Euro boardgames. I know the latter when I see it, but it's necessarily subjective.
 
That like complaining about chess game focusing on chess. The title of this forum is Roleplaying Games another is Board and Miniatures Game. Do you go over there and complain that they are not consdering roleplaying in their game design? Why it tabletop roleplaying has to be the exception.

I think that collaborative storytelling through the use of game is an interesting idea that better served by being it own thing so it can develop the tools best suited its focus. Just as twenty years ago a new wave of ideas called Euro games and revitalized interest in board and wargames when everybody thought the category was dead.
Yeah, so you only quoted part of my post and focused on that.
You know full well I was referring to this toxic theory crafting, specifically the ones where we all club each other over the heads with classifications and then wank off to our own self importance.
And no, this board is not all about theory crafting and only theory crafting.
 
I agree it is nuanced however I emphasize focus because it seems to me the "root" of the difference when it is clear cut. If you focus on playing a game with victory conditions that leads down a path where certain elements are emphasized far more than others. Once you start focusing on players interacting with a setting as their character another path unfolds with others elements are emphasized. However it doesn't mean that suddenly everything becomes useless. For example in a Mechwarrior campaign they may be a great many encounters resolved using the Battletech rules. And if that all the observer sees then they may thing they are just wargaming. But when observed over multiples it become clear that the focus is on pretending to be Mechwarrior pilots and not just playing Battletech scenarios and see who is victorious.

The same with storygames and tabletop roleplaying. I observed there is now a class of games that support collaborative storytelling where the participants are given mechanics or are told to think of the overall narrative and not just in terms of playing a character. That these games tend to give equal responsibility in and out of game to all the participant and not have a single individual, the referee responsible for manage and presenting the setting.

There is not clear line of demarkation if you just look at the mechanics. Just as there is isn't a clear line of demarcation between games like Shadowrun Crossfire and games like the Shadowrun RPG.
 
My issues dont really lie in the realm of deciding what is a wargame and what isnt. So as far as the forge labels go, gamist isnt really what we're talking about. My real lack of interest lies in attempting to use the terms simulationist and narrativist to separate RPGs and playstyles into two piles. I dont find it a useful separation since most games aren't one or the other but some mixture of both. I think you need to get a lot more granular than that to really be able to make any interesting distinctions.

So I'd rather talk about the intersection of how a rules set apportions authority over the diagetic frame, set next to how a set of table conventions further modifies that authority. The division of authority over the diagetic frame and avatars involved results in a discussion I find significantly more enlightening when it comes to comparing games and talking about their moving parts.
 
Yeah, so you only quoted part of my post and focused on that.
/QUOTE] I didn't disagree so did not see the need to talk about it.
You know full well I was referring to this toxic theory crafting, specifically the ones where we all club each other over the heads with classifications and then wank off to our own self importance.
And I get annoyed when some folks piling on when anybody proposing any kind of theory or observation that smacks of categorization. .
 

... and I get annoyed when people quote me out of context and confront me over it.
 
So I'd rather talk about the intersection of how a rules set apportions authority over the diagetic frame, set next to how a set of table conventions further modifies that authority.


The problem in regards with roleplaying games is that they are silent on anything diagetic or presentation of a narrative. Because the narrative is always after the fact due to the emphasize on pretending to be characters interacting with a setting. It makes as much sense as figuring out the narrative of a upcoming trip to Greece. You won't know what the story is until you have experience the trip. The same with roleplaying there is no narrative until the adventure has been experienced.
 
Then we are equally annoyed.

No need to stay annoyed in my opinion.

You points are valid, and I think you misunderstand me.
I have no issue with theory crafting in general. I have umbridge with the toxic type as has been discussed here. Where it becomes tribal and used to silence creativity instead of expanding upon it. I am not accusing you of that, I've not seen anything like that from you or anyone else on this thread. I have seen it elsewhere and it seems like the Forge and OSR tribalisms reflect that as well.

Some people just take it to extremes, the page count example I used came from a thread I was reading where someone asked what a good page count was and it erupted into all out war with two very distinct camps dueling to the death over it. At that point, we all suffer because no one can get any valid input and people with otherwise good ideas think they are shite and never pursue them because they got dogpiled over it.
 
I do think Edwards was prescriptive about design and play in his overall view but do think he is often misrepresented online and his argument is simplified and then attacked for being too simple-minded.

Here's what he actually said:

Much torment has arisen from people perceiving GNS as a labelling device. Used properly, the terms apply only to decisions, not to whole persons nor to whole games. To be absolutely clear, to say that a person is (for example) Gamist, is only shorthand for saying, "This person tends to make role-playing decisions in line with Gamist goals." Similarly, to say that an RPG is (for example) Gamist, is only shorthand for saying, "This RPG's content facilitates Gamist concerns and decision-making." For better or for worse, both of these forms of shorthand are common.

(My bold, from 'GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory')

Now one could say that this is the typical ass-covering that polemicists enage in where they say 'course I'm speaking in general for the sake of argument' and then proceed to use their terms as absolutionist hammers.

It is also quite possible Edwards contradicts himself after this statement, it has been a while since I read him closely, but based on this I find a lot of the online arguments are misrepresenting him.
 
The problem in regards with roleplaying games is that they are silent on anything diagetic or presentation of a narrative. Because the narrative is always after the fact due to the emphasize on pretending to be characters interacting with a setting. It makes as much sense as figuring out the narrative of a upcoming trip to Greece. You won't know what the story is until you have experience the trip. The same with roleplaying there is no narrative until the adventure has been experienced.
This seems like an odd statement to me. Almost every game has rules that govern authority over the diagetic frame, along with more or less advice about how to realize that authority in play. The framework for diagetic authority flows from the rules, and the various ways that might potentially be realized at the table is also circumscribed to a significant extent by the rules. The rules set the basic knobs and dials for avatar creation, and player facing rules set the base for how those avatars interact with the diagetic frame. The GM facing rules, assuming the game in question has a GM, generally lay the base for how to respond to and adjudicate avatar actions, and also how to present the diagetic frame to best realize the genre conventions in play to facilitate avatar action declaration. With all that information present in the rules it's very possible to discuss the kinds of narrative likely to be, or intended to be produced by a given table, by which I mean the combination or rules and players.
 
Yeah, so you only quoted part of my post and focused on that.
You know full well I was referring to this toxic theory crafting, specifically the ones where we all club each other over the heads with classifications and then wank off to our own self importance.
And no, this board is not all about theory crafting and only theory crafting.

Paul Mason identifies exactly what you're talking about in his excellent essay "In Search of the Self: A Survey of the First 25 Years of Anglo-American Role-Playing Games" (2004). Beyond Role and Play, pg 1-14.

"Much of this debate, like others before and since, was primarily political arguments seeking to establish the superiority of one form or approach over another."

For the reason's Mason outlines I think the idea that a productive RPG theory can come out of online fandom is unlikely, he was discussing theory from the APAs and fanzines of the 70s and 80s, it is now decades later and things have only gotten worse.
 
The problem in regards with roleplaying games is that they are silent on anything diagetic or presentation of a narrative. Because the narrative is always after the fact due to the emphasize on pretending to be characters interacting with a setting. It makes as much sense as figuring out the narrative of a upcoming trip to Greece. You won't know what the story is until you have experience the trip. The same with roleplaying there is no narrative until the adventure has been experienced.

Many fiction writers when they sit down don't have a clear narrative planned out. Many sit down with a basic idea or situation and then 'write to find out what happens' by 'following what the character does.' For the writer there is no 'story' until they've completed the short story or novel. So I don't see that as a unique distinction to rpgs.
 
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