"The term 'GNS' is moronic and annoying" – well this should be an interesting interview

[Manbearcat]

Wow. Shocked. This is actually a really good thread with wide and varied contribution. I was certain this was going to be an absolute, 0-200 MPH trainwreck when I saw the title and then saw the very predictable early responses.

Pleasantly surprised.

A trio of thoughts on art vs creative vision as North Star & audience of one vs mass consumption motive.

1) My partner and I (along with my sister and her husband...who are both actual artists) make a lot of random stuff for personal life hacks, for our home's general function/decor, and for climbing workouts in particular (actual things to facilitate getting stronger or working on techniques and then mounts for them when necessary).

All of this stuff is (i) 100 % creative vision as North Star & (ii) audience of one (well...two if you separate us out!).

2) Contrast (1) with the varying Story Now games that I GM. There is no creative vision as North Star; that would basically be the entire site nuked from orbit. What there is would be (just GM-side here) a novel game engine + the constraints of that engine + the constraints of prior fiction and present situation-state/game-state + my brain locked into the moment (following Yoda's Empire advice to Luke!) trying to generate the most compelling decision-space for player(s) to navigate right now.

3) Interestingly, this cognitive orientation and ordering of play looks somewhat similar when running the type of Pawn Stance Dungeon/Hexcrawls that I've spent at least half of my GMing hours on (probably more). Make a map, key/stock/theme it, run the procedures and do my part providing vigorous opposition with respect to what has come before. Does it count as creative vision as North Star when you prep the dungeon/hex? There is certainly a level of focus on outputs/progression there. However, if you generate a good dungeon/hex, with compelling and dynamic branches (including multiple ingress/egress to various rooms), with compelling and dynamic encounter tables when Wandering Monsters hit, relentlessly follow NPC Reactions to the interesting and varied places they can lead (particularly when they turn up a WTF reaction)...well, you've got something compelling and dynamic that can generate a rather different blow-by-blow play experience (GM-side and player-side) upon different playthroughs.

I mean, don't get me wrong. Its not going to be something like an Agon Island or a Dogs in the Vineyard Town where the prep and the play is centered around protagonist-interests. But I don't think we need to reference "does this game center its play around protagonism upon moral/ethos-motivated lines" in order to examine whether prep and play (either discretely or both in concert) to scrutinize it for its level of (or absence of) creative vision as North Star, right?


I'm finding myself wondering how this tracks with the conversation?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, even though there's a scale of frustration tolerance, frustration is frustration, and it should be voiced. I mean in software, after each sprint, you have a review - "what worked, what didn't work" with no accusations or finger pointing. People can have mostly a good time, but then have some serious issues that should be voiced allowing for continuous improvement. What's not good is to let the frustrations fester or remain unvoiced even with a good session. A good group will allow for that, a more toxic group would discourage it, but if you feel discouraged from doing it, that's a problem right there with the health of the table.

I don't think it necessarily is an indication of social toxicity for it to end up being discouraged; sometimes there's various sorts of reflexive reactions that passively discourage negative reactions without any hostile intent; perception that a GM may get angry or discouraged (whether true or not), liking the game so much oneself that criticism is viewed negatively, and probably others I haven't thought of. Those are all problems when it comes to resolving in-game issues, but I think calling them toxic may be an overstatement.

 

[Wolfpack48]

I don't think it necessarily is an indication of social toxicity for it to end up being discouraged; sometimes there's various sorts of reflexive reactions that passively discourage negative reactions without any hostile intent; perception that a GM may get angry or discouraged (whether true or not), liking the game so much oneself that criticism is viewed negatively, and probably others I haven't thought of. Those are all problems when it comes to resolving in-game issues, but I think calling them toxic may be an overstatement.

A better phrase might be "a group that doesn't want to rock the boat" or "a group that feels they don't want to bring 'negativity' to the table." That's why I like to phrase it as "what worked, what could be better.' It takes the sting out of things, especially in a group where things were mostly good.

 

[payn]

A better phrase might be "a group that doesn't want to rock the boat" or "a group that feels they don't want to bring 'negativity' to the table." That's why I like to phrase it as "what worked, what could be better.' It takes the sting out of things, especially in a group where things were mostly good.

Sometimes its floating around in the noggin and folks dont know how to come to terms with it too. Hard to say you dont like what you cant put into words.

 

[zakael19]

I think it's hard for most players / DMs who haven't tried a multiplicity of systems to articulate what they're striving for or what they feel is lacking. 5e for example is like the Skyrim of TTRPG rulesets - the base game is alright if a bit buggy, and can feed some great moments, but then you can go mod it to all hell and back to get to a remarkable spread of experiences. But, the combat will never be as visceral and complex as something focused on that from teh ground up like Dark Souls (despite there being mods to try and hack that sort of thing into Skyrim!). Without trying a game like that, if you were always craving a more tactical and dangerous combat system you'd lack the point of reference to really land on what you felt was missing beyond a vague "I wish combat didn't feel like flailing away with nerf bats."

Likewise you can mod all sorts of things into 5e (I know people who play it as nearly pure ERP, near freeform RP, gritty combat, classical dungeon crawling, 4e-alike); but the core design decisions do mean that things fray around the edge compared to a system built ground up to focus on what the player might want.

Finally, I think it's harder for players to take the step towards criticism because there's so many players and relatively so few DMs / scheduling availability. I have a couple players who have been trying to get into additional games without luck for quite some time.

 

[zakael19]

Wow. Shocked. This is actually a really good thread with wide and varied contribution. I was certain this was going to be an absolute, 0-200 MPH trainwreck when I saw the title and then saw the very predictable early responses.

Pleasantly surprised.

A trio of thoughts on art vs creative vision as North Star & audience of one vs mass consumption motive.

1) My partner and I (along with my sister and her husband...who are both actual artists) make a lot of random stuff for personal life hacks, for our home's general function/decor, and for climbing workouts in particular (actual things to facilitate getting stronger or working on techniques and then mounts for them when necessary).

All of this stuff is (i) 100 % creative vision as North Star & (ii) audience of one (well...two if you separate us out!).

2) Contrast (1) with the varying Story Now games that I GM. There is no creative vision as North Star; that would basically be the entire site nuked from orbit. What there is would be (just GM-side here) a novel game engine + the constraints of that engine + the constraints of prior fiction and present situation-state/game-state + my brain locked into the moment (following Yoda's Empire advice to Luke!) trying to generate the most compelling decision-space for player(s) to navigate right now.

3) Interestingly, this cognitive orientation and ordering of play looks somewhat similar when running the type of Pawn Stance Dungeon/Hexcrawls that I've spent at least half of my GMing hours on (probably more). Make a map, key/stock/theme it, run the procedures and do my part providing vigorous opposition with respect to what has come before. Does it count as creative vision as North Star when you prep the dungeon/hex? There is certainly a level of focus on outputs/progression there. However, if you generate a good dungeon/hex, with compelling and dynamic branches (including multiple ingress/egress to various rooms), with compelling and dynamic encounter tables when Wandering Monsters hit, relentlessly follow NPC Reactions to the interesting and varied places they can lead (particularly when they turn up a WTF reaction)...well, you've got something compelling and dynamic that can generate a rather different blow-by-blow play experience (GM-side and player-side) upon different playthroughs.

I mean, don't get me wrong. Its not going to be something like an Agon Island or a Dogs in the Vineyard Town where the prep and the play is centered around protagonist-interests. But I don't think we need to reference "does this game center its play around protagonism upon moral/ethos-motivated lines" in order to examine whether prep and play (either discretely or both in concert) to scrutinize it for its level of (or absence of) creative vision as North Star, right?


I'm finding myself wondering how this tracks with the conversation?

I think we might be mixing discussion of system & play in this thread, as often happens here. I think most of the creative agenda/design discussion was wrt rules and system innovation per @kenada 's points, and less "at the table/prep" within a system?

Although I think it's worth emphasizing again that Edwards seem to be focused much more on outcomes and play vs system at this point.

 

[Atomoctba]

I just want to say that both AD&D 2e and Vampire are two of the games I had most fun playing.

 

[Wolfpack48]

I just want to say that both AD&D 2e and Vampire are two of the games I had most fun playing.

Not allowed! 1e for me, but we played lots of 2e stuff.

 

[kenada]

I'm finding myself wondering how this tracks with the conversation?

My discussion of games-as-art is about the actual games themselves (as artifacts). How they are consumed would be a separate discussion.

 

[Manbearcat]

I think we might be mixing discussion of system & play in this thread, as often happens here. I think most of the creative agenda/design discussion was wrt rules and system innovation per @kenada 's points, and less "at the table/prep" within a system?

Although I think it's worth emphasizing again that Edwards seem to be focused much more on outcomes and play vs system at this point.

That is probably happening for sure.

Though I don't explicitly outline it, my post above is meant to be about the relationship of design priorities and usage (just as Forge analysis entails the relationship of play priorities, attendant design, and actual play...striving for synthesis of the three rather than discord).

One thing (and that one thing is multivariate) I've found frustrating over the years is discussions on that parenthetical above. The following (empirically absurd) contentions come to mind (in no particular order):

* There is no such thing as competing play priorities which result in discordant play.

* Even if there is such a thing as competing play priorities resulting in discordant play, they can always be resolved via extra-system measures for any desired play experience; social contract or GMing technique (often the deployment of Force of Calvinball buggery) or deft hacking (and this assumes both deftness and that the game is amenable to the desired hacking).

* There is no such thing as identifying and distinguishing play priorities in the first place! Humans and play are just so impenetrable!

* Even if you can identify and distinguish play priorities, curated design that attends to a particular priority is impossible!

My discussion of games-as-art is about the actual games themselves (as artifacts). How they are consumed would be a separate discussion.

Just quoting this here as cross-posted. My above addresses this a bit.

Aren't games meant for play (consumption), though? Consumption of one or niche or mass is irrelevant to me here. Conversation always gets bogged down on that line and that is another frustrating facet of these conversations I could fold into the bullet points above!

Oh, and its overwhelmingly deployed as a culture war cudgel to try to initiate collective action or influence designers-by-proxy while masking those partisan interests as "I'm just talking sound business decisions bruh"; "you shouldn't include x thing (which person invariably hates and has seriously partisan priors) because that is niche and won't sell and that is bad for business!"