Quote from: Benoist;731308You'd have to be pretty thick to not get how dumb that idea between quotation marks sounds right off the box when talking about games.

I remember laughing out loud when I got the SLA Industries GM screen and there was a one page insert that was essentially the author telling everyone they were playing his game wrong.  He went on about how the game is not about combat with big guns.  He just couldn't see that it was okay that people took his combat system that tracked everything by 0.6 second phases and tracked each and every bullet, ammo types, rate of fire per 0.6 second phase, etc., and had great fun playing a dystopian shoot-em up game.  He wanted it to be all about this deep moral shit.

Equally dumb though, is that idea that because play can emerge that what the people do when they play is irrelevant to what emerges.  Like the poker example.  The game has explicit rules about revealing cards and making bets based on unknown card values.  As if that has nothing to do with bluffing.

What I see a lot of is a deep emotional need for Ron Edwards to be wrong to the point that they can't just let him be irrelevant instead.  Give it a try some time.  You'll notice crazy things will emerge, like the ability to admit that the rules of poker directly deal with bluffing.

I would like to respond to Adric later but the basic rules from which D&D's emergent properties arise are:

The player controls their character and can generally only do or know what their character can (to the extent possible).
The GM controls the world and tries to make it act and respond to player actions as if it were a real world--without favoring certain outcomes.

In Diplomacy the emergent properties come from:

Multiplayer setup
Explicit time allowed for negotiation
Secret orders
Winning defined as either an agreement among surviving players or single control of a certain number of supply centers

Other elements such as the details of the deterministic combat resolution and military strength being tied to control of supply centers are also worth mentioning.

I don't remember if the rules spell out the importance of trust and betrayal but they'd emerge with just the mechanics and the fact that players can talk from time to time.

Quote from: NathanIW;731307Bluffing isn't something that emerges despite the rules, it emerges because of the rules (specifically the ones about hiding cards and revealing cards).

I never said it was "despite" the rules.

Putting words in my mouth? How typically Forgite.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;731334I never said it was "despite" the rules.

Putting words in my mouth? How typically Forgite.

LOL. Now I'm a Forgite?  I've played some games by Forge participants.  They were okay.  They weren't for me.  I much prefer things like Runequest and Call of Cthulhu.  

I was simply making a contrast.  If the word "despite" doesn't work for you, then ignore it.  It doesn't matter.  Just like it doesn't matter if you even made the initial poker comment or if it was someone else.  The poker point about bluffing is just wrong.  What emerges is a result of what you do at the table and bluffing is right in the rules of poker as it is in every vying card game developed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The idea that what you do at the table produces what emerges in play shouldn't be controversial.  This is pretty much a tautology and should be obvious.  It's only people's hatred of Ron Edwards that blinds them to it.  He can't be right.  About anything.  No matter what!  The problem when you're motivated by ideology against a group is that you paint yourself into a corner where you can't admit anything at all was either accurate or useful.  It has to all be bad, all of the time.

The truth is that the Forge people made some bad assumptions (like the primacy of play dealing with moral issues when it comes to story creation during play) but had the occasional insight.  When you blather on for hundreds upon hundreds of pages about RPG theory, you're going to occasionally say something useful or have some idea that's not completely useless.  Like, for example, both Ron Edwards and Richard Baker making the same point as you have about emergent strategies back in 2005.

People accuse Ron Edwards of being like a cult leader, and I'm sure that was at least partially accurate, but if you want to see some real religious fervor about this whole issue, it's in the detractors who are still fighting their holy war against ideas people have largely stopped promoting.  The pro-Forge people and the actual forge participants have largely moved on and aren't stuck in the past fighting the same internet war over and over and over.

So what if Pemerton finds some of the forge ideas useful and also thinks they had an impact on the larger industry.  So fucking what?  Let's have a 60+ page fight about it?  And refuse to accept that the people you don't like could ever be right about anything to the point where you deny that the rules of the game might be connected to what happens when you play it?  Really?

Quote from: Arminius;731323In Diplomacy the emergent properties come from:

Multiplayer setup
Explicit time allowed for negotiation
Secret orders
Winning defined as either an agreement among surviving players or single control of a certain number of supply centers

Other elements such as the details of the deterministic combat resolution and military strength being tied to control of supply centers are also worth mentioning.

I don't remember if the rules spell out the importance of trust and betrayal but they'd emerge with just the mechanics and the fact that players can talk from time to time.

I found a PDF hosted online at WotC and the rules explicitly list the ways you can forge alliances and make agreements! but that nothing in the rules binds the participants to abide by any of these agreements.

Having not played the game, I can't really comment with any authority on whether the diplomacy segment or the actual order/movement/capture makes for the primary experience of the game. I would think, it plays an important, but not the most important part of winning the fame, but I may be wrong in that assumption.

QuoteI wouldn't use D&D to try and play a game about alien teenagers  coming to earth to try and become pop idols and become famous, because  they are two very different genres.

That is patently wrong!

As anybody with eyes to see can see, Heroes Unlimited or TMNT or Ninjas & Superspies are mechancally D&D-like, with some rearrangement of deck-chairs*.
Either of named games is perfectly fitted for your scenarios.
As such D&D is perfectly fitted, structurally.

q.e.d.

*ADD or more rigorously formulated: with some additional Gygaxian Building Blocks

Quote from: Adric;731483I found a PDF hosted online at WotC and the rules explicitly list the ways you can forge alliances and make agreements! but that nothing in the rules binds the participants to abide by any of these agreements.

Having not played the game, I can't really comment with any authority on whether the diplomacy segment or the actual order/movement/capture makes for the primary experience of the game. I would think, it plays an important, but not the most important part of winning the fame, but I may be wrong in that assumption.

The mechanical parts of Diplomacy are frankly incidental; interaction with other players (negotiation, alliance, betrayal) is the essence of the game. Clever tactical play only gets you so far; to win, you must play the other players. That's my considered opinion, after having had episodes of Diplomacy play over the past 30 years. I'm not sure if that jibes with your intuition, but I offer it for free.

Quote from: Settembrini;731505That is patently wrong!

As anybody with eyes to see can see, Heroes Unlimited or TMNT or Ninjas & Superspies are mechancally D&D-like, with some rearrangement of deck-chairs*.
Either of named games is perfectly fitted for your scenarios.
As such D&D is perfectly fitted, structurally.

q.e.d.

*ADD or more rigorously formulated: with some additional Gygaxian Building Blocks

This may be true, but I'd like to see more evidence for HU or TMNT or N&S being "perfectly fitted" for a game about alien teenagers coming to Earth to become rock stars. The conclusion fails because the premise can't be granted.

Quote from: Bill White;731539This may be true, but I'd like to see more evidence for HU or TMNT or N&S being "perfectly fitted" for a game about alien teenagers coming to Earth to become rock stars. The conclusion fails because the premise can't be granted.

Fair enough.
Let us just take TMNT.

It has TEENAGE in the title.
Also do go on to find TURTLE just as well, it shall be viewed as close enough to ALIEN for the time being.

Now we move on to exhibit A:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_Go_Hollywood

Which features Rock bands & popularity in one of the short adventures IIRC. It might have been the "Adventures" module, books not at hand.

Other SDC worlds also field Pop-Music rules, such as Robotech and of course RIFTS with at least two kinds of Song-Magic. TMNT definitely has sound performance rules and the like. Please compare the "Stage Magician".

As to Aliens, Mutants in Space has Turtles-style Aliens as does Transdimensional Turtles and the Turtles Galaxy Guide. HU itself fields Aliens rules that specifically include curious Aliens of lower age coming to Earth for personal enlightnment, curiosity or similar endeavours.

That enough?

Quote from: Bill White;731537The mechanical parts of Diplomacy are frankly incidental; interaction with other players (negotiation, alliance, betrayal) is the essence of the game. Clever tactical play only gets you so far; to win, you must play the other players.

This last is true, and I feel it supports my general point. But having some kind of mechanical element, i.e. the board, is needed to give some "stickiness" to the negotiation. This is really typical of most multiplayer games, and I think it's quite important that Diplomacy allows direct competition (attacking other players)--which again is pretty typical of multiplayer conquest-type games, as opposed to Euros such as Princes of Florence. One thing that gives Diplomacy its particular texture and tension, though, is the fact that moves are written in secret and resolved simultaneously, along with the geometry of conflict which makes a solid alliance both very strong (because it can put all its resources on the periphery facing the enemy) and very brittle/unstable (because the strength you get from trusting each other comes at the cost of being highly vulnerable to a betrayal). Note one of the parts of the Dippy "geometry" is the slow movement rate of units, which makes it very hard to shift resources in response to a political realignment such as a backstab.

The larger point, which I think is being lost in recent posts, is that the quantity of rules on a certain element of a game doesn't necessary tell you how important that element will be in play. Diplomacy and poker (whose rules I imagine were transmitted verbally before ever being written down) may mix strategy and analysis into their manuals, but the actual play emerges from formal rules which don't directly encode behavior at the table. In fact the rules of Western Chess were pretty much standardized between the 15th and early 19th century, but new qualities of play continued to emerge into the 20th century and perhaps beyond.

Quote from: NathanIW;731314I remember laughing out loud when I got the SLA Industries GM screen and there was a one page insert that was essentially the author telling everyone they were playing his game wrong.  He went on about how the game is not about combat with big guns.  He just couldn't see that it was okay that people took his combat system that tracked everything by 0.6 second phases and tracked each and every bullet, ammo types, rate of fire per 0.6 second phase, etc., and had great fun playing a dystopian shoot-em up game.  He wanted it to be all about this deep moral shit.

I'm not familiar with SLA Industries beyond the vaguest idea of what it's about, but I have had contact with Leading Edge games and a modicum of play with Harnmaster, Runequest, and a hybrid of HM/RQ. You can also add some experience with SPI's old Dragonquest 1e combat system and some Rolemaster--the first in the form of the combat-focused Arena of Death wargame, the second over the course of several sessions with absolutely zero combat and a tiny bit of magic use.

I'd agree that a given set of RPG combat rules can form the basis of a skirmish wargame practically devoid of roleplaying, or that the rules are so complicated to learn and apply that they're practically not worth using unless you intend them to be the focus of play. But this is problematic in a way since people do internalize rules of an RPG after a while and are then freed to focus on the broad structures--again, the qualities that emerge from the fundamental GM/player split--while still benefiting from the texture provided by the detailed rules. Another way I'd put it is that if the Leading Edge algorithms actually produced good outputs (presumably, given the overall design goals, "good" = "vivid and realistic"), I might be happy to let a computer handle them, since I wouldn't be bothered how convoluted they were, and the burden of complexity needn't be justified by focusing the game on combat.

In Harnmaster (or RQ 2 & 3), the payoff from the combat complexity vis a vis 1980's-era D&D isn't enjoyment of complexity and it's not entirely enjoyment of combat detail, but also the outputs of combat that lend texture and verisimilitude to the rest of the game. E.g., other payoffs include the dilemmas, narrative depth (if you will), and authenticity that come from having a PC who's got a crippled leg or an infection while the party is working to solve some other problem. You might achieve these with a simple system augmented by ad-hoc judgment but then you run into the problems that tend to arise when human judgment is substituted for physics rules or at least guidelines, namely situational bias and second-guessing.

Quote from: Settembrini;731584Fair enough.
Let us just take TMNT.

It has TEENAGE in the title.
Also do go on to find TURTLE just as well, it shall be viewed as close enough to ALIEN for the time being.

Now we move on to exhibit A:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_Go_Hollywood

Which features Rock bands & popularity in one of the short adventures IIRC. It might have been the "Adventures" module, books not at hand.

Other SDC worlds also field Pop-Music rules, such as Robotech and of course RIFTS with at least two kinds of Song-Magic. TMNT definitely has sound performance rules and the like. Please compare the "Stage Magician".

As to Aliens, Mutants in Space has Turtles-style Aliens as does Transdimensional Turtles and the Turtles Galaxy Guide. HU itself fields Aliens rules that specifically include curious Aliens of lower age coming to Earth for personal enlightnment, curiosity or similar endeavours.

That enough?

Just having "teenage" in the title doesn't prove anything; likewise "turtles." But that's incidental. You said D&D was "perfectly fitted" for a game about becoming famous rock stars from outer space, since Palladium games were structurally similar to D&D, and had games with rock stars and aliens in them. I was skeptical, and still am, because that's a long way to go.

But having rules for being alien certainly goes part of the way there. How do those rules handle not being from Earth? That is, the cultural part of being alien? Or are the aliens just people with funny foreheads (or whatever)?

And it's great that there are performance rules; what outcomes do they permit? In other words, how is a really good performance connected with getting famous or rich or what have you?

I mean, it does seem likely that a class- and level-based system could do rock stars from outer space, with going on tour being the equivalent of a dungeon crawl ("I'm a 3rd level xenomorph back-up vocalist!"). But it seems like you'd have to do a lot of work to get there from OD&D. "Perfectly fitted" still sounds like hyperbole.

Quote from: Bill White;731602But having rules for being alien certainly goes part of the way there. How do those rules handle not being from Earth? That is, the cultural part of being alien? Or are the aliens just people with funny foreheads (or whatever)?

[...]

"Perfectly fitted" still sounds like hyperbole.

My good friend Settembrini will answer to the last, I'm sure, but I'm thinking that "good enough" can replace "perfectly fitted" for lots and lots of people. I really don't think that any one set of rules is going to work equally well for all types of games for everyone. I do think that broad rules sets which don't have much tightly-embedded focus can go a long way, with non-rules elements and social interactions at the table taking it from there, to the point of reaching a custom fit that produces the ultimate quality, "fun", apart from any a priori genre or thematic requirement.

Case in point, I don't see a need for rules to handle not being from Earth, apart from physical stuff like whether you need to wear a breathing apparatus all the time. In Gleichman's Layers schema, that can all happen somewhere in the "Near Meta-Game" to "Meta-Game" layers--that is, the group understanding of the social implications of being an alien and the understanding of who has final say about the details. I think a great example of this sort of thing is in this old post by jibbajibba. Some games do have reaction roll modifiers for characters of different backgrounds/species/races, and that's fine. But not necessarily necessary--which also goes for reaction rolls themselves.

Quote from: Arminius;731610I'm thinking that "good enough" can replace "perfectly fitted" for lots and lots of people.

I agree, and that ties in with your observation that "the quantity of rules on a certain element of a game doesn't necessary tell you how important that element will be in play." What it tells you is how important a quantity of rules is to some people! (Something might be streamlined because it's used very frequently, regardless of whether by some assessment it happens to be of great or small importance.)

QuoteI really don't think that any one set of rules is going to work equally well for all types of games for everyone. I do think that broad rules sets which don't have much tightly-embedded focus can go a long way...

Well, there can be -- indeed, ought to be, in an RPG -- rules that are not written down.

QuoteCase in point, I don't see a need for rules to handle not being from Earth, apart from physical stuff like whether you need to wear a breathing apparatus all the time.

I'd say that's a case in point not of NO rules, but rather of UNWRITTEN rules. It's just not efficient to write down everything we've packed into our minds!

The imagination is really where it all starts. Before the model, comes the subject to be modeled: the concept, then whatever "game mechanical" abstraction may be convenient.

When there's sufficient payoff in writing something down and looking it up, we do it. When there's not, we don't.