Quote from: Phillip;444220Are you one of those blokes in whose theory "Apples to Apples" does not have a game system?

I'm not really sure how someone could possibly claim that. So... no?

I suspect you're trying to makes some point about Apples to Apples being enjoyable because of the social interactions that happen outside of the mechanics. But that's not really true, is it? The mechanics of Apples to Apples include the cards themselves and are specifically designed to create conceptual matching in a competitive environment. The social strategies and interactions which arise around those mechanics are all specifically tied to the mechanics themselves.

Quote from: RPGPundit;444327In that sense, I would disagree with Amber being included, because there's nothing in the rules per se to discourage fighting, and every campaign I've ever run was full of bloodshed. Mainly of uncountable numbers of shadow-people, but also really vicious fights between amberites or chaosians.

I'd go so far as to say that Amber encourages violence.

I obviously run and play in very different Amber games than other people on this thread at least as far as the amount of violence goes.

Whereas my experience with CoC seems to be quite different than many online.  We always had all kinds of gunfights in the games I played of it.  One game I ran started with a big firefight at a train station between a group of federal agents and a mob gang (several PCs were mobsters or mob associates).  And the final part of the story arc I ran had a cult getting blowed up real good by setting fire to the oil derrick that was near their meeting place.

Quote from: Lorrraine;444344I obviously run and play in very different Amber games than other people on this thread at least as far as the amount of violence goes.

Yeah, me, too. To me, Amber has always been about a) getting to create cool characters, b) mystery, c) exploration, and d) player cleverness.

Combat doesn't have, as far as a recall, voluminous or unique mechanics. It relies, like everything else, on the player to leverage his or her imagination against the situation.

In my experience, that's not attractive to folks who enjoy combat - they want static numbers, set maneuvers, a drawn out battlefield, etc.. They want outcomes to be determined by the numbers, it seems to me...

Seanchai

Quote from: Justin Alexander;444342I'd go so far as to say that Amber encourages violence.

Its one of the things I love about the game.

RPGPundit

Quote from: danbuter;444282I think it's funny that many of the recommended systems in this thread have an entire chapter of combat rules.

But this is in comparison with games that have nothing but rules for conflict.  Writing a chapter or 2 about combat in a rule book of 15 chapters would indicate a game where combat can happen as one means of resolution.  A game where 12 chapters of 15 are based on combat would indicate another sort of game.

Quote from: Justin AlexanderI suspect you're trying to makes some point about Apples to Apples being enjoyable because of the social interactions that happen outside of the mechanics.

No. I'm trying to make the point that "game mechanics" don't always involve number crunching and dice rolls. Sometimes -- as in AtA -- they involve someone passing judgment.

This is very often the case in RPGs. Some people try to claim that using rules other than the aforementioned "crunchy" ones constitute "not really playing the game". Actual role-playing would be a prime example.

What is really determinative is what the game is about.

There are no rules for glacis slope or shaped charges in Monopoly, because it's not about shooting tanks in Atlantic City.

When some guys decided that they wanted to add shootouts to Clue, naturally they had to add rules for the pieces to get hurt.

The possibility of injury or even death is part of the human condition of most roles that people play in role-playing games. If that is accounted for, then combat merely consists -- as in the real world -- of doing things to cause injury to other beings.

If the game prohibits injury or death, then it's a stranger world with stranger roles in it than those assumed in old D&D.

However, the overwhelming majority of RPGs have been inspired by fiction genres -- heroic fantasy, duelists in Paris, western, space opera, crime, espionage, horror, pirates, superheroes, etc. -- that put special emphasis on risk of injury in general and on fighting in particular.

Turn to Chivalry & Sorcery or King Arthur Pendragon, and you'll find special attention paid to dynastic issues: courtly romance, marriage, pregnancy and birth, bastardy and order of inheritance, titles and lands, fealty and alliance, influence and intrigue, armies and castles, grain and gold.

A game meant primarily as a "bodice ripper" and family intrigue might utterly invert the priority of what gets worked out in detail and what gets treated simply.

The ancient computer-game version of Nine Princes in Amber had notably complex systems for fencing both literal and (most strikingly) conversational. The physical puzzles -- focused on the interactions of objects -- that were the preoccupation in most "Adventure" type games played a much smaller part in the Amber game.

Quote from: jgants;444346Whereas my experience with CoC seems to be quite different than many online.  We always had all kinds of gunfights in the games I played of it.  One game I ran started with a big firefight at a train station between a group of federal agents and a mob gang (several PCs were mobsters or mob associates).  And the final part of the story arc I ran had a cult getting blowed up real good by setting fire to the oil derrick that was near their meeting place.

Dude, there's nothing wrong with that type of CoC game at all, as far as I'm concerned.

Sometimes I like careful investigations and much talk going on at the game table, and sometimes I'll enjoy this type of game just as much. I think CoC's versatility is one of its greatest assets, point of fact.

Quote from: Benoist;444436Dude, there's nothing wrong with that type of CoC game at all, as far as I'm concerned.

Sometimes I like careful investigations and much talk going on at the game table, and sometimes I'll enjoy this type of game just as much. I think CoC's versatility is one of its greatest assets, point of fact.

Oh sure, I've always had plenty of investigation and non-gunfighting action, too.  

There was a hilarious scene at the beginning where the guy playing the undertaker was rooting through the office of a reporter for clues, but managed to completely miss them all.

Another time the two mob guys tracked a clue down to an old house, but when they opened the door a severed head came rolling down the main stairway inside and inhuman sounds could be heard from upstairs.  They decided to run for it.

We even had a chase scene where one guy was trying to chase after a guy in his car.  He ended up running into a tree and drifted in and out of consciousness for hours before the other PCs finally located him.

Quote from: Phillip;444435What is really determinative is what the game is about.

This is received wisdom in the indie world but I think it's deeply questionable.

Firstly, a fairly traditional view of game design was that the rules were there for those things which weren't capable of being simply roleplayed.

Analyse what any game designed on that basis is about by reference solely to the rules and you'll go wildly off base. "Hey, there's no rules for social conflicts, clearly this game isn't about those" just doesn't follow with this kind of design theory. If the assumption is that social conflicts are the point of the game and so don't need rules as they'll be roleplayed you've just missed the whole point of the design.

Secondly, it's often used to argue that D&D is about combat because it has rules mostly about combat. That's wrong though because most of D&D's rules in the majority (maybe all) editions aren't about combat. When you look at the large number of non-combat spells and the exploration stuff in earlier editions (plus what you got xp for, combat was not an effective means of gaining xp in earlier editions compared to theft) the fact is D&D's rules aren't mostly about combat. People drifted it to that.

The key point though is that this ignores the fact that what's not present in the rules is sometimes as important for how the game is meant to be played as what is present. I find rules dull. I want the rules out of the way when I rp. Accordingly, I dislike games where the rules step in to actively support the stuff I want most to do. I want the rules mostly there to help resolve the stuff that doesn't interest me.

I'm not universal in that preference, but nor am I rare. Your philosophy would miss the point of almost every game I enjoy playing. It's fine for indie games where mechanical support of the core elements of play is a given, but not for other design philosophies.

Quote from: D-503Your philosophy would miss the point of almost every game I enjoy playing.

You do not appear to know thing one about what my philosophy is, and this is definitely not for any want of my having expressed it. You seem simply not to have bothered to read what I had written.

Quote from: D-503This is received wisdom in the indie world but I think it's deeply questionable.

I think it's deeply questionable that some jerk who is determined not to play the game at hand gets invited back again, at least in the circles with which I am acquainted.

"I want to buy a hotel."
"You can't."
"Why not? I've got a full house."
"Because this is P O K E R, not Monopoly!"

I am just amazed at the dysfunctional attitudes of so many gamers online. The main reason that old D&D doesn't have in the books any treatment of sheep herding or cheese making, or zillions of other occupations, is that those are not what the game was designed to be about.

Ditto the lack of pixies and sorcerers and giant transforming robots in Boot Hill.

Now, no book is an exhaustive definition of any "the game" except the particular theoretical one it describes. Game Master Gary may well have sixgun-toting sorcerers and robot-riding pixies in "the game" that is the actual process of play that he moderates.

The obverse may be true as well: some things found in some books may be absent from some actual games, or present but with different particulars.

This is so obvious and makes such common sense that the claims of some people not to get it were at first hard to believe. The accumulated weight of evidence suggests to me that birds of such a feather flock together because nobody else will tolerate them.

There seems thus to be a sub-culture of gamers who only ever experience RPGs as fought over -- much more than actually played! -- with others of their bull-headed ilk.

Quote from: D-503"Hey, there's no rules for social conflicts, clearly this game isn't about those" just doesn't follow

It is necessary to READ THE WHOLE THING, not just pull out of context the empty spaces between words. This should be no startling revelation, whether one is reading an RPG text -- or a series of posts in a thread!

I addressed above to Jason Alexander the very point that not all rules are formulated in terms of numbers and dice rolls. This, however, has nothing really to do with the perennial insistence in some quarters that old D&D has "no rules for social interaction" -- despite the explicit numbers and dice rolls in the very first book, and the huge tabulation of factors in 1st ed. AD&D.

Uninformed opinions are a dime a dozen.

Also pretty much common sense and based on experience is the observation that people's personal hobby horses tend to get extra attention. Not everybody was as keen as Gygax on the nomenclature of polearms, or even ever thought of "fish tickling" at all prior to the presentation of a system for it in The Chivalry & Sorcery Sourcebook.

Some people want lots of added details about guns and ammo, or wrestling, or ships and sailing, or commercial speculation, or the Astral Plane -- or any of countless other topics -- while others just have no use for those.

There IS usually a correlation between the significance of a question and how much the answer is formalized, because the formalization entails an investment of time and energy.

A question that is not likely to get asked because everyone but a few nuts is trivially in agreement is not worth the effort. Neither is one for which arbitrarily different answers are not likely to matter much to anyone but a few nuts.

The particulars of that calculation are of course different when one's own group happens to be just those very few nuts!

In short, I can only wonder on what basis you figure that a game that is not presented as being about violence should be assumed to be about violence. All I see in evidence is an absurd little-boy-ish myopia, on par with a little-girl-ish myopia that would insist that a game called Hackers & Slashers 'must' involve tea parties.