Why D&D?

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Faylar said:
It played differently than any other like it that I played before or sat in on. It wasn't squad level so much as you and your squad vs a Game Master.
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Wait...what?

I think you witnessed someone playing it...uniquelly. BatteTech, as far as the rulebooks, is pretty clearly laid out as a two person battle between lances and auxiliary units.

Here's a pdf of first edition:

It even goes so far as to describe itself as a "boardgame".
 
TristramEvans said:
Wait...what?

I think you witnessed someone playing it...uniquelly. BatteTech, as far as the rulebooks, is pretty clearly laid out as a two person battle between lances and auxiliary units.

Here's a pdf of first edition:

It even goes so far as to describe itself as a "boardgame".
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Maybe. It was 24 years ago
I played it a bit with my friends, but they were more heavily into it. we played an inner sphere vs the clans campaign. Our usual GM played the clans, we played the squad.
When we revisited it with mechwarrior rules later, I played an Elemental under Wolf's Dragoons. I ran the artillery and infantry units so that they could spend the evening sitting around maneuvering mechs and I could just glance at the map on my turn and make actions if anything was near my ambush sites while playin Shining Force 2 on my Genesis. lol
Pre Mechwarrior, we very much played it as a squad vs the GM though. I do remember that quite clearly.
 
Faylar said:
Maybe. It was 24 years ago
I played it a bit with my friends, but they were more heavily into it. we played an inner sphere vs the clans campaign. Our usual GM played the clans, we played the squad.
When we revisited it with mechwarrior rules later, I played an Elemental under Wolf's Dragoons. I ran the artillery and infantry units so that they could spend the evening sitting around maneuvering mechs and I could just glance at the map on my turn and make actions if anything was near my ambush sites while playin Shining Force 2 on my Genesis. lol
Pre Mechwarrior, we very much played it as a squad vs the GM though. I do remember that quite clearly.
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Well, I'm not putting it down, it sounds fun.

Especially because I hate the Clans.

And one of the strengths of BattleTech is that it is completely modular. You could just as easily play a game with just 2 mechs taking each other on, as you could a planetwide war that's fought on three battlefronts - land, air, and outer space.
 
TristramEvans said:
Well, I'm not putting it down, it sounds fun.

Especially because I hate the Clans.
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TBH... I kind of hated the Battletech part, but loved the Mechwarrior part. My character was the muscle and financier of the group. They were the pilots.
Battletech got boring for me after a half dozen games. My friends took too damn long on their turns because they always were bickering over some thing or another.
It's entirely possible I am either remembering it wrong, or we played a weird version of it and never knew better. Only one guy had the books at the time. I have the main book now and 3 tech manuals from a garage sale, but I didn't have them then.
 
My friend Scott was all hot and bothered about the Atlas, so my friend Jeff would pilot one of his mechs and I would pilot the Thunderbolt and we would try to kill the Atlas.
 
Vargold said:
My friend Scott was all hot and bothered about the Atlas, so my friend Jeff would pilot one of his mechs and I would pilot the Thunderbolt and we would try to kill the Atlas.
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Didn't the Atlas have a movement of like 2 hexes or something ridiculously small like that?
 
Faylar said:
Didn't the Atlas have a movement of like 2 hexes or something ridiculously small like that?
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walking 3/running 5 (though why you'd ever run in an Atlas is beyond me)

Yeah, it was slow, but it was the Mech equivalent of Jason Vorhees....
 
Basically, I would park my Thunderbolt in a pond and lob missiles at it while the others screened me and ran circles about it.
 
Vargold said:
Basically, I would park my Thunderbolt in a pond and lob missiles at it while the others screened me and ran circles about it.
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Did you guys allow mods, or was it strict 3025 record sheets? Because if allowed to mod the Atlas, there are known ways to make it more efficient
 
Whatever was in the second edition boxed set is what we used. I don't think we played any edition after that because college intervened.
 
I recall in the 90's playing Battletech as a single mech of a squad vs set enemies for a scenario (often those were premade) but several people played. (I even completed the entire mission before my team got into range of the enemy as I built a light mech with super high speed, and ran to the objective, and ran back off the map which was the goal to get the data from a thing and leave.) They were kinda put out--but I didn't know that be the mission when I built my "I can't survive being hit" mech, I just wanted to push the speed up and plink the enemy then run away...guerilla tactics style.



On the interesting note Car Wars, had the Driver, and slowly evolved it into a skilled person you cared about and not just a component of the car, but still kept it mostly tied to the Car Wars rules, but with RP. Heck Autoduel America is a friend's favorite Post-apocalypse sci-fi setting (but not Gurps.) Then again he did work for S.J.G at one point. I love the setting too and find it interesting, the cars are cool, and it could use a modern rework that actually plans to rework it for speedier play. I mean it's competing more with video games (and other wargames, Gaslands Refueled for example, which is scaled for Hot Wheels/Matchbox already IIRC)

Mind you Interstate '76 and Twisted Metal both were a blast but a long time ago., shame we don't have versions of those more recently yet they turn out race car video games, sans combat left and right...
 
TristramEvans said:
walking 3/running 5 (though why you'd ever run in an Atlas is beyond me)

Yeah, it was slow, but it was the Mech equivalent of Jason Vorhees....
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I once played a game against my brothers using an Atlas equipped with jump jets. The little bastards kept using their mechs flamethrowers....
 
EmperorNorton said:
See I just think this kind of cut and dry definition stuff is how we squash creativity in the RPG field. I think sometimes the reason why I've loved the Japanese TTRPG field so much is they don't seem to be burdened by the mountain of navelgazing that we have in the EN community. They don't think about "oh but if I do x, I'm no longer making an RPG".

"If you do this or that, you aren't a REAL RPG" is just trying to fit everything into the mold of your mindset, rather than accepting that the field is much more nebulous than that.
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Imagine if people tried to define the novel or film as narrowly as some in RPG fandom try to define the form? Such attempts have ended in total failure for a reason.
 
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I'm still, 20 odd years later, sad we never got that Atlas action figure

battletech-4.jpg
 
robertsconley said:
In addition the early Brausteins featured players controlling armies like in a wargame. So that was another point of difference. I listened to Dave Wesely describe his sessions and it sounded like a cross between a LARP, a monster session of diplomacy with miniature wargames on the side.
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If memory serves...

The later Brausteins, like Braustein IV, had all the players sitting at the table with statted characters and describing what their characters did in first person. The results of that would then feed into a wargame after, but those later Braustein sessions were RPGs I would say.

Then along comes Brownstone, the Wild West campaign of Braustein sessions (as they thought of it at the time). GM adjudicated roleplaying of statted characters who could advance.

What Arneson did was apply this to fantasy and come up with the cool concept of the dungeon, but it seems to me everything was already there in Brownstone at the very least.

Of course Marc Miller has described roleplaying SciFi sessions around the same time, he just didn't stat the characters. So he didn't have a roleplaying "game" in the sense we mean today.

EDIT: I should say this isn't a counterpoint to anything you've said, just checking my own understanding.
 
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Some nights the humour will rule, some nights the grim intensity comes upon the players. The trick is being sympathetic, moving the story and having fun. You CAN NOT play Dying Earth (Pelgrane Press) straight - you will temp and be tempted. We are allways "knowing" - my current Heroic Greece campaign asks the players to get into the Heroic mindset - but it is still knowing,
 
CRKrueger said:
One of the issues with diagesis is it comes from literary studies, ported into video game studies, comic studies etc. And based on it’s literary roots, the term comes to mean ”the world of the story”.

The problem is the word story. A story is an artistic construct, and creating one is an active conscious act. Roleplaying occurs within an imaginary space, not a story...unless the people Roleplaying are actively storytelling at the same time.

“RPGs create stories“ was never accurate, but was kinda sorta true enough for gov’t work, and was definitely true for some people, but definitely not true for others. Once Story came to be a literal Story with the likes of Laws and Edwards, that phrase is not only incorrect, but actively harmful, because it frames all RPG theory from the viewpoint of only a section of the Roleplayers.

So if you see a diagetic frame as a story that we are to some degree all collaborating in telling, then we’re done before we start, because we are disagreeing on first principles.
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I'd disagree, simply on the grounds I think that "story" is a broader term than that. Do RPGs create story? Absolutely. But so does something like VIrgin Queen. Specifically, the story it creates is emergent narrative. Which is still a form of story, it just doesn't follow the traditional story structure.

I think it was you who has previously differentiated between trad rpgs, narrative rpgs and storygames? That works for me, there's definitely three broad categories here, not two. And actual storygames are pretty rare. Yes, Apocalypse World is pretty different to Runequest in terms of its structure.

TristramEvans said:
As I said - I can roleplay during Monopoly. But that doesn't turn Monopoly into an RPG. The game itself must have the intention from the onset.

Recall Roleplaying is an activity, divorced from RPGs. It may be the purpose of the Roleplaying games, but they aren't linked. You can roleplay in a thousand different contexts that aren't RPGs. In fact it's a borrowed term - it was already in frequent use in Psychology years before the first RPG.

Hence you need both elements - the role-playing and the game. Or role-playing as a game is probably more accurate.

The minute a game has a different primary purpose (in Monopoly's case to teach you why Georgism is awesome), it ceases to be an RPG. But again, the game itself, not the person using the game. You can use an RPG to not roleplay, but it's still an RPG, just as you can roleplay during a wargame, but its still a wargame.
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Monopoly is pretty easy to dismiss here. As you say, it doesn't have roleplaying as a primary purpose or even a secondary goal.

Where I think the grey area arises is something like Junta. You could play it as a strict mechanical exercise, although I'm not sure why that would appeal. But roleplaying, in the sense of negotiating as the head of your family does arise naturally through the game structure and is almost always approached in the first person.
 
Black Leaf said:
Where I think the grey area arises is something like Junta. You could play it as a strict mechanical exercise, although I'm not sure why that would appeal. But roleplaying, in the sense of negotiating as the head of your family does arise naturally through the game structure and is almost always approached in the first person.
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I'm not familiar with Junta. Does it call itself an RPG?
 
TristramEvans said:
I'm not familiar with Junta. Does it call itself an RPG?
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It doesn't, but it's from the era where hobby boardgamers and hobby roleplayers were almost always the same people. As a theory, while heavy negotiation games aren't actually RPGs they're probably the closest kin in the boardgame world. (Even more than wargames).
 
Black Leaf said:
It doesn't, but it's from the era where hobby boardgamers and hobby roleplayers were almost always the same people. As a theory, while heavy negotiation games aren't actually RPGs they're probably the closest kin in the boardgame world. (Even more than wargames).
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What about Murder Mystery Party Games?
 
TristramEvans said:
What about Murder Mystery Party Games?
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In a Murder Mystery game you have to stay on script or the game will break. So while you can ACT during a Murder Mystery game, you can't ask "what would my guy do."
 
TristramEvans said:
What about Murder Mystery Party Games?
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Depends on the type of game.

At one end of the spectrum you have the stuff from Freeform Games and are an attempt to market LARP to a mainstream audience. Those are so obviously a form of RPG I don't think anyone would argue the point. (Unless they don't think LARP is a variant of RPG for some reason).

At the other end you have private theatre peformances in front of an audience that tries to guess the murderer, which equally obviously isn't a RPG.

ffilz said:
In a Murder Mystery game you have to stay on script or the game will break. So while you can ACT during a Murder Mystery game, you can't ask "what would my guy do."
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Much like Tristam, I think that depends on whether you're using "Murder Mystery Party Games" to describe that brand (who I don't know but might well not be RPGs) or as a broad description of the genre. There's a lot of different stuff covered in the latter. I actually broke this down on here previously


Depends what kind of murder mystery games we're talking about.

This is a good breakdown - https://www.great-murder-mystery-games.com/murder-mystery-party-games.html

Of his types:

Dinner Theatre is a term often used for professionally organised events that consist of a group of actors staging a murder mystery for the audience to solve.
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I think we'd all agree that isn't a LARP or any kind of RPG, it's a private theatre performance.

Interviewing Suspects

Mysteries-on-the-Net champion these types of murder mystery party games, and they consist of several suspects with detailed character background and motives.

Everyone else plays a detective, trying to solve the murder (usually in teams).

(...)

Interaction in these games is limited to interviewing the suspects and they are firmly focussed on solving the murder.
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Not LARP. While it would technically be possible to roleplay in them, it's not the focus and I doubt most participants are actually playing a detective character. I'd see those more as an interactive puzzle.

Turn-based murder mystery party games are probably the games that most people are familiar with as they have been made famous by Decipher's How to Host a Murder... range of boxed games available in stores.

Each game is split into turns (usually four) and in each turn you find a little bit more about the murder and your background until at the end you have all the facts to solve the murder.

During each turn everyone has a chance to question everyone else.
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It's getting a bit more murky here but I'd still see these as not LARP. They're scripted and people aren't so much playing a role as saying what their character knows. They're more a kind of theatrical party game. If this is a form of RPG so is Werewolf and I don't think it is.

Interactive Murder Mystery Party Games

My favourite murder mystery party games are those that are fully interactive:

  • You know everything up front about your character.
  • You have lots of other goals - not just solving the murder.
  • It's up to you how you solve the murder and achieve your goals.
  • The game isn't played in rounds.
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Definitely LARP. Steve Hatherley author of the quoted piece makes these, so there is a marketing bias here. But I own a lot of his work (it appeared on a Bundle of Holding one time). And they are functionally identical to any of the other LARPs I own. They play in exactly the same way. The only difference is there's a bit more advice on how to run as you'd expect from a product aimed at non gamers.

So when we're talking about murder mysteries these are the only type I think are genuinely LARPs and hence a type of rpg.

The only part of his definition I'd take issue with is the "game isn't played in rounds". It's rare, but I know of a handful of LARPs that use theatrical acts. Boxed Set is the main one.

It's worth noting that Hatherely has also written RPG supplements, mostly for Call of Cthulhu. So he's bringing that to his business.

I'm actually slightly awed by the cunning of getting people who wouldn't consider themselves gamers to play LARPs by calling them "murder mystery parties".
 
Yea, I was thinking of the "How to Host a Murder" types. Definitely not a LARP. And yea, a true LARP is an RPG, perhaps in the form of a one-shot.
 
TristramEvans said:
Honestly, I think the big difference with Battletech, as opposed to Mechwarrior, is simply in perspective - you are not a single character, you are an all-seeing, all-knowing general looking at the gameboarsd from a 3rd person omniscient view. To me RPGs start with picking a role and role-playing it - but more than that, it's not the ability to do this (that's almost universal - Ican and have roleplayed as a rich dog robber baron in Monopoly), but instead it's the primary purpose of the game.

And I think it's the purpose that distinguishes RPGs, not the mechanics.

So an RPG, I'd say, is any game that sets out to be an RPG.
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I really think this is the crux of the truth - that it's literally all a matter of perspective and intent. An rpg and a non-rpg can be identical mechanically, but the game that calls itself an rpg expects that the players will view their game-pieces as "characters" (which can mean widely different things in different games, and from different players) while a non-rpg expects that they will be viewed as game-pieces.

I remember playing Squad Leader with one of my rpg buddies back in the day. He made up personalities for the various named counters and made his decisions in the game based on that rather than the pure rules-based tactics. He was playing it as an rpg. Squad Leader isn't an rpg because there's no instruction or expectation to do that, but at least IMO a game with the exact same rules but, like, one more paragraph that described those named counters as characters rather than game-pieces, could be.
 
T. Foster said:
I really think this is the crux of the truth - that it's literally all a matter of perspective and intent. An rpg and a non-rpg can be identical mechanically, but the game that calls itself an rpg expects that the players will view their game-pieces as "characters" (which can mean widely different things in different games, and from different players) while a non-rpg expects that they will be viewed as game-pieces.

I remember playing Squad Leader with one of my rpg buddies back in the day. He made up personalities for the various named counters and made his decisions in the game based on that rather than the pure rules-based tactics. He was playing it as an rpg. Squad Leader isn't an rpg because there's no instruction or expectation to do that, but at least IMO a game with the exact same rules but, like, one more paragraph that described those named counters as characters rather than game-pieces, could be.
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I'm still not convinced that your friend was playing Squad Leader the RPG... I think it's also important that those "in character" decisions have an impact on the game based on their role playing content. I don't think that being in character and losing the game because you made in character choices that were not good choices to win the game doesn't count as an RPG. The game doesn't care about your role playing, it just is showing you that you made sub-optimal choices.

This is one reason a GM may be necessary. The GM can evaluate the in character choices and decide they have merit outside the strict mechanics of the game. For example, your playing being friendly to the villagers as your troops enter wins over some villagers so they give you information that translates into a bonus on an attack, or gains you actual additional troops, or whatever the GM decides. Your war game opponent isn't going to say, "Oh, you can have a +1 on your attacks against me because you got information off the villagers." And ultimately, you're still playing to victory conditions.

Now Braunstein had a GM and had the potential of the role play leading to bonuses, but the victory conditions still didn't change. In Squad Leader the RPG, the GM might allow your squad leader to desert and join the villagers in resistance, and now the original victory conditions you were playing to become irrelevant to the game, what becomes relevant is "what happens next." NOW you've transformed Squad Leader from a war game into an RPG.

So Braunstein had role playing but wasn't an RPG. The game wasn't about the role playing, the game was about the scenario with it's victory conditions.

But I think Braunstein really stretched the role playing as a war game and thus I think it can be considered an almost RPG. And it certainly provided a good foundation for Arneson and the Blackmoor players to launch off from.
 
I think looking through the prism of what differentiated Blackmoor from previous Braunsteins in order to define what is and isn't an rpg is too narrow a perspective, because there have been a lot of rpgs published in the decades since that aren't much like Blackmoor at all - GM-less games, games with explicit victory conditions, games meant to be played in a single session, etc. - and while I suppose it's any given person's prerogative to define some or all of those games as "not really rpgs," that's not really helpful for purposes of meaningful conversation because to their creators and participants they clearly ARE rpgs.

Let's remember also that prior to about 1976 there wasn't really any attempt to differentiate rpgs from other war-games - the 1975 edition of Boot Hill, for instance, just calls itself a 1:1 scale war-game with optional campaign elements. The firm delineation between Blackmoor and everything that came prior is important to people who have a vested interest in maintaining Dave Arneson's legacy as "the inventor of the rpg" but I'm not convinced it's particularly applicable or interesting outside of that narrow context. A lot of importance is attached to Blackmoor's open-ended scope as the main characteristic that set it apart from all prior games, but open-ended scope can't be the universal defining characteristic of all rpgs, because many rpgs (in fact, the vast majority of all published rpgs) don't have that - they have defined genres, settings, etc. My understanding of Rob Kuntz's position is that by his estimation all of those other games have failed to live up to Arneson's model and are therefore stunted quasi-rpgs at best, which I suppose serves his polemical end but, again, isn't really helpful for anything else.
 
dbm said:
* ETA: I will qualify that to say (before the hoard arrives :clown: ) that yes - I would really struggle to point at any narrative style rules in early editions of D&D and games very strongly based of them. Nothing is absolute.
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What do you mean by "no narrative rules in early D&D"? Hit points, alignment and Wish spells aren't iconic enough for you:devil:?
 
AsenRG said:
What do you mean by "no narrative rules in early D&D"? Hit points, alignment and Wish spells aren't iconic enough for you:devil:?
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Deck of many things is arguably an even better example. Not necessarily narrative, but it's in no way immersive either. Because if you took the decision IC (as opposed to from the perspective of a player who can just roll up another character) touching it would be an incredibly bad idea.
 
AsenRG said:
What do you mean by "no narrative rules in early D&D"? Hit points, alignment and Wish spells aren't iconic enough for you:devil:?
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Personally I would classify HP as a gamist mechanism. They don’t have any tangible thing that they simulate, and they aren’t a form of narrative control, either. I’m pretty sure Gygax has been reported as saying that HP are a pacing mechanism, primarily.

Alignment might be a simulationist item, in that it simulates something that exists in the metaphysics of the game world. In many editions of D&D, alignment is a tangible and measurable thing.

A wish is also probably a simulationist item in that it represents an ability that someone can acquire through learning.
 
Black Leaf said:
Deck of many things is arguably an even better example. Not necessarily narrative, but it's in no way immersive either. Because if you took the decision IC (as opposed to from the perspective of a player who can just roll up another character) touching it would be an incredibly bad idea.
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Hell, for that matter going into a dungeon full of monsters that can all see in the dark and notice you coming a mile away is an insanely bad idea from an IC perspective.
 
Brock Savage said:
Hell, for that matter going into a dungeon full of monsters that can all see in the dark and notice you coming a mile away is an insanely bad idea from an IC perspective.
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That I can at least believe, on the grounds that mercenarys exist in the real world and choose to be shot at for a paycheck.
 
I would say HP is narrative depending on who describes what they are lost means. If the GM is describing the loss of HP, it is just abstraction, if the players describe what the loss of HP means, it would be narrative.

Maybe. I guess. Who knows. The words almost lack meaning at this point.
 
Acquiring experience points through killing monsters and gathering treasure in order to gain levels, which in turn provide more hit points and better abilities (and eventually grants the ability to build a castle, acquire a body of free followers, and start levying taxes on the populace) looks like a narrative construct to me - it incentivizes particular activities and imposes a default shape and set of goals to the campaign. Following these rules the game will end up "telling the story" of an adventurer who rose from humble beginnings to become a legendary hero and lord of their own realm, just like Conan (except you can also do it as a wizard, cleric, or thief).
 
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