Sorry about that. I was working off http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/encyclopedia/alphabetical/C.html and http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/encyclopedia/byyear/2002.html

Seemed off but I didn't think about it too much. Somebody should let John know.

About Agon...actually the connection to Rune helped me find a couple reviews through Google which have got me interested in the game for the first time. At least the concept of an adversarial budget that's impacted by the GM/Player actions is something I've been thinking about.

It's a pretty good game. I know one group that's playing it a lot.

Tony, if you're still around, what's your view on this? What were your immediate influences when you designed Capes?

Game-wise?  Amber had a big part just from being a large part of my experience (and convincing me that balls-to-the-wall competitive play could be fun) but I didn't lift any mechanics from it.  I'd purchased My Life with Master partway through design ... the elegant mathematics of which were inspiration in spirit, if not much lifted in practice.  Most of the actual techniques came from people who bounced ideas back and forth with me in the Forge forum.  It was only after I published that I made a concerted effort to pick up some of the other indie games and dissect them to figure out how they worked.

My next game will owe a huge debt to PTA and TSoY and DitV, but the first one didn't.

Quote from: Elliot WilenSorry about that. I was working off http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/encyclopedia/alphabetical/C.html and http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/encyclopedia/byyear/2002.html

Seemed off but I didn't think about it too much. Somebody should let John know.

Fixed now.

Quote from: SettembriniWell, if you can "only" bring up new combinations of older elements, to prove originality, creativity and intellectualism, go ahead.

Its only the whole basis of the renaissance

Now you are comparing the Forge to the Rennaissance?

Oh boy...

Quote from: SettembriniNow you are comparing the Forge to the Rennaissance?

Oh boy...

No, a combination of dispirate qualities coming together and resulting in something new despite none of the individual contributing elements being true.
That.

"being true"? I think you mean "truly original".

In any case I think the Forge has arguably been a sort of "singularity" (with apologies to Vernor Vinge) where a bunch of preexisting trends and ideas were pushed together and started to take on a life of their own, becoming a core of a new movement instead of the periphery of an old one.

The question I think is whether this will lead to a sustainable period of innovation (not just in design but in play: you can always make up variations, the question is whether people will find enough new to bother to play them), or if the games are just going to turn out to be seen as "merely" variations on the basic idea of having rules to regulate narrative control, plus maybe having some flags or kickers that the players are exhorted to be mindful of in their narration.

By that I mean to imply a mild tu quoque toward critics who keep saying that most RPGs prior to The Forge were just variations on D&D. Indeed, most wargames up through the 80's and beyond were just variations on the Avalon Hill classics (for operational/strategic games), Panzerblitz (or really Tactical Game 3) for tactical games, and Diplomacy/Kingmaker for diplomatic games. Yet they've maintained interest as a core genre for new titles for decades, even while people appreciated the innovation of games such as Cosmic Encounter, We the People, or Columbia's block games.

Well yes, that´s because they added value per product.

They went through the drill of researching the historical facts, coming up with a different board, prinitng it and supplying new scenarios.
Same with Adv.Games: New Maps, new Illos, new Crunch, new NPCs...etc.

In a deragatory way, Forgers sometimes speak of stuff like that as "just" new toys.
I think the toy approach is very valid, and I accuse recent Forge-derived Thematic Games to lack strongly in the toy division. It´s neither constant innovation, nor is it constantly providing new toys.

Well, wargames also add value through the development of novel systems, apart from research. The benchmark for wargame systems is the ability to represent a dynamic of the situation. So there have been improvements over the years, as well as emphases on different dynamics and just plain different opinions about how the dynamics operate. (E.g. one wargame basically has the English winning at Agincourt because they shoot well; another shows that they won because the French lacked mobility and flexibility.)

German-type games or Euros also add value through their systems, though the benchmark is different: inherently interesting mechanics for competitive interaction.

RPGs are caught in between, especially so when the mechanics are only functional when supplemented by mutual social understanding, at every stage in the game. That is, the limits on what anyone can propose as stakes, or narrate after gaining authority to do so, are a property of the social relations of the group, which makes the rules themselves a rather weak tool for transmission of a playstyle.

That's IMO, though. It remains to be seen if people will start seeing a sameness in the experiences offered by these new-style games.

QuoteIt remains to be seen if people will start seeing a sameness in the experiences offered by these new-style games.

Ultimately, this ends the discussion.

But one might weigh in, that sub-sub-cultural reasons could stabilize this development. In such a way, that the audience is determined to stick to the same-old-same-old, because of personal identification.
This definitely happened to some games and hobbys, maybe it´s always a factor.
And it´s one of the arguments prominently used against Adventure Games of a certain ilk. So it´s very fitting to cast that question back:

If Game X is supposed to be all about marketing and sub-cultural identity, why isn´t that also true for Thematic Game Y?
What do you do do prevent that?

Quote from: SettembriniIf Game X is supposed to be all about marketing and sub-cultural identity, why isn´t that also true for Thematic Game Y?
What do you do do prevent that?

Stay away from subcultures?

The approach I'd like to take on this question is to lay out the features of Pantheon, then compare the features of the Indie games that have been mentioned. I have no direct expreience of Pantheon, but based on Abyssal Maw's description and the RPGnet review:

Pantheon

• One-shot play
• Defined Scenario
• GM-less
• Free narration within specific procedures
• Bidding to resolve contested points
• Scoring based on appropriate story elements

Does that sum things up to everyone's satisfaction? Anyone more familiar with the game, let me know if I'm missing/mischaracterizing any elements.

So how do Forge/indie/thematic games relate to Pantheon? Well, I can definitely see influence in some key concepts, such as alternate distribution of narrational authority and short-play, more quick and focused games. But I'm not even sure Pantheon qualifies as "Thematic" (or whatever term you wanna use for it). I don't know much about the actual scenarios presented, but unless they're pregnant with theme in a way that's not obvious from the descriptions I've read, they seem just like simple "achtypical" situations based on different genres (horror, mafia, etc). There's scoring based on genre emulation, sure, but that's not Thematic necessarily. When I talk about Thematic gaming I'm talking about games that deliberately set out to address and explore moral/psychological.human issues. Are other folks using the term differently? 'Cause otherwise, I don't particularly see the "thematic" in Pantheon.

So what's come along since? Let's separate further developments into refinements and innovations. Settembrini seems to be belittling or at least marginalizing refinement, in the sense that he's not recognizing it as sufficient to give a game merit. But refining a process is just as important as originating it; there are only so many original ideas yet countless possible improvements.

Let's look at it in terms of refinement (and I'll just cover innovation along the way, game by game). Going down the list for Pantheon:

From my understanding, My Life With Master, The Mountain Whitch, and Shab-al-Hiri roach have all sharpened the One-shot and Defined Scenario innovations into razor-focus. Clearly a lot of Forge games have adopted the idea of short (or at least short-er) term play, but these games thoroughly embraced it. I can't comment on their specific mechanics of procedures, but from all reports they seem to represent a significant improvement in gameplay experience from Pantheon.

In the GM-less department, the front-runners are Universalis and Capes. Haven't played Uni, but Capes (from my play of Capes and from description of Pantheon) seems to run like a far more sophisiticated version of Pantheon, and with greater flexibility, via abandoning the fixed-scenario setup. Capes sports a sophisticated negotiation mechanic over Pantheon's rather simple one, wired into a competitive framework that brings out exciting gameplay. Also, Capes' goal-setting rules are a significant advance over Pantheon's cruder means of narrative constraint (Free narration within specific procedures), and I'd say represent a genuine innovation.

I ended up covering Bidding to resolve contested points regarding Capes above, but it's not the only game to tackle that issue. Dogs in the Vinyard is a front-runner here. Its poker-style bidding system attaches weight to statements about the story/game world/SIS/whatever, and provides a neat combination of random rolling and the strategy of point-allocation/bidding. It provides just the framework required for addressing its theme, moral judgments, by allowing you to stick it out or back down, thereby declaring how far you'll go for X principle. Pantheon doesn't have anything remotely like that. It's a system that's made up of a lot of individual elements that aren't in themselves unique (freeform traits, dice pools, bidding elements, hitpoint-less wounding), but I'd argue that they all add up to innovation in their implementation.

It's worth noting, while on the subject of bidding, that I'm entirely unfamiliar with Amber DRP, which Tony cites as a major inspiration for his negotiated-fiction-control game. If any insight from ADRP can shed light on the discussion, by all means, share!

Sticking with Dogs for a minute, I'll add that it has one distinctive feature completely alien to Pantheon: the Town Creation rules. In general, we could call this Situation Generation. Sorceror is notable for this too. The basic concept is, this is a game about a theme, here's how to engineer a situation to really highlight and energize that theme. R-maps, flag framing, etc. all fall under this umbrella. It is, of course, the Thematic equivalent to Dungeon design. I'd argue that this is the primary innovation of Thematic games over the last few years; giving you tools to have games with the themes you're after without having them fall flat. Just like Adventure gaming gives you the tools to have Adventures without having them suck. That's really the benchmark, and I contend that Pantheon as described doesn't cut it for my, and I'm guessing most everyone else's, Thematic needs.

A minor note: there's one Pantheon trait above, Scoring based on Story, that I'm not sure has any parallel in the modern crop of Thematic games. This is probably because it's a simple and limited concept based on a very narrow idea of how to tell a story. Not necessarily that it isn't just right for the game, but it doesn't provide the interpretive depth that Thematic gaming requires. The closes thing I can think of is Capes' story tokens, but those are a usable resource rather than an end-of-game prise/ranking. I guess Tony DID work out a scoring system to award "winners" for con play, so maybe that's a good parallel. But a minor one.

Peace,
-Joel

PS: On the subject of "Toys:" I would, once again, lift up Capes as a game that provides fun toys up the wazoo. Messing about with poker chips and index cards with opposing dice on them and slapping click'n'lock character modules together are all very visceral and playful and fun. As soon as I'd played my first game of capes I went out and bought a plastic case to convert into a Capes Kit with all the bells and whistles in it. Sure, Tony doesn't actually publish a set of story and dept tokens, or Official Muse of Fire Conflict Cards with fancy production values. . .but surely that's a product of small vs. large press, and the financial differences that entails? And he does offer a set of laminated dry-erase click'n'locks, which I think is just damn cool.

Also, if you're including "new crunch" under toys, I'd include Dogs and it's rais-and-see dice mechanic. But you (Sett) have made it clear that you're unimpressed with any and all Forge dice mechanics, so I imagine that'll be far from persuasive here.

Thanks for this post!
Marvelous!
Indeed, the funky dice mechanics doen´t impress me much.

But the actual refinement has been shown convincingly.

Thank you again.

So we can say: Several post-Sorcerer Games refined Pantheon´s innovations.

Is Pantheon thematic?
I´d say yes.
You can use Narrative Cagematch in that way, scoring  is optional.

Has anybody on this thread actually played Pantheon? Or even seen it?

Settembrini, I notice in your list of games you have played that you have not played any games you would call thematic.

If you're looking for forerunners, I'd add Prince Valiant, Over the Edge, Soap, and several others, which again are given their due in Ron's essays.