OMG OMG

I was going to yell at Settembrini for dragging in BW... but lo and behold: The Dancey's new blog entry:

http://web.mac.com/rsdancey/iWeb/RSDanceyBlog/Blog/3D5EF842-0B0F-4DEC-A21A-F379AEDF15B6.html

Burning Empires! Yes!

The sad part: He clearly looked at it for all of 1.3 minutes.

My favorite sentence:

QuoteThe Storytelling Game is predicated on the idea of leveraging the community resources to make the experience fun.

Gotta go do some leveraging. Later.

Well, so he should invest in these games. Put his money were his mouth is.

I´ll be laughing my ass off in the meanwhile.

Has RD stopped playing RPGs? Or what happened to him?

I mean fuck: He´s actually lying to himself:

What supplements sell best?

I would be very interested in the collaborative story appeal of the book of nine swords. Please explain, Dancey-Boy!

Oh, but didn't you hear Settembrini?
There's shitloads of people sitting around campfires, in amateur improv theatre troupes, and yes, even in online "RP" mailing lists and such that are all just desperately waiting for someone to make a bunch of rules to restrict the way they already tell stories!

Clearly, these people are the future, the ones who will replace all us wrong-minded gamers who think Roleplaying Games are all about playing a role.  

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditOh, but didn't you hear Settembrini?
There's shitloads of people sitting around campfires, in amateur improv theatre troupes, and yes, even in online "RP" mailing lists and such that are all just desperately waiting for someone to make a bunch of rules to restrict the way they already tell stories!

Clearly, these people are the future, the ones who will replace all us wrong-minded gamers who think Roleplaying Games are all about playing a role.  

Well, playing a role is pretty much the boon of RPGs in ANY application. The trouble here is that there´s people who have a ridicolously narrow idea of what playing a role is.

Gygay once said there´s role assumption, and that´s the real deal.

The power of RPGs is letting you pretend to be and act upon a fictious situation. Anything that interferes with that is ass-backwards kind of niche fun, that actually hampers the real power of RPGs. I mean, if that´s floats their boats so be it.
But the notion that RPGs are about storytelling is as idiotic as proclaiming they are about dice rolling.

The key is to explore a virtual situation. That´s what RPGs are powerful at. That´s why they are used in real life, tough shit, human lives depend on their outcome training exercises. It´s a form of simulation, as in the english meaning of the word, the cheapest and most versatile form of simulation.
It´s a Holodeck.

Yeah, I´m with Malcolm Sheppard regarding the real storytellers: They already have their rules be they written or unwritten.
Thematic Games and Grey´s Anatomy scriptwright imitation exercises aren´t helping them. Again: Even the real storytellers try painfully to reach immersion. No contrived plot points or Artha-judgements. A novel is only good, if you don´t see the "wires" so to say.

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'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so. I can't understand why, when people start to talk about Forgey, funky games, Burning Wheel is always mentioned. Burning Wheel is a traditional game, in fact, some of its rules feel pretty archaic (in a good way), such as skill improvement.

Quote from: ClaudiusI'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so. I can't understand why, when people start to talk about Forgey, funky games, Burning Wheel is always mentioned. Burning Wheel is a traditional game, in fact, some of its rules feel pretty archaic (in a good way), such as skill improvement.

Just a hunch, but it may have something to do with Luke Crane babbling on and on about how GMs are evil and about how GM authority is killing the hobby, and all that sort of nonsense.

Quote from: TimGetting 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

We've got a winner. That's what people want from RPGs, the wow things.

Quote from: ClaudiusI'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so. I can't understand why, when people start to talk about Forgey, funky games, Burning Wheel is always mentioned. Burning Wheel is a traditional game, in fact, some of its rules feel pretty archaic (in a good way), such as skill improvement.

Really? Someone still has to start a thread talking about it. I've tried to look at it in stores, but here they sell the two books wrapped together with a strip of papers with pullquotes from reviews, mostly Forgers saying "iz t3h k3w1!" So it could be the best thing since Gygax's "Handling Troublesome Players" DMing advice, or it could be full of pictures of Man Faye for all I know.

People are always talking about how because they hate authour X, they can't buy their game. Me, I don't care if the authour eats babies, so long as their game is good. But if someone I think is a drongo gives a game a good review, that puts me off. Like, I stumbled across this sci-fi rpg in the FLGS the other day, "Orbit" it was called. It looked pretty old-school from a casual glance, but then there was a pullquote from Uncle Ronny saying how awesome it was, I put it down quickly.

Anyway, someone ought to start a thread telling us about BW. It sounds pretty thespy to me, but I can dig that. Of course if Ryan D. gave it a good review I might have to swear off it. Between his "roleplaying is 20 minutes of fun packed into four hours" and now this "let's tell a STORY, bitches!", I really don't trust his opinion.

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.

People enjoy furor(s?).

I'm with Jeff on this one.  Whoop-de-Shit.  I don't know why people continually feel the need to pronounce Game Style A or Movement B as the Savior of Roleplaying.  If he wanted to talk about something that wasn't a ridiculous blanket statement, he could talk about how the small press module allows for more games of varying tastes and styles to be more viable.  But no, instead, we get this, which has the smack of One-True-Way-ism.  It's just not anything that we haven't seen a lot of other folks post before.

Here's the problem of misunderstanding:

Quote from: Ryan DanceyI say that people who want to run a game where a single person takes full responsibility for all non-player character aspects of the session while the other people focus exclusively on roleplaying individual PCs is just one point on the continuum of how to set up a successful Storytelling Game session.  If that is the preferred format of all the players and they all agree up front to make the compromises necessary to make that format work and achieve the goal of "Tell a great story", then more power to them!

It's not one point in the continuum of how to set up a successful Storytelling Game session.  It's the most widely used, popular, successful method of running an RPG session. Does that make it sacrosanct?  No.  But it sure makes it a big cluster on that continuum; it might be a single point, but statistically, it's obvioulsy the preferred method.

If that's the preferred method?  Chances are, Ryan, it will be the preferred method.  How do I know?  Look at your own research from 2000, Mr. Dancey. I know it's a few years ago, but unless you'd like to share some hard data with us, I'm taking your recent turn as a marketing ploy.

Last thing: they don't make the compromises necessary to make that format work and achieve the goal of "Tell a great story." This is because the goal of the large majority of the hobby who play this way is not "Tell a great story."  In fact, it's not the goal of most people in the RPG hobby.

Caveats: None of this is to say Tell a Great Story isn't a valid goal for a group of people, or that for those who wish to do so making a RPG to do so is not valid, or that they can't be having fun, or that they aren't playing the One True Way, etc. etc. etc.

NOTE: Interestingly, the Sean K Reynolds Breakdown of RPG Players seems to have disappeared.  Anyone have a snapshot of it?

Quote from: SettembriniThis 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.

Hello little yappy dog. a) I don't care where the 'say yes' mechanic came from. b) You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. c) you don't have to be afraid.

Quote from: SettembriniI mean fuck: He´s actually lying to himself:

What supplements sell best?

I would be very interested in the collaborative story appeal of the book of nine swords. Please explain, Dancey-Boy!

Why is it that when these "what people really want" comments get made, they frequently point to certain small press indy games rather than the popular supplements/games that outsell them by an enormous margin?

Doesn't the fact that people spend several orders of magnitude more money on games like D&D tell you that D&D may actually be what people really want?

Quote from: RPGPunditThere's shitloads of people sitting around campfires, in amateur improv theatre troupes, and yes, even in online "RP" mailing lists and such that are all just desperately waiting for someone to make a bunch of rules to restrict the way they already tell stories!

This always gets me. It seems to me that in this respect, the story-now/indie movement is self defeating.

Quote from: GoOrangeDoesn't the fact that people spend several orders of magnitude more money on games like D&D tell you that D&D may actually be what people really want?

No, they don't really want it, because roleplaying is dying! Remember, he said

"I believe that the path to revitalizing the tabletop roleplaying game hobby requires -"

You only need to "revitalize" something which is losing vitality, losing life - roleplaying is dying. And he knows. He had a graph and everything!