Right, I think I'm not really super invested in making it come out a certain way. Its [MENTION=6790260]EzekielRaiden[/MENTION] 's thread, so its to some extent his call really as to what his vision is.
Yeah, I've been thinking on this tension, between pure "philosophy" and pure "practice," for a while (part of why I haven't posted in a bit--though, admittedly, only part). I see the thread as an open discussion more than a "my vision" kind of thing; I would never dream of suggesting that I know or have seen enough to really "direct" the whole thing by myself. At very most, it's a
primus inter pares deal. With that said, though...
I see the 'howto' thing as being kind of an endless swamp though, you can expound forever on how to run 4e. It almost seems like no one short document can really capture that at a useful level of detail, though I guess that may just be my perspective. A philosophical statement OTOH might be finite in scope and lay out the essence of the sort of game it is. Everything else then just needs to be viewed by the reader in that light and they can come to an appreciation of how to play (at which point they can of course benefit from howtos, etc).
More or less, I think both sides have a clear "failure case" and a clear "ideal case" too. For the pure-philosophy "manifesto" type, the ideal is simply to reveal the fundamental truth, so that practice naturally follows. The hope is that people who want to like/appreciate it, but have struggled to do so, simply need a paradigm shift and can then stand on their own, like a person with healthy legs who has never considered the idea of walking. The "failure case" is when someone totally groks the paradigm shift as a result of reading the manifesto, but has no idea how to deal with the practical issues, which is more like telling someone all the high-concept functions of a computer or even a particular program ("Excel is perfect for <list of spreadsheet-appropriate tasks>") without explaining anything about the syntax or methods for doing it. (As a personal aside: I never really NEEDED the "this is how to use various Microsoft document software" class I took in college, but it did actually teach me a lot of useful-but-not-critical things, mostly in Excel, that make it a MUCH more useful program to me than it was before.)
For the pure-practice "how-to" type, the ideal is fairly obviously to give practical application, that it's a
praxis, not a
theoria, since the goal is to produce a behavior and elicit a reaction. Give someone a calculator, and you'll need to show them what things do what--but it's up to them to feed it good data. The risk, then, is creating a movement of mere mimicry and thought-free replication, rather than one of reasoned practice with models as a particular way for that "reason" to become reality.
If you can't tell, I think a degree of both things is useful. There are definitely some "pure philosophy/explanation" things that just need to be spelled out, conceptually, so people understand what 4e is, what it tries to accomplish. At the same time, solving commonly-addressed issues like "combat takes forever" is, IMO, beyond the ability of a "manifesto." A manifesto can shout from the rooftops "combats should matter! a combat that gets boring is a combat that failed to do its job!" all it likes, and still fail to actually help people achieve that goal. To that end, then, I think we should collect and discuss elements of both sides, and shoot for a structure like...
<PART I: MANIFESTO>
<pithy, punchy summary of all points>
<in-depth explanations/discussions>
<PART II: PRAXIS>
<examples, where appropriate, of each pithy/punchy concept>
The explicit advice, then, would be to COMPLETELY read and try to understand Part I before ever looking at Part II. The first part is, then, essentially foundation: how to get your concepts framed in 4e-compatible way. The second part, which some people may not strictly need, is then a selection of practical examples--strongly stressing that MERELY copying them into your game will not produce as good of results as understanding
why they are examples, and then creating your own constructions for the same reasons as the provided examples were created. To that end, it might be better to give examples less in a "THIS THING WORKS" kind of way, but in a "we have a Thing To Do, let's build a solution to it" kind of way. Less "example" and more "how-to," the way a Bob Ross video works.
Anyway, I don't want to clutter up Zeke's thread with my maunderings.
Nah, keep it up. All of the stuff I've seen thus far has been good, even great. It's more a matter of getting it into the right presentation than whether we need "philosophy" or "example" pieces, because (as stated) I think we need both. And if we're specifically intending to
avoid the problems I (and I assume others) have had with the "Old School Primer" and its...less-than-friendly examples, a thorough investigation of what presentation we want, and how we want to achieve it, is a very good thing too.
