Quote from: Cole;413708What would you characterize as the most prominent forge-isms of 4e?

Very "gamist".  The weirdest case of this, was trying to making role playing into a hard mechanic in the form of the botched up skill challenges.

I suppose the "gamist" aspect isn't too surprising, if their intention was to imitate MMOs like WoW or EQ.

Quote from: RPGPundit;413715Koltar was not indifferent about it, he was upset about it. He had complained about the constant harassment many times, and was right to have done so.

Sorry to comment being ignorant of this.

Quote from: RPGPundit;413715The fucker deserved to be banned for the wellbeing of the site, and because that sort of harassment, of anyone, is not on.

I think Cylonophile's behavior is totally asinine, but, obviously not speaking as a moderator, not good grounds for banning. I'm not going to argue with your decision, though; as moderator it's of course in the end your responsibility to decide what moderator action is in the site's best interest. I still disagree, but having stated my opinion I'm leaving it at that.

To be clear, generally speaking I am comfortable with the moderation policies here. This is both why I felt it was worth commenting, and why I wasn't hesitant to do so.

Quote from: Cole;413666It's not that you don't have a point; I just feel, as a poster, that it's not good for the site overall to be banning on those grounds. I think the ban warnings aren't really even a mitigating factor; a lot of ban warnings can be almost as bad as bans; it's hard not to ban someone after warning, and even in a more even-tempered poster than Cylon, a ban warning often seems in practice to act more as a challenge to continue the behavior than anything else. So "warning more than once" in some cases is just winding up publicly for the ban. That's what makes it feel like closer to an RPGnet style ban than other situations I've seen here.

In one sense, you're right.  That is, in that I should have banned the motherfucker eight months ago.

The thing was that Cylonophile was not entirely worthless in my eyes.  He was extremely politically naive, but good for a laugh. He was prone to saying mostly idiotic things about RPGs, but he did it with this charming enthusiasm and once in a while even managed to say something insightful about something.  In other words, he was about a million times more tolerable than Nox, or some of the others in the relatively miniscule list of people who've managed to get themselves banned  from theRPGsite in the several years I've run it.

So this made me want to hope against hope that he could just shut the fuck up, and stop harassing Koltar.  Or at least, stop harassing Koltar here.  That's all he had to do. If he had continued to stalk him elsewhere, that would have been between him, Koltar, whatever mods those sites might have, and possibly Law Enforcement.

But he couldn't do it. Which is what leads me to the conclusion that Cylonophile is too psychologically disturbed to be able to function on this site.  He knew full well what would happen but couldn't bring himself to stop.

And really, my mistake was in giving more than "one last" warning.  It was in trying to get him to stop more than once, knowing in fact that if he couldn't stop himself after the first warning, the rest was utterly irrelevant.  Because unlike rpg.net, here the point of warning or of banning is not in fact punishment (except for Seanchai, he got to be my special whipping boy for being such an ass), but to simply eliminate a problem to the functioning of the site. We're not trying to engage in behaviour modification here.  Thats why the only bans this place does (again, except for Seanchai) are permabans.

And I should have permabanned Cylonophile ages ago.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;413700While Ron Edwards may have had his followers, he wasn't Voldemort. he doesn't hold an unnatural influence over people.

LOL! That rocks

Quote from: Seanchai;413673Are you always this foul-tempered when you lose? Here's the thing: You didn't stand a chance because I'm right about Pundit. I'm right about his moderation practices. I'm right about what motivates him. I know it. He knows it. And now you know it.

Seanchai

Do you react like this anytime someone makes you their bitch? Its cute.

RPGPundit

Quote from: ggroy;413720Very "gamist".  The weirdest case of this, was trying to making role playing into a hard mechanic in the form of the botched up skill challenges.

I suppose the "gamist" aspect isn't too surprising, if their intention was to imitate MMOs like WoW or EQ.

Any others? I would agree that the extreme vagueness of many skill challenges as to what the characters were doing in a given situation is reminiscent of forge designs. I feel like the "gamist aspect" is as much of an extreme outgrowth of a fixation on mechanical balance than any outside theory. Incidentally I don't really want discuss the game in terms of GNS jargon per se; I'm more asking about what rules elements have a likeness to rules elements of forge designed games.

Quote from: Cole;413727Any others?

Just that big one.

I don't know whether 4E's designers had "gamist" (or GNS) in mind, when they were first designing and developing 4E.

Quote from: Cole;413727Any others? I would agree that the extreme vagueness of many skill challenges as to what the characters were doing in a given situation is reminiscent of forge designs. I feel like the "gamist aspect" is as much of an extreme outgrowth of a fixation on mechanical balance than any outside theory. Incidentally I don't really want discuss the game in terms of GNS jargon per se; I'm more asking about what rules elements have a likeness to rules elements of forge designed games.

Well, there is the removal of all the "non combat" abilities and information from monsters. This was accompanied by the "insight" in the & column that monsters only exist for a few rounds of combat, so any abilities they had that weren't going to be used in that combat were wastes of conceptual space and page count. This is an incredibly "Forgesque" revelation, since with more holistic theories of RPGs, monsters do in fact exist when you aren't fighting them. Indeed, in many peoples' formulations, why a monster is where it is right now and what it has been doing and will do if the fight does not happen is more important than the four rounds of combat it takes to stab it in the face.

Or the full-scale removal of magic items that didn't give minor Christmas Tree combat bonuses from the core books. On the grounds that the game was exclusively about the combat minigame, so anything else that a magic item might do was wasted space. That's very Forge too.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;413731This was accompanied by the "insight" in the & column that monsters only exist for a few rounds of combat, so any abilities they had that weren't going to be used in that combat were wastes of conceptual space and page count. This is an incredibly "Forgesque" revelation, since with more holistic theories of RPGs, monsters do in fact exist when you aren't fighting them.

Ah, interesting point. I remember that column article now (and others like it) and it irritated me to no end. What I especially didn't like was the implication from there that it was somehow an error for a monster to work outside the context of a programmed encounter.

Same thing about "Save or Die is not Fun™", "the Rust Monster needs to be redesigned because destroying gear is not Fun™," and so on. Tying in with my comments about the new swine worshipping at the altar of Fun™. It's not about fun being the goal of the game (it is!). It's about believing that Fun™ has to be THIS EXCLUSIVE way, that's there's no way in hell anyone could have fun rolling to save or die, or fighting a rust monster with rocks instead of a sword. It's about a one-dimensional view of game play. A completely unimaginative, stale view of what the game is and isn't, what people enjoy playing it, how they play it, and why they play it.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;413731Well, there is the removal of all the "non combat" abilities and information from monsters. This was accompanied by the "insight" in the & column that monsters only exist for a few rounds of combat, so any abilities they had that weren't going to be used in that combat were wastes of conceptual space and page count. This is an incredibly "Forgesque" revelation, since with more holistic theories of RPGs, monsters do in fact exist when you aren't fighting them. Indeed, in many peoples' formulations, why a monster is where it is right now and what it has been doing and will do if the fight does not happen is more important than the four rounds of combat it takes to stab it in the face.

It is indeed very reminiscent of forge POV.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;413584

• An individual player is either Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, and not some mix of the three.
  
• A game should, and indeed needs to appeal to just one of those things at a time.
  
• A game attempting to appeal on multiple levels makes it worse at appealing to whatever level it is actually appealing on, making the game experience worse.
• Playing games is SERIOUS BUSINESS.
• Individual Players have specific questions they want answered by participating in the game.

Sorry, but that's not right.  GNS was never about categorizing players, it was about recognizing instances of decision making where one of those three choices describe motivating factors behind the final action taken by the player, much like the original Theefold.  The difference is that Edward's believes over the course of play (a campaign or arc) only one of the three would be the dominating factor in how the game turns out, depending on how instances of decision making are distributed along the three "agendas" when all those junctions are taken into account at the end of everything.

The latter two only apply to a particular group, or in the case of uber-focused design, the designer's intent.

Really, GNS isn't solely about design, but mostly about actual play.  Whether it's correct or not, I don't have enough experience to judge.

Quote from: Peregrin;413744Sorry, but that's not right.  GNS was never about categorizing players, it was about recognizing instances of decision making where one of those three choices describe motivating factors behind the final action taken by the player, much like the original Theefold.  The difference is that Edward's believes over the course of play (a campaign or arc) only one of the three would be the dominating factor in how the game turns out, depending on how instances of decision making are distributed along the three "agendas" when all those junctions are taken into account at the end of everything.

The latter two only apply to a particular group, or in the case of uber-focused design, the designer's intent.

Really, GNS isn't solely about design, but mostly about actual play.  Whether it's correct or not, I don't have enough experience to judge.

Yet the labels created in GNS could be applied to players based on their decision making tendencies. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as my Gram used to say.

Quote from: Peregrin;413744Sorry, but that's not right.  GNS was never about categorizing players, it was about recognizing instances of decision making where one of those three choices describe motivating factors behind the final action taken by the player, much like the original Theefold.  The difference is that Edward's believes over the course of play (a campaign or arc) only one of the three would be the dominating factor in how the game turns out, depending on how instances of decision making are distributed along the three "agendas."

The latter two only apply to a particular group, or in the case of uber-focused design, the designer's intent.

Well, if you want to get technical, the claim put forward by GNS was that the premise addressed in the dream by the exploration of gamist and narrativist themes were mutually unrealizable and that the system that attempted to do so was incoherent. But I find that the results were much the same once you cut through all the jargon.

QuoteReally, GNS isn't solely about design, but mostly about actual play.  Whether it's correct or not, I don't have enough experience to judge.

Sure you do. When you're playing a game, do you know anyone who is neither bored nor frustrated when the storyline progresses through a series of "role playing" and "combat" encounters that are very talky and very crunchy respectively? If you know even one person who enjoys that sort of thing, you know that Forge Theory is crap. Because Forge Theory predicts that to be an incoherent and unsatisfying experience by definition.

-Frank

In 20/20 hindsight , GNS theory is looking more and more like a Sophomore college term paper that had just enouigh eloquence in it to guarantee the student got a better than passing grade.

It just doesn't hold up as useful after so many years have gone by.
Part of the problem might be thaty so many gamers are either themselves college sophomore or got older but their brains never progressed beyond that way of thinking.


- Ed C.