The only thing we can hope for at this point is that a company with enough money will instigate a reactionary design ethos to counter 4e, and do the same thing that WW did in the 90s, and expand the spectrum a bit.

Quote from: Peregrin;388375The only thing we can hope for at this point is that a company with enough money will instigate a reactionary design ethos to counter 4e, and do the same thing that WW did in the 90s, and expand the spectrum a bit.

There's no doubt in my mind that it's going to happen somehow. You can't have a flagship like 4e taking RPGs in a direction like this without some counter-culture coming up with their own take at some point. The question is what form it will take. Who knows.

Quote from: JasperAK;388358When I want to have a rewarding role-playing experience I'll play earlier editions of D&D, or COC, or Dragon Age, or WHFRG. When I want a knockdown dragout fantasy tactical experience, I'll play 4e or D&D Heroscape. (I don't hate 4e, I just know what itch it scratches for me and don't try to use it for what it wasn't designed for. YMMV)

Just back from a party...this caught my eye...
wise, you are.  Identify things for what they are good at, and use them for that.  
Imagine that...

Quote from: Benoist;388376There's no doubt in my mind that it's going to happen somehow. You can't have a flagship like 4e taking RPGs in a direction like this without some counter-culture coming up with their own take at some point. The question is what form it will take. Who knows.

Well, the next big thing isn't going to be a new edition of Shadowrun, Catalyst's next phase of their bankruptcy trial isn't until August 9th. Probably won't be anything out of White Wolf either, considering what a low penetration their work actually has on a per-book basis and what an "afterthought" they are to their own parent company.

It pains me to say it: but I honestly think the next big thing is going to be something with a Celebrity Endorsement. The number of copies of these books that are actually being sold is so small that if some dude flacked his fantasy hartbreaker on The Daily Show, it would probably be the #2 or even #1 selling
game.

Get some gamer who is also a celebrity like Vin Diesel to put in the time to write a chapter in the core book for a new game, get some face time on some talk shows, and get the damn book in Barnes & Noble. We're sitting around talking about the impact of stuff like the Dresden Files RPG - when it sold like four thousand copies of each of two books. If someone drops an RPG book that is discussed on Fox & Friends, it could easily sell a hundred times that. And then it would be the dominant word in RPGs. No matter what it was!

It could be a late 70s mass-of-charts game. It could be a late oughts wall-of-text game. It could be an early nineties story driven opus of impenetrable statistical engines. It could be something else entirely. The fact is that simply getting noticed to the point where you have hundreds of thousands of people reading and playing (which is easy enough to do with a marketing blitz), would make your game the dominant thought in RPGs for the coming decade.

Or getting a foothold in China or India. That would work to. The first game that is a "hit" in the PRC gets 13 million players. Tomorrow. That would catapult them so far into dominance of the industry that they would thereafter define the industry.

-Frank

The problem these days is that time is too valuable a commodity for most people to commit any to lengthy tabletop games.  Video games aren't in direct competition with tabletop as far as experience goes, but they definitely are in terms of how easily each fits into your schedule.

The only thing I could see hoping for is that there's some sort of "post video-game" RPG revival as geek chic continues to penetrate popular culture.  That's still pretty pie-in-the-sky, though.

I think Dark Heresy really showed the promise of catching the lightning in the bottle, but completed mismanagement from two seperate companies sure solved that.

True, DH gained steam pretty fast but kind of petered off.

Dragon Age, AFAIK, was a flop from the start.

Blizzard is only interested in quick-cash CCGs, board-games, and other "mini-game"/paraphernalia type tie-ins.

If any of the big CRPG companies released an RPG with their name on it, with strong tie-ins to the main product (and the associated marketing), they might be able to tread some water, but it'd still be risky.  White-Wolf and D&D 3e managed it because of near-perfect timing in terms of pop/geek culture.  But now that video-games have gotten so big, it's hard to get the spotlight off them.

Personally, I'd love to see a Fallout RPG, but I don't think Beth has expressed any interest in tabletop, especially now that they're self-admitted console-only players because "we don't have time for that more complex stuff -- we just want to have fun."

Quote from: Saphim;388233And yet people state that they do. So either all of these people lie or your insight isn't as profound as you think it is. I am going with the second option here as I don't think all those 4e players have a reason to lie.

Okay, look:

(1) You claim you're making a decision as if you were your character.
(2) The character is completely ignorant of the decision in question.

That is not possible. If you're making that claim you are either mistaken or you are lying.

This is indisputable. Frankly, I'm done discussing it. If you want to continue beating your fists against the brick wall of a tautology, go right ahead, but I'm not going to waste my time on such inane idiocy any longer.

Now, what I have already said is that it's quite possible to roleplay all around that dissociated mechanic. But at the moment you are using the dissociated mechanic (and, thus, making a decision about which your character is completely ignorant) you ARE NOT ROLEPLAYING.

In making this statement I am, as I have said before, presuming a definition of roleplaying as being "the making of decisions as if you were the character". And I'm perfectly willing to debate whether or not that's an appropriate definition of the term.

But if you accept that roleplaying is "the making of decisions as if you were the character", then the fact that you are not roleplaying while you are using dissociated mechanics is, as I have said, indisputable.

Period.

Quote@magic items: So your gamemaster looks up and says "in the hoard are three mage touched swords, 2 glaives that were majorly mage touched and a two handed sword that was really touched by a mage"? Really? That is the first time I hear of this. We always say +1 Sword/Axe/Whatever.

Sometimes. But it's also irrelevant. You are still confusing abstracted/metagamed mechanics for dissociated mechanics. (A fact you would have been forced to confront if you weren't cherry-picking statements from my posts.)

Quote@action points: So there is no luck or heroic effort or any other of multiple of possible labels for such a thing in your gameworld?

Sure. But the decision "my character is going to be lucky here" has no analog in the game world. That's what makes it a dissociated mechanic.

Let's compare this to a nearly identical associated mechanic: The character has a two-headed coin that was given to him by the Goddess of Luck. Once per day he can call upon the Goddess of Luck to help spin the odds a little bit in his favor for a few moments. This, mechanically, translates into rolling twice and keeping the better result.

The difference is subtle, but distinct and meaningful. Until you are capable of recognizing the difference, you're just flailing blindly in this discussion.

Quote from: Saphim;388275@types of mechanics: It might be a dissociative mechanic for you, for other people it might just be what the doctor ordered to be in there and feel what it means to be a hero and give everything at a certain moment. Preferences vary.

But I suspect the root of your problem lies here: You assume that dissociated mechanics are innately bad, and therefore if you like something it must not be a dissociated mechanic.

There's nothing innately good or bad about dissociated mechanics. They are a tool. Like any tool, they are good for some things and bad for others.

Quote from: two_fishes;388277Inevitably all arguments have to be decided by evidence, and that's something that's lacking in almost any RPG discussion. You can label mechanics associative or disassociative, and claim that disassociative mechanics interfere with immersion, but without a statistically meaningful survey of people playing the game, it's all just intellectual exercise. Someone who comes along and says, "Nuh-uh, I immerse fine with these so-called disassociative mechanics!" is making a claim that is just as valid as the opposite.

JA: I'm going to define "run" as "to move swiftly on foot so that both feet leave the ground during each stride". I am therefore going to conclude that someone who has had both of their legs surgically removed cannot run.

two_fishes: Without a statistically meaningful survey of people who move around, it's all just an intellectual exercise. Someone who comes along and says, "Nuh-uh, I run just fine without any legs!" is making a claim that is just as valid as the opposite.

No. They're not. If they want to dispute the definition of "running", that's fine. That's a discussion we can have. But if you accept the definition, it follows that people without legs cannot run. It's no longer a matter of opinion.

Quote from: Peregrin;388316Yeah, but Justin uses 3:16 as an example of something that's "dissociated", yet it has verisimilitude because the actions follow logic, it's just that the scale is zoomed out a bit (rather than "mismatching" what would happen in reality).

Yup. Verisimilitude is a useful term, but it's describing something distinctly different from the associated/dissociated terminology.

For example, Monopoly could be re-designed so that it's property values closely matched current property values in the real world. The result would have a high degree of verisimilitude, but it wouldn't make the game's mechanics any less dissociated.

Now, people who are interested in associated mechanics are probably likely to want verisimilitude, too, because both values cater to a similar set of tastes. And associated mechanics may innately bring some degree of versimilitude with them. But there isn't a direct connection between the two.

Quote from: Benoist;388362

QuoteRight, but that doesn't mean if I'm against funny voices, or acting in first-person, or breaking the 4th wall, I've suddenly become anathema to role-playing.

Actually, as for the bolded passage? Yes, that makes it anathema to role playing games.

Here I would disagree. I think that one can play a role without necessarily acting the role.

The key here is the continuum of "as if" in my definition of roleplaying: "Making definitions as if you were the character."

At one end of that continuum you have a completely logical construct: "I think that Bob the Warrior would do X."

As you move along that continuum, you begin putting yourself more and more "in the character's shoes" as you move more and more towards something that we would recognize as acting. In other words, as you move along that continuum you are moving from logic (concluding that X would be Bob's action) to emotion (feeling that X would be Bob's action).

Stanislavski's acting method is entirely predicated around the construction of the "magic if" or "as if". And when we talk about "immersion" we're talking about something very much akin to that semi-transcendental state that Stanislavski talks about in which you move beyond the logical or cognitive construct of the "as if" entirely -- where you stop having to think about your acting and simply become the character.

Another way of looking at this is to consider the character as a meme-construct that you create in your brain: At one end of the continuum you are very much aware of what you're putting into the meme-construct, how the meme-construct is processing that input, and why the output exists the way that it does. At the other end of the continuum, the meme-construct is essentially a "black box".

These meme-constructs are similar to the images we build up of other people's mental states during social interaction. Recent neural science is demonstrating that not only are these meme-constructs in many ways hard-coded into our brains, but that there's a hard-coded connection between these meme-constructs and our own consciousness: When we see someone crying, we're hard-coded to recognize their sadness and to feel sad ourselves. When we see someone laughing, we're hard-coded to feel happy ourselves.

This is why so much of acting theory is built upon a fundamentally empathetic structure. The roles we play are illusionary people to whom we forge an intensely empathetic bond to the point of complete identification.

And to bring this back around to the point: In other words, at one end of the scale we have a meme-construct that we identify with 100% (immersion). And at the other end of the scale we have a meme-construct that we hold at a complete arm's length (for which I don't have a handy term).

Most of us, of course, fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum. And will, in fact, move backwards and forwards along the continuum depending on any number of factors. But my big point here is that you can hold that meme-construct at complete arm's length and still be roleplaying.

Quote from: Peregrin;388401The problem these days is that time is too valuable a commodity for most people to commit any to lengthy tabletop games.  Video games aren't in direct competition with tabletop as far as experience goes, but they definitely are in terms of how easily each fits into your schedule.

The only thing I could see hoping for is that there's some sort of "post video-game" RPG revival as geek chic continues to penetrate popular culture.  That's still pretty pie-in-the-sky, though.

What will really make the scene *pop* is when an RPG system, a newer one, is really good enough for long-term, campaign play, has basic, advanced an optional rules, and is used in a large scale video game, so it brings fans to the tabletop version from both directions.  It needs to get the hardcore gamer not to hate it, the newer and more casual player to enjoy the more basic rules, and to bring in some curious video gamers who want to see what it is all about when you have a live GM.

Quote from: Benoist;388376There's no doubt in my mind that it's going to happen somehow. You can't have a flagship like 4e taking RPGs in a direction like this without some counter-culture coming up with their own take at some point. The question is what form it will take. Who knows.

Unfortunately, I think the hobby has shrunk to the point that the reaction is only online rather than on the shelves of stores, and is already with us in the form of the OSR. If V:tM was an echo of the boom of '81, the echoes are just getting smaller.

Quote from: CRKrueger;388365And of course you think that way because you don't immerse to the same extent that others do, thank you once again for proving my point.

I'm actually the big roleplayer of my two groups, both as a player and (especially) as a GM. But nice try.

Seanchai

Quote from: Peregrin;388405Dragon Age, AFAIK, was a flop from the start.

I found it! My FLGS finally got it in! I think it's not a fantastic benefit to sales when it takes months for a copy to arrive at an FLGS.

Seanchai

Quote from: two_fishes;388333Again, I'm not convinced that "associative" or "disassociative" are anything more than technical sounding jargon to lend credibility to a fairly arbitrary and subjective distinction between the sorts of mechanics you like and those you dislike.

Probably because that's just what's happening. You've got the classics going on here: neologisms/jargon, theories that don't explain what's actually happening and seen at the gaming table, pronouncements about what is and what is not a roleplaying game, et al..

We humans use the same basic pattern over and over to attack that which we dislike, fear, or don't understand.

Seanchai

Quote from: Seanchai;388438Probably because that's just what's happening. You've got the classics going on here: neologisms/jargon, theories that don't explain what's actually happening and seen at the gaming table, pronouncements about what is and what is not a roleplaying game, et al..

We humans use the same basic pattern over and over to attack that which we dislike, fear, or don't understand.

Seanchai

I think my irony meter just broke.