Well, Castle Falkenstein is about as close as you get, although I think the premise that the rules shouldn't be told as an abstraction just can't be reached. Reality and throwing dice just don't mix.

QuoteChallenge Rating is worthless and makes the game bland.

This is the most anti-western bullshit that you ever said, Pundit.

Come to your senses!

Do you consider Mythic innovative or a rehash?

Closest that I have see is the old solo or "Pick a Page" adventures, yet it is neither of these.
=

Quote from: RPGPunditArneson is allowed to say that.
When he says it, its one of the actual CREATORS of the RPG citing some of his influences.
When the Swine say it, its their pathetic attempt to claim that Gygax and Arneson didn't invent the RPG.

See the difference?

I'd see the difference if you could point to instances of anyone claiming that Gygax and Arneson didn't invent the RPG. I guess the closest I can think of is Ron Edwards in one of his articles ("A Hard Look at Dungeons and Dragons"), which I think contains a fair amount of speculation and political axe-grinding masquerading as scholarship, including when he touches on the invention of RPGs. However he never mentions Braunstein, and as I've suggested, tracing the roots of D&D back to Braunstein shows that his "myth of the Fall (or Narrativism Betrayed)" is ass-backwards.

Oh, wait. This goes back to the Pistols at Dawn thread with Sett, doesn't it? Okay, this is an internal Swine War issue, you think Sett is "giving ground to the enemy", so you're attacking anything that he uses to support his ideas.

Quote from: J ArcaneBecause the terminology "innovation" is one with certain value-laden implications that are inappropriate for discussing matters of individual taste.

The term often carries with it the implication of "new and improved", and I don't think anything that's come since the introduction of RPGs themselves is necessarily "improved" over anything else.

Ah, I see the problem. You're reading into this something that needn't be. In arts, which includes games, innovation is impossible to separate from its etymological root & its dictionary meaning, which is just "new".

This is why I apologized for using a technological analogy, because I do understand that. Your literary analogy is more apt; I certainly don't see Don Quixote as an improvement on The Iliad even though the former is widely seen as the first novel. (There's that root again.)

However by the same argument D&D was only an innovation in the narrow sense; the proof is trivial: Scrabble, Chess, Checkers, Diplomacy, Panzerblitz...none of these were rendered obsolete by the invention of D&D. In fact within the hobby game field, the immediate forebears of D&D, namely wargames, continued to develop in both board and miniatures variety, more or less separately from RPGs, and continue to be produced and played today. That leaves us only with the argumentum ad populum: I wouldn't be surprised if RPGs (and probably D&D all by itself) are a bigger hobby today than all wargames combined. But, that's a dumb argument unless the question concerns marketing and market environment rather than quality or taste. If popularity were a measure of progress, we'd have to conclude that RPGs have gotten worse since the 1980's.

In conclusion I believe there has been innovation in the field of RPGs over the last decade, though I would measure it purely in terms of new approaches gaining widespread currency, not in terms of "improvement".

The most innovative design decisions in the hobby are probably the ones that leaves us arguing if the design in question is an rpg at all.  I may not care much for MMORPGs or LARPS or most of the Forge-driven story-type games, but those are places where I see the innovation most clearly.  To say that such-and-such a mechanic is an innovative approach is not on the same level as these clear paradigm-breakers.

Also, I agree with Pundit that "The Braunsteins were a big influence on Arneson" is a different statement than "The Braunsteins invented what we call roleplaying".  Without Arneson and his enthusiastic dungeon-delvers we would not have the hobby as we know it.

Quote from: mearlsThe thing is, I think that there's an underlying desire for innovation to be this big, groundbreaking thing. I'm not sure that's really possible without inventing a new type of game.

Personally, I don't find it desireable. Too many companies and designers create gimmicky games in the name of innovation.

Seanchai

Does innovation with regards to RPGs have to mean groundbreaking or even popular ? Could it just mean expanding the possibilities of what an RPG is ?

Regards,
David R

Well people, neither of you listened to me, so this thread is where I predicted it to be.

Theres different kinds of innovations. The ones Jrients has in mind, might be called "basic innovations", and can be likened to product life cycles and even kondratieff cycles. If you believe in those concepts that is.

Mearls on the other hand is talking about procedural innovations in D&D rules. Way more narrow.

So what are we talking about? Decide!

@Braunstein & D&D:

The REAL and HUGE as well as BASIC innovation in D&D was the following:


1) Providing radically new building blocks for fictious situations.
2) Providing a robust model for interaction of said building blocks.
3) Providing the idea for interacting building blocks

Building Blocks:
- spells
- magic items
- monsters
- special abilities
- traps
(- planes & gods)

the combat stuff was already there in some form. Just look at the monsters, at the spells and realize how this stuff was basically made from whole cloth!
I cannot emphasize the importance of that enough.
Whole cloth!

Sure there are conceptual sources. But the procedure in which source material and original ideas were mixed and mashed and formed into interactive building blocks for challenges and their resolution, is creative genius of the highest degree!

And no matter what nice little precedural innovations mearls (whom I hold in the highest respect, I even wrote him a filk song) cited, they don´t matter much.
The reason why D&D is so robust is because neither of him, Monte, not even Mentzer, Moldvay. And surely not Arneson or Weseley. It´s Gary´s freaky mind that created the building blocks (AFAIK).
That´s why you can even drop the thief class and different damage for different weapons: The oeuvre of building blocks Gary created is the BIG THING that jumpstarted our hobby.

What 3.x did so very right is concentrating and polishing the

1) building blocks
and
2) their interaction

Keep in mind, that from this perspective, the RQ/Traveller line of tradition is actually a conceptual step back: it´s like the Kriegsspiel supplements made by officers to enhance "realism" but within the single character framework.

Traveller  is conceptually Braunstein+Kriegsspiel Supplements, whereas D&D is Arneson+Gygaxian Building blocks and RQ is Arneson+Kriegsspiel Supplements.

So we have:

- the Braunstein flavour MoR
- the Arnesonian Dungeon
- the Gygaxian building blocks
- the Kriegsspiel supplement tradition

Quote from: David RDoes innovation with regards to RPGs have to mean groundbreaking or even popular ? Could it just mean expanding the possibilities of what an RPG is ?

Regards,
David R

This is the understanding of "innovation" I most like on this thread.

Quote from: RPGPunditPoint out to me one "improvement" in actual RPG rules that EVERYONE agrees makes RPGs objectively better than before.

I think certain people are setting the bar pointlessly LOW in order to claim they're just as brilliant as Gygax or more deserving of praise than Arneson for the creation of their shitty little gimmicky micro-game or tic-tac-toe based task resolution system...

Sigh.  The fucking lies really start to annoy me.  Pundit, the claim that there have been any innovations in the hobby at all is not the same as saying that Joe Schmoe is more deserving of praise than Arneson.  

And regardless of that, your criteria is stupid.  Not EVERYONE agrees that OD&D is objectively better than prior games.  

Sure, you can probably dig out someone somewhere who claims that OD&D is his favorite game and plays with his copy of "Greyhawk" -- but the vast majority of people play the D20 version, which has been majorly influenced by prior games: notably RuneQuest and The Fantasy Trip.  

Quote from: jrientsThe most innovative design decisions in the hobby are probably the ones that leaves us arguing if the design in question is an rpg at all.  I may not care much for MMORPGs or LARPS or most of the Forge-driven story-type games, but those are places where I see the innovation most clearly.  To say that such-and-such a mechanic is an innovative approach is not on the same level as these clear paradigm-breakers.

Also, I agree with Pundit that "The Braunsteins were a big influence on Arneson" is a different statement than "The Braunsteins invented what we call roleplaying".  Without Arneson and his enthusiastic dungeon-delvers we would not have the hobby as we know it.

Yeah, that person who said the Braunsteins invented roleplaying was a fucking moron.  Oh wait?  Who said that?  That would be no one because it's a fucking lie of Pundit's.

I'm the one who brought up the Braunsteins, and I never claimed that they invented role-playing.  D&D was an enormously innovative and it completely changed the face of the hobby -- but if you want to have any measure of its innovation, you have to compare it to its predecessors.

Though my input was ignored, maybe comments from others in the industry that do feel that Mythic is innovative will be noted.

Quote from: Jeff Dee-It's the most amazing new thing I've seen in the tabletop RPG hobby in
-many many years! Thank you thank you thank you.

-Excuse me, I'm going to go have another solo adventure now.

--Jeff Dee
-UNIgames

Quote from: Tom PigeonFor those of you with Faulty Memory Syndrone, Jeff is one of the original artists on AD&D.
Think the Norse and Egyptian sections of Deities and Demigods and you'll
know exactly who I mean. Also, his art can be found in a boatload of modules
(Slave Pits,etc.). He is also the designer of Villains and Vigilantes. Today,
he runs Unigames (check him out at http://www.io.com/unigames/)

Ideas that have been recycled, had to have been initially introduced and cast aside.
=

Quote from: jhkimSigh.    


Yeah, that person who said the Braunsteins invented roleplaying was a fucking moron.  Oh wait?  Who said that?  That would be no one because it's a fucking lie of Pundit's.
I'm the one who brought up the Braunsteins, and I never claimed that they invented role-playing.  D&D was an enormously innovative and it completely changed the face of the hobby -- but if you want to have any measure of its innovation, you have to compare it to its predecessors.

 NO - its NOT a lie of Pundit's, in the book The Fantasy Role-Playing Bibleby Sean Patrick Fannon (ISBN 0-7615-0264-5) the Braunsteins are specifically mentioned as what gave "birth" to D&D or at least they should be considered proto-Dungeons & Dragons or Roleplaying games.


- Ed C.

That´s where I got it from, too.

OK, let's try this again.  Here's what I was responding to:

Quote from: jrientsAlso, I agree with Pundit that "The Braunsteins were a big influence on Arneson" is a different statement than "The Braunsteins invented what we call roleplaying".  Without Arneson and his enthusiastic dungeon-delvers we would not have the hobby as we know it.

There is a non-existent argument here.  Everyone agrees that the Braunsteins were an influence and can reasonably called the proto-role-playing -- this was explicitly cited by Arneson, but everyone here also agrees there was major innovation in the creation of D&D.