Quote from: Fiasco;416365Beat me to it.  Spot on.  For me roleplaying isn't about 'sitting in a circle and pulling a cool story out of our arses'.  Its all about facing a set of challenges while staying true to the character I'm playing. I expect the same from my fellow players and I expect the GM to keep things rolling, present interesting challenges and when a call needs to be made to god damn make one.

Yes, except that for the challenges to be interesting there has to be a context, they need to mean something to the character or leading somewhere the character wants to go. And the context and sense of direction is kind of like a story, no?

Quote from: Koltar;416367You or me as GM are at the table.
We judge by player's reactions and body language : "Do they want more time in this village?" , "Do I as GM want to spend more time in this village with NPCs?"

".....Do I have a cool map ready if I send them off to another Village?"

"Do I really have enough time for X, or do I need to speed things up?"

"We only have an hour and half left to play "

...cvompared to

"Cool!! Trina just said she doesn't work tomorrow after all - we've got two more hours than we thought we had. That means I can stretch things out a little."

That's really interesting. It sounds like you're saying that table-level concerns about time constraints, pacing, and player interest level drive how you resolve in-game questions of fact. That makes sense, I just never heard anybody put it that way before--usually people say that they're striving for internal consistency and some sort of verisimilitude in the game-world.

Quote from: One Horse Town;416393Never said otherwise, old bean. Just pointing out what prompted you to come here.

Fair enough. But I would have left if it wasn't for that Dragon magazine thread. That just makes me self-absorbed.

Quote from: Cole;416359I like the point you make. From my perspective, immersion aside (though I think it is desirable and sometimes unavoidable), RPG play at its best has very little to do with inventing a story and everything to do with interacting with a situation. The players are engaging in a fictional act of adventure. This may be recounted after the fact as a fictional tale of adventure, but is not identical with that. Today, when I ate lunch, I engaged in a nonfictional act of eating lunch. I was not engaged in inventing a tale of eating lunch. NOW I am inventing a (nonfictional tale) of eating lunch, but that's not the same as the eating. I would say there is a comparable relationship between the fictional act and the fictional tale.

What he said.

Quote from: Bill White;416366Are there ever circumstances where what you're rolling for isn't "Is X the case?" (e.g., "Is there an armorer here?") but is instead, "Can I find X?" or "Can I find out X?" What I mean is, you can imagine that in a big city there might be plenty of armorers, but some fact about the city -- the PCs are strangers there, there's a lot of time pressure on them, and so forth -- makes you want them to roll to succeed rather than simply automatically failing or succeeding by your say-so. In those circumstances, to what extent would you incorporate character attributes into the probability calculation, such that a character with a high Charisma score or Streetwise skill (for example) would get a bonus to the roll?

Speaking for myself, almost never.

Quote from: Soylent Green;416395Yes, except that for the challenges to be interesting there has to be a context, they need to mean something to the character or leading somewhere the character wants to go. And the context and sense of direction is kind of like a story, no?

All of life is "kind of like a story", including us sitting here typing away. A boring story, but that's adjacent to the apex. When I play RPGs I'm no more setting out with the intent of creating a story than I would be playing Munchkin, Risk, War of the Rings, or Total War: Rome. Now it can be argued (and often is) that stories arise anyway, but that's a non-argument because stories arise constantly, every second of every day, in everything that we do. The whole of the issue is dependant on intent. If your intention is to build an entertaining story out of a game with friends around a table, then rock on, but for most of us here that is not nor has ever been the intent. This is why most of us do not like or need rules that promote or even enable that goal.

Quote from: Bill White;416398That's really interesting. It sounds like you're saying that table-level concerns about time constraints, pacing, and player interest level drive how you resolve in-game questions of fact. That makes sense, I just never heard anybody put it that way before--usually people say that they're striving for internal consistency and some sort of verisimilitude in the game-world.



Fair enough. But I would have left if it wasn't for that Dragon magazine thread. That just makes me self-absorbed.

Dude, honestly, there's no reason not to enjoy the forum as long as you realise that your tastes in games and most of our tastes in games are a bit different. I'm quite confident there's loads of overlap among the vast majority of us. You know Pundit's (and some other's) opinions about many "story games" already so don't be surprised if he expresses himself here, but honestly as you've seen there's some good discussion and we're not a bunch of rabid dogs (well, most of us aren't).

Quote from: Cole;416353t the party has entered a town where the armorer was killed yesterday." Is this still an RPG? It is a question of semantics, I suppose. My theoretical answer is "on a line between "RPG" and "Something else" it rests further down the line than the "RPG" end.

I see what you are saying. But it's such a hair-splitting, obtuse way to define things - especially considering that there is no real need to make a distinction, except among the tiniest priesthood of nerds on the internet.

The list I provided was a sampling of various ways that different RPGs - and different groups playing the same RPGs - choose to allocate AUTHORITY over the fiction.

Fundamentally, they all do the exact same thing, in service of the exact same goals. So to arbitrarily pick a handful and say that THESE over here are totally different from THOSE is kind of silly.

It just doesn't make sense to anyone who's considering the question objectively. It only serves the purposes of someone who is trying to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion. Like "I know that Vincent Baker is a swine of the first order, so his games MUST be non-RPGs. When you sit down and actually PLAY Storming the Wizard's Tower or Dogs in the Vineyard, it turns out that they are really really similar to D&D. So we'll have to go with this crazy hairline fracture of a definition, in order to assure that ideological purity is safe for another day."

Makes no sense.

Quote from: Benoist;416355To me it's not a tale. It's actuality. Hence, immersion.

Sure thing! I just used "tale" as shorthand. I can't actually think of many games where the goal is to "create a story", and the group's effort is directed towards that. In most games I know, from OD&D to Fiasco, shit comes up as you go along, you react to it in character, and you look back when you're done and see the outline you made. We can call it immersion if you like.

Quote from: Sigmund;416404I'm quite confident there's loads of overlap among the vast majority of us.

That shit is true.

Quote from: Seanchai;416344But they're not, are they?

There's no reason a GM has to run an indie with a different distribution of power if he or she doesn't want to do so.

Ah, but he does if the game obliges him to.  And the Forge Swine wanted to make ALL games oblige him to.

QuoteMoreover, there's no reason a GM can't change the portion of the rules to better suit whatever distribution of power he or she envisions for the game.

Which is why the Forge Swine were HUGE promoters of this "anti-houserule" movement, trying to change gaming culture so that rather than something encouraged, houseruling would be seen as something taboo, a sign of "bad gaming".  

QuoteIn fact, the Forge, it's designers, et al., CAN'T force anyone anywhere to do anything. In other words, people are voluntarily choosing distributions of power you don't approve of.

The Forge tried their damnedest to force EVERYONE to do what they wanted. Yes, they've failed, thanks to people like me.
And no, hardly anyone was voluntarily choosing those distributions of power I don't approve of, because you see, as usual, I'm RIGHT.

The Forge was basically like communism. Aside from a tiny handful of true believers, they had to either lie and trick people, or create a situation where you literally can't go elsewhere.

QuoteThus it seems to me you're on a crusade against the wrong folks. You should be attacking the GMs and groups who game differently than you do.

Seanchai

No, there are hardly any of those. Most people game just like me; because I am on the side of the majority, and I represent the side of Good in this fight.

RPGPundit

Quote from: BWA;416346An RPG is a set of rules (written or not) by which we agree to abide while inventing a fictional tale of adventure and derring-do.

Let's say we're playing a fantasy adventure game, and our characters are in a frontier village. Is there a armorer in village? There is no objective reality we can consult to determine the answer. There's no real village. So we need a method that everyone at the table agrees on.

• In some D&D games, there is ONLY an armorer if the GM has previously decided there is an armorer.
• But in other D&D games, maybe the GM hadn't thought about it beforehand, but he'll make a decision on that right now, when a player asks.
• While in another D&D game, the GM might say "Beats me. I guess if you want there to be one." and the player says yes, and the armorer's name is Murgo the Foul-Tempered.
• In Storming the Wizard's Tower, maybe there's an armorer as long as someone picked "Murgo, the armorer" as their free contact during character creation.
• In a FATE-based fantasy game (I think there is one, but I can't remember what its called), there is an armorer if the player is willing to spend a fate point on it.
• In Burning Wheel, the player has to make a Circles roll to see if he can find an armorer.

And so on.

To play together, we just need a method of determining who gets to decide what about the imaginary world we are sharing.

If you can ONLY enjoy Method #1, I think that's weird, but it's a free country. More power to you.

The idea, however, that ONLY Method #1 is a role-playing game, and the other things are all something else entirely is not just pointlessly obtuse, it's irrational. Any normal human being, if asked, would correctly identify all these things as being fundamentally the same thing.

No, you see, you started with a fundamentally wrong assumption the second you said "There's no real village".  There, you destroy the most basic element of what the vast majority of RPG players enjoy gaming for: Emulation and Immersion.
The right answer is that there IS a real village, or that it absolutely needs to seem like there is, in order for the game to maintain emulation.
The best way for this to be done is if it is the GM who chooses whether there's an armorer there or not. He can have planned it for months or choose it in the moment, it doesn't matter. But it absolutely depends on the GM being the one who creates that Armorer and that the players don't just feel like they can walk into the village and "invent" an Armorer.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Bill White;416350Changing the entire hobby? How is that even possible? The fact that one group is playing Game X arguably has minimal effect on the ability of another group to play Game Y.

Well, as it happens it really didn't turn out to be possible as a conscious effort, because the Forge Swine lost.

But their basic plan was: dominate small-press publishing while creating a new ideological formula that is strictly enforced on the Forge website, then indoctrinate a number of fanatical followers on this formula and send them out to evangelize everywhere else on the internet; then attempt to subvert or take over the moderation and administration of other websites and forums so that this ideological formula is obeyed, while at the same time subverting anyone who presents opposition (ideally trying to get them banned); then work our way up to dominating major game companies, the whole time creating a powerful veneer of academic authority to appeal to those vain game designers who want to have the sensation that they are somehow being "academically backed" in their design or those gullible game designers who will be too stupid to know better and understand that what we're doing is really pseudo-academia; until finally virtually all games being produced are "Forge Games" and we've changed the culture enough that those things we hate (Immersion, Emulation, houserules, Strong GMs, D&D) are eliminated and those who cling to them are mocked as "incoherent" or even mentally damaged individuals.
Its the classic Bolshevik strategy; you don't even TRY to win the majority to your side, instead all you worry about is taking over the top positions of power, and then you can get everyone else to do what you say.


RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;416427the whole time creating a powerful veneer of academic authority to appeal to those vain game designers who want to have the sensation that they are somehow being "academically backed" in their design

Were their papers ever published in a "respected" peer reviewed academic journal?

Quote from: BWA;416417I see what you are saying. But it's such a hair-splitting, obtuse way to define things - especially considering that there is no real need to make a distinction, except among the tiniest priesthood of nerds on the internet.

The list I provided was a sampling of various ways that different RPGs - and different groups playing the same RPGs - choose to allocate AUTHORITY over the fiction.

Fundamentally, they all do the exact same thing, in service of the exact same goals. So to arbitrarily pick a handful and say that THESE over here are totally different from THOSE is kind of silly.

It just doesn't make sense to anyone who's considering the question objectively. It only serves the purposes of someone who is trying to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion. Like "I know that Vincent Baker is a swine of the first order, so his games MUST be non-RPGs. When you sit down and actually PLAY Storming the Wizard's Tower or Dogs in the Vineyard, it turns out that they are really really similar to D&D. So we'll have to go with this crazy hairline fracture of a definition, in order to assure that ideological purity is safe for another day."

Makes no sense.



Sure thing! I just used "tale" as shorthand. I can't actually think of many games where the goal is to "create a story", and the group's effort is directed towards that. In most games I know, from OD&D to Fiasco, shit comes up as you go along, you react to it in character, and you look back when you're done and see the outline you made. We can call it immersion if you like.

Clearly it only makes no sense to someone who doesn't actually like RPGs. Or maybe has never played RPGs? I don't know which.
But its obvious that to you, both Emulation and Immersion are either meaningless or you've bought into the idea that they're evils that need to be expunged. So you start from a totally alien premise: that what matters is "creating story", and not "adventuring in an emulated world".

So its no surprise that you're expressing (possibly pretend) confusion about the problem we have with Forge Swine games: its like saying "so what, the distrinction between having a Formula One race WITH cars or WITHOUT cars is so tiny, why are you all nitpicking?!"

RPGPundit

Quote from: ggroy;416428Were their papers ever published in a "respected" peer reviewed academic journal?

They were not, and could not be publishable.  I think some of the Forgers went so far as to create their own, completely illegitimate "academic-journal" type media. At every step they tried to act like what they were doing was rigorous academic discipline when in fact it was Ron Edwards talking completely OUT OF HIS ASS, while the rest of the Forge Swine just regurgitated from him.
It wasn't science, it was scientology.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;416421Which is why the Forge Swine were HUGE promoters of this "anti-houserule" movement, trying to change gaming culture so that rather than something encouraged, houseruling would be seen as something taboo, a sign of "bad gaming".

I don't know how hardcore forge followers are about banning rule zero in general. What I notice though is the significant number of threads on story-games about hacking games and house rules experiments.