If he had used any assertions other folks reinterpretted his comments as, there wouldn't be a problem.

If he had said 'ok, I was being a bit hyperbolic, but the basic idea is there,' I, at least, wouldn't have a problem.

But when you start saying shit like your brain is actually being damaged and teaching people badwrongfun is like raping toddlers, and repeatedly supporting that that's literally what you mean... in my book, you're a crazy asshole who doesn't deserve respect.

Or in other words, him being wrong doesn't disturb me. Most people online are wrong in dizzying ways.

But his ideas are hurtful and wrong in a way that reminds me of historical revisionism -- ignore the facts, brush off any responsibility for study (I'm not a psychologist BUT...), spread venom.

Quote from: WillBut when you start saying shit like your brain is actually being damaged and teaching people badwrongfun is like raping toddlers, and repeatedly supporting that that's literally what you mean... in my book, you're a crazy asshole who doesn't deserve respect.

See, now, this I won't argue.

There was an attempt on rpg.net to discuss the core issue with the offensive stuff stripped away.

It seemed though to then become rather platitudinous, habits acquired in one game may interfere with how well you play another.  Shorn of the offensive stuff there just didn't seem much left that merited much discussion.

It went to about 98 posts and we mostly avoided flames, but with the brain damage and abuse taken away we kept finding we didn't really have much to say.  Yes, playing one game may give you habits that are a pain in other games, and yes people using trad rpgs to try to tell collaborative stories will struggle since they're not really designed for that no matter what the marketing bumph on some may say.

Hardly groundbreaking insights.

One of the issues though I think is that Ron has surrounded himself with people who agree most of the time, and he genuinely thinks Sorceror is a brilliant rpg.  And I mean, it's not bad, but he's the only designer who I have regularly seen posting stuff like "wow, clearly my rules work even better than I had realised myself" and that is not far off a quote from something I read recently.  He needs, well, I think he needs to get out a bit more.

He's kind of the Michael Jackson of the rpg world, he did a lot of cool stuff back in the day but nowadays he seems kind of creepy and a bit out of date.

Ron did a lot of good at the Forge, but I'm not so sure it was so good for him.  That said, most of the real theory work now is being done in the blogoverse, I think Ron's meaningful contribution to theory is a thing of the past now and I don't see much of the recent big ideas coming from him.  It's more guys like VIncent or Chris Lehrich or people like that from the Forge diaspora.

Oh, utter tangent but somebody had Perfect20 on their top ten list of rpgs in the favourite systems thread, don't know if you saw that but if you haven't you should go over there and bask in some glory

Quote from: John MorrowYes, but the fact that this was survey data that they paid for and released to their R&D people before the public counters that opinion.

Released select portions of. Neutered as it were.  Do they have an agenda? Hrmmmmm, now what was that again. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. The most objective data? Well there are a number of audio recordings (which I like for conveying the pauses and tone) and transcripts (which I like for capturing wording, because I'm not great at listening to audio to take it all in). There was also a bit of video (and I've posted before about how I'm considering video taping for my own purposes) which gives even better body language. What I haven't seen is a lot of full debriefings from all the players, the kind that you get for playtests.

As for your beefs about it all being a fractional sample, well that WotC stuff is definately a sample. As well woe is the person that only follows survey question results, for that is the path of New Coke.

QuoteThis was data they paid for to use internally to make their products appeal to the broadest audience.

It was one of the pieces used to build within the existing constricts of the brand. To market their products to the biggest chunk of market within the constricts. And yes, so of that marketing is largely lipservice. "Oh, it can do it all." Which is enormous a crock of shit. Otherwise who'd own more than one game? Why would RPGPundit put off doing 3 Kingdoms till Qin?  Each game definately has it's own tone, and D&D is certainly no exception to that. You can pretend it is so amazingly broad because, hey, they have all this market research they used! But the truth is that amazingly broad is just as big a delusion and/or con as not being able to successfully cover anything other than a single focused point.

QuoteI know that sort of business thinking is alien to a lot of the hobbyists producing games for the love of gaming, but I'm willing to bet that WotC was more interested in selling a lot of copies of D&D than convincing gamers that styles are evenly distributed into four clear buckets.  What's the purpose or benefit of twisting the data for WotC, Dancey, or Reynolds?

The audience certainly wasn't Jane Public. Perhaps it was wanting content creators to jump on the D20 bandwagon and help push core book sales? That was the gist of the D20 licensing, right? To get other people to help out WotC?

Quote from: John Morrow

QuoteThe at one time is way back in one of the essays, and it's important in defining "coherence". Coherence is really just another way of saying consistancy between all the single points that happen during playing the game. That you don't have one part of the game fighting against the other or creating a pathological conflict within the rules.

And that only make sense if you assume that everyone at the table wants only one thing, to the exclusion of all else, out of their role-playing games. For many people, that's not true.

Yes and no. People, at least in my experience, have their comfort zones. They aren't just points on whatever graph, with some zones bigger than others. If you have something that hits where those zones overlap then you are golden.

But getting back to what you are saying I think you misunderstand here. If one part of the game is heavily 'N' and the other is heavily 'G' or 'S' or whatever, then that doesn't really create a good game for people that find those outside their comfort zones. Because at least part of the time they are annoyed by the game.  At the least if the game is consistant you'll be able to take or leave the game (especially if the advertising is consistant with the contents) and if you take it then you won't have people annoyed by being outside their zone.

My biggest disagreement is with Ron Edward's assertion (from what I've managed to decode) that a game can only successfuly provide a point somewhere in the GNS range (or whatever 'model' you want to run with for that matter) rather than a bit larger range of points to intersect with people's comfort zones.

Quote from: BalbinusSnipping away the rest of your excellent post, which as so often put my points more clearly than I had managed, I think this bit is important to single out as well because the Dancey research specifically speaks to and refutes this assertion I believe.

It does no such thing as it doesn't say shit about how the respondants were grouped at tables.  In no small part because it reads like they didn't sample that way, so even the underlying data doesn't have that.

Quote from: WillOr in other words, him being wrong doesn't disturb me. Most people online are wrong in dizzying ways.

But his ideas are hurtful and wrong in a way that reminds me of historical revisionism -- ignore the facts, brush off any responsibility for study (I'm not a psychologist BUT...), spread venom.

I'm sorry, I lost track. Who are we talking about now?  This guy? :pundit: :mischief:

Quote from: BalbinusLevi, it's like you've learnt internet aikido, every time I think I may have a hold I find myself grasping air then moments later flat on my ass on a padded mat.

Thanks for the mat by the way, it does make it easier

I think that ones 'Always conceed on the big issues'.

I'd have a go at 'pretending that to me your issue is the most important thing in the world', but it would mean thinking about ways to get Tau to work in a 40K rpg and I'm not sure I have the stomach for it.

:rimshot:

Actually, if anyone does have any ideas about how the heck you could play a Tau in a game I'm open to hearing about it.

Quote from: John MorrowI've been told to look at some "Actual Play" threads at the Forge to help me undestand why certain games seem so magical to their advocates.  Ever time, I walked away thinking, "That looks like a pretty normal role-playing session to me, with a lot of abstract mechanics getting in the way."

That says to me that somebody has been paying very good attention to games as they are played [successfully]. And then building rules that reflect and aid that success.

Now if you've already built the rules yourself then you're off. But it is surprising (well actually to me not very surprising at all) how often people struggle to nail down those rules that weren't written down anywere. Pour hours and days into it. If only I could go out and buy a really good head start on that somewhere, like for $20-$30. Well hot damn....maybe I can.

QuoteWhat I'd really like to see are some actual play threads of the games that these people played before they found Forge games.  I'm really curious what they are comparing against because they seem to think the differences are self-evident and I'm just not seeing them.

I'll tell you how mine were, a tale of fighting with the written rules that were in the way and trying to figure out rules that worked and accomplished our goals. Then I found the rules I'd wanted all along, and they only cost me $35CDN? SUH-WEET deal!

EDIT: This didn't have to be "Forge" nessasarily. It could have been any game. That the game I happened to pick up and say "HELL YEAH, THAT'S THE SHIT" turned out to be connected to The Forge (which I had never heard of before) was....well irrelavent. All I know is there was this game and it's what I wanted. What I wished I had found 15 years ago. That's why I'm glad there are people out there doing different things, that there is more than one type of game.  That people aren't just knocking off another D&D take on gaming, because it doesn't cover everything and even some of the things it covers can be covered better in other ways.  And sometimes that takes looking at things from a different POV.

Quote from: BalbinusOh, on the issue of whether the questions were leading or not, we can't know but it is worth remembering that this research was not to prove a point or philosophy.  This is a business carrying out market research on what gamers want in order to better shift product, they have a clear financial incentive in getting it right.

I want to clarify in response to this, and to John M's posts, that I'm not saying the data is being falsified. I do find it surprising that they found "clusters" which were roughly equal in number. That could simply be a remarkable result, or it could be an artifact of the questions or interpretation of data. (I didn't realize that Sean Reynolds, whose statement about "clustering" is stronger than Dancey's, had access to the raw data.)

However, even if the questions were leading, or the data didn't really show clusters, or the axes were chosen simply to bisect the population on the two dimensions, that doesn't invalidate the theory that the best place for D&D to be is right in the middle of the graph, as John reported above in this thread.

Aside from that empirical finding ("Games that lack support for one of the four differentiated segments struggle, and games that lack support for more than one are rarely played"), the "network effect" that I've argued for also provides an explanation for why the market favors a game which has broad appeal, even if it's not "the perfect game" for any given segment. If the "perfect game" can only be played in groups made up of a small selection of the overall gamer population, then those groups are going to have more difficulty forming than if the game can be played by groups of people with a mix of preferences. And since the value of a game is largely in the playing, the value of such a game is enhanced, even if it isn't "the perfect game" for notional groups composed of people with homogeneous preferences.

Quote from: blakkieReleased select portions of. Neutered as it were.

Not surprising.  Why give away something the paid for?

Quote from: blakkieThe most objective data? Well there are a number of audio recordings (which I like for conveying the pauses and tone) and transcripts (which I like for capturing wording, because I'm not great at listening to audio to take it all in). There was also a bit of video (and I've posted before about how I'm considering video taping for my own purposes) which gives even better body language. What I haven't seen is a lot of full debriefings from all the players, the kind that you get for playtests.

Let's assume that about a million people role-play and the average group consists of 5 people.  That's 200,000 role-playing groups.  How many different sessions from how many different groups do you need to carefully research before you get a represenatative sample?  And complicating matters, how many average role-playing groups have no interest in theory or having someone analyze their games like this?

Quote from: blakkieAs for your beefs about it all being a fractional sample, well that WotC stuff is definately a sample.

Sure.  But how many actual play threads or recordings have you read of D&D sessions compared to other games?

Quote from: blakkieAs well woe is the person that only follows survey question results, for that is the path of New Coke.

Speaking as someone who actually preferred New Coke, you aren't convincing me.  

What Coke didn't count on was the attachment people had to the brand and traditions.  Now, if you want to think of D&D as "Coke Classic" because it's the traditional game that most people play and plug that into your analogy, feel free but you'll wind up with the Forge fighting an even steeper uphill battle to change minds and win hearts.  Beyond trying to create new Coke, they are trying to sell people on the equivalent of organic black bean soda -- because it's good for you.

Quote from: blakkieIt was one of the pieces used to build within the existing constricts of the brand. To market their products to the biggest chunk of market within the constricts.

That's not entirely correct.  I have a copy of that entire thread from Pyramid.  It's clear that WotC wanted not only to build within the existing brand but (A) recapture the people who had been alienated 2nd Edition AD&D and (B) bring in new people who didn't play D&D.  Yes, they wanted it to be D&D but they also wanted it to be more than it was.

Quote from: blakkie"Oh, it can do it all." Which is enormous a crock of shit. Otherwise who'd own more than one game?

There are lots of people who don't own more than one game and lots of people who only own a couple.  D&D's sales are so much greater than any other game that it's clear that a lot of people buy D&D and not much else, if anything else.  So for a lot of people, D&D does do it all -- or at least all they want it to do.  And that's why I'm doubting your sample.  Heck, look at all of the "I want to try something else but all my group wants to play is D&D" (or maybe "d20") threads on RPGnet and elsewhere.

Quote from: blakkieWhy would RPGPundit put off doing 3 Kingdoms till Qin?

The same reason why most people vanity publish.  Yeah, I know some people don't like that term but there is a reason why it's used for self-publishing of books.

Quote from: blakkieEach game definately has it's own tone, and D&D is certainly no exception to that. You can pretend it is so amazingly broad because, hey, they have all this market research they used! But the truth is that amazingly broad is just as big a delusion and/or con as not being able to successfully cover anything other than a single focused point.

Before the D&D 3.5 game that I recently ran, I hadn't played D&D in at least a decade and probably never played it entirely by the book (the games I played in college used lots of custom rules).  Most of my earliest experiences used Traveller.  I'm also currently playing in D&D 3.5 games.  Do you know what we spent most of our time doing?  Playing through interpersonal conflicts between the characters and with the NPCs.  I have no particular attachment to D&D and may never run it again, but it's been doing a pretty good job of staying  out of the way of the role-playing in the games I've been playing in and running.

That's part of why Forge "Actual Play" threads leave me cold.  Characters having intense conflicts and making meaningful decisions?  I can't think of many games that I've played in that didn't have that stuff, regardless of the system.  Do people really need rules for that?

Quote from: blakkieThe audience certainly wasn't Jane Public.

Sure it was.  You could argue that it did a poor job of it, and in many ways I'd agree with you, but I think it was also designed to appeal beyond the existing D&D fan base.

Quote from: blakkiePerhaps it was wanting content creators to jump on the D20 bandwagon and help push core book sales? That was the gist of the D20 licensing, right? To get other people to help out WotC?

It's possible.  But, again, Sean Reynolds says that's what they also showed their internal R&D department.  Now, I can understand why you might question Ryan Dancey's motives and interpretations but I don't think Sean Reynolds has any history of selling snake oil.

Quote from: blakkieYes and no. People, at least in my experience, have their comfort zones. They aren't just points on whatever graph, with some zones bigger than others. If you have something that hits where those zones overlap then you are golden.

Sean Reynolds essentially says that.  He said, "Just be aware that these results are tendencies; someone whose answers landed them in the 'Thinkers' quadrant can still enjoy aspects of the other four quadrants. It's a market research study, not a psionic blueprint of the gaming populations."  And the lesson that WotC drew from their data wasn't to design games for just Thinkers but that each of those styles enjoys elements of the others.

Quote from: blakkieBut getting back to what you are saying I think you misunderstand here. If one part of the game is heavily 'N' and the other is heavily 'G' or 'S' or whatever, then that doesn't really create a good game for people that find those outside their comfort zones. Because at least part of the time they are annoyed by the game.

You just got through claiming that points are bad and some comfort zones are bigger than others.  What makes you think that most gamers fit neatly withing a single GNS category but not into one of the WotC categories?  You are skeptical that gamers magically grouped into WotC's 4 quadrants.  Are you equally skeptical of the idea that most gamers group neatly into the 3 GNS categories?

Quote from: blakkieAt the least if the game is consistant you'll be able to take or leave the game (especially if the advertising is consistant with the contents) and if you take it then you won't have people annoyed by being outside their zone.

Another sort of thread you'll see a lot of online is, "I can't find anyone to role-play with."  For many people, if they leave the game, they don't game.  Or they stop hanging out with good friends  So instead of having a game that they can enjoy most of the time and be annoyed with part of the time, they've got a game that they find annoying most of the time and enjoy very little of or they have to leave.  Is that really a preferable choice?  Maybe if you start from the assumption that the traditional role-playing game is 20 minutes of fun for every 4 hours of playing.  In my experience, unless you are playing with strangers, that's not true.

Quote from: blakkieMy biggest disagreement is with Ron Edward's assertion (from what I've managed to decode) that a game can only successfuly provide a point somewhere in the GNS range (or whatever 'model' you want to run with for that matter) rather than a bit larger range of points to intersect with people's comfort zones.

And that's exactly why two parts of the rules might work toward contradictory ends.  They are each providing something to a different point within a broader zone.  So I could argue that Fudge's Fudge Points (which are cinematic) contradict the wound penalties (which are, in theory, realistic) because the Fudge Points counter the more realistic elements of the wound system.  But that totally misses the point of why they are both there.

Quote from: BalbinusFor all the theory at the Forge, the actual sales remain very low, lower than many trad games brought out without any real backing of theory to them.  That doesn't make them bad games, but it does cast doubt on the underlying theories as good explanations of what gamers want.

I agree with this.

I'm not much of a fan, but for the sake of argument I'll accept that, for a group with homogeneous preferences, or whose members are very flexible, a tightly-focused game based on GNS may be more fun than a general-purpose, traditional, "incoherent" game.

But if the theory says that tightly-focused games are better choices for marketing purposes, or that every individual is better served by tight focus, or that every game group is better served, it's wrong.

Start with individuals: many people see the potential for long-term, wide-ranging play as an attractive feature of RPGs.

Now groups: If the only way to play game X is to hunt down a whole new game group (if you can, given the game's limited appeal), then game X may not be worth the trouble compared to game Y which you can enjoy playing with your existing group, or even a random bunch of people as long as they're willing to compromise a bit.

Marketing: Both because there are individuals who don't want focus, and because of the network effect that enhances the value of games which can be played in a variety of ways with people of mixed preferences, an "unfocused" game is certainly viable.

However, those same network effects also amplify the "niche" effect on any given game. That is, if customers don't see a compelling inherent reason to choose game A over game B, they'll tend to gravitate toward whichever of the two is better supported by an existing network of gamers.

This is why D&D is both successful for good reasons and, very likely, a bad model to follow for all but a few publishers. If you try to make a "big game", you're going to have trouble gaining traction in the "big game" market. Everybody already knows which game to go to if they want something with wide appeal, so if you simply recapitulate those "wide appeal" features, the marginal difference in inherent value, between D&D and your game, is going to be swamped by the value offered by D&D's bigger network.

In short, Forge design theory has some validity, given that the market is already dominated by D&D. It's a bit of another question whether Forge theory has valid marketing advice for games like RQ, BRP, Hero, GURPS, or small press games (other than the Forge-y ones). I think it does, to some extent, in that a bunch of these games do seem to struggle along, trying to compete with D&D in its broad niche, and they'd be better off going for more differentiation and carving out a niche of their own. On the other hand, the differentiation needn't be a matter of GNS-focus, as the games I've mentioned have managed to do more or less well simply by offering technical differences that appeal to the highly discriminating RPG market--given that gamers will argue over whether percentile rolls or bell curves are superior, there is room for games that differ on that point alone.

Quote from: blakkieThat says to me that somebody has been paying very good attention to games as they are played [successfully]. And then building rules that reflect and aid that success.

To some degree, that's true.  Most of my group's games were played using homebrew rules over the years.  But that has to do with how situations are handled and not how the game runs at the level of plot, story, or whatever you want to call it.  Our homebrew rules have always been quite traditional in that regard.

Here's the point that I think a lot of Forge people are missing.  All that stuff about Narrativism being about addressing premise and so on?  You don' t need formal rules for that.  Heck, I don't even need GM buy-in to get that.  If I want a character who "addresses a premise" and had an intense ephiphany or whatever, I simply make a character that's strongly engaged with their situation and the setting and has some unanswered questions that they are interested in and it just happens.  I don't need a special resolution system that breaks conflicts down into abstract back and forth contests.  I can do it in Hero.  I can do it in D&D.  Heck, I don't want the GM "banking" my "kickers" (hope I used that correctly).  I can handle all of that myself if I want.

Quote from: blakkieNow if you've already built the rules yourself then you're off. But it is surprising (well actually to me not very surprising at all) how often people struggle to nail down those rules that weren't written down anywere. Pour hours and days into it. If only I could go out and buy a really good head start on that somewhere, like for $20-$30. Well hot damn....maybe I can.

I think the Forge people are on to something with the idea that creating characters with intense questions and tweaking those questions into play will go a long way toward creating good stories.  Where I think they miss the boat is the idea that one needs to wrap a whole new type of rules around that idea to benefit from it.  You can insert that idea into plain old D&D and get the benefit from it.

Quote from: blakkieI'll tell you how mine were, a tale of fighting with the written rules that were in the way and trying to figure out rules that worked and accomplished our goals. Then I found the rules I'd wanted all along, and they only cost me $35CDN? SUH-WEET deal!

Why do you think you were fighting the rules?  What were they doing wrong?  What's the key thing you get out of this different game that you didn't get out of traditional RPGs?

I'm not hostile to experimentation and new things.  But my concern with the idea of coherence is that it produces games that appeal to even smaller niches than traditional games.  As a social hobby played by groups, I'm not sure that's a good thing.

The analogy for why else I think this can be bad that I usually give comes from this page, which talks about the end of AM radio's biggest Top-40 station and the broad appeal Top 40 format in favor or radio stations that program to small niche audiences.  The analogous point can be found in the section that starts, "Was something lost?"

Quote from: Elliot WilenAside from that empirical finding ("Games that lack support for one of the four differentiated segments struggle, and games that lack support for more than one are rarely played"), the "network effect" that I've argued for also provides an explanation for why the market favors a game which has broad appeal, even if it's not "the perfect game" for any given segment. If the "perfect game" can only be played in groups made up of a small selection of the overall gamer population, then those groups are going to have more difficulty forming than if the game can be played by groups of people with a mix of preferences. And since the value of a game is largely in the playing, the value of such a game is enhanced, even if it isn't "the perfect game" for notional groups composed of people with homogeneous preferences.

Bingo.

Personally, I find that playing alongside folks who have different, but overlapping, interests makes for a much more enjoyable game.

Sure, I'm not hugely into tactics. But I can find a friend's enthusiasm for the grid infectious. Likewise, some of my worldbuilding gearheadedness can get people going, at least for a little while.