Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459And 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.

In general I favor John Morrows and the others PoV in the conversation, and I have no love at for Story-Games which I consider a different hobby from traditional RPGs much like motorcycles are a different hobby from cars or Skeet from Bullseye Shooting.

But I must agree with chaosvoyager on this point. There was nothing in any version of D&D at any time that catered to anything other then what can correctly be called gamist play no matter what the designers or others have said. Any immersion or other factors are brought to the table by players of the D&D, completely independant of rules so abstract as to be senseless for anyone actually attempting to view the world through a pure game mechanic PoV.

Quote from: gleichman;567465But I must agree with chaosvoyager on this point.

Well sure, of course you'd agree. You're the guy who thinks it's impossible to play an RPG verbally, and you need to have some type of visual representation otherwise the game can't be played meaningfully.

Quote from: Benoist;567464I'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.

You were talking to hear yourself speak as no  one made the claim you're refuting.

I swear, you've done more to convince me that the Forge actually have a valid point in this thread than years of their junk theory disscussions. I would have thought that impossible.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459Done it. In fact, it's expected.

Also, Hopscotch can now be played on a table?

It could be.  More importantly, it's played on a board.  This is how one goes about denying obvious difference, by coyly ignoring the differences and grasping at any similarity, right?

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459And 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.

So you don't have contempt for traditional games, just the majority of gamers who play and enjoy them.  Got it.  That makes all the difference.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459Like what? Because everything people have claimed traditional RPGs do I have found done better using so called 'indie' and 'story' games.

So, storygames do a better job of giving the player a metagame experience solely from the perspective of their character?  Which one does that.  I'd be interested in playing it.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459And 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.

I've never been a huge D&D fan combat.  As I've pointed out, I think that because HP and AC are non-representative abstractions, they easily become dissociated mechanics outside of combat (e.g., healing, falling damage, etc.).  Of course I realize that my tastes can be somewhat extreme and are not universal and the point is not that D&D does what I want perfectly, but that I can do what I want while playing D&D, and so can a gamist player, and so on.  D&D does nothing perfectly but gives everyone something they can work with.  It's a jack of all trades and master of none, and that's a feature, not a bug.  It's the point that the Forge coherency argument misses entirely.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459Yet I can find the RPGs I enjoy more easily now than ever before.

I wonder why.

Why should that matter to anyone who thinks such games are awful?  

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459The hobby? No. People in general? Yes.

...because you have contempt for the people who are actually in the hobby, right?

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459No, 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.

I'm not talking about quality, but I think quality can be irrelevant if nobody is interested in it.  There are plenty of high quality movies that get made that nobody wants to watch.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459Also this.

I don't find any of those things particularly disappointing.  It looks like the list was written by a disappointed Baby Boomer that can't deal with the fact that the music of their youth isn't as eternal and timeless as they'd like to think it was.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459Yes, 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.

When the designers responsible for it parrot Forge theory points to describe their choices, yes, I blame The Forge and not mysterious and inexplicable forces of evolution.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459I do understand the difference, just in a far more nuanced way.

And what nuance is that?

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459Well, 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.

I was wondering how far you'd be willing to stretch to avoid acknowledging the point.  The answer is, "pretty far," it seems.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459(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.

Not what I'm talking about.  If you throw a pitch during a baseball game, you don't get to choose if it's a strike or not.  If you shoot an arrow at a target, you don't get to decide if it's a bullseye or not.  If you ask a woman out on a date, you don't get to decide if she says yes or not.  If you do a gymnastics routine, you don't get to decide if it's a perfect 10 or not.  Do I need to go on?

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459But then, even storygames don't do this. Nobody gets total narrative authority. That's the whole point.

Nice attempt at moving the goal posts there, sport.  I said "ultimate narrative control over whether my character succeeds or fails at uncertain tasks", not "total narrative authority".  Try responding to the point I made, not the straw man you want to knock over.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459I'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.

Sure, but I don't need rules to simulate intuition.  When I'm thinking in character, the intuition just happens as part of that.  If youa re looking at the game through the character's eyes, you can actually see the battlefield through that character's eyes.  That's what many of us mean by "immersion".  When I'm role-playing like that, I notice mistakes that the GM and other players make, too.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459And without such tools, the game is actually less immersive to me.

Then by all means use them, but they can actually be detrimental to people who don't need them, sort of like turning the key to start an engine that's already running can produce a nasty grinding noise.  The problem is not when people ask for tools to make the game better for them but when they demand other people use those tools, too, even when it makes the game worse for them.

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

In an odd sort of way, they were, though rather than trying to play the character as a distinct personality, it was more of an avatar for the player.  But the goal was similar enough that it works both ways, which is that the approach is to look at the situation through the characters eyes and deal with it through character choices.  A pit trap in a room isn't much of a challenge if the player is the one deciding it's there and the player decides whether their character falls into it or not.

Quote from: gleichman;567467Derpy derp derp

Well, fuck you too, asshole.

Quote from: Benoist;567466Well sure, of course you'd agree. You're the guy who thinks it's impossible to play an RPG verbally, and you need to have some type of visual representation otherwise the game can't be played meaningfully.

And you're a person who thinks in-game reality is unimportant to keep track of, a GM focused person who thinks that whatever comes out of your thick head must be law because there is no other option.

And worse, you're losing an easy argument to a Forge booster due to your own ego and inability to use logic. You're a sad example indeed.

Quote from: gleichman;567465But I must agree with chaosvoyager on this point. There was nothing in any version of D&D at any time that catered to anything other then what can correctly be called gamist play no matter what the designers or others have said. Any immersion or other factors are brought to the table by players of the D&D, completely independant of rules so abstract as to be senseless for anyone actually attempting to view the world through a pure game mechanic PoV.

I would agree that character immersion is something that the players bring to the table themselves, and what happens is that the system either works with that perspective or it fights against it.  While I also agree that D&D has some rules that are so abstract that they can produce some pretty nonsensical results from an game world perspective, the rules are largely tolerable for immersive play because the choices made in the game can be made from the character's perspective.  What makes storygames toxic to character immersive play is that true storygames often require that the player look at the game from a perspective that's not focused on their character or from their character's perspective.  Even though it sounds like the people playing in Gary Gygax's original D&D games didn't do a lot of character immersion, either, they were still largely engaged in the game and solved problems from their character's perspective and the players didn't get to decide what happens beyond what their characters would reasonably have control over.

Quote from: John Morrow;567473While I also agree that D&D has some rules that are so abstract that they can produce some pretty nonsensical results from an game world perspective, the rules are largely tolerable for immersive play because the choices made in the game can be made from the character's perspective.

This is where you and I differ.

For me decisions made from the character's perspective become impossible when that perspective seems unrelated to the reality the game should be modeling. Even if I manage to blind myself to the disconnect, I'm aware of that I'm putting on blinders and thus can never be comfortable or really engaged in what's happening in game.

It's a bit like attempting to view chess as a wargame. Much as I might try, I don't see the fields of Gettysburg on a chess board. Something like Terrible Swift Sword is required.

It's not a issue of abstraction as such, for I'm good with abstraction. The issue arises when that abstraction conflicts with the reality of what's being abstracted.

Quote from: gleichman;567475For me decisions made from the character's perspective become impossible when that perspective seems unrelated to the reality the game should be modeling. Even if I manage to blind myself to the disconnect, I'm aware of that I'm putting on blinders and thus can never be comfortable or really engaged in what's happening in game.

I consider it far from ideal and prefer something more in harmony with the game reality, but it's not as disconnected as storygame mechanics generally are.  And the last D&D 3.5 game I played in (and perhaps the only true D&D game I've ever played) was a great experience largely in spite of the D&D rules, not because of them.  There wasn't that much fighting or magic in that game.

Quote from: gleichman;567475It's not a issue of abstraction as such, for I'm good with abstraction. The issue arises with that abstraction conflicts with the reality of what's being abstracted.

The way I describe the problem with D&D is that it uses non-representational abstractions for armor and damage such that they work as an abstraction in simple combat (such that people with more armor take less damage and people with more skill last longer in combat) but fall down when applied to other situations (e.g., healing, falling damage, surprise attacks, etc.).  It's no mistake that hit points escalating with level and armor class (along with character classes) are the most divisive and complained about mechanics in D&D and almost no game that's not deliberately trying to ape D&D keeps those mechanics.

Even all of that said, it's still more friendly to character immersion to me than asking me if my character succeeds or fails, asking my to describe how my character fumbles, the dice telling me how my character reacts to an in-game situation, or drama-inspired mechanics that mean that I have to take some sort of story-oriented penalty later in the game for success now.  I, too, like the Hero System (at least up to 5th Edition) but drama-oriented mechanics like psych-lims with rolls to determine if they're triggered or not never did much for me.

For the record, if I were trying to redo D&D, I'd consider fixed hit points, making armor subtract from damage, and making higher levels make a character harder to hit.  That would make the abstraction more representational and would naturally deal with things like surprise attacks.  It would probably break the resource-management focus of the game, though.  It would probably also drive all of the people who don't like the "whiff factor" (lots of rolls that produce a "miss" result) nuts, too.

Quote from: John Morrow;567433But if you read what a lot of the people pushing storygames have written over the hears, they actively hate on traditional role-playing games, and it shows.  Don't feed me haute cuisine and call it McDonalds in an attempt to trick me into eating it.

It's only tricking if the Japanese were trying to "trick" me into playing their adventure games with spreadsheets that they call RPGs.

QuoteWhile I agree that there are people who don't want any change, D&D 3.x was pretty enthusiastically embraced.  That system was designed to offer something to everyone, even though I don't think it succeeded fully in balancing those interests.

3e was enthusiastically embraced, but for many other reasons besides design.  Monte Cook has a good interview he did at a con where he talked a little about the external factors that led to it being such a huge success.  Mostly he chalked it up to people being sick of 2e, the LotR rush, and fan's kids being old enough to really appreciate the game.

QuoteD&D 4e was designed to cater to a specific style of play and to produce a narrow type of game to the detriment of other styles of play and other ways of playing and it tanked.  It didn't lead a mainstream shift in the role-playing culture.  It stepped away from the mainstream and lost audience as a result.

If people were so attached to those dead limbs it was carrying, I guess they can obsess over aesthetics, but IME the play structure was largely the same if you look at how 3.x was played by most groups.

Quote from: John Morrow;567477Even all of that said, it's still more friendly to character immersion to me than asking me if my character succeeds or fails, asking my to describe how my character fumbles, the dice telling me how my character reacts to an in-game situation, or drama-inspired mechanics that mean that I have to take some sort of story-oriented penalty later in the game for success now.

To me, the impact of D&D's abstraction is roughly equal to the problems Story-Game mechanics cause.

In fact, I see little difference between them in a way and that's especially true with OSR style D&D (at least as practiced by members of this board). Both run roughshod  over in-game reality. Only the reasons for doing so differ, and sometimes that even isn't the case.

Quote from: John Morrow;567477I, too, like the Hero System (at least up to 5th Edition) but drama-oriented mechanics like psych-lims with rolls to determine if they're triggered or not never did much for me.

It's been a while since I read the specific rules, but as I recall Psych-lims don't have rolls to determine if they're triggered or not, they have rolls to determine if you are able to force yourself to not continue acting according them (you always spend one phase reacting if the trigger comes up in play).

But that's nitpicking.

I don't care much for HERO's disadvantages either (hence why I haven't read those rules in a while), and only use them as notes of character traits that only come up when it seems reasonable for them to. In terms of point balance, they never have nor ever can actually work without disrupting the game and the reality its modeling.

Part of the reason D&D games works well is its ubiquity.  Most of us have grown up using the rules, so the mechanics become ingrained, we learn to ignore the game's quirks, and we play the game with ‘unconscious competence’ of the game mechanics. This makes the rules pretty much invisible to us during play, making immersion much easier.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567459Also, Hopscotch can now be played on a table?

How else are you going to add the narrativist mechanics?

JG

Quote from: gleichman;567465But I must agree with chaosvoyager on this point. There was nothing in any version of D&D at any time that catered to anything other then what can correctly be called gamist play no matter what the designers or others have said. Any immersion or other factors are brought to the table by players of the D&D, completely independant of rules so abstract as to be senseless for anyone actually attempting to view the world through a pure game mechanic PoV.

This is a good point. Where did the Immersionist Party around here took the idea that D&D was meant to be played in full character immersion and all that crap ? Because the very rules dont support this and neither its own creator cared much for it, if Ben's posts are right.

Quote from: John Morrow;567468If you throw a pitch during a baseball game, you don't get to choose if it's a strike or not.  If you shoot an arrow at a target, you don't get to decide if it's a bullseye or not.  If you ask a woman out on a date, you don't get to decide if she says yes or not.  If you do a gymnastics routine, you don't get to decide if it's a perfect 10 or not.  Do I need to go on?

In which storygames do you get to decide whether or not you succeed, and by how much? Because I haven't seen them.