AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I think that this statement is clearly not supportable from my experience. As early as the mid-late 1970's there many diverse opinions on different sorts of rules and already much thinking (albeit of a very early sort) had gone on. Certainly Ken St. Andre and the T&T folks engaged in a robust debate with the D&D folks. Anyone who played a game of Boot Hill certainly was well-educated on the HUGE impact of system on play experience vs D&D! Traveler offered another PoV, and RQ another. ALL of these people were well aware that their systems differentiation from D&D was a key aspect of why and how they 'felt different' in play. All of this was well appreciated by 1980.Let me try to make a thesis out of this.
In the late 90's and early 00's people began to try to think systematically about RPG design and develop a framework for describing RPGs. They contributed a lot of potentially useful terminology to the game and the exercise was itself really worthwhile, even if I'm not convinced any of their conclusions necessarily hold true. One idea that they hit upon was the idea of "system matters". Now, I'd argue that this is something they had to hit upon in order to do the thing that they were doing. It was a necessary pre-condition for the exercise. And, to some extent I agree with it. I would certainly never argue that the system doesn't matter at all. But there is I think a gotcha in the idea of "system matters" that if you overlook, can lead to wildly erroneous conclusions.
Well, yes, I agree, a certain group of what are now deemed 'indy game' or 'story game' developers created some games of this sort (and a wide spectrum of games were, and are, being created in the middle). As I pointed out before, 'system matters' came long before the first story game! (though IMHO those games have their roots in 1980's games that were of a similar but less refined ilk). TBH I think there's no big divide overall. Everyone knows that system matters, and everyone knows that you can bend different systems in various ways. Still, nobody thinks it is wise run games with inappropriate systems.The people who were engaged in these conversations and who decided that "system matters" went on to create very tightly scripted games with rigorously defined goals and procedures of play. These were games that consciously attempted to implement "system matters" and who consciously had thought about procedures of play in a way no one else before really had.
Naturally, you can analyze these games pretty much entirely within the framework their creators had created. It works. Because those games were in fact created and inspired by that framework with the intention of implementing the ideas that they had invented.
But you cannot necessarily apply the same level of analysis to game which were not consciously created under the "system matters" paradigm, whose creators had very different ideas about what they wanted to accomplish, and which did not rigorously define what the procedures of play were to be. AD&D actually IMO better defined procedures of play than most games created at the time, which literally told you nothing about how to play them and typically just dumped a huge amount of rules on the player because the author never considered procedures of play as something that needed to be communicate. But AD&D certainly didn't limit procedures of play in the way Indy or Indy inspired game systems typically do, because while the author's of D&D didn't necessarily assume someone would know how to play an RPG, neither did they think of themselves as trying to produce a single type of gameplay within a single game.
OK, so I'm not really having a problem with this in the sense that, yes, some games envision a very specific type of play. They are generally called 'niche' games. Paranoia was an early-ish example of this sort of game, which came out in 1984, but arguably Boot Hill was the earliest mainstream example, and it was probably the 2nd or 3rd RPG ever written.
Now, I admit, Boot Hill, and even Paranoia ARE a lot looser in their procedural formulation than DitV or Dungeon World. I would chalk that up more to a lack of understanding of how to do it, and generally lower editorial and writing skill levels in games of the 70's and early 80's vs a lack of basic understanding of the concept of constrained play.
Another aspect is that RPG authors were pitching games in a MUCH less saturated and competitive market back in the early days. They naturally tended to aim for a more general audience. Today its pretty hard to imagine tossing yet another general purpose fantasy RPG out there, it has 100 competitors and is unlikely to be differentiated much. In 1980 it was perfectly feasible for RQ to do that however. Its authors didn't NEED to make it niche, that would have simply limited its appeal!
Mostly I just don't believe there were ever serious game designers who thought system didn't matter. Maybe a few SAID stupid things like that, but they knew better...