Dude. Huge difference between "most" and "many." That's why I bolded the word. He does say "most" once I see. . .but he refers to "most roleplayers I encounter. Not the same thing as "most roleplayers" by a long shot. Likewise, "widespread" and "all gamers." Ron may be scientifically off base in saying "widespread" based only on personal experience, but man, if I had dozens of fellow gamers exhibiting these symptoms, and if "most" of the roleplayers I encountered were bitter, I'd probably call it fucking widespread too. Fuck, I've never even met dozens of gamers. He calls it his "straightforward observation," which sounds an awful lot to me like "in my experience" rather than a statistical reality. So if you haven't had that experience, why not consider yourself fortunate? Who knows just what proportion the burned out or frustrated gamers are? They're numerous enough that a place like the Forge can sustain its dialogue on how to fix gaming problems, whatever you may think of the methodology or results of that dialogue.

Regarding Physicians and Mechanics: I never said "only." You keep inserting words or upgrading them to greater severity and trying to make me out to say something I didn't. I can't really engage in dialogue under these conditions.

ANd lastly. . .yes, I have read all of those essays. I obviously did not draw the same conclusions as you did. The insinuation that I haven't read them is insulting and obstructive to say the least. if a Christian asks you, "tell me where in the Bible it says that," it doesn't mean he/she hasn't read the Bible. It means it;'s a big body of work and complete command of its every chapter and verse is beyond most readers. And particularly given your claim that these statements of Ron's are all "between the lines" so to speak, it's pretty shitty to assume I'll see the same thing as you in all instances, then accusing me of not reading them if I don't.

I made a straightforward request, not because I;m poorly-versed in Ron's material and wanted a cheat sheet, but because I am pretty well versed and have no idea what writings of his are spawning these claims. You can help me or not. But I dislike being called a liar for merely disagreeing.

Peace,
-Joel

Quote from: Levi KornelsenYou can be on my team.  We've got...

Uh...

A straight white male market researcher, and a chinese lesbian geneticist.

We fight crime!

Awesome! I shall be the Paisley Prince, Thriftstore Shopping Love Warrior!

Subject: JimBobOz

Action: Increase Respect +1

Oh boy. More "prove it to me" from Joel. I suspect a desperate move to derail the thread by sending people off to find links. Then he's denying the links say what they say.

There's the dishonesty that comes from outright lying, and then there's the dishonesty that comes from pretending you can't see the obvious or never saw it.

Quote from: MelinglorANd lastly. . .yes, I have read all of those essays. I obviously did not draw the same conclusions as you did. ... It means it;'s a big body of work and complete command of its every chapter and verse is beyond most readers. And particularly given your claim that these statements of Ron's are all "between the lines" so to speak, it's pretty shitty to assume I'll see the same thing as you in all instances, then accusing me of not reading them if I don't.

And here we come to the root cause of all this brouhaha.  Because, you see, there's a whole lot of negative connotation between the lines in those posts that any neutral reader would see.  But most people steeped in Forge discussion just don't see it.  The result of this is that when these people post about RPGs, they use the same negative and offensive connotations without intending to...just because their only model for talking about RPG theory has taught them to.  Look here for the perfect example (reference Troy Costisick's anonymous comments).  

Like I said to droog, if Ron made those disparaging comments about, say Dogs, you'd immediately see how insulting it is.  The fact that you (and many others) don't even see it simply indicates how much Forgespeak has poisoned net RPG discussion.

So I don't think you're being dishonest at all about the fact that you don't see the insults in GNS discussion at the Forge.  But that don't mean they're not there.

Quote from: MelinglorDude. Huge difference between "most" and "many."

Okay, I've been skimming over much of this, but look: Ron does say "most", just not where you're looking.

"Most role-players I encounter are tired, bitter, and frustrated."

Both this and the following quote cited by JimBob suggest either that Ron is a bitterness magnet, and that a theory based on his observations is necessarily skewed, or that Ron really does believe that most roleplayers don't enjoy their hobby.

Things may have changed and Ron may have corrected or contradicted himself at a later point in time, but that gets into a whole 'nother problem with grappling with GNS. Which is why, as I wrote upthread (I think it was this thread), I don't really find "GNS--saint or sinner?" threads to be terribly productive--or interesting at any rate. If someone says something that's wrong on the face of it and then tries to overcome your doubt by reference to a set of dodgy theories, you really don't have to refute the theory to reject the conclusion. Or rather, the faultiness of the conclusion is enough to refute the theory.

I think someone once said something about new wine and old wineskins, and also knowing a tree by its fruit...

Quote from: Lee ShortAnd here we come to the root cause of all this brouhaha.  Because, you see, there's a whole lot of negative connotation between the lines in those posts that any neutral reader would see.  But most people steeped in Forge discussion just don't see it.  The result of this is that when these people post about RPGs, they use the same negative and offensive connotations without intending to...just because their only model for talking about RPG theory has taught them to.  Look here for the perfect example (reference Troy Costisick's anonymous comments).

QFT

A point I've tried to make a number of times here.

Personally, I think I can talk till next year without having to get offensive.

Quote from: droogThe fuck? You decide what you want to achieve, the dice determine if you achieve it. It's not rocket science.

First, it doesn't look that simple for me.  True, you decide what you want to achieve and roll dice but then go into a process of using the dice combined with discriptions of what's happening to determine whether you achieve it.  What's the advantage of that process between rolling the dice and determining who wins over, say, "He threatens to shoot the old woman" followed by, "I make a Persuasion roll to talk him out of it!"  If the answer is all the description that gets generated while interpreting the dice, I'm curious whether that's just elaborate flavor text or actually has a role in the outcome.  

In looks very much like it's trying to have one foot in rolling dice to decide what happens (like simple the Persuasion roll) and one foot in just role-playing it out (the player deciding to give in to the argument being made) because a player can decide to Give or change the nature of the conflict.  Is that the advantage of it, that it lets the players use the dice or the description to figure out what happens?  If so, that's interesting, but then how is that particularly Narrativist or help Narrativism and what happens when one player is leaning on the dice and the other player is leaning on deciding?

Second, you suggested that I was complaining about personality mechanics in a more general sense and there is truth to that.  I think I would argue that most personality mechanics "remove me from having ownership of my character's protagonism", not just DitV.  But to the extent that D&D has personality mechanics (e.g., Alignment, social skills, the Wisdom attribute), they are fairly easy to ignore and even in Hero it's possible to avoid psychological Disadvantages, though Presence and Ego can still be issues.  So they might bother me in other games but it's often easy to ignore them.

Since the mechanics in DitV seemed designed to be used for social conflicts (as well as other types of conflicts), they seem hard to ignore in that respect.  That's why I asked about just ignoring the mechanics and role-playing through a DitV social encounter without them.  What happens to the game if you use the conflict rules for some things but don't use them for others compared to, say, ignoring Alignment or social skills in D&D or ignoring Psychological Limitations in Hero?

I think social rules are often designed to (A) prevent bad role-players from playing their characters badly, (B) encourage people to create more 3-D characters with social depth, and (C) to help players play characters with social skills that are stronger than they can effectively role-play.  But if a player doesn't have those problems, they can just get in the way in my experience.  For me, deciding how my character reacts to what's going on in the game is fairly central to "having ownership of my character's protagonism".  So if the rules in DitV prevent me from just deciding, I'm going to feel that way.  If they don't, that's great but then it seems like I'm using a lot of rules for nothing.

Quote from: John MorrowWhat happens to the game if you use the conflict rules for some things but don't use them for others compared to, say, ignoring Alignment or social skills in D&D or ignoring Psychological Limitations in Hero?

Then you're playing a different game. If conflict looms in DitV, you make it a gimme or roll. Ignoring this would be like ignoring the combat system in D&D, not alignment.

For what it's worth (I suspect not much), I have never found that the conflict res mechanics in DitV to work the way you seem to think. I also find them fun to use. At that level, as I keep saying, it comes down to personal preference. If you don't like the mechanics, it's going to be difficult for you to see what I get out of them.

Quote from: droogOf course you can, but that's another matter. Please take it to the Forge if you want to debate design issues. I just play the things.

I don't think that's a design issue.  I think it's a theory issue.  An idea near the very center of the theory is the idea that "system matters".  What we've both just agreed is that, "No, it doesn't really." at least with respect to a key element of Narrativism.

Quote from: droogNow, as for your point about exclusivity and inclusivity, an RPG is not a casual gathering where one adjusts conversation to the company. It's a shared endeavour that people have worked towards and planned for.

The issue I was talking about (discussing computers around people who can't participate in the conversation) grew over a series of planned social get togethers.  They werne't simply casual gatherings.  But I do agree that can be a significant distinction.  

For example, if a group of friends planned a meeting to discuss computers and that's why everyone showed up, it would seem a bit silly to not talk about computers because someone showed up anyway, knowing what the gathering was for, who didn't want to talk about computers.  

So, yes, the group doesn't always have to bend.  But then I go back to my point that, in that case, "the problem isn't flexibility but a lack of it".  A gathering to discuss computers isn't as flexible as a gathering to just talk to friends.  The former is the equivalent of a "coherent" game while the latter is the equivalent of an "incoherent" game.  In the first case, anyone who doesn't want to talk about computers is going to be alienated while in the second case, the conversation can be adjusted to include everyone.  

Claiming that the coherent game is inherently more fun than an incoherent  game is similar to claiming that a gather of friends to talk about a very narrow topic is inherently more fun than a gather of friends with no agreed-upon common topic.  I just don't think that's true unless the participant of the freeform gathering have such narrow ideas of what's fun to talk about that they can't find any overlap.  Again, that problem isn't the flexibility of the gathering but the lack of flexibility from the participants.

So if the gathering isn't flexible (people are gathered to do something very specific) or the people aren't flexible (they only want to do something very specific), then matching expectations is going to be very important or people aren't going to have fun.  In Forge terms, coherency is more fun than incoherency for all of the same reasons.  But in cases where the gathering is flexible and the people are flexible, incoherency can be every bit as fun as coherency.  Why?  Because the people can find sufficient overlap and common ground to have fun.  Incoherency is a problem when people can't find common ground.  It's not when they can.  And there is nothing magical or rare about that.

Quote from: droogYou're suggesting that one person should have disrupted – by right – a game that had gone seven years without him. Why is that? It wasn't like there was a shortage of roleplaying around at the time. Some of the guys were playing three or four nights a week.

No.  I'm suggesting that if you wanted Glenn to have fun in the game, you should have tried to accommodate him.  You were framing this in terms of what you could have done to help Glenn.  From that perspective, you decided that the price of including Glenn was not worth the disruption of accommodating him.  I'm not claiming that your problem and decision wasn't real.  I'm claiming that it was a social issue, not a style issue.

Let me give you another personal example to step away from the specifics of your situation.  

When I spent time living in Japan, I stopped playing with my regular group and they ran a long campaign that all of the players enjoyed.  When I returned, I had no desire to join that campaign and I've had little interest in attempts to run other games in the same setting.  Why?  Because when people run long-term campaigns, the players develop a shared experience that's very difficult for other people to step into without changing anything.  

If I had joined that campaign after a year or more of playing, I would have changed the game simply because I would have brought a different  perspective to the table.  It would have had nothing to do with style clash or incompatible objectives.  It would have had to do with a shared history in the game, or a lack of it, and a difference in the composition of the gaming group.  A social issue.  And in my experience, such changes can cause problems even when the added person has played successful games with the same people in the past.

Even if, in your case, it was entirely a style-clash issue and not an issue of shared history and so forth, it's still a social issue and a flexibility issue to the extend that, after seven years, the group wasn't flexible and you weren't willing to risk changing your game for the worse to include Glenn.  That's not necessarily wrong or bad.  It means that there was no place for Glenn in the game.  Whether that was good or bad, right or wrong, is for you to decide.

With respect to Forge coherency and incoherency, the root of this discussion, the reason why Glenn was not having fun was the coherency of the game, not it's incoherency.  And the reason why the players didn't want to change the game for Glenn was concern over incoherency ruining the game.  Also looking at Glenn's role in this to be fair, it sounds like he had a very narrow idea of what was fun, too, and wasn't willing to adapt to the flow of the existing campaign.  Either way, the lack of fun wasn't because the game or group was incoherent.  The lack of fun was because the game and group was coherent and/or Glenn lacked flexibility.  

Coherency becomes an issue when the players, system, or milieu is inflexible.  When those things are flexible, it becomes a lot easier to find overlap.  It's like trying to pick a restaurant when one friends is a vegitarian, another friends only eats hamburgers, and a third friend only likes Italian food vs. trying to pick a restaurant when your friends will try or eat just about anything.  And the demand for coherency is akin to the person with friends who are vegitarians, hamburger only eaters, and Italian food fanatics demanding that the only way to have fun going out to a restaurant with friends is to agree on what kind of food you are going to eat first and then excluding those with different preferences.  Or worse, to insist that the only way to have fun is to pick only restaurants that serve a single narrow style of cuisine.  That leaves the people who can have fun eating anything (or who can at least be pretty flexible) going, "Huh?"  

If you have trouble picking a restaurant that everyone can enjoy with your friends, you've got two choices.  You can pick a bunch of friends with the same narrow preference and go only to restaurants that cater to that preference  or you can pick friends who are flexible and will have fun eating just about anything and go to just about any restaurant.  The same thing is true in role-playing.  If you have trouble having fun in games with other people, you can solve that problem by picking people to role-play with who enjoy exactly what you enjoy or you can find people who are flexible and have fun in the overlap.

Quote from: droogGlenn joined the game for social reasons (he wanted to hang out with us). It worked out all right for a while, it became increasingly harder, and we were saved from actually making a decision by a big out-of-game event that affected many people. We tacitly left him out from then.

And that also suggests that the priority wasn't to find a game that everyone could enjoy or to expend any effort to accommodate each other.  What I'm not seeing (and maybe it was there) was what your group did to help Glenn have fun or what Glenn did to try to fit in.  Maybe the flexibility problem wasn't your group.  Maybe it was Glenn.  Maybe it was both of you.  I'm only going by what you are telling me.  But what I'm seeing is that hanging out and preserving a 7-year campaign were higher priorities than finding common ground in the game where everyone could have fun.  To the extent that he was joining a long-running campaign is a special and different case than starting a new group.  Let me ask you this.  Could Glenn play with the same group that was in that 7-year campaign if he joined a new campaign with them at the very beginning?  Why or why not?

Quote from: droogDon't you practise some form of selectivity in social gatherings and/or gaming? Or is it like open slather?

Sure I practice some selectivity (e.g., to avoid socially deficient players), but if I invite someone to sit at the table or find myself sitting at someone else's table, I make a serious effort to work with them to find common ground.  If we can't find common ground, it's usually because of a lack of flexibility on somebody's part.

I recently joined a D&D game with people I had never role-played with before.  My play style can have some sharp edges so I purposely picked a character with fairly soft edges.  I also had some style clash issues with one of the players and took the effort to explain where I was coming from and suggested some ways in which we could meet in the middle.  That's the choice you have in those situations.  You can either dig your heels in and refuse to play with someone who isn't a perfect fit for what you want to do or you can figure out how to enjoy different things and find room in the middle where everyone can have fun.  Both work, but I find the latter much easier than the former, especially in a niche hobby like this one.  And the problem is that Forge theory suggests that one works and the other doesn't.

Quote from: droogThen you're playing a different game. If conflict looms in DitV, you make it a gimme or roll. Ignoring this would be like ignoring the combat system in D&D, not alignment.

OK.  That would explain my feelings that the mechanics are the least interesting and important part of that game.

Quote from: droogFor what it's worth (I suspect not much), I have never found that the conflict res mechanics in DitV to work the way you seem to think. I also find them fun to use. At that level, as I keep saying, it comes down to personal preference. If you don't like the mechanics, it's going to be difficult for you to see what I get out of them.

I don't have any doubt that it works great for some people and they have fun using it.  I'm not asking you to convince me to like it.  I'm asking you to explain why you like it and have fun with it.  

In the past, I've been told to read Actual Play threads to understand what makes games like DitV so different from traditional games and (A) looking at the game events and character dialog, they don't differ substantially from what I see in most games that I play in and (B) I don't really understand how the mechanics contribute to that dialog and flow of play.  To me, and I'm not trying to be nasty here, it looks very much like people playing Yahtzee while they are role-playing with the one having very little to do with the other.

Clearly, I'm missing something.  I know I am.  Maybe I'm just not asking teh right question.  What I'm asking is akin to, "How does the DitV system promote Narrativist play?"  Perhaps the disconnect is that I see the purpose of the system and the character-challenge concerns of Narrativism to be unrelated and often feel that the system interfering in that element of role-playing hinders complex and deep character play rather than helping it.  Maybe I just don't get how the mechanics help other people do something for which they only get in the way for me.

QuoteI don't think that's a design issue. I think it's a theory issue. An idea near the very center of the theory is the idea that "system matters". What we've both just agreed is that, "No, it doesn't really." at least with respect to a key element of Narrativism.

No, system matters. If system did not matter, you would enjoy DitV as I do. and I would enjoy D&D as lots of people do.

I don't think it can be seriously entertained that system does not have a major impact on how the game plays. Now, if you're going to ignore the game and play by your own system, it still matters. It just means that system may be harder for somebody else to learn.

Now, at a gut level, I know what DitV does for me (and everybody else I've seen play). But that's design stuff that I'm not good at addressing. Give me some time and I might be able to put a reply together, but after all I'm not getting money or paper qualifications out of this. There's a limit to how far I'm willing to go in the interests of internet debate.

QuoteAnd the problem is that Forge theory suggests that one works and the other doesn't.

I don't agree. I think there's now a general consensus on the forums that incoherency in a game can work (and the Big Model itself doesn't even address the issue). I postulated before that one effect of incoherency might be to place more responsibility on the social level for making the game work. What do you think?

I'd suggest that you drop trying to question my relationship with Glenn. It will get you nowhere. Consider that if I wanted to, I could have given you any impression I liked.

The Forge Theory

Hit anything long enough and hard enough and eventually it will behave itself.

Quote from: droogSee, old bean, you keep on coming with this attitude. Just skating around the edges and making tiny little ad hominems.

Yes, everything's political. And I say that, and apply it to roleplaying games, from the perspective not of a wounded player, but of somebody who's been a GM almost always. I've had a couple of decades to observe things going on and learn my craft.

If you're not on the same page, things go pear-shaped more easily. Simple.

Now, do you want to talk, or be smooth?

Talk or "be smooth?"

No one's ever accused me of being smooth! Thanks!

Actually, here we have a good point -- you see "little ad hominems" in my posts... Yeah?

Look hard at the theory you believe in -- they're there, too -- but dead center; not "skating around the edges."

You're surprised when people take offense at a theory loaded with Brain Damage, Power-Struggle, talk of gamers being turtles -- of having gripping protagonism with "stump-fingered hands"

Droog, people at The Forge (and on boards like Story Games) are *astonished* when they receive a less-than-warm reception...

Astonished that *anyone* could take offense at a theory that calls popular games "incoherent" (and then claims that's a neutral term) and states their popularity has nothing to do with being fun, or having a compelling setting, but is a function of "economic factors"

It continually amazes me that anyone would show up with those beliefs and that presentation and expect polite discourse...

But, I don't think they do -- I think the theory is popular because it draws fire. A good number of people here and other places simply get off on the conflict.

They have to be -- they're certainly not talking or thinking deeply about *games*

I'm just being obliging.

Cheers,
-E.