QuoteThe crux of what he is saying is "The successful [new RPG] Industry company will be at heart a customer service company. Most of its work product will be related to internet services and community tools, rather than making & printing rule books."

Could be that the ever business savy dancey has decided that the future money is gonna be in selling printing and web services to the vanity publishing sector.

I mean, all the geeks writing their games and going to cons. Maybe he could set up some kind of weekend where you do a two day workshop, write your game and then get fifteen minutes of adoration by paid professionals for your skillz.

It'd be pretty popular...

:-)

Quote from: AosI bet you have a job, a girl and your own residence too.
it's people like you that are ruining it for everyone else.

The residence is rented, but otherwise indeed.

That said, the job does get in the way of gaming, but so far my long term goal of inheriting and living a life of leisure has not gone well for me.

Quote from: jgantsThe best "stories" to arise from gaming are almost always in the "remember the time when [player] did [stupid thing] and [funny result] happened?" vein, anyways.  At least, they are for me.

I can't think of any gaming memories where somebody said, "Hey, remember that awesome narrative structure in [game x]?" or "How about [game y] - that had some rockin' allegories!" or maybe "I loved the use of comparing and contrasting the PCs life with the NPCs life in [gamez]."

Spot on, it's why I love fumble mechanics actually, many of my personally favourite roleplaying stories come out of fumbles or whiffs or whatever you like to call them.

Hm, if we wanted to get theoretical I would say that story is an emergent property of gaming, but we don't so I won't.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityAt my table we used to smoke and imbibe alcoholic beverages, but now that I live in the US where everyone's a health fascist* I'm reduced to kicking ass and/or chewing bubblegum.

*Except when it comes to food.

I'm in the US and we still do this. Right now we don't have any drinkers at the table, but tabacco and cannabis smoke cloud the air from start to well after we pack up the dice. Furthermore, while well behaved drunkards/stoners are ALWAYS welcome at my gaming table- puritans are not. not even a little.

Quote from: AosI'm in the US and we still do this. Right now we don't have any drinkers at the table, but tabacco and cannabis smoke cloud the air from start to well after we pack up the dice. Furthermore, while well behaved drunkards/stoners are ALWAYS welcome at my gaming table- puritans are not. not even a little.

Ah, now I must clarify that I hail from the 80s, which among many other things means that the only acceptable drugs amongst one's peers were 100% synthetic ones, lest one be ostracized as a younger version of one's own proverbial older brother, i.e. a hippie who'd get high on Pink Floyd Ummagumma.

I told you guys Dancey was a cunt, but noooo, you wouldn't believe me.  Look who's laughing now, fuckers.

Ryan brings up an interesting point.
 

QuoteThe term "Roleplaying Game" has a lot of baggage.  It makes the tacit assumption (demonstrably false) that the primary entertainment value is "playing a role".  30+ years of negative brand equity have accumulated around "Roleplaying Games"

Then he turns around and uses a lot for terms, like storytelling, that has "negative brand equity" among mainstream gamers.

I read his post carefully and a lot of what he talks about isn't really about the negative storyteller aspects that we dislike.

I think he hits a home run on the idea that RPGs are a GROUP social activity which is something that MMORPG have trouble matching. I been gaming a virtual tabletop campaign, GURPS, for a group of scattered friends. It better than than I thought.

But it is not the same as sitting around a table, looking at each other, and playing the game. The same thing with MMORPGs. You can be playing with your friend but it is not the same things as being there with them and talking face to face.

This aspect is a separate characteristic of RPGs than the Role-playing, Story/Plot, or Game parts.  I think that the use of Storytelling is a poor choice. I agreed with Mearls that people play RPGs to play a game and story is flows from actual play but not the point of actual play.

However I add to that that it also appeals to people because it is a group activity, and unlike many games it is a COOPERATIVE activity (among the players at least). In fact of all the cooperative games out there I say that RPGs are by far the most sucessfully. Most games involve players competing AGAINST other players.

With those caveats RyanD remaining points have merit.

I give a B+ for effort
and D- for a poor choice of terminology.


Rob Conley

Why does the hobby go into a furor over Dancy's pronouncements, anyway?  I've certainly been guilty of this in the past, but I couldn't get worked up about this even though I tried.  Nowadays he looks to me as only slightly more relevant than Mark Rein-asterisk-Hagen.

Quote from: jrientsWhy does the hobby go into a furor over Dancy's pronouncements, anyway?  I've certainly been guilty of this in the past, but I couldn't get worked up about this even though I tried.  Nowadays he looks to me as only slightly more relevant than Mark Rein-asterisk-Hagen.

Personally I just plain enjoy going into a furor.

Other than that, I got nothing.

Jesus, I've just read his "Step 2". I think this is a conspiracy... I guess Ryan Dancey is going to publish his new indie game or he will promote some other indie game or I don't know. At first it didn't sound that wrong, but what the hell...?!?

Quote from: AosIf we're going to save the hobby I think the first thing we need to do is safeguard the world's dorrito, funion, and cheeto supplies.

Pretzels and microwave popcorn - in my group's case.

..but yeah - right there with you on that.

- Ed C.

If he actually knew shit, he´d be rich instead of living off past glories.

I tend to agree with most of what Pundit said in his blog reply. RD and I are on the same page about not making RPGs like MMORPGs and that virtual gaming isn't the answer.

However, reading step 1 and step 2 of Dancey's blog gives me the impression that he wants the entire hobby to take up the ideals of Forge gaming/story now/indie gaming/swinedom.

The whole point that everyone plays RPGs to tell a story is completely off the mark. Sure, a portion of RPGers want to tell a good story, but my guess is that it makes up much less than half of all gamers, probably somewhere around 20-30%. The rest want to kill monsters and take their stuff. Or pretend to be an elven wizard and explore a fantasy world, solve puzzles, engage in highly tactical wargame-like combat. Tell a story - I don't think so.

As a matter of fact, I think this is the exact opposite approach to take to games. Forge-ifying things too much will chase off more gamers than it will attract. I've got nothing against story-now games, but they're not my cup of tea, and not what 95% of roleplayers go for. I think the hobby needs to focus on the roots of RPGs, the wargame aspect. Solid rules for doing various things is the heart of a good RPG core product. It doesn't have to be super crunchy like Hero, it can be lean and simple like Savage Worlds. Games need to handle the crunch and rules well. The storytelling part we can figure out on our own. I don't need game rules telling me how to act in game. Even D&D's alignment seems to go too far in the direction of telling you how to play a character.

Just tell me how much damage my longsword does or what my odds of jumping over that pit are. I'll figure out how my character should react to a moral dilemma.

I don't think Dancy's bizarre post even goes in the direction of the Forgies; he's advocating a form of storyplay that was vaunted as 'real roleplaying, not rollplaying'...back in the '90s.

I find this an almost surreal thing to read; Dancy, a guy who was ever current if often wrong, discovers the One True Way...that got left behind by the rest of the hobby a decade ago.

Quote from: BalbinusSpot on, it's why I love fumble mechanics actually, many of my personally favourite roleplaying stories come out of fumbles or whiffs or whatever you like to call them.

Hm, if we wanted to get theoretical I would say that story is an emergent property of gaming, but we don't so I won't.

Interstingly (or not) you have this same phenomenon in story games (or at least in Burning Wheel). If you fail a Circles roll when looking for someone who knows the Black Beard Blood Bandits, the GM can invoke the enmity clause and have the bandits find YOU, or perhaps you get the contact you were looking for, but he is operating at cross-purposes to you.

If you just got totally rocked by an orc and are about to die you can spend a point of Persona Artha, and instead of dying you invoke a complication: perhaps your magic sword is broken, or you've been forced off a cliff and are now dangling from the ledge.

Hell, if you fail almost any roll SOMETHING is supposed to happen that makes the game more interesting and pushes it along. I believe the BW guys call it failing forward.

I realize none of these things are exactly the same as fumbling, but the concepts are at least close cousins. I think it's pretty cool that this idea is there in the rules, even though some may take offense to having it written down.

That said, I'm not in favor of one-size-fits-all conflict resolution and eye of a needle thin thematic focus being the wave of the future. Ideally I'd like to see some of the cool (and to me VERY useful) concepts that story games focus on incorporated into traditional games with mechanical meat and at least an attempt at verisimilitude. I think that would be a pretty cool future of RPGs.

No fucking way would it 'save the hobby' though.

Tim