Quote from: soviet;623664So WFRP 1e and D&D 4e are hybrids, one with storygaming and one with wargaming I guess? (I'm thinking here action points, dailies, etc). Are Vampire (willpower) and Cyberpunk 2020 (luck) also hybrids? What about barbarian rages in 3e? Or taking ten?

Don't know about WFRP 1e but yes D&D 4e mechanics make it a hybrid wargame/roleplaying. One that more toward the roleplaying side than say SPI's Freedom in the Galaxy or Swords & Sorcery.

I will limit myself to what I know which is Cyberpunk 2020 luck and barbarian rages. Luck mechanics are more emulation than meta-game. The idea of that luck is a quality with a specific quantity or level is present in many types of genres and subgenres. So like supernatural or superpowers it sometime that can be emulated. The same with Barbarian rages, it emulates the berserker aspect of the barbarian legend.

It not the design of the mechanic that makes it meta-game mechanic. It is whether it can be tied back to something concrete about the setting or character. Reality altering mechanics work great for emulating Amber, but emulate nothing in Harn. Or to make it even more fine tune, reality altering mechanics do emulate stuff at the Immortal levels of BECMI D&D but nothing at the Basic and Expert level.

You could have high fantasy like Exalted where heroic characters have some type of inner power capable of shaping circumstances.

For me the test is simple does it tie back into something about the character or setting? Either in detail or in the abstract.

And it is fuzzy with no clear cut line. The situation is that the more you have to more the game becomes something else and not a RPG. D&D 4e has a lot of wargame aspects but what really sunk it was not the core rules but the presentation of the adventures, supplements and product line.

Quote from: soviet;623664I'm not trying to catch you out here. But it seems to me that metagame mechanics are pretty widespread even among what we would call traditional RPGs. To the extent that I'm not sure that pure immersion (or pure in-character POV) could necessarily be used as the platonic ideal of RPGs, that other games are measured against. For some people, sure, that's the best kind of RPG. But not definitionally, not for everyone. Otherwise logically D&D itself is less of a pure RPG than freeform is (due to the faint metagame effects of any kind of mechanics, even in-character POV ones).

Yes metagame mechanics are fairly widespread which is why if you were able make a plot with each dot representing a specific game the view would look like a fuzzy cloud blending into other forms of games at the edges. "Progress"
in game design means there are more options to pick from. Which means the number of "hybrids" goes.

But there a set of traits that wargames, boardgames, storygames, and tabletop roleplaying games each revolve around. For tabletop roleplaying it is a game where players play individual characters interacting with a setting and whose actions are adjudicated by a human referee.  

I admit it is a simplistic definition that relies on common sense. For example, I assume that playing a character means the same thing as a piece in a board game. That you are limited in what you can do based on the rules. That you can't just change or add to the circumstances on a whim. I feel that is a valid assumption because we are talking a game one that evolved out of another type of game, wargaming. Not something that came out collaborative fiction or improvised theater.

What people hate in general that most definitions of rpgs really boil down to variation of this

"Games like the one Gygax and Arneson were playing in 1974".

This is because more than few RPGs are defined by how they are NOT D&D. Or how "advanced" they are over D&D. My viewpoint that is understandable but seriously they should get over it.

In the end if folk figure out a new type of game or hybrid, I feel they are best served by making it its own thing.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;623796Simming is a term used in the collaborative fiction community, but not in roleplaying circles because even people who view roleplaying as collaborative fiction writing approach it from a mechanical perspective, and aren't typically conversant with the very large simming community and their techniques (which exist largely in isolation from RPG's

My understanding that is a far larger than roleplaying and indeed one of the largest forms of collaborative activity on the internet. A lot of people mock it as fan-fiction, but the communities that put serious time into this are HUGE.

Quote from: jibbajibba;623741The trouble is though that the set of pure RPGs by your definition would be tiny.

The key element of RPGs isn't mechanics but a group of players playing individual characters and a referee. That was Gygax and Arneson key innovation. That the focus of a tabletop RPG.  Everything else is preference, a useful aid for consistency or for easing communication. This makes RPGs a broad cloud of games not a tight cluster. This also means that "cloud" overlaps other game forms.

Quote from: jibbajibba;623741If I can spend a background point to add a contact or a henchmen or a pet or vast wealth I am changing the game world outside my character.

That not necessarily a meta-game mechanics. In many games it is an abstract emulation of what goes on between session, in some it reflects what you focused on during the session. For example in by the book GURPS if you gain a new ally group, which is an advantage, you are supposed to pay for it with your experience points.  When applied to skills a point represents 200 or so hours of training.

But if the rules allow you to spend that group in the middle of session to just magically say "BTW the character has a new ally group" then it is a meta-game action.

Quote from: jibbajibba;623741Even if you were adding a caveat that said 'outside of the character creation process' (which weakens the clarity of your defintion) then all games with heropoint style mechanics or games that allow you to set stakes etc are hybrids.

Yes they are. Because if you were really in the setting of those game as that character you would have no concept of "heropoints" or any idea of how to spend them. The same with the "mark" mechanic of D&D 4e. It was rightly pointed out as a wargame mechanic imported from MMORPGs because it could not be reasonably translated into anything concrete that a character could do.

Quote from: jibbajibba;623741What I have been saying from the start is that 90% of RPGs are hybrids so the distinction is moot.

The family of games that are tabletop roleplaying have a common center they revolve around. Which why they are different than miniature games, europgames, CRPGs, MMORPGS, and yes storygames.

Even OD&D was a hybrid of Diplomacy campaigns, Miniature Wargames, and other games.  What made OD&D unlike it predecessors was what it focused on. Every mechanic that Dave Arneson used were found in predecessor games including the human referee. But when Arneson shifted the focus to the playing of individual characters within a campaign featuring advancement and continuity he invented the tabletop roleplaying game.  Then with Gygax, the two refined, mostly Gygax, the original Blackmoor campaign into a form that was usable by others. I.e. OD&D.

As a general point, I really recommend reading Peterson Playing at the World. It is a well documented history of the evolution of tabletop roleplaying games, wargames in general, and even has a short section on computer roleplaying games.

What you will get is a sense of what distinguished D&D from the rest of what was going on. Which will help you understand what makes tabletop roleplaying games different from the new forms of gaming that have developed over the past decades.

You may not agree with all of the author assertions but he provides the documentation  so you can decide for yourself and not just rely on him saying it was so.

Quote from: estar;623801My understanding that is a far larger than roleplaying and indeed one of the largest forms of collaborative activity on the internet. A lot of people mock it as fan-fiction, but the communities that put serious time into this are HUGE.

That's my sense of it, too.

Also, I pretty much agree with the rest of the stuff you just posted. Overlapping genres of games, and all that.

I did quite a bit of simming around the years 1999-2001, and yeah, there are a lot of aficionados. I was doing it on Ancient Sites, which was a huge ancient history type site where you could create an alternate identity that was Roman, Egyptian, Celt, Babylonian etc and build your own page/'house' and so on.

There were a variety of groups in this community, some with strict scholarly interests like archaeology, others more web oriented like Arachne, others yet into the arts like graphic stuff, ancient poetry forms and the like, and then there were a buttload of simming groups with their own stories you could take a part on via the forums each group had.

I played in stories about Celtic Ireland, the Table Round and Tombstone, for instance. The quality of the writing and the amount of dedication of the writers was generally pretty good, actually. It was pretty fun to play, and I made quite a few friends that way.

Just to say that the simming community isn't all about the sexual adventures of Harry Potter and whatnot. There's a broad range of interests and people participating in those kinds of activities, that's for sure.

Yeah, it's about the sexual adventures of Hermione.  Ok, moving on.

Any mechanic designed for genre convention is metagame by its very nature.  Fate Points, Hero Points, James Bond Points, whatever you want to call them.  Unless your character is literally living inside a book and can, like Bruce Willis in Moonlighting, turn towards the screen 4th wall style, then it's OOC.  It has to be, simple definition, it's axiomatic.  Conan does not know his world is S&S, sorry.

One metagame mechanic, however, that can be easily jettisioned leaving the entire rest of the game structures intact does not make a hybrid game.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;623519Group creation of narratives is not roleplaying. Just like writing a novel with a partner (Niven and Pournelle) isn't acting.

The effort to conflate two highly dissimilar enterprises, by attempting to redefine words so they have no meaning, is a flawed approach.

I see what you mean but I don't think our two activities are that far apart (as acting and writing a novel).
It's more like different strains of board games - highly competitive mind benders (ASL), cooperative games (Knizia's The Lord of the Rings), party games (Pictionary, Taboo), casual family games (Carcassonne, Monopoly), auction games (Modern Art). They are still all board games (even though most of my examples don't even have a proper board).

Hardcore game fans do make distinctions between them and have dislikes of certain types of games.

To outsiders, comic books, manga and bandes dessinées are all the same -- comics. Only fans make that distinction, or divide the field even further with école Marcinelle, ligne claire, golden age super hero, silver age super hero, newspaper strip, and then there are those who need a term such as graphic novels ("no, I would never read a comic book, I prefer graphic novels!").

I have no problem with the big tent "role playing game" including everything from old school wargame type campaigns to storygames and beyond.

Quote from: CRKrueger;623823One metagame mechanic, however, that can be easily jettisioned leaving the entire rest of the game structures intact does not make a hybrid game.

It might make a 'hybrid' book, but a huge variety of different games -- actual instances of play -- have been inspired by the same little brown books.

To point out that this or that mechanism departs from role-playing seems a lot more fruitful than pointing to Rules & Raconteurs Vol. IV and labeling all R&R games as "not role-playing".

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;623824I see what you mean but I don't think our two activities are that far apart (as acting and writing a novel).

That's fine. My primary point isn't how far apart the two different activities are, but that they are different. And, for many RPG'ers, intrusive.

I prefer narrativist mechanics, if present in an ostensible RPG, be easily ignorable without having to rewrite the game. My preference, mind. Not a categorical moral imperative.

If you have a case in which one is not allowed to play from the character's perspective, but is required to act out of character, then that's going to be a problem for many people.

Designing/running a game that has stuff like that tightly integrated, one should not be bashful about it. Tricking people into playing something they won't like is very bad form.

Is anyone really interested in doing that? I doubt there are many.

Are we likely to see the RPG term used only in purist fashion any time soon? I really, really doubt it, considering how broadly the older "wargame" term has been applied.

I expect rather that we'll continue to see distinguishing terms added to the RPG billing.

Quote from: TristramEvans;623608Its the adult swim

Damn straight.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;623834That's fine. My primary point isn't how far apart the two different activities are, but that they are different. And, for many RPG'ers, intrusive.

ve.

I think this is the really important thing. These kinds of mechanics are intrusive when you really just want to have the experience of being in the setting, playing in a living world. We dont see it here so much because sonmany of us are on the same page in terms of playstyle (even if there are some disagreements on peipheral details and categories) but in other forums you run into a clash of expectations between players who care about story (things being dramatically appropriate or significant, issues of theme, story structures and devices, as well as emulating the feel of story mediums) versus payers who care about the feling of being there, of in character immersion. The problem I see is a lot of folks dont seem to get that there is a split around this and that a game tailored toward story (in the sense I just used) creates problems if you are in the other group. So you will see a lot of discusions about next where folks just assume good design means D&D can emulate the experience of reading or writing a conan story. But for some of us that path not only makes the game unenjoyable, it makes it incomprehensible. It just isnt what we are after. And these are also often the kinds of discussions where you see people dismising or defining away things like immersion.

I don't think classifying these as two different hobbies is all that helpful (and I don't feel any need to define rpgs to keep them out of it----because i think there is a huge danger pf throwing out the baby with the bath water). But i think distinctions like narrative mechanics, story rpgs, inncharacter point of view and out of character point of view, are all enormously helpful toward navigating this. What I am affraid of though is creating our own forge-like doctrine and vocabularly where arguments often become a battle over terms rather than the ideas behind them.

Quote from: CRKrueger;623823.  ...Unless your character is literally living inside a book and can, like Bruce Willis in Moonlighting, turn towards the screen 4th wall style, then it's OOC...

Was this really the plot of moonlighting? I only have vague memories of the show from when I was young, but I had no idea he was supposed to be a character in a book.

Quote from: Phillip;623839I expect rather that we'll continue to see distinguishing terms added to the RPG billing.

And there already alternative forms of roleplaying games with such modifiers

Computer Roleplaying Games
Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games
Live Action Roleplaying Games.

All of which developed out of Gygax original tabletop roleplaying game and differ by changing one or more elements. For examples CRPGs substitute the computer for the human referee. LARPS feature live-action where the players act as their character in person. And so on.

The changed elements have consequences which imposes advantages and limitations on the variant. Enough so that they become their thing.

The same with storygames and narrative mechanics. It neither good or bad but the consequence of the narrative mechanics wind up making the game its own thing related but different from tabletop roleplaying games.