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[everything this site loves] John Wick's at it again, Benoist writes epic reply

Started by The Butcher, October 02, 2014, 04:14:08 PM

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Phillip

The lack of flexibility is a general shortcoming of computer games, but it's an oddity that the ones distinguished with the "RPG" label tend to be especially stereotyped in allowed actions, especially focused on numbers, and especially removed from first-person perspective. The Adventure game type, especially the old-fashioned ones with halfway decent language parsers, better evokes for me the classic role-playing-game experience. Why are FPS not considered CRPGs? Apparently, not enough number-crunching for the player - just that "roleplaying" aspect.
And we are here as on a darkling plain  ~ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, ~ Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Simlasa

Quote from: Phillip;790351Why are FPS not considered CRPGs? Apparently, not enough number-crunching for the player - just that "roleplaying" aspect.
I was never much a fan of the actual RPG style videogames but I Deus Ex remains one of my favorite FPS games, because of all the optional stuff and choices that can be made... including the dreaded 'no-kill' playthrough.

TheNextDoctor

Quote from: Will;790312Later the party had the chance to resurrect my character, whose spirit told them to fuck off. Better off in his heaven. Idiots.


So I liked D&D when I was very young, because it was my first RPG (though quickly intrigued/entranced by CoC), and then with 3e, because it seemed actually functional.

Funny

So yeah, there's nothing wrong with gamers or games that play that way.  It's just not what I desire from a game but I wouldn't say that it's not an rpg.  

And I have a similar nostalgic feeling towards Rifts/Robotech/Palladium books because it was my first rpg experience but I wouldn't play those games again and I shudder to think that folks will consider me snobby for saying this.

I just want something different from rpgs or at least different rules if I were to play any Palladium settings.

And I'll admit that Dark Sun and Planescape settings always interested me but no one I ever met was interested in either or more specifically running either settings.

I used to wish someone would run a Dark Sun game where all the PCs were slave enforcers/police to one of the city lords but was secretly trying to subvert the city lord's authority.

Always thought that was a nice campaign idea.

I think they were called city lords.

TheNextDoctor

Quote from: Daztur;790326Yeah, I think most gamers go through the "I'm to SMART for that STUPID D&D phase," some just never come out of it.

For example I played a bunch of D&D with my students and they name their character things like "Stupidpie" and "Fighter"


Cool story.  

Maybe a lot of gamers do. Speaking for myself, I like a certain type of experience from role playing and I never got that from D&D.  I wish I had, as per my Dark Sun idea in the above post.

And I'm contemplating, as I am getting back to role playing after a hiatus of more than a decade, purchasing the 5e even with my unsatisfying experience because it's D&D (the granddaddy of them all)

It's cool that your students (don't know their age range) had a great experience role playing.  Stupidpie and Fighter are probably the best descriptors of characters that I've ever heard.  Encompassing motivation, occupation, priorities, etc.  Simple yet to the point.  Would this be called elegant?

Spike

Quote from: Ladybird;789967There is no meaningful capacity for player choice or exploration in the great majority of so-called computer RPG's; they're just slightly more advanced CYOA books.

Like in WoW, you can't speak to the NPC's and see what they think about the situation. You can't defect to the bad guys. You can't steal enemy uniforms and sneak into their kingdom that way, unless it's the Specific Mission Where You Steal A Uniform And Sneak In That Way. You can't your king to go do one. You can't say "fuck this shit, I'm going to live out my life as a fisherman"... or rather, you can, but the storyline won't progress without you, it'll just wait for you to get back. Claiming that somehow gives you control over the storyline is like saying you're got control over the story of a book, because you can stop reading at any time.



Well, you do have the various Elder Scrolls games, fer ex Skyrim. You can talk to just about any NPC in the world. Most of them haven't got much to say, but then that's true about asking random schmucks in teh real world about whatever floats your boat.

More importantly, they don't force you to solve quests in any particular way. Oh, sure: Sometimes you absolutely have to kill the bad dude to take his stuff, but shockingly often you can just pick pocket it, or walk into his house when he's not home and just walk off with it, even before you have the quest!

And if all else fails, in a massive number of cases you can just go get another item just like the one you want from 'bad dude x' and give it to the quest giver without ever dealing with bad dude x in the first place.

To my mind the only thing really missing from the experience of TRPGs is the social/group dynamic.

Oh, I suppose you could claim that being geographically constrained to a single country is an arbitrary limit, to which i would then say: Daggerfall.
For you the day you found a minor error in a Post by Spike and forced him to admit it, it was the greatest day of your internet life.  For me it was... Tuesday.

For the curious: Apparently, in person, I sound exactly like the Youtube Character The Nostalgia Critic.   I have no words.

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Phillip

I'm puzzled.  Can anyone explain this to me?

If I'm supposed to be all about story-telling and not care about game balance, what's supposed to be my incentive for paying my hard-earned dollars to Wick for hundreds of pages of his presumably unbalanced abstraction?

Not only is making up a shit-who-cares abstraction easy as pie, but my friends and I were doing collaborative storytelling with no handbook at all years before D&D was published. Kids have been playing Let's Pretend for millennia without John Wick's punditry.
And we are here as on a darkling plain  ~ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, ~ Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Daztur

Philip: never much liked those games because my options always felt so constrained. I always did the most RP in TBS-style games, like Civilization or Crusader Kings since I had so many more options.

Quote from: CRKrueger;790341This brings up the nature of Immersion.  Obviously, "StupidPie's" player isn't really Roleplaying a character, but he is interacting with the world, he's immersed in an alternate reality that isn't his.


There's an overlapping line between immersing yourself in a setting without getting into character (roleplaying yourself), and immersing yourself into a specific character within a setting.  Similarly, there's an overlapping line between immersing yourself into a specific character, and also immersing yourself as author/observer into the story of that character.

Immersing into Setting
Overlap
Immersing into Character
Overlap
Immersing into Story

All three of these are usually referred to as RolePlaying, at which time the knives usually get drawn.

Yes, immersion into a setting is RPing as well and it`s something a lot of good GM and rulesets wisely cultivate but I don`t think it`s what makes an RPG and RPG any more than identifying with the main character makes a movie be a movie, despite that being what a lot of movies aim for.

OK let`s take my oldest son as another example. He can`t read yet so I haven`t started him on D&D but he loves dungeon crawling board games like DungeonQuest and the Lego one. He gets never RPs but he gets immersed into the setting and often recounts our adventures as a story to his mom.

But he keeps on butting his head into the border between RPGs and board games. While learning the games he kept on trying to do things that the rules don`t allow but that made sense in the implied setting of the game. I ran with that but as soon as he grasped the rules he stopped doing that as he understood that in this game anything not permitted is forbidden. He got that in the Lego game thw ONLY things he could ever do was fight, move, pick up stuff and drink potions and stopped trying to so anything else, which is just what the rules intend.

For me that`s not much fun and my mind gets pretty numb playing that Lego game because it doesn`t really allow for the one thing that makes RPGs special: the ability to do anything that makes sense in the impled setting of the game.

Haffrung

Quote from: LordVreeg;790037Wow.  
That never occurred to me as possible, since the game was spawned by Chainmail and the ubiquity of minis in every con, game mag, and hobby shop in the late 70s and 80s.

I doubt if 10 per cent of the the people who were playing D&D by 1984 had even hear of Chainmail, let alone played it. Minis were in hobby shops. People painted them. Brought them to D&D sessions. But in my neck of the woods, they were not placed on a tactical grid in combat. They were models of the PCs. Maybe used to show marching order. Apparently, that's the way Gygax himself played, so it's not as though theatre of the mind combat was some weird playstyle that only developed in the 2E era.

The thing that gets on my tits about the whole "D&D's roots were a tabletop wargame" meme, usually spouted by 3E and 4E fans to defend their games, is that it fails to recognize that the thing which made D&D so different from anything before, and sparked the exponential growth in it as a game and pass-time, was the ways is which it was different from a wargame  or boardgame.

 If D&D had remained a fantasy miniatures game, it would not have exploded out of the tabletop wargaming hobby into mass popularity in the basements and rec rooms of millions of new players. The fact that all you needed to play were some books, imagination, and some dice is what enabled that massive growth.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;790174Hex crawls, dungeon maps, top down view of the combat, rules for flanking etc. All that stuff is pretty board gamy to me.

There is no mention in the Holmes Basic, Moldvay Basic, or 1E AD&D of positioning and moving minis on a grid. None. Not a single one of the examples of play and combat reference grids and minis.

Dungeon maps were used by DMs, not players. In my experience, it was regarded as cheating for players to even look at them. And there were virtually no tactical-scale maps in published adventures. No battle mats. If D&D was primarily a game played on a tactical grid, why weren't those common commercial products? Why didn't the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief include a skirmish-scale map of the king's hall?
 

Armchair Gamer

Quote from: Haffrung;790386If D&D had remained a fantasy miniatures game, it would not have exploded out of the tabletop wargaming hobby into mass popularity in the basements and rec rooms of millions of new players. The fact that all you needed to play were some books, imagination, and some dice is what enabled that massive growth.

     I'd say that massive growth had more to do with James Dallas Egbert, Pat Pulling, and things like 60 Minutes than with the presence or lack thereof of miniatures. The absence of miniatures removed a barrier, but I wouldn't say it accounts for how the game 'exploded out of the tabletop wargaming hobby.'

   The 1980s boom was a fad, folks. Drawing too many conclusions about what makes for long-term success from that event is just as big a mistake as dismissing it as irrelevant.

   (And personally, I don't care for miniatures-focused gaming, will be running tomorrow night's session of I6--my first time behind the screen in over a decade--without them, and think 4E would have done much better if it had deemphasized the grid and/or been packaged in an Essentials-style format with counters. But I also don't much care for the 'neither fish nor fowl' approach of AD&D nowadays; either exploit the use of graphic representation, a la 4E, or abstract things out a bit, like FATE or 13th Age.)

Bedrockbrendan

Quote from: Haffrung;790386I doubt if 10 per cent of the the people who were playing D&D by 1984 had even hear of Chainmail, let alone played it. Minis were in hobby shops. People painted them. Brought them to D&D sessions. But in my neck of the woods, they were not placed on a tactical grid in combat. They were models of the PCs. Maybe used to show marching order. Apparently, that's the way Gygax himself played, so it's not as though theatre of the mind combat was some weird playstyle that only developed in the 2E era.

The thing that gets on my tits about the whole "D&D's roots were a tabletop wargame" meme, usually spouted by 3E and 4E fans to defend their games, is that it fails to recognize that the thing which made D&D so different from anything before, and sparked the exponential growth in it as a game and pass-time, was the ways is which it was different from a wargame  or boardgame.

 If D&D had remained a fantasy miniatures game, it would not have exploded out of the tabletop wargaming hobby into mass popularity in the basements and rec rooms of millions of new players. The fact that all you needed to play were some books, imagination, and some dice is what enabled that massive growth.



There is no mention in the Holmes Basic, Moldvay Basic, or 1E AD&D of positioning and moving minis on a grid. None. Not a single one of the examples of play and combat reference grids and minis.

Dungeon maps were used by DMs, not players. In my experience, it was regarded as cheating for players to even look at them. And there were virtually no tactical-scale maps in published adventures. No battle mats. If D&D was primarily a game played on a tactical grid, why weren't those common commercial products? Why didn't the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief include a skirmish-scale map of the king's hall?

Yeah i started just before 2E came out and we didn't use miniatures at all, and when we did start buying them, they were mainly used for things like marching order. Eventually we tossed them because we found them distracting (I found I kept picturing my character looking exactly like the miniature). The whole thing with map tiles and stuff wasn't even something I would have thought to do at the time. Eventually we learned about the chessex mat and you'd see that in play once in a while. I don't think I ever ran a game using miniatures until at least 2000 (I had played in games using them before that but had very little demand for them in my own group).

Bunch

Bla blah blah two guys on the internet are fighting but I can't be bothered to listen as it would get in the way of the fun I'm having.

TheNextDoctor

John Wick wrote, I don't want you to think I just get rid of combat mechanics. On the contrary, for Vampire, I usually get rid of that whole Social trait thing entirely. Why? Because this is a roleplaying game, and that means you roleplay. You don't get to say, "I have a high charisma because I'm not very good at roleplaying."

My response to that is, "Then, you should get better at it. And you won't get any better by just rolling dice. You'll only get better by roleplaying."


I completely disagree with him on this.  I like to think I'm a decent role player but I'm a horrible actor and while I can "act" some things out others I can't like...

If I was playing a giant stupid uncharismatic ogre who has the trustworthy, honest, and sincere advantages and had to convince a bunch of dwarves that I didn't kill their companions. I will have no idea how to act it out, what he'll say, behave or anything (maybe that means I'm not stupid or uncharismatic)

But I do know and will tell the GM that my character wants to talk in a non-confrontational way, drop my weapons, and try to convince them of the truth that I had no part in the killing of their companions using a lower submissive voice.

So I roll some dice with my low charisma with whatever bonuses I get from the honest, trustworthy, and sincere advantages even knowing in the back of my mind that I probably could take down all these dwarves.

I think that's decent roleplaying, non-existent acting, but role-playing nonetheless.

I think John Wick created L5R (had the book and always wanted to play but never got to) and I believe there's social conflict resolution mechanics in that game.

Nexus

Quote from: Necrozius;789875Well, they ARE a little goofy. Think about it: the only well known established Matriarchy in D&D lore are a bunch of evil sexy S&M slavers who worship a demon queen goddess of darkness and evil.

That's what makes them cool...

QuoteOh and they're "black".

That's what makes them perfect.
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Omega

So Wick is another in the endless parade of people who played an RPG, usually D&D, and came away from it with some insanely narrow mindset of a "revelation" as to what RPGs are.

"I played in a D&D game and there was fighting. D&D is ONLY about fighting!"
"I played D&D and was immersed. D&D ONLY is about immersion!
"There were minis! Gygax tells you to use minis! D&D is ONLY about minis!"

etc etc etc ad nausium.

Followed by how everyone elses playstyle is NOT really real role playing.

Which is the opposite end of the crazy stick to the people who apply a term to EVERYTHING!
Reading a book is Role playing! Monopoly is Role Playing! Rugby is Role playing! Worms fucking is Role Playing!!!

Next week someone will post their revelation on how not using dice or pennies to mark position degrades the purity if immersion only real represenative miniatures can give.

Then it will be the guy who played with this really obnoxious elf player and how ELVES are a poison to RPGs and no one should ever play them and anyone playing them is not really playing.

In a few months it will be someone extolling how playing without henchmen is not really real role playing.

And on and on and on.

estar

Quote from: LordVreeg;790037Wow.  
That never occurred to me as possible, since the game was spawned by Chainmail and the ubiquity of minis in every con, game mag, and hobby shop in the late 70s and 80s.

Reflecting on taking up RPGs in Junior High in 1978 I would guess it depends heavily on what was available at the place you bought D&D. I know there were two places to get D&D in my hometown, State Street Model Shop and the Dandelion. State Street had miniatures the Dandelion did not.

I lived in a town of 15,000 surrounded by a rural agricultural area. Having the State Shop in hindsight was a bit fortunate for a town my size. It where I picked up the Grenadier boxed set that formed the core of my miniature collection. It didn't exist there was only the Dandelion then I could see miniatures not being a big thing at all.

Slightly later with the bookstores like B Daltons picking up RPGs. That would also continue increase the chance of area without experience with miniatures.