Quote from: SettembriniYou don´t even know wht you are talking about. It´s so pathetic.

EDIT: Go, play a RC character up to level 36. Or return to Normal, Illinois from Poland in a Twilight: 2000 campaign, before I can even start to rake you seriously...

LOL! Awesome. The German Retard called me pathetic!

Shall I whip out my gaming pedigree? I'll bet I've played just as many games on both sides of the fence as you.

-L

So much is true, in the past couple of days, Settembrini has been taking no prisoners.

Quote from: lukeLastly, GNS are moment to moment play priorities. While it is possible to design a game that appeals to one particular play priority, it is also possible to activate all three priorities across the course of play of any game.

Whoa:jaw-dropping:

Luke, you get points for not knowing your GNS...but also a deduction for not knowing your GNS.

They're not moment to moment priorities: they're gestalts that are sustained over complete "instances of play" or "reward cycles".

Last I checked, Forge orthodoxy was required (by the evidence) to acknowledge that you could have different priorities in different "coherent" instances of play...but it (by which I mean Ron) was fairly pessimistic about designing a game to support that sort of changing around (called "transition" in F-speak). It's certainly not a routine spec...though I recall Ron saying that Robots & Rapiers had a shot at it.

But success in this (as far as I'm concerned) really means "Getting Ron to bless it"...because, until it's proved otherwise, I think you already have "transition" in regular RPGs, it's just that it goes by the names of Incoherence (in design) & Drift (in practice) at the Forge because of the Not Invented Here syndrome.

Put differently, after half a decade of theorizing on hundreds if not thousands of threads we're back to that handy little tome called Robin's Laws of Gamemastering.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityPut differently, after half a decade of theorizing on hundreds if not thousands of threads we're back to that handy little tome called Robin's Laws of Gamemastering.

And a damn fine tome it is...probably the only one you will ever need IMO.

Regards,
David R

I've been thinking that the very incoherence of the Forge dogma is part of it's appeal - everyone can read in to it what they want. So it can be both a call to publish your own games, an attack on The Man and his Evil Big Companies who Hold back gaming, an excuse to prented you are smarter or cooler or less fat than you really are or what ever else you want it to be.

Similar to how all the good games appeal to people in a variety of ways.

Quote from: joewolzWhy is Narrativist play now the main focus of the Forge?  It's not that it's as marginal (on the internet at least) as it once was, so where's the Forgey love for the other two play styles?  Do they not deserve any sort of serious innovation with a solid theoretical basis?

No.

It all makes much more sense when you realise that the whole GNS theory is a load of old bollocks. It's discussing imaginary things.

"Narrativist" just means, "a story with a point to it." That is, "not a boring story."

"Simulationist" nobody is sure what it means, therefore it means nothing.

"Gamist" means "competition among the participants", which means, "haha PWNED" which doesn't happen much in rpg sessions after the age of 13.

So the whole point of GNS is that your rpg sessions should have some sort of direction in the events, and that direction - that "story" - should have a point to it. And, um, there's some other stuff which is too difficult to talk about, or childish, so we'll ignore it.

It's a load of old bollocks, and its resemblance to what actually happens at the game table is purely coincidental, like when I read my Gemini horoscope and it says, "Geminis are intelligent, magnetic and charming," and I say, "oh my god, that is totally me!" That does not make astrology a true and precise thing. Throw out twenty random adjectives, and at least ten of them, someone will say, "that's me." Likewise, if you come up with a few random categories to describe game play styles, at least half of it will sound true.

It's still bollocks.

It's all about these guys feeling special and artistic and coming up with abstract reasons for everyone gaming with them feeling "tired, bitter and frustrated."

The big lie is that the forge is about individuals developing and promoting their own games "fugazi style". Thats a huge lie, (and also kind of an insult to Fugazi).

Jeez.

The forge is a collective. All credit for anyone involved flows back to the collective. The buy-in is loyalty. The benefit of membership is you get to rely on another member of the collective (who may have never even played or even looked at your game) promoting you, and you get another PR-guy defending your ass on the RPGsite when one of us inevitably slags them.  Oh, and sometimes, (well, lets say "often") you'll be expected to take on these roles of PR-guy and promoter for other people. Also, there will certainly be pressure to conform to the forge's gaming models, group politics, and advocacy theories. Thats how it works.

I guess thats a legitimate way of doing it, but keep in mind-- It is the exact fucking opposite of independent artistry.  

Independent artists existed before the forge. Independent artists exist now *outside* of the forge. By now, technology and networking have arrived-- so that if you really want to be an independent game designer-- nothing is stopping you. You can create with free tools. You can publish with PDF or POD. You can distribute through any number of possible outlets or even create your own storefront. If you want to be a game designer, and you aren't one yet? You really have no excuse. It could be a money thing. It could be a free thing.

All that money that Vincent Baker likes to brag about making? He should be splitting it up to all the people who worked so hard to promote him in the hopes of getting a little promotion for themselves. Of course it wasn't a mutual thing... So thats kind of funny.

Anyhow.  Hey hows that Spione doing?

Anyone who willingly gives up that kind of freedom in exchange for a tour of duty blathering about how drow elves are really racist or 'what Ron really meant by that brain damage thing' pretty much deserves whatever they get, I guess.

Quote from: Pierce InveraritySo much is true, in the past couple of days, Settembrini has been taking no prisoners.

Of course not, he's been taking pot shots into the crowd.
I like ya, Sett, but what's up lately?

But as to GNS? It's only vaguely accurate, which is to say, it's not. Manifestos dedicated to explaining it don't make any sense, and it's not well developed. Like Erik mentioned, it's incoherence probably facilitates its popularity. Real research isn't as popular or dogmatic as this kind of call-to-arms. It's like it never reached beyond hypothesis stage, and now it's 3-Fold which was championed; as far as I can tell though, it died an early death.

As for Nar, specifically, getting all the love? I can't say. Part of me wants to speculate that it's an easy aspect of would-be gaming to latch onto. 'Gamism' had been done, in that initially all a game really needs to do is create mechanical bits to replicate whichever devices you don't trust to just handwave over. The 'who-hits-who' factor, if you will. Narrativity seems like a gimme, because you can make stuff that's a game out of basic story principles (I'm talking story-arch stuff like you'd find discussed in a Creative Writing class), but it's not actually any different. Just thematically. So, it's ripe for an easy pick-up.

Sim? Not as big a deal, because it was just kind of an idea, but didn't pan out. GNS is dead for a reason; it doesn't hold together very well. Of course, the above is rampant speculation. I have no special view into designers heads, and they likely each do things for slightly different reasons.

I've read stuff on the newer 3-Fold Model, but never got it to make any sense. I could be brain damaged, but I highly doubt it.

Quote from: lukeI think Tony and Eliot and Andy hit it: Games like Inspecters and Sorcerer were pretty freaking rare pre-2000. It only makes sense that there was a rush to that side of field once the insights into that kind of game design became transparent.

That I can understand, and did understand...it's not "Why did they do it?" that I'm asking.  I think Tony hit the nail on the head with his "accessibility" argument.  There's more folks doing it transparently (which is what the Forge is about in part) and so more people follow the formula.

Quote from: lukeAlso, most of the small press stuff that's coming out of that community is narrowly focused and designed expressly to be turned around in less than a year and played in one night. This school of thought makes Sim design priorities difficult, as Tony pointed out.

As a theoretician, I understand the merits of games like that.  I really appreciate the DIY or Punk aesthetic.  It's also disappointing to me as a consumer/player.  I like playing longer term games, I actually run my games based around semesters, since we're all in school, and like that to be my goal length.  Most games coming out now don't support that, my favorite Narrativist games do.    

Quote from: lukeHowever, most of the games with forums on the Forge have very strong Gamist components to them. They are probably more ardently gamist than DnD or it's numerous children -- they demand you play the game by the rules and play to "win."

I agree with you here, although it's most likely a trend.  Perhaps a damaging one, if the designers making these games decide they prefer board games anyway...here's looking at you, Vincent Baker .

Quote from: lukeThat said, the current crop of narratively focused games is just a trend. It'll change. Most likely, we'll start seeing more broadly focused games that don't gun for one particular play priority. Either that or you're doomed and the Nar-heads are going to take over the world. That style of play is certainly as accessible as number-crunching in Trad rpgs. Of course, tabletop as a whole is shrinking...maybe this current crop of games will be our salvation?

I disagree with your details, but our end result is the same.  I think the future of RPGs is a synthesis of the Narrative stuff and the current "traditional games" crop.  I don't know if the numbers of tabletop players is shrinking, in fact I doubt it.  I think they're stabilizing to mid-to-late nineties levels (a stable population, I think) but there's more competition in the market...a lot more.

Quote from: lukeAnyway, the crack elite NYC Hardcore Playtesters tell me that Ralph Mazza's Robots and Rapiers is pretty rad. They're telling me it's a big game. With long tem play and fiddly bits and every thing.

Can't wait to see it, I just hope it's not too over the top...I don't really like over the top.  To each, his own though.

Quote from: lukeLastly, GNS are moment to moment play priorities. While it is possible to design a game that appeals to one particular play priority, it is also possible to activate all three priorities across the course of play of any game.

I believe you are very wrong there, based on the texts Elliot and I  read.  However, that "shifting priorities" approach you're mentioning is much more in line to what I've seen in my gaming career.  Is Burning Wheel based on that premise, mechanically?

I submitted before I was through. Damn my shaky fingers. >.<

I think by 'just being' Tony's talking about the sort of play where your aim is to experience life as another person in another world. For instance, Calithena's example of sitting around having a meal (I have a similar story about planning and throwing a birthday party in RQ). I'm really not sure how common this style of play is.

Which only goes to show, yet again, that Tony & Co. are unable to imagine Sim other than as the absence of Nar. So what else is new.

Question for Tony: what games (not game designs but games) have you played that you feel are simulationist?

Quote from: Erik BoielleI've been thinking that the very incoherence of the Forge dogma is part of it's appeal - everyone can read in to it what they want.

Ding! Ding! Ding! give that man a steak dinner. That is EXACTLY how I see much of the forge.