Quote from: TristramEvans;844480I'm going to suggest thats largely because in a boardgame the primary focus is on mechanics, while a great many roleplayers prefer that the mechanics remain invisible or as unobtrusive as possible, to the point of seeing them as simply a necessary evil.

Also the counters or game pieces and the game boards or maps.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;844516Ah. Okay. So we've confirmed that you were arguing that no mechanic involving talking at the table can be considered innovative because people talking was a thing which previously existed.

And that you haven't stopped beating your wife yet.

Apparently you are being intentionally obtuse. I’ve said no such thing. Also, the middle called and she said you make her very sad. Your attempt at reduction ad absurdum using your own straw man is sophomoric in the high school sense of the word.

QuoteThe entire point of talking about "innovative mechanics" (as opposed to mechanics which are not innovative) is to draw a distinction between two different types of mechanics which actually exist. Your attempt to narrow the definition of "innovative" to the point where it describes nothing is pointless sophistry.

Your attempt to broadly define the word innovative so as to include as innovative all preceding usages of not only a similar mechanic, but the exact same mechanic (e.g. Jenga) renders any discussion about innovation with you no more interesting that an examination of the publishing date of the latest game on your shelf.

I've come to expect more intelligence from your comments, but apparently you are having an off week or two or else you really, really love Jenga. Are you by chance posting from the beach after having a few too many piña coladas?

Most things are novel, in the sense of not having been used much or at all so far, simply because they have already been recognized as not so hot.

It might add "authentic ancient flavor" to replace dice tosses with reading the entrails of sacrificial victims, but man what a mess!

However, the views of many of us old-timers are sometimes different from those of folks who have more of a board-game ethos. That seems to dovetail with "narrative focused" -- as opposed to role-playing focused -- developments. So stuff that was dismissed in the past might become the latest hotness today.

Quote from: Phillip;844547It might add "authentic ancient flavor" to replace dice tosses with reading the entrails of sacrificial victims, but man what a mess!

Hey if you can't read the markings on a sheep's liver like a true Etruscan haruspex, you might as well stick to Candy Land.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;844548Hey if you can't read the markings on a sheep's liver like a true Etruscan haruspex, you might as well stick to Candy Land.

My son at 4 asked me how much damage Lord Licorice did.

Quote from: Haffrung;844505Frankly, that ideological divide is driven by two groups of people:

1) Indie hipsters who love innovation for innovation's sake but have trouble designing games people actually want to play.

2) Nostalgic grognards who have an idealized era in their RPG history that they're desperately trying to define and defend.

I disagree. I believe the ideological divide on innovation is driven by two groups that actually play RPGs but what they enjoy are very different.

One group likes mechanics and prefers to play games with interesting mechanics that they can manipulate.  The other group has little interest in mechanics and just wants them to fade into the background.  The first group likes innovation because it gives them new ways to play with the mechanics. The latter group generally only likes an innovation if it is easy to learn and makes the mechanics fade into the background more. (Yes, of course there is a middle, but it doesn't drive this discussion).

On Jenga:

If Dread was not the first published RPG-type rules set to use it, that's something I didn't know (and I suppose maybe neither did the makers of Dread).

On the other hand, if the argument for its lacking novelty is simply the prior existence of Jenga as a stand-alone game, then I think that makes too little of the novelty of adding it to an RPG context. D&D itself was not ex nihilo; all cultural developments build on what has been built already!

Jenga is something I would prefer to save for especially analogous situations, but pressing things into service and fitting them together is part of the fun I associate with the early years of the hobby. (There's really no reason it must be stuck in a more stereotyped form today, but that's how the culture has tended over the decades.)

Quote from: Bren;844538Your attempt to broadly define the word innovative so as to include as innovative all preceding usages of not only a similar mechanic, but the exact same mechanic (e.g. Jenga) renders any discussion about innovation with you no more interesting that an examination of the publishing date of the latest game on your shelf.

Okay, to review your (new) argument: A mechanic can use pre-existing elements (like dice or talking) and still be innovative... UNLESS that pre-existing element is a Jenga tower.

What makes a Jenga tower unique in this regard? You refuse to explain.

Quoteour attempt to broadly define the word innovative so as to include as innovative all preceding usages of not only a similar mechanic, but the exact same mechanic (e.g. Jenga)

Except you've already admitted that the mechanic in Dread is not "the exact same mechanic" as a Jenga game.

The only thing more ridiculous than the completely untenable argument you made is the way that you keep waffling back and forth on it.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;844503I suspect where he is coming from is how a lot of people look to board games as the model for innovation in RPGs (at least that is how it felt a few years ago, not so much anymore). I think people have begun to realize the key difference between the two is a board game's mechanics are kind of the point. If the mechanics are not fun, the game itself isn't fun (and the mechanics only superficially have to connect with the flavor material). Whereas RPGs need mechanics that enhance the flavor component. I don't play D&D to experience the thrill of rolling initiative. I roll initiative to experience the thrill of combat.

I understand what you're saying, but if anything mechanics vs theme is one of the great divides in boardgaming.  Modern boardgames are on a continuum rather than one or the other, so something like Imperial Assault can have a decent set of coherent mechanics AND be a strongly themed Star Wars mission/combat game.

I think where boardgames have scored is tight design (both mechanical and layout/graphical), ease of introduction and speed of play, and I fully understand that RPGs are meant to be more of a toolkit.

But there's room for tight design too.  You can see in a game like Torchbearer how the inventory layout and death spiral have picked up on outside influences.

Actually, Torchbearer's death spiral is VERY neat - it takes a bunch of character statuses/conditions, hardly a novel mechanic, and turns them into not just a death spiral but also a countdown timer and ties into the games resource economy directly.  All the same, it's more than a dungeon crawler boardgame.  Shame I hate the Burning X system so much...

Quote from: Phillip;844552On the other hand, if the argument for its lacking novelty is simply the prior existence of Jenga as a stand-alone game, then I think that makes too little of the novelty of adding it to an RPG context. D&D itself was not ex nihilo; all cultural developments build on what has been built already!

I agree most mechanics build on existing mechanics. I think there can be disagreement about where the bar for actually novelty should be. I don't see any value to novelty for its own sake so if the bar is too high, I don't see that as an issue. And the current fashion in our culture generally and RPGs in particular to value the new as an improvement in and of itself makes me more inclined to draw the bar too high rather than too low.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;844627Okay, to review your (new) argument: A mechanic can use pre-existing elements (like dice or talking) and still be innovative... UNLESS that pre-existing element is a Jenga tower.

You seem fond of reduction ad absurdum. Why don't we apply it to your point of view. You maintain that novelty is present regardless of similarity so long as something is just a little bit different. In that case every RPG is novel since the wording used to describe even a functionally identical mechanic is not identical.

No one other than you maintains that D&D was novel in using a six sided die to roll for something other than moving around a circular track like Monopoly or Backgammon. But using your criteria any use of a six sided die to roll something other than weapon damage or hit points is novel. And rolling a D12 with results of 1-3 =4, 2-6 = 2, 7-9 = 3, and 10-12 = 1 would, by your logic, be a different mechanic than rolling a D4 in the usual way.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;844627Except you've already admitted that the mechanic in Dread is not "the exact same mechanic" as a Jenga game.

As far as I am aware it is the exact same mechanic in the same way that rolling a six sided die and reading the side on top is the same mechanic in monopoly as it is in D&D. In what way does one pull blocks differently in Dread than in Jenga?

Quote from: Justin Alexander;843589Sure. And I'll give you three recent examples.

Technoir found a completely new (and truly compelling) method for action resolution by using Verbs (which describe what a character is good at) to push Adjectives (which describe the outcome of their action) onto a target. Once this is coupled with the mechanics which determine how the improvised adjectives affect the target, the result is incredibly compelling. (Technoir also features awesomely innovative plot-mapping mechanics.)

Numenera gave us GM intrusions. Although superficially similar to luck points or Fate points, the unique aspect of the GM offering the intrusion and then the player choosing to either accept or reject the intrusion creates a simple, streamlined mechanical structure that allows the GM to take huge creative risks while being "protected" by a safety net which allows players to seamlessly rein them in if they go too far. I've found this to be absurdly valuable, and once you've mastered the art of the GM intrusion, you'll quickly find yourself wishing that EVERY game had this mechanic.

Blowback is a lesser known game by Elizabeth Sampat, but it created the Push Pyramid for managing the responses of large NPC organizations to PC activity. Kenneth Hite took this idea and turned it into the Vampyramid for Night's Black Agents, added the Conspyramid for running NPC conspiracies, and then laced in a ton of really cool and innovative mechanics by which the PCs can navigate through these structures.



It's incredibly elegant, actually. If you decreased the size of the die, you'd lose the useful mechanics tied to specific natural rolls and you'd also lose the ability to occasionally provide smaller +1 modifiers to the die roll. If you increased the number of difficulty levels, you'd push the range of the difficulty numbers to a size that would make it psychologically difficult for GMs to assign them consistently and you'd lose the current simplicity of the skill-based difficulty adjustments (or you'd drastically reduce the effectiveness of skills).

These are fascinating. I'll have to make a mention of them back in my old Design Archive thread, I think. I may quote you directly if that's OK, since I'm not specifically familiar with the games in question.

The Jenga thing isn't innovative, it's gimmickry.

Heh. I must live in a different world than most people here then, because I see innovation happening everytime in the hobby. In fact, from the early 2000s till now we are in a innovation boom, with new games trying new things or new approaches to established tropes and styles almost every year, from Dread and its Jenga tower, to Apocalypse World Moves and Fronts and First-Sessions and "role playing is a conversation", to Sorcerer' Kickers and Bangs- based gameplay, to Technoir verbs-adjectives and R-maps based gameplay, to Dogs in the Vineyard escalation-based conflicts, to Shadow of the Yesterday's Keys concept, to Marvel Heroic's Milestones and Doom concept, to FATE's Aspects and Compels, to Burning Wheel Beliefs and Instincts, to D&D4e minis-integrated gameplay, to D&D5e distillation of old and new in a fast and coherent package, to OSR games that give new spins to old tropes (everything by Zak S is deliciously transgressive and/or lunatic in a way I don't remember reading in those old modules).

Come on boys, innovation is all around us.


*Edit*: Only now I see Justin Alexander already touched on similar points as me.

Quote from: Bren;844718As far as I am aware it is the exact same mechanic in the same way that rolling a six sided die and reading the side on top is the same mechanic in monopoly as it is in D&D. In what way does one pull blocks differently in Dread than in Jenga?

There have now been multiple people who have explained this to you.

You have quoted them doing so, so we know that you have seen those posts.

You have, in fact, directly acknowledged how the Jenga tower is mechanically used in Dread in a way that it is not mechanically used in an actual game of Jenga.

And yet, despite all that, you've somehow come full circle and are back to insisting that the mechanics of a game of Dread are identical to the mechanics of a game of Jenga because they both use a Jenga tower.

There's really nothing else to be said here. The most charitable interpretation is that you somehow actually believe that Jenga is a storytelling game. The rules are available online, so if that's actually the situation you can quickly disabuse yourself of your mistaken belief.

If that's not the case, then any interpretation that a rational person could make at reading your dizzying posts in this thread would, perforce, be an intensely uncharitable one.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;845399I may quote you directly if that's OK

Go for it.

Thanks! Partly done (here and here, with the latter also cross-linked from the 'NPCs' post).  While Tech Noir is currently under a general post on abstraction  I may split it off later  to a more specific section on universal resolution frameworks or somesuch (along with such things as DC Heroes universal APs). Hard to classify. It gets a mention under 'dice pools' also. Numenera I think I will have to check out.

Quote from: Itachi;846300Heh. I must live in a different world than most people here then, because I see innovation happening everytime in the hobby. In fact, from the early 2000s till now we are in a innovation boom, with new games trying new things or new approaches to established tropes and styles almost every year, from Dread and its Jenga tower, to Apocalypse World Moves and Fronts and First-Sessions and "role playing is a conversation", to Sorcerer' Kickers and Bangs- based gameplay, to Technoir verbs-adjectives and R-maps based gameplay, to Dogs in the Vineyard escalation-based conflicts, to Shadow of the Yesterday's Keys concept, to Marvel Heroic's Milestones and Doom concept, to FATE's Aspects and Compels, to Burning Wheel Beliefs and Instincts, to D&D4e minis-integrated gameplay, to D&D5e distillation of old and new in a fast and coherent package, to OSR games that give new spins to old tropes (everything by Zak S is deliciously transgressive and/or lunatic in a way I don't remember reading in those old modules).

Come on boys, innovation is all around us.


*Edit*: Only now I see Justin Alexander already touched on similar points as me.

Most of what you named aren't even RPGs.  The rest are creative elaboration on existing ideas, not innovation.

Note that the latter is generally way better than trying to 'innovate'.  Making a better, different, or cooler wheel is usually a more sensible approach than trying to invent a replacement for the wheel.