Quote from: John Morrow;567433While I agree that there are people who don't want any change, D&D 3.x was pretty enthusiastically embraced.

I love this fairy tale that 3.x players tell themselves. I'm not sure how you can read the posts on this forum and not realize there is also a divide between TSR and WotC D&D.

Quote from: NosimsNobody actually makes choices as if they were the character. If they did, their choice would be to go back to the farm rather than enter the deadly dungeon. Let's not be silly about this. Pretty much anybody who engages in any pen and paper tabletop game makes choices based on what is best for the game and what they think would be fun - or, what will win them gold and XP - not "as if they were the character".

"Pretending to be a character" is exactly that: taking on the persona of somebody who you are not. It's rather simple.

Not to dogpile, and I have needed to be away from this repetitive thread now due to work...
But I am saying this so that maybe, maybe, if you hear this from enough  people at once, it may finally creater that rare miracle of the internetr where someone actually looks at why some small brigade here or there in cyberspace tells them they are seeing things wrong.

If your character ever did something in my games that I saw as chasing exp, I'd call it metagaming to your face.  Chasing gold, ok, wealth has done strange things.  But most people playing a 'heroic fantasy Game' tend to be heroic.  Maybe the in-game logic allows them to think that magic healing exists in their world, or maybe there are great legends of heroes.

But then again, we are roleplaying.  PLaying from within the eyes and knowledge of the player.  And the more you are talking...the more it sounds like you might be doing something else.
(And SIlva, I really can't believe you thought that totally off-target comment was good insight.  Very much, 'the price of tea in china'.

And, Ben...I think I have you trumped.  One of my players was playing two characters, an assassin and a Druid/sage.  Due to what the assassin did in town, and what happened in the chase, the two ended up in a fight to the death...because from both of their within-character viewpoints, that's what would have happened.

I do agree with Noism's earlier comment that more than pathfinder and bad $e design choices is hurting D&D, but I do think that most of those factores would also have damaged Pathfinder, which would have negated the growth in one and the drop in popularity of the other.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;567441I love this fairy tale that 3.x players tell themselves. I'm not sure how you can read the posts on this forum and not realize there is also a divide between TSR and WotC D&D.

So I run one D&D 3.5 campaign and play in one D&D 3.5 game and now I'm a "3.x player" pushing fairy tales?  As I mentioned,. I don't think it succeeded fully in balancing various interests and suffered for it, but in terms of sales and people playing it, not to mention all of the OGL variants based on it, it seems pretty objectively successful to me.  That it had less than 100% buy in from players of earlier editions does not mean it wasn't a success.  It certainly did better than 4e.

Did I go through some kind of time warp and end up back in 2006?

Quote from: LordVreeg;567445And, Ben...I think I have you trumped.  One of my players was playing two characters, an assassin and a Druid/sage.  Due to what the assassin did in town, and what happened in the chase, the two ended up in a fight to the death...because from both of their within-character viewpoints, that's what would have happened.

At one point, while trying to understand what the big deal with Forge Narrativism was supposed to be, I read some actual play reports and they seemed a lot like a normal role-playing game where the people periodically stopped and played Yahtzee for some unfathomable reason instead of just playing through the scene in character.  What I realized after going around a bit with the advocates of those games (some of whom told me that I'd been playing Narrativist games all along) is that the reason they thought Narrativist games seemed so great was that they'd never had powerful conflicts happen in their games before.  I pretty much left it at that, but based on this thread, I think I now understand why they had to play Yahtzee to get the drama.  Since they don't play the game in character and don't try to have their characters do what they'd do if they were real people, they don't get spontaneously generated drama or powerful emotions through their characters, so they need to Yahtzee and rigged scenarios to tell their characters to respond in extreme ways to generate the drama because they don't know how to do it otherwise.

Quote from: JamesV;567447Did I go through some kind of time warp and end up back in 2006?

It's been Eternal September since 1993.  People should be used to it by now.

Quote from: John Morrow;567446So I run one D&D 3.5 campaign and play in one D&D 3.5 game and now I'm a "3.x player" pushing fairy tales?  As I mentioned,. I don't think it succeeded fully in balancing various interests and suffered for it, but in terms of sales and people playing it, not to mention all of the OGL variants based on it, it seems pretty objectively successful to me.  That it had less than 100% buy in from players of earlier editions does not mean it wasn't a success.  It certainly did better than 4e.

It was more successful that 4e, no doubt about it.

I think that had more to do with the success of d20 and the OGL as a whole though than specifically the design of 3.x.

3.x was the right game at the right time along with a 3pp policy that was amazing for its growth. It's a pretty good game. Not for me, but a good game. And the d20 boom really created a lot of other really good games.

That being said, do I think that there were problems with 4e design that led to losing a ton of fans? Yeah, actually I do.

Quote from: John Morrow;567449At one point, while trying to understand what the big deal with Forge Narrativism was supposed to be, I read some actual play reports and they seemed a lot like a normal role-playing game where the people periodically stopped and played Yahtzee for some unfathomable reason instead of just playing through the scene in character.  What I realized after going around a bit with the advocates of those games (some of whom told me that I'd been playing Narrativist games all along) is that the reason they thought Narrativist games seemed so great was that they'd never had powerful conflicts happen in their games before.  I pretty much left it at that, but based on this thread, I think I now understand why they had to play Yahtzee to get the drama.  Since they don't play the game in character and don't try to have their characters do what they'd do if they were real people, they don't get spontaneously generated drama or powerful emotions through their characters, so they need to Yahtzee and rigged scenarios to tell their characters to respond in extreme ways to generate the drama because they don't know how to do it otherwise.

Basically if you're not feeling it as the character, you have to think it as the author/director.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;567454That being said, do I think that there were problems with 4e design that led to losing a ton of fans? Yeah, actually I do.

Got it, read it, never played or ran it. Instead I get my D&D fix now by running BFRPG and playing in a 3.x game.

So yeah, it lost me anyways.

Quote from: noisms;567361You can certainly play Risk and Monopoly as if they are role playing games, by pretending to be a military dictator or a property entrepreneur respectively. (...) Do you understand why this doesn't rob the term "roleplaying game" of any meaning, but actually just attributes to it its actual meaning in terms of the English words of which it is comprised?

Do you understand that the term "roleplaying game" has an accepted, common usage which determines its actual definition?

That's a rhetorical question. Obviously you don't. Or, at least, you are willing to claim that you don't understand that.

But that's fair enough: You want a definition of "roleplaying game" so broad that it applies to virtually every single game ever made. The fact that this doesn't actually match the way that the word "roleplaying game" is actually used in the real world is inconsequential to you.

At this point we can agree to disagree, and let other people decide if they agree with your absurd claim that Risk and Monopoly are roleplaying games.

QuoteGimme a break. People stopped playing D&D because they couldn't agree on what role playing games vis-a-vis story games were? It had nothing to do with the rise of video games, the general decline in social activities in the West, the growing competition from other leisure activities in general?

Frankly, I'm not really interested in hearing your "explanations" for how, according to you, absolutely nobody rejected 4E and went back to playing pre-4E versions of the game or Pathfinder. So we'll just let other people decide whether or not they agree with you on this absurdity, too.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;567145I gave three examples from published adventures that describe how to do it.

Please, try to pay attention.

I think you mean this link

Quote from: Dan Davenport;567173It's akin to claiming that Olympic diving would be the same sport if the divers got to dictate what scores the judges give them.

The Czege Principle basically states that if the same person who creates the adversity also creates its resolution that the result will be boring, and AFAIC, meaningless. But doing that is not what I'm proposing at all.

Hm, let me put it this way: All actions are intents because their validity can be contested at any time by the GM or a roll. When I attack an Ork, I don't rise my sword above my head and cleave him in half, I intend to rise my sword above my head, then I intend to cleave him in half. And you can break this chain of events down more or less as you like.

Quote from: John Morrow;567425Ask your board game club to switch over to Chess, Poker, Advanced Squad Leader, or perhaps even hopscotch for a few weeks and see how much buy in you get.

Done it. In fact, it's expected.

Also, Hopscotch can now be played on a table?

Quote from: John Morrow;567425You don't really like traditional role-playing games so you'd like to see the hobby dominated by games more to your own personal tastes, regardless of how many many other people don't like it.

If by traditional you mean D&D, then no. If you mean CoC, then yes.

And it's not that I don't like traditional games, it's that I don't like many of the sorts of people who play them, or at least who they are when they play. It's the same case for MMORPGS, which I WANT to love if it wasn't for the fact that so many of the other players are just obnoxious.

Quote from: John Morrow;567425People who actually do like traditional role-playing games can see that, at some point, the goal is to make a game that's not a traditional role-playing game, designed to engage the players in something different than traditional role-playing games do, generally at the expense of the things that people who enjoy traditional role-playing games enjoy and actually want in their games.

Like what? Because everything people have claimed traditional RPGs do I have found done better using so called 'indie' and 'story' games.

And D&D prioritized gamist combat from the beginning. Not immersion. Not character roleplay. Gamist. Combat. If anything following the discussions on The Forge would have taken the design in the other direction.

Quote from: John Morrow;567425So why should anyone care what other people do?  Because the size, health, and direction of the hobby affects what people can buy and the pool of players and GMs that a person can potentially play with.

Yet I can find the RPGs I enjoy more easily now than ever before.

I wonder why.

Quote from: John Morrow;567425The hobby had that, to a large part, in D&D, which was a near universal experience in the hobby for quite a while.

And then there was d20, which resulted in a LOT of shitty products with settings and themes which didn't mesh well with the system.

Luckily that one ring has been thrown back into the volcano

Quote from: John Morrow;567425And do you think you reflect the majority of the hobby or a niche taste?

The hobby? No. People in general? Yes.

Quote from: John Morrow;567425Do the games you play sell on Amazon and sell in the tens of thousands of copies or do you find them on Lulu selling a few hundred or maybe a few thousand copies?

No, but I'm not sure what your point is, because Monopoly outsells ALL RPGs by a wide margin, and if you're using popularity is a gauge to quality then D&D4 is the second best RPG ever made.

Also this.

Quote from: John Morrow;567425It does == D&D 4e being a specialized "gamist" game at the expense of other mainstream styles of play.  Yes, you can argue that D&D had been moving in a "gamist" direction for a while, but D&D 4e embraced it with such gusto that it alienated just about everyone else.

Yes, and it's TOTALLY due to The Forge, and not the gradual refinement and evolution of how D&D was actually being written and played for over a decade.

Gotcha

Quote from: John Morrow;567425Changing that power relationship seems to be the whole point of storygames, so I find it difficult to believe that you don't grasp the difference.

I do understand the difference, just in a far more nuanced way.

Quote from: John Morrow;567425Do you believe that both deserve the same punishment, which they would if the two were actually the same thing?

Well, let's just say that if a man shoots another in the head and puts them in a permanent coma instead of killing them outright that it has a greater cost to society and causes greater emotional pain for the family.

Quote from: John Morrow;567425Let me clearly state that I have no interest in deciding whether my character succeeds or fails when they attempt an action where the character does not have a choice over whether they succeed or fail.

(bold) That's different for everyone. And when people encounter things they thought were a choice and find they weren't, it creates cognitive dissonance. This is also something that can lead to good roleplaying however; where a man finds out he isn't the kind of man he thought himself to be.

Quote from: John Morrow;567425When I play, I not only have no interest in having ultimate narrative control over whether my character succeeds or fails at uncertain tasks but intensely dislike being forced to make such decisions while playing.

Neither do I.

But then, even storygames don't do this. Nobody gets total narrative authority. That's the whole point.

Quote from: John Morrow;567430Many of the people I've played with over the years also played that way, to the point where some of the people wouldn't say how badly wounded their characters were in combat to avoid the other players having their characters step out of character and act on out-of-character knowledge to save them.  And I've also seen players walk out of their room when things were happening that their character wouldn't know about to help firewall that information from the character.  In fact, I've also seen players rebel against a GM who offered script immunity to a degree that was detrimental to verisimilitude because they'd rather their characters die and missions fail than the verisimilitude of the in character experience be broken.

I'm actually a firm believer in the IC/OOC divide.

However, it's not that simple. While a player may know things their character doesn't, their character may also know things they don't. And part of the reason we have dice and hit points and miniatures and shit is to bridge that gap, to simulate the character's intuition, all the minutiae they can read on a battlefield which we the players can't see.

And without such tools, the game is actually less immersive to me.

Quote from: Benoist;567428It's no wonder you guys don't understand what we're talking about. You are literally describing yourselves as color blind: it's all the same thing because to you, there's never been a situation in the game where you took decisions from your character's POV exclusively, assuming that alternate identity immersed in the game world and its specific circumstances, so naturally for you anything that is third-person POV including storygames is a role playing game. QED.

Quote from: John Morrow;567432Sadly, I fear D&D is in the hands of designers who have the same problem.

Yes, because the original designers of D&D totally prioritized immersion and making decisions from the character's PoV.

Right

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459Yes, because the original designers of D&D totally prioritized immersion and making decisions from the character's PoV.

Right

These are not the same things you are talking about. Immersion =/= taking decisions from the character's POV.

See these two posts.

Quote from: Benoist;567461These are not the same things you are talking about. Immersion =/= taking decisions from the character's POV.

You do your side a deservice here, there was nothing in the quote from chaosvoyager that indicated that were the same (hence the listing of both concepts instead of just one).

Quote from: John Morrow;567449At one point, while trying to understand what the big deal with Forge Narrativism was supposed to be, I read some actual play reports and they seemed a lot like a normal role-playing game where the people periodically stopped and played Yahtzee for some unfathomable reason instead of just playing through the scene in character.  What I realized after going around a bit with the advocates of those games (some of whom told me that I'd been playing Narrativist games all along) is that the reason they thought Narrativist games seemed so great was that they'd never had powerful conflicts happen in their games before.  I pretty much left it at that, but based on this thread, I think I now understand why they had to play Yahtzee to get the drama.  Since they don't play the game in character and don't try to have their characters do what they'd do if they were real people, they don't get spontaneously generated drama or powerful emotions through their characters, so they need to Yahtzee and rigged scenarios to tell their characters to respond in extreme ways to generate the drama because they don't know how to do it otherwise.

Quote from: CRKrueger;567456Basically if you're not feeling it as the character, you have to think it as the author/director.

That assessment rings true to me.

People advocating that storygames and role playing games are the same thing seem to have never felt an emotion from their character's POV or taken decisions from an immersive POV EVER. So it's no wonder that an RPG would feel flat and would need to be jolted from the player's seat to create some kind of drama or conflict worth watching from afar as though it were a TV show or something.

Quote from: gleichman;567462You do your side a deservice here, there was nothing in the quote from chaosvoyager that indicated that were the same (hence the listing of both concepts instead of just one).

That's "disservice" to you. And no, I don't think I'm doing any "side" any "disservice". I'm just being clear that there is a fundamental difference between experiencing the game live from an immersive point of view and assuming a different personality and characterization thereof. If you are playing yourself in situation, it does not follow that you are in fact not immersing yourself in the game world (as a matter of fact, you may be more directly invested than you otherwise would be through the lense of a different personality you'd assume in the game world), and it is certainly not true that you are playing from a third-person authorial point of view either.

People who played D&D at Lake Geneva didn't seem to give much of a shit about characterization. It does not follow they weren't immersing themselves in situation at all, or not experiencing the exploration live as it occured, as opposed to "building a narrative" or "collaborating in a story".