Sett -

It will help other people reading this thread if you re-post that diagnosis of the four elements of early RPGs, the one that has I think Braunstein (?) + Arneson (dungeons) + Gygaxian building blocks + that fourth thing (roleplaying? wargames? you gotta say it again, man) as the 'conceptual anatomy' of early RPGs. Don't know where that got off to.

QuoteIF you value original or primary derivative design and if you value situational creativity, there is nothing else left, than to write your own setting and possibly rulesset.

Well, of course everyone writes their own setting, right?

I realize they don't. It's funny, though: the RPG culture I grew up in, my high school RPG club in the south SF bay area and my friends up in Berkeley and the east bay, everyone had their own secondary world. Even the crap GMs had their own maps, etc. Some of those were pretty cool and weird, others were totally by the numbers or boring despite their variations, but the point is, that was what you did if you were a DM. Nobody ran in the Wilderlands or Greyhawk or Blackmoor or the Realms or Arduin or Glorantha or Tekumel or anyplace like that...we had the stuff 'cuz it was a good idea mine, but real DMs made their own fantasy worlds, pretty much period.

Now, this is only about 150 RPGers we're talking about, maybe 20 GMs. But seriously, no-one used canned secondary settings in my circles. You made your own, and conversations started "Well, in my world..." so much it could make you sick if you weren't in the mood.

Those are the norms I grew up with, and the culture I was part of. I've had a real shock coming back in the last eight years and finding that so many GMs don't do this any more. For me it was a big part of the fun of the hobby.

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If nothing but D&D continues to exist as a mass market product, if we all write our own settings and rulesets, and sell each other PoD books over the internet, and a few dozen stars settle in with low five figure incomes, and a couple hundred satellites make low four figure bonuses, and a couple thousand fringers make beer money, and people are loving and enjoying these games and playing them, I don't see that as a bad future for us at all.

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I'll mull over the rest of your thoughts but off-hand I don't prize creativity for its own sake. I think people should be able to explore their own fantasies and have rules that help them do that, partly by providing other kinds of fun. Don't care if they wind up taking over other people's building blocks to do that, so long as those are the ones they want.

Cal, is this the post you meant?

Quote from: SettembriniWell people, neither of you listened to me, so this thread is where I predicted it to be.

Theres different kinds of innovations. The ones Jrients has in mind, might be called "basic innovations", and can be likened to product life cycles and even kondratieff cycles. If you believe in those concepts that is.

Mearls on the other hand is talking about procedural innovations in D&D rules. Way more narrow.

So what are we talking about? Decide!

@Braunstein & D&D:

The REAL and HUGE as well as BASIC innovation in D&D was the following:


1) Providing radically new building blocks for fictious situations.
2) Providing a robust model for interaction of said building blocks.
3) Providing the idea for interacting building blocks

Building Blocks:
- spells
- magic items
- monsters
- special abilities
- traps
(- planes & gods)

the combat stuff was already there in some form. Just look at the monsters, at the spells and realize how this stuff was basically made from whole cloth!
I cannot emphasize the importance of that enough.
Whole cloth!

Sure there are conceptual sources. But the procedure in which source material and original ideas were mixed and mashed and formed into interactive building blocks for challenges and their resolution, is creative genius of the highest degree!

And no matter what nice little precedural innovations mearls (whom I hold in the highest respect, I even wrote him a filk song) cited, they don´t matter much.
The reason why D&D is so robust is because neither of him, Monte, not even Mentzer, Moldvay. And surely not Arneson or Weseley. It´s Gary´s freaky mind that created the building blocks (AFAIK).
That´s why you can even drop the thief class and different damage for different weapons: The oeuvre of building blocks Gary created is the BIG THING that jumpstarted our hobby.

What 3.x did so very right is concentrating and polishing the

1) building blocks
and
2) their interaction

Keep in mind, that from this perspective, the RQ/Traveller line of tradition is actually a conceptual step back: it´s like the Kriegsspiel supplements made by officers to enhance "realism" but within the single character framework.

Traveller is conceptually Braunstein+Kriegsspiel Supplements, whereas D&D is Arneson+Gygaxian Building blocks and RQ is Arneson+Kriegsspiel Supplements.

So we have:

- the Braunstein flavour MoR
- the Arnesonian Dungeon
- the Gygaxian building blocks
- the Kriegsspiel supplement tradition

I totally have that post bookmarked.

Quote from: jrientsCal, is this the post you meant?

I totally have that post bookmarked.

Yep, that's the one.

Quote from: CalithenaI'll mull over the rest of your thoughts but off-hand I don't prize creativity for its own sake. I think people should be able to explore their own fantasies and have rules that help them do that, partly by providing other kinds of fun. Don't care if they wind up taking over other people's building blocks to do that, so long as those are the ones they want.

Sure, I obviously don´t fetishize creativity for itself neither. But for a critical discussion, some considerations must be made.
At least I structured my own thoughts on that.

OK.
Great if somebody else could follow those thoughts!

People bookmark my posts?

I remember being puzzled by the reference to Kriegsspiel supplements. Sett, could you clarify?

I was referencing mostly the 1828 supplement written by a group of young officers to enhance realism. It was called:

"Supplement zu den bisherigen Kriegsspiel-Regeln, von einer Gesellschaft preußischer Offiziere bearbeitet". Berlin, 1828."

It began the clogging of the Kriegsspiel. A spiral of rules add-ons to "update" the game to new technology and more "realism" made the original game very hard to handle.
EDIT: And totally took out the GAME aspect, the original had!

The first instance of rules bloat, and that rules bloat went on for over fifty years!

Hi Eliot -

For further context read Rob MacDougal's article http://www.robmacdougall.org/index.php/2007/05/dungeon-master-zero/ and the follow-up post. Sett's also posted in the comments there.

That is getting way away from the point Sett started the thread with, but it's still good stuff, so what the heck.

Sett, your thinking on this stuff is valuable, even if the way you express yourself is sometimes contentious and choppy.

Quote from: CalithenaSett, your thinking on this stuff is valuable, even if the way you express yourself is sometimes contentious and choppy.

As long as it´s not pretentious and sloppy, I can live with that.

OK, reading those links put the matter in context.

Settembrini, your thoughts on the elements of creativity and the levels of their implementation are far more important than refuting somebody else's personal playstyle.* It's not like Cali's running around the internet proselytizing for the downfall of the industry.

Keep working on that model of creativity. It's very, very interesting. Ditto that whole Braunstein thing--very impressive historical analysis. As you say yourself, neither the Forge nor the WOTC mechanics monkeys have ANYTHING comparable going for them.

You should talk to Jonathan Tweet. Seriously. Look at the games he wrote. Whole cloth (or nearly so), every time. Essentially, you are working on a model for which his games would be paradigmatic examples.

*Totally coincidentally, check out this historical document, which I came across last week and which lists the most important RPG homebrewers circa 1978. But you can't set the clock back, or can you?

http://www.diffworlds.com/images/different_worlds/my_life_and_role_playing.jpg

Great letter, Pierce. Yeah, we wanted to be like them, not just enjoy their creations but make them ourselves. Making your own fantasy world was a calling.

The fantasy worlds of my youth: D. Beaudry's Oceania, P. Farley's Elderaan, J. Wilcox's Phantasy Realm, my own Advent, numerous others.

The published ones were models, but the message we took was not "find the best world and play in it." It was: Go and Do Thou Likewise.

A lot of what seems like odd minutia in the AD&D DMG were actually tools to help people do that, and Gygax in places speaks of creating a fantasy world as a kind of GMs calling.

Quote from: CalithenaHi Eliot -

For further context read Rob MacDougal's article http://www.robmacdougall.org/index.php/2007/05/dungeon-master-zero/ and the follow-up post. Sett's also posted in the comments there.

Rob couldn't have written that if I hadn't posted the link to Weseley in my Livejournal, where he found it. What I didn't know about was the Supplements from 1828. (Thanks, Sett.)

One thing that Rob probably gets wrong, and certainly doesn't demonstrate adequately, is the "specialness" of Totten in the RPG lineage. I.e., there's nothing there which shows Totten was much different from any other teacher of Kriegsspiel concepts, either "free" or "rigid". He may have been the first American to bring them over from the Prussians, and he may have been the direct source for other American military wargame developers (such as Farrand Sayre), but Rob doesn't make the case. Instead he talks up Totten's eccentricities and connects them tenuously to modern geek personality traits. In the process, the nature of the "referee" in wargaming--in terms of responsibilities and prerogatives--is relegated to a side-note that obscures both the nature of the game and the radical changes (in responsibilities and prerogatives) that only occurred after D&D hit a mass audience.

But this is a digression, too, so I won't carry it any further.

QuoteIn the process, the nature of the "referee" in wargaming--in terms of responsibilities and prerogatives--is relegated to a side-note that obscures both the nature of the game and the radical changes (in responsibilities and prerogatives) that only occurred after D&D hit a mass audience.

I also think Rob doesn´t know how military exercises are run.

Quote from: SettembriniThere is no inherent difference. I´m argueing that to reach true originality and to keep the degrees of separation down, you have to homebrew.
Thusly a longing for thorough creativity is a longing for the death of the commercial hobby.
Maybe replaced by a community of homebrewers who chat with each other sharing methods and the like.

Sounds grand.   From a Settings perspective I couldn't agree more.

- Mark

(Okay, a little thread drift...)

Well, Rob does say that Weseley contributed to the "re-introduction of an impartial, all-powerful referee" and "complicated war games had long enlisted neutral referees" That sounds pretty unequivocal. For that matter, Rob did clearly understand the sea-change emblemized by the appearance of Dragonlance, when he contributed to these two Forge threads: Precursors to AD&D2 and History of the GM?.

It's unfortunate though that the message of those threads was transmogrified in the minds of many Forgers (including Edwards) into a history of "Narrativism betrayed". I think it's far more likely that (a) except under an overly elastic definition of "Narrativism", it was rare to nonexistent--the closest thing being nonrailroaded world-based gaming that in Forge terms would be considered incoherent today, or maybe grudgingly acknowledged as Sim, and (b) the appearance of the storyteller GM, which came out of "Narrativist impulses", was due to a misapprehension of the function of the rules and resulted in almost immediate recognition of the concept of "railroading".

Anyway, to connect this back to the thread--the 80's transition is an interesting bifurcation of realms of creativity. I think a lot of the homebrewers--basically the mainstream of the existing hobby audience--essentially dropped out of the mainstream, or rather were passed by, as comprehensive game worlds and/or heavily-plotted adventure series became the commercial norm.