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General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
4e Compared to Trad D&D; What You Lose, What You Gain
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7532199" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Let me try to make a thesis out of this.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7532199, member: 4937"] 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. 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. [/QUOTE]
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