Quote from: soviet;566788So WFRP 1e isn't a roleplaying game because of fate points?

1e's Fate Points are nothing more than an "extra life" mechanic, essentially a luck mechanic meant to balance out the races. There's nothing storygamey about that.

RPGPundit

Quote from: soviet;566990Fair enough, you're probably right here. But the point I was trying to make remains, which is that D&D may not be that useful as a template for what all RPGs must fundamentally look like. There is still room for plenty of variation without leaving the 'it's an RPG' sphere.

I don't think anybody here is trying to say that D&D represents the entirety of possible game plays and variations thereof one could have in a role playing game. Every single individual here likes more than D&D. You ask me and I'll throw a bunch of names at you like CoC, Vampire, INS/MV, Hurlements etc. TheDungeonDelver will tell you Twilight 2000 and others. Others will say RIFTS, RuneQuest, etc etc.

I mean, yeah, we're all playing in the role playing game hobby here, and nobody's saying that D&D is the be-all, end-all of everything you can possibly play with a role playing game.

Now that does not mean that a role playing game is anything you brand as such, or that you can't discuss about what one would consider a role playing game and therefore, how this or that game would *not* be a role playing game for this or that gamer. It so happens that to me, a game with a primary focus of creating a collaborative story from an author's point of view is not a role playing game - it's a story game, and that can be fun to play, too.

But when I come to your house expecting to play an RPG and that you throw Fiasco on the game table I'm not going to be pleased, because that's not what I came for. Likewise, when some asshole changes the game I like from being a traditional role playing game to being a story game and radically changing its game play as far as I'm concerned, I'm annoyed, and rightfully so, I believe.

Quote from: John Morrow;566615And what was that mission?  To destroy the D&D brand and cripple the hobby with boutique games that sell a few thousand copies each?

For the first, prove it.

For the second, how have MORE choices crippled the hobby?

Quote from: CRKrueger;566621How do you know, you weren't born yet.

Luckily, we have a culture that records its history.

Crazy, I know.

Quote from: CRKrueger;566632only none of them are currently a living version of D&D, WFRP or Middle-Earth RPG I can stand.

Perhaps you should design a game yourself then.

Quote from: CRKrueger;566632As far as 4e goes, if it doesn't scream Gamist Coherence to you brother, you're stopping your own ears on purpose.

It screams 'miniature wargame rules' to me, because it looks a lot more like those games than any of the Indie games I've encountered.

And those kinds of rules have been around a LOOOOOONG time.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;566635There's a difference between, 'I roll to see if the task I want to perform is successful or not,' and, 'I roll in order to determine if I get to narrate the results of my actions.'

But Attempting a Task IS Narrating a Result. How do you take action in an RPG without first describing your intent? The only difference is where the line is drawn. What you believe a character has direct agency over vs what they do not.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;566674It's not about "non-linear play." It's about teaching referees how to prepare better linear adventures which are less susceptible to railroading or illusionism.

This is an impossible combination, but please share your advice for doing this nonetheless.

Quote from: estar;566856Stakes of Failure are clearly metagame mechanics. A character is not going around thinking about what the Stakes of Failure are going to be in a mechanical sense.

Most people, including myself, anticipate and consider potential bad consequences before taking important actions all the time. In fact, I suspect we consider the consequences of failure more often than success as well.

Quote from: estar;566856Actively thinking about what 'would be most dramatic' is a metagame mechanic. Character would not be going around thinking to themselves "What is going to the most dramatic way I can spend my day?"

I do

Quote from: Black Vulmea;566865Instead, I would present them as a timeline in which the antagonists are acting and the adventurers are free to respond, like in Operation: Ace of Clubs for Top Secret, or as a series of events to which the adventurers may or may not respond, like in Burned Bush Wells for Boot Hill, or the referee is given a slew of options for how the npcs react depending on what the adventurers do, like in "The Lady of La Rochelle" for Flashing Blades.

OK, but if the players' actions affect the direction of the adventure, then it isn't a 'Linear Adventure'.

Quote from: The Traveller;566943Aha see that what every game designer does, and for good reasons, they are writing a game. But the result is that quality GMing, an art form of its own in many ways, isn't focused on by anyone.

Well, except for Vincent Baker in Apocalypse World, and...

...well, you get the idea

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567061Well, except for Vincent Baker in Apocalypse World, and...

...well, you get the idea

Sex moves for the win!

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567061For the first, prove it.

I think seeing the leading brand that defined the hobby knocked down to second-rate status by an upstart because fans would rather play an older version of the rules rather than the new edition is a pretty heavy piece of damage to a brand that's been essentially synonymous with the hobby since it started.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567061For the second, how have MORE choices crippled the hobby?

First, role-playing is a group hobby rather than an individual hobby.  More choices further fracturing an already small hobby into incompatible subgroups is not the way to keep a social hobby alive.  More choices are not necessarily a good thing if the dispersal of the audience between the choices produces insufficient density for any choice to maintain it.

Second, the more serious problem is not fracturing the player base but saddling the standard-bearer and traditional gateway game into the hobby with the idea of "coherency" such that the 4th Edition offered little to nothing to anyone other than the niche it was specialized to cater to.  Again, role-playing is a social hobby, not a specialized one.  

To illustrate, maybe you like a niche type of music that's nothing but annoying noise to most other people.  If you are sitting alone listing to it with headphones, that can be fine.  If you start playing it at your house when guests are over, maybe it will drive them away.  Start playing it in in public venues and maybe you'll have a lot of unhappy people.  If a #1 Top 40 station starts playing it and loses 95% of it's audience, that's a disaster.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567061It screams 'miniature wargame rules' to me, because it looks a lot more like those games than any of the Indie games I've encountered.

Do you understand what coherency means in Forge theory?

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567061But Attempting a Task IS Narrating a Result. How do you take action in an RPG without first describing your intent? The only difference is where the line is drawn. What you believe a character has direct agency over vs what they do not.

No, it's not narrating a result.  It's stating an intent.  Intent does not equal a result, no matter how much you desperately want to claim they are the same.  You'd be great fun on a jury, arguing with the judge that there is no difference between attempted murder and murder because you think having an intent to do something is the same as actually doing it.  Please report for post-modernism poisoning detoxification because you've got a terminal case of post-modernism poisoning and don't even seem to know it.

Quote from: John Morrow;567067First, role-playing is a group hobby rather than an individual hobby.  More choices further fracturing an already small hobby into incompatible subgroups is not the way to keep a social hobby alive.  More choices are not necessarily a good thing if the dispersal of the audience between the choices produces insufficient density for any choice to maintain it.

I've never understood this line of argument. Surely most people have a group that they roleplay with regularly, or some sort of store/college games night possibly? If I want to play a particular game I don't go round looking for other people that already like it, I ask my existing group if they want to try it out.

I remember stories from the heyday of the hobby, where GenCon was lined with hundreds of publishers (indies, if you will) all trying to sell their own game.  Somehow, it survived this period, and in fact thrived.

Also, people tend to gravitate towards popular titles.  Gaming is a national pastime in South Korea despite the fact that the market is absolutely flooded with online games.  

That's the thing, though.  If our hobby is so dependent on one title dominating in order to maintain momentum, to the point where people can't naturally shift towards popular titles as they come out, then it's not a very healthy hobby to begin with.

Quote from: soviet;567075I've never understood this line of argument. Surely most people have a group that they roleplay with regularly, or some sort of store/college games night possibly? If I want to play a particular game I don't go round looking for other people that already like it, I ask my existing group if they want to try it out.

A lot of groups consist of a gamers with mixed preferences, including casual gamers who aren't really all that interested in making a story happen and are often quite happy with a GM who feeds them a story, and that's exactly the wrong type of audience for a "coherent" game specialized toward one style of play.  Sure, you might have a group of friends who love going out to a new exotic restaurant each week but there are plenty of people who eat at chain restaurants for a reason.

Quote from: Peregrin;567082I remember stories from the heyday of the hobby, where GenCon was lined with hundreds of publishers (indies, if you will) all trying to sell their own game.  Somehow, it survived this period, and in fact thrived.

The vast majority of those games were fairly similar in approach, but diversity and storygaming are not the most serious problem to come out of Forge theory.  Coherency is, because it was embraced by the market leader.

Quote from: Peregrin;567082That's the thing, though.  If our hobby is so dependent on one title dominating in order to maintain momentum, to the point where people can't naturally shift towards popular titles as they come out, then it's not a very healthy hobby to begin with.

It's not a very healthy hobby and hasn't been for years, if it ever was.  And a big part of the problem is that only one game seriously took on the role of bringing new people into the hobby for much of that time (though White Wolf deserves some praise for bringing a new demographic in).  That's why the health of D&D is so strongly tied to the health of the hobby.  It's the gateway for most people into the hobby.

Yeah, I know it's going to disappoint a lot of people who fancy themselves paragons of creativity but the most successful games are full of clichés, stereotypes, strong genres, rip-offs and licensed titles, and other least common denominator elements.  The successes are like McDonalds, Top-40 Music, and blockbuster action movies, not haute cuisine, experimental modern classical music, and the Sundance Film Festival.

Quote from: John MorrowYeah, I know it's going to disappoint a lot of people who fancy themselves paragons of creativity but the most successful games are full of clichés, stereotypes, strong genres, rip-offs and licensed titles, and other least common denominator elements. The successes are like McDonalds, Top-40 Music, and blockbuster action movies, not haute cuisine, experimental modern classical music, and the Sundance Film Festival.

Ain't nothing wrong with that.  If someone actively hated on all (or a lot of) pop-culture, it would say more about them than pop-culture.

However, the difference is that pop-culture changes and evolves.  Aesthetic tastes and needs change with society.  A lot of people in this hobby don't want that.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;566674It's not about "non-linear play." It's about teaching referees how to prepare better linear adventures which are less susceptible to railroading or illusionism.

You want to teach referees how to design linear adventures that are less susceptible to being linear?

Quote from: noisms;566698I don't accept the premise that "If you are manipulating mechanics which are dissociated from your character — which have no meaning to your character — then you are not engaged in the process of playing a role."

You don't accept the premise that if you're doing something which has nothing to do with playing a role that you are not playing a role while doing that?

QuoteIn my view, playing a role is much simpler than that: it involves identifying with a character and, for the purposes of the game, pretending you are him or her. No more and no less. (...) There is nothing to prefer my definition over yours, I'll grant you...

Your definition doesn't seem significantly different from mine. What is the actual action of "pretending to be a character" and how does it differ from "making choices as if you were the character"?

Or are you arguing that any game in which you talk in a funny voice while rolling the dice is a roleplaying games? And do you understand that if that is, in fact, your argument that you are arguing that Risk and Monopoly are roleplaying games? And do you really not understand how that robs the term "roleplaying game" of having any meaning whatsoever?

QuoteWhy on earth should we care about that subdivision except as a very dry academic issue?

People feel strongly enough about these issues that it broke the commercial back of Dungeons & Dragons and is forcing Wizards of the Coast to completely reboot their product line.

People like different shit for different reasons. Furthermore, clearly understanding the distinctions between STGs and RPGs will allow for better game design.

And, on a purely personal level, I find that I enjoy things a lot more when I'm not trying to interpret it through the lens of a different experience. Citizen Kane makes for a lousy comedy. Trying to play 3:16 as if it were an RPG instead of an STG makes for a lousy game.

It's due to this last point that I find these discussions so destructive and pointless: People are so hellbent on calling Monopoly a roleplaying game that any attempt to discuss the practical differences between prepping for an STG like 3:16 and prepping for an RPG like Shadowrun gets caught up in this pointless insistence that Fiasco and Arkham Horror are the exact same activity.

Quote from: Dan Davenport;566781The game calls itself an RPG.

Back when it first came out I was arguing that it should be an RPG. That's because I was using the definition "any game where you happen to play a role".

Quote from: Sacrosanct;566787I don't recall this ever being an issue when Vampire came out.  That was role-played just like those of us who were playing D&D, and nobody really cared about the difference.  I might not have preferred to play Vampire, but I didn't get indignant about how they weren't "real" rpgs.

Vampire isn't an STG. It's a purely traditional RPG that had a lot of pro-railroading advice for the GM.

Quote from: silva;566796If thats the case, why not create a new word for your specific definition ? I mean, roleplaying already have a very clear definition - the act of playing a role. Add a "game" to that and you have a "game where you play a role". Simple.

So, in your opinion, Arkham Horror and Twilight Imperium are both roleplaying games?

Honest question. I'm interested in seeing if you're really willing to follow through on the conviction of your proposed definition.

Quote from: Benoist;567005That's not a linear adventure in my mind.

Now add a time-sensitive mission to it that the adventurers must complete against the background of that timeline.

That's basically Operation: Ace of Clubs and Operation: Fastpass from Top Secret. The adventurers - agents, in this case - must get from A to E to complete the mission, but rather than progressing from set-piece to set-piece, they are setting the tempo and the direction of how the mission is accomplished while still hitting those marks.

Remember, this tangent arose over how to make linear adventures less susceptible to railroading and illusionism. A timeline is one example sometimes used by sandbox referees, but it's not the only example.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567061This is an impossible combination, but please share your advice for doing this nonetheless.

'Impossible for chaosvoyager' != 'impossible for anyone else.'

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567061OK, but if the players' actions affect the direction of the adventure, then it isn't a 'Linear Adventure'.

I think I lost a couple of IQ points from reading that sentence.

Quote from: John Morrow;567070

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567061But Attempting a Task IS Narrating a Result. How do you take action in an RPG without first describing your intent? The only difference is where the line is drawn. What you believe a character has direct agency over vs what they do not.

No, it's not narrating a result.  It's stating an intent.  Intent does not equal a result, no matter how much you desperately want to claim they are the same.

Thanks for saving me the trouble of replying.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;567105You want to teach referees how to design linear adventures that are less susceptible to being linear?

A trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco can go by a number of routes and involve different methods of travel, but it's still a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Quote from: soviet;567075If I want to play a particular game I don't go round looking for other people that already like it . . .

That's exactly what I do, actually.

I don't have 'a gaming group.' Either I look for a group of players interested in playing a game I'd like to run, or I join a group of players who are playing a game I'd like to play.

There are very few games, and more significantly very few genres of gaming, that interest me.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;567119Now add a time-sensitive mission to it that the adventurers must complete against the background of that timeline.

That's basically Operation: Ace of Clubs and Operation: Fastpass from Top Secret. The adventurers - agents, in this case - must get from A to E to complete the mission, but rather than progressing from set-piece to set-piece, they are setting the tempo and the direction of how the mission is accomplished while still hitting those marks.

Remember, this tangent arose over how to make linear adventures less susceptible to railroading and illusionism. A timeline is one example sometimes used by sandbox referees, but it's not the only example.

I remember. I do agree with you on pretty much everything, I've been there too and I totally see how that works. It's just that it does sound to me like you're saying that to make linear adventures not devolve into railroads then... they should not be linear adventures to begin with.

Please repeat for me your definition of a linear adventure. I suspect there's some difference in the way we define these. To me it's an adventure that is, well... linear, that is, it includes a sequence of events for the PCs that go like this: PCs are confronted to Event A. Then they talk to NPC1 in Scene B. Then from this they might learn about NPC2. Meeting with NPC2 gives a piece of information about who's behind Event A. Et cetera. That's a linear adventure, to me.

If the sequence of events isn't linear but dynamic... then it's not a linear adventure, is it?