Quote from: jhkim;982101Actually, I think it takes us back to 1980, with these theories about Power Gaming, Role-Playing, Wargaming, and Story Telling - and the conflicts between them.

http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/models/blacow.html

Which, for all its deliberate exaggeration, is STILL probably the best summarization of the situation.

The person running this website is a racist who publicly advocates genocidal practices.

I am deleting my content.

I recommend you do the same.

Quote from: jhkim;982101Actually, I think it takes us back to 1980, with these theories about Power Gaming, Role-Playing, Wargaming, and Story Telling - and the conflicts between them.

http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/models/blacow.html

Not exactly, unless I'm misremembering that article. There are a couple things that really stand out about those 1994-5 discussions. One was the heated arguments over whether a GM could steer play along dramatic pathways without the players noticing--a debate that's irresolvable in theory.

The other was the way that "gamism" was an afterthought, the same way it was just now when I brought it up just to cover my bases. "Game" interests are almost never the focus of these discussions, but many of the same points apply--at least the ones about GM manipulation vs predictability, and dissociated mechanics.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;982104... which you can tell isn't his original post on the topic because the very first sentence in the thread references the fact that he's talking about the original post. You can also tell because the two posts are dated.

Nobody gives a fuck about the 'original post'. The point of contention is in the link provided.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;982104... which you can tell isn't his original post on the topic because the very first sentence in the thread references the fact that he's talking about the original post. You can also tell because the two posts are dated.

The original post was in the marginalia on lumply's "Anyway" blog. Why does it matter?

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: rgrove0172;981902The PCs are heroes afterall and throughout endless examples from fiction we find that good things happen to heroes - they are must lucky, fated or what have you.

And that's a difference in philosophy even within "traditional" games: do you survive because you're heroes, or are you heroes because you survived? In other words, do we make rules so that the PCs will be advantaged or lucky, or do we just make rules that seem reasonable and just wait and see which PCs get lucky?

In my last campaign, in the final fight all the PCs were struck down, as well as the evil leader, and a party henchman a paladin Ivyst took the evil artifact and tossed it into the lava... they hope. And the players said, "holy shit, all this time we were her henchmen." I hadn't planned that at all, obviously. But the players were cool with it.

And this division within traditional games also highlights a traditional and storygame difference: is "story" something you try to make happen, or is it something you made up to explain the random crazy shit afterwards? Is "story" before and during, or only after the in-game events? Is "story" something you try to make happen, or is it an emergent property, or is it just a post hoc rationalisation?

You're heroes because you've survived.

Who's Luke, who's Wedge, who's Porkins, who's Biggs?  We won't know until after we play.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;982148You're heroes because you've survived.

Who's Luke, who's Wedge, who's Porkins, who's Biggs?  We won't know until after we play.

^This.

Quote from: -E.;981904The problem with Ron's formulation around "heartbreakers" isn't that it's not presented diplomatically -- or that it's disrespectful, it's that it's a ridiculous and naive way of understanding game design.

He's frustrated that a bunch of people used D&D as a template for their games and that they follow the traditional model, instead of following his ideas about RPGs. This is a novel thing to be frustrated about given the relative commercial and critical success of many of these games and the ultimate failure of his ideas and his games.

Of course a lot of people who picked up on the nomenclature use the term "heartbreaker" in much less specific ways -- to describe any game they find derivative. In this way, it's very much like his GNS stuff -- functionally and intellectually incoherent, but great for snubbing other games and gamers.

Cheers,
-E.

I haven't encountered anyone who found the heartbreaker essay offensive. I guess I haven't probed enough into the far reaches of RPG snowflakery.

Seems pretty clear to me he means games that were built off a D&D base even if it made little semse for what they were trying to do or were games that were D&D 'but done right' which just made them redundant.

The person running this website is a racist who publicly advocates genocidal practices.

I am deleting my content.

I recommend you do the same.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;982199Okay, so when you claim that he was only talking about Vampire: The Masquerade system with his "brain damage" comments, we should understand that to mean he was only talking about Vampire: The Masquerade if you're only very selectively quoting later conversations about the "brain damage" (because even in the thread you link to, he explicitly mentions AD&D, Champions, and others) and explicitly ignore his original comments?

He directly referred to Vampire, because he had a particular beef with the 'storytelling' moniker. His references to AD&D and Champions were merely to support his contention that Vampire was of the same ilk, and as a consequence was being somehow duplicitous for calling itself a 'storytelling game'.

Frankly, you are just being a troll here anyway - you're making no salient point here. The link has been provided, people can read it for themselves.

Quote from: Voros;982177I haven't encountered anyone who found the heartbreaker essay offensive. I guess I haven't probed enough into the far reaches of RPG snowflakery.

Seems pretty clear to me he means games that were built off a D&D base even if it made little semse for what they were trying to do or were games that were D&D 'but done right' which just made them redundant.

You're exactly right.

He had these weird, idiosyncratic ideas about how RPGs should be designed and so when he saw people who built on the foundation of the most popular RPG of all time, instead of his ideas, he had his heart broken.

It was strange. And -- for people building games -- terrible advice. As we've seen (both recently and at the time) there is a place in RPGing, both artistically and commercially for both "D&D done right" and games that use D&D as a baseline even if they're trying to "do" something else (whatever that means). While he's over there having his heart broken there are innumerable riffs on D&D and people love them.

He was a font of bad advice for game developers, because he couldn't see past his own advocacy -- one of the worst failed-detours of RPG evolution.

Cheers,
-E.

RE was all over the place and prone to grandiose, oblique pronouncements which would serve as mirrors for both his fans and detractors, and let him say in the end that he was right all along--having merely been misinterpreted.

In the case of the brain damage quotes, in the first quote he doesn't quite single out D&D, giving only a timeline. The later thread blames trends that allegedly started in AD&D 2e and "certain applications of Champions". One can only guess what he's talking about and how widely he'd cast blame. The second statement might be retreat from the first--which could be construed as blaming the original Blackmoor campaign, or the publication of Brown Box D&D, but might refer to a module published in 1979. Most likely it refers to the beginnings of "module-based" play and whenever modules or module series started to contain fixed plot progressions; he probably had in mind his essay on D&D history which (also obliquely) refers to the publication of tournament modules, probably the G-D-Q series. I can't say anything about Champions, but the 2E comment may be a result of getting the timing off on the publication of Dragonlance (1984; 2e was published 1989), or maybe RE considered 2e to be the point at which "plotted" modules came to predominate.

About the heartbreaker essay, I'm a bit rushed but I think if you look at Part II, you'll find RE wasn't just criticizing games that had minor mechanical innovations but pretty much any game whose subject matter and overall game structure was similar to D&D. I.e., fantasy, where you play a bunch of adventurers. If you look at the games themselves I'll bet you'll find some aren't that close to D&D mechanically.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;982148You're heroes because you've survived.

Who's Luke, who's Wedge, who's Porkins, who's Biggs?  We won't know until after we play.

And even then, things may change so that our views of characters are altered as well. Just look at Luke. A new GM comes along with a new story and suddenly Luke's player isn't so happy with his character, but all he can do is play the game as best he can.

Quote from: Voros;981855Perfect example of someone projecting negative traits onto others because they like something you don't. Based on exactly nothing as well I'd say.

I said nothing negative about storygamers here, nor about Instagramers for that matter. Unless you consider being "different" from adventure-gamers and diners to be "negative". But then, that's your projection, not mine.

An entirely different activity, using the same name as another activity, is part of what I think causes the hate (that's what this thread's supposedly about, right?). You may have just demonstrated that point.