L5R is Vampire for NippoPhiliacs.

More likely nipphophilia for Vampire players, considering that it treats its source material with the same "reverence" as Vampire does/did.

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.

Provided he's not lying through his teeth, Dancy claims that he operates as some kind of consultant to RPG companies, meaning that he's not jsut rambling this shit to the yahoos on the web, in theory, he's actualyl advising real companies to follow this idiotic whims of his.

However, I've yet to see any proof of real companies he's actually advised or consulted for, so for all I know, his "consulting firm" or whatever the fuck is just a bogus puppet company to let him pretend he's still "in the business".

Quote from: TimInterstingly (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

I think Burning Wheel is what GoOrange is talking about when he says the key to this is to create a solid rules framework first and then put some story stuff on top should you wish to.

To be honest, I don't think BW is particularly part of the Forge movement, it takes some ideas from it but it has IMO far more in common with traditional gaming than it does with story gaming.

That said, there are some well designed story games, I've played a fair few, I'd be amazed if none of them delivered what I'm looking for.  I just don't think they do it as well or as consistently as more traditional games do because that's not really what they're primarily aimed at.

Oh Tim, Mongoose's Conan contains some light dramatic editing rules which were directly inspired by comments in Sorceror and some Forge games, according to what one of the designers told me anyway.  According to Allen Varney, Paranoia XP took the concept of perversity points directly from My Life with Master (not sure where from as I don't recall them in MLwM, but he is the designer so he would know).

So your happy future is happening right now, and MLwM incidentally is a fun game which I would happily recommend as providing exactly what it sets out to.

Is it an rpg?  Don't know and don't care, but it is a fun game for the occasional night when you don't fancy the main campaign.  I note without further comment that it's designer, Paul Czege, just does his thing and leaves it to others to fight for a mythical indie cause.  Indeed, I don't consider it any favour to Paul Czege to call him a story game designer, he's just a guy who makes fun games.

Really that's where I see the long term story game influence, a few ideas that will get picked up and bolted onto trad games and which will provide a few fun options, and a few games which are fun in their own right but have niche appeal.

As you (almost) say, they won't save the hobby though.

There are times when Dancey doesn't do it.  This is one of them.  Mearls has the right answer this time.

Now we know why Dancey thinks "roleplaying is twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours." He's buggerising about trying to tell a story while everyone else is trying to play their character and have fun.

I gave him a comment:
   Dear Ryan,

You should put on a leotard and take up improv theatre. The rest of us want to play rpgs.

Love,
Kyle

Quote from: J ArcaneProvided he's not lying through his teeth, Dancy claims that he operates as some kind of consultant to RPG companies, meaning that he's not jsut rambling this shit to the yahoos on the web, in theory, he's actualyl advising real companies to follow this idiotic whims of his.

However, I've yet to see any proof of real companies he's actually advised or consulted for, so for all I know, his "consulting firm" or whatever the fuck is just a bogus puppet company to let him pretend he's still "in the business".

Oh, he advised AEG... of course, he advised them out of the RPG business completely, so that should tell you what his advice is worth from an RPG industry POV.

Dancey is and always has been a parasite, living off the good ideas of others without producing anything substantive of his own and consistently leaving a dessicated husk in his wake.  The bottom line is that he has almost always been wrong in his prognostications, and when he's been right it's been in no-brainer circumstances that a complete retard could predict (e.g. that if given the free choice, lots of people would choose to produce supplements for what is by light-years the most popular RPG in the world -- NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!).  He's a fool, and following his lead makes one a fool by association.  It's delicious to watch his fool followers turn on him now.

Oh, and I want to game with Balbinus.

KoOS

What fun!  Something we can all agree on!  Dancy is irrelevant, indeed he always has been.

Here's Dancy's excellent judgment on George W. Bush, from Jonathan Tweet's website:

QuoteI think that it is too easy to bash a guy like George W. Bush. Parts of his history fit a stereotype that a lot of people want to believe is true: Rich guy who got by through family connections who has become powerful in his own right mostly through dumb luck, and in spite of numerous personal moral and intellectual failings. When I consider that we're talking about a person who served in the military as a fighter pilot (nobody, no matter the family connections, flies jets in the military unless they've got a lot on the ball. And Bush flew the F4 Phantom, which is regarded as one of the most technically demanding and temperamental planes in aviation history), who attended Harvard and earned an MBA (and I don't think Harvard is in the habit of handing those out just because someone's daddy happened to be a Congressman at the time), who ran for public office and lost, but still decided to stay in the arena and try again (eventually winning the highest office in one of the most diverse and most complex states in the Union), was regarded as an excellent governor by key members of both parties, and won reelection in a landslide, and then successfully did the things necessary to get first nominated as the Presidential candidate of a major national party, then run a dead-heat election against a politically popular regime during a time of economic growth, peace, and general prosperity, I wonder exactly who we think will be willing and able to pursue high public office if this person isn't reasonably qualified and can't be accorded the reasonable benefit of the doubt as to his abilities?

I look at all the stuff that has happened in this country since the 2000 election, and I ask myself if I think Bush has done a good job managing his responsibilities. My answer is yes. Unlike his predecessor, who mostly faced crises of his own creation, Bush has been forced to react to significant and real problems. And I think he has faced those problems and has been managing in a reasonable, prudent way.

Quote from: Pierce Inverarity2. Mike Mearls thinks like me!

That was a brilliant quote.

Quote from: CalithenaHere's Dancy's excellent judgment on George W. Bush, from Jonathan Tweet's website:

Actually, George W. Bush flew F-102s, not F-4s.

Quote from: BalbinusTo be honest, I don't think BW is particularly part of the Forge movement, it takes some ideas from it but it has IMO far more in common with traditional gaming than it does with story gaming.

I think that's at least partially true, but the more I play BW the more I realize how things like conflict resolution, say yes or roll the dice, adherence to the Belief-Artha mechanics, skill advancement, and such really are deeply woven into the game and exist primarily to drive story. And those mechanics work really well for those purposes, and they're a far far cry from angst-ridden improv theater.

Thing is, I still get to wail on orcs with my dwarven axe, while scripting a head-cleaving great strike, and getting +1d for having the high ground. I can still fuck up while casting White Fire and accidentally summon a Greater Seraph. My armor can break. I can use extra successes in combat to change the hit location. Every wound is its own separate entity, so on and on and on.

BW is an incredibly strong game in my opinion and every time over the last two years I've fooled with switching systems (and I used to switch all the time) whether it's Runequest or Dogs in the Vineyard or Castles and Crusades....those games have felt flat and lifeless in comparison.

Where BW falls flat (to me) is the fact that it takes many weeks of play to master the mechanics. The individual mechanics are easy-peasy, but to use the whole machine as intended takes some serious effort and understanding.

It's also a lot of work to kitbash it away from the implied medieval/Tolkien setting (but god do I love lifepaths).

The point of all this fanboy gushing is that I think the eventual (and probably inevitable) mixing of traditional playstyles with story-games style is going to make for some really really strong games that will help to keep people hooked once they're involved in RPGs. I say this because the last two years that I've been playing BW I've had the best time gaming that I've had since I was 14-16 years old and first discovered D&D/AD&D.

Getting people hooked is another thing, and obscure story-focused/not story-focused mechanics aren't going to have jack-shit to do with that. "Oh wow, I can pretend to be Aragorn and go on adventures?", "Sweet, you can fly spaceships and shoot plasma rifles?", or "Woah, getting to BE a vampire is super-cool"....those basic WOW things are what have fueled RPGs for the last thirty years. Till fundamental concepts like those are again brought to the forefront you're not going to see a great boom in RPG players. Are any of those concepts left? I don't know. I think we're probably looking at diminishing returns until the hobby stabilizes at some relatively low number of participants. Not as many people are going to be interested in "Woah, I can pilot mechas while fighting Cthulhu's minions?" At least I don't think so.

Tim

Quote from: John MorrowActually, George W. Bush flew F-102s, not F-4s.

He can't let facts interfere with the elegance of his argument.

Edit: hey, he deleted my comment! What a pussy.

Quotesay yes or roll the dice

This is from AD&D. Look into the Complete Fighter´s Handbook, written by Aaron Allston. 1989.

EDIT: Artha destroys games. Did I mention that conflict resolution is a useless concept also? At it´s worst it acan also destroy games. But mostly it´s basically moot.