Quote from: Elliot Wilen"Adventure" mode = strong correlation of player-knowledge and player-action with character knowledge/action, reinforcing cognitive identification with the specific role. It fosters "adventures" in the sense of experiencing strange new worlds in person.

Gotta stop here. "Thematic" is basically that which works against "Adventure", though.

Elliot this isn't saying very much. Maybe it's because the word "adventure" itself is problematic. I dig the fact that it all boils down to "thematic means working against adventure"

With regards to the whole "making moral statements"...sheesh, this is the problem with the adventure/thematic, storygame/rpg divide.

And yeah, I know I said my last post was my final thoughts, but....

Regards,
David R

Okay, for your benefit David: forget the terms Adventure & Thematic.

The breakdown is between:

a) We try to have "what the player knows" roughly match "what the character knows", and "what the player does" maps structurally to "what the character does".

Or b) We're relatively unconcerned about player knowledge/expectations diverging from character knowledge/expectations (e.g., players know the characters can't die in a combat that happens in the first 15 minutes of play, and expect a climactic battle in the last half hour), and players mostly "do stuff" in ways that don't map structurally to the actions of their characters. (E.g., player activity consists mainly in negotiating a narrative via a collection of keywords, as in Polaris. Or the player chooses his own character's Fallout, even whether said Fallout makes the character more or less capable, as in Dogs in the Vineyard.)

I agree that "making moral statements" is a blind alley; it's what GNS officially uses to distinguish Nar, at least last I checked. Technically you're making a moral statement when you choose to hold off the Etruscans at the bridge, even if you're playing RQ and there's nothing in the rules which gives the moral content of your action any special mechanical consequence. However in practice there's a switch-up such that the desire for Nar is expressed as a need, in fact a responsibility, to exercise external control over the fiction from moment-to-moment, as the only way to guarantee you'll be able to "make your statement".

In short the technical definition of Nar doesn't really identify the major fault line between game styles and tastes, rather it's a set of mechanics designed for the benefit of people who desire to be entitled to express themselves in a manner they see fit, instead of having to work through the fiction in an experiential fashion.

Quote from: Elliot WilenIn short the technical definition of Nar doesn't really identify the major fault line between game styles and tastes, .....

Neither does adventure/thematic...so why use any of this nonsense?

Regards,
David R

Why not just use words people already use? If you talk to gamers who've never heard of this stuff, they use words like "hack & slash dungeon crawls" and "thespy angsty bullshit". We can just trim those down a bit to make them less judgmental... hack/thesp. And cinematic/realistic, etc.

Then you get to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. But I guess really the Forgers and Settembrini and our own Mirror Ron want to be prescriptive. They want to tell us what to do.

:confused:

Quote from: David RNeither does adventure/thematic...so why use any of this nonsense?

So, what I wrote in my last post was nonsense, David?

I mean (a) vs. (b). Nonsense, eh?

Quote from: Kyle AaronWhy not just use words people already use?

You mean like they've been using them for the last couple decades?

These are distinctions that keep getting discussed.

There's a reason for this: because they mean something to the people raising the distinction.

Story-telling games
Storytelling vs. Roleplaying Games
A modest proposal: rec.games.frp.storytelling

Quote from: Elliot WilenSo, what I wrote in my last post was nonsense, David?

I mean (a) vs. (b). Nonsense, eh?

No Elliot. What I was refering to was GNS and Adventure/thematic. I should have made that clear.

Regards,
David R

Yes but they don't mean anything to anyone else.

You can't argue for the universal applicability of language which hardly anybody understands, and where even the founders of argue about the meanings.

Whereas if you use everyday English as used by the people engaging in the activity, things make a lot more sense. To everyone.

I don't think anyone's had any more luck with hack/thesp or cinematic/realistic than we've had with simulationist/dramatist or RPG/storytelling game.

You know I'm pretty skeptical of RPG theory jargon. It's not only opaque in many cases but it often hides the fact that there's no "there" there.

But the general problem that I'm talking about in this thread, which I believe's more or less the same as Sett, is a conceptual divide, not between "hack" & "thesp" as it were but between seeing a difference between hack & thesp and insisting there's no difference.

David, it really seems to me that you don't like Sett, you don't like his delivery, and you don't care for the terms he's chosen...yet pace the concerns Pierce Inverarity raised earlier about overemphasis on Challenge, I'm not sure where my (a) & (b) differ from the descriptions he's used when talking about Adventure/Thematic.

This is rather different from the Nar-vs.-everything-else issue because there, even if you relabeled the GNS terms to make them clearer, they still wouldn't demarcate the same divide as (a) vs. (b). (I'm not sure how familiar you are with the details of GNS. Actually I think the ideas that go into Nar are pretty useful, but it's less than the sum of its parts, particularly when it's used to diagnose problems arising from differences of taste.)

BTW, Kyle, is your avatar a picture of you? If so you look a great deal like James Baker in profile.

Personally, I would like to expunge the word 'story' from this discussion , unless every single user defines his usage of it.

Wow ... didn't expect to still see this thread up when I got back.

While you were doing racking up another eight pages of discussion about how people discuss the way people discuss theory, I went out to a convention and played a dozen awesome games.

I'm just sayin'.

Quote from: Elliot WilenBut the general problem that I'm talking about in this thread, which I believe's more or less the same as Sett, is a conceptual divide, not between "hack" & "thesp" as it were but between seeing a difference between hack & thesp and insisting there's no difference.

Elliot, I think Sett's agenda is more Swinish than this. It's not really about a conceptual divide within the same hobby (something I think everyone acknowledges), but rather an attempt on his part using jargon to remove an aspect of the hobby he finds distasteful.

QuoteDavid, it really seems to me that you don't like Sett, you don't like his delivery, and you don't care for the terms he's chosen...yet pace the concerns Pierce Inverarity raised earlier about overemphasis on Challenge, I'm not sure where my (a) & (b) differ from the descriptions he's used when talking about Adventure/Thematic.

It's not that I don't like Sett. I find him disingenuos and hypocritical but it's nothing presonal, just the vibe I get from reading his posts. To be honest I think (a) & (b) with a bit of work could work well with Kyle's Hack/Thesp division although I prefer Action/Thesp myself - much better than Adventure/Thematic. To be clear Elliot, I think (a)& (b) are very real divides, but I think you are going about it the wrong way in labelling them Adventure/Thematic.

As for the overemphasis on challenge...this is where it gets tricky. After reading both Sett's (and yours) posts upthread... I think a dogmatic belief  (on Sett's part) that "challenges" in rpgs should be rigidly defined in a particular manner leads to this kind of muddled thinking. I'm just saying, that if anything, this is where the overlapping between (a) & (b) occurs.

Quote(I'm not sure how familiar you are with the details of GNS. Actually I think the ideas that go into Nar are pretty useful, but it's less than the sum of its parts, particularly when it's used to diagnose problems arising from differences of taste.)

I have read some stuff on GNS. Most stuff I get are from folks like you, droog and Kyle and general theory discussions. Stuff that I found useful from the Forge came from the AP threads.

Regards,
David R

IMHO, Tony - for a guy who talks as much theory as anyone I know here, for you to throw the "Go Play" card is a bit disengenuous...

I'm just sayin'

Quote from: James J SkachIMHO, Tony - for a guy who talks as much theory as anyone I know here, for you to throw the "Go Play" card is a bit disengenuous...

I'm just sayin'

Fair 'nuff.  FWIW, I try (as much as possible) to talk theory from the point of view of how I view my own gaming, or how another person views their own gaming.  I tend to lose interest in discussions where person A talks about how person B thinks person C views person D's gaming.  Dunno whether that's a distinction that makes sense to anyone else, but it informs how I look at things.