howandwhy99 said:
all games are pattern designs. This isn't under debate.
Yes it is.
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I don't understand any of these statements, but as far as I can tell they don't bear upon anything that I am saying.
Well, you're saying this first thing and then ignoring all my discussion of it at the end.
When I ask my 6 year old daughter, "What are you doing" and she replies "Playing a game", what she almost always means by "playing a game" is that she is pretending to be doing something imaginary. For instance, she might be piling wood chips onto a park bench, pretending that she is making cakes for sale in her cake shop; or pretending that she is a pet-store owner and that her older sister is her English-speaking pet cat.
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Your daughter sounds amazing. This is the point though, What rules is your daughter following for any of her pretending? What win/loss conditions is she acting under? What predefined game objectives does she seek? How does she score points? I'm sorry, but your daughter is simply using "game" to mean something that has nothing to do with playing games. But hey, a word is a label. She can use it for whatever she wants and that's fine. But let's not obfuscate it in order to conform gaming into storytelling. You've just wrote at considerable length about only the latter.
The point is that the game was able to proceed with a less-than-complete ruleset, patched over by improvisation and ad hoc rulings. The fact that the game broke down over this some months later doesn't mean that a game wasn't being successfully played in the intervening period.
The player's had a broken game system. The circle of the game had one element missing. That sucks. That doubly sucks in the middle of a game, because it could invalidate the game. It doesn't sound like it did, but maybe one player believed Poland was to operate one way while another believe in a second interpretation? But what happened was it crashed to a head what could have been good game play throughout strengthening the players.
What you claim obviously did not happen. The players played around by avoiding the glaring hole in the game until one was probably put in a position where they had to lose something or bring the issue to the fore. Who knows how unbalancing and interfering to play it was before that point? And just as you say, "acriminoy and recriminations and fallings out." That sucks.
I don't know what label you use to describe that process of rules invention. Most posters on these boards call it improvisation. Various D&D texts have talked about adjudicating things or actions that the rules don't cover.
You say you can't conceive of a game that covers everything a player could ever possibly attempt, so a GM doesn't need to improvise. Let's try. What's the smallest possible example of a game design you can think of that covers everything any player could ever attempt to do within a game design?
My thinking? "If the game piece is moved, it moves in any manner as described. If anything else is moved, it doesn't." The design is an opaque piece on an undefined board. That's it. (have a pencil ready)
We have Superman. As long as the player doesn't attempt stuff like "The NPC says hello" or "The magic cloak flies over to my character", then everything attempted by the player is tracked as happening by the DM as they furiously take down all the details the player elucidates to put them in the now wildly increasing game. Without any prior design, this will soon get out of hand as simply too much needs to be written down to be put into the game, but we're talking about the smallest possible game design that still covers everything anyone could ever attempt in a game prior to play.
Musson clearly regards the ideal as one in which the GM has fully prepared the map and key. But he recognises that human time, energy and ingenuity is finite, and is offering advice for what to do when those limitations mean that not everything has been written up.
The first part gives me hope, the second dashes it away. Not everything the players will think of will be on the gameboard. Of course. But there are already rules for miles miles of binary answers to player attempts. We randomly generate a large game space on the map, areas that are not on the map are not on the map. We've removed all kinds of potential discoveries which might have been, but now aren't when players go looking for them.
It is literally impossible for a GM to anticipate and preplan for all those solutions, which know no limits except those of human ingenuity.
That's a nice fantasy, but it's clearly wrong. There are no limits potentially. There are limits right now.
Here's the thing we both know. Nothing can ever be put into the game without it first being designed. That's why we have literally a million books with every possible item given statistics for one game or another.
You say again rules cannot be made that cover everything players can imagine. But remember the game pieces are patterns, designs that had to already be added to the game. No matter what, whatever is on the game board already has to be accounted for with everything else on it. That's more than enough, that's everything. Anything more is a hole in the game. Anything more means more rules must have been added. That which lies outside the design is added by the player just like any other situational puzzle, but not to their knowledge. Just keep digging for specifics until the design has all the game stats as are covered. And a good game, like D&D, has broad systems covering most of the spheres of all human ideas. Think of a dictionary. It's big, but it's not infinite. It's easier to great a huge canvas covering seemingly everything than one might think.
What is the bonus for a friendly greeting in a hobgoblin's language? What does "hostile" mean? When do hostile NPCs attack?
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What happens if Silverleaf, to try and pacify the hobgoblins, offers to marry the hobgoblin leader's oldest daughter? Does that increase or decrease the likelihood of attack? How important is marriage to hobgoblins? What are their dowry practices?
I've never heard of the friendly greeting gesture bonus, but perhaps it's in Molday. Otherwise if there is no bonus, there isn't a bonus. Bonuses are supposed to come from measures of the game design anyway, not abstract stuff.
Agreed about Hostile, if you are using the Reaction roll it needs to refer to something in your game. The result of Hostile behavior needs to be designed before it can be interacted with. But rather than building a logic system, generate a game pattern instead. Than look at the behavior of the creation and what patterns it exhibits. Basically everything in the game world is exhibiting a behavior. For monsters, this can be quite a lot as they are usually very complex designs. But once you know all those behaviors plot them on your Alignment chart. How creatures of different alignments act to destroy something in the game could fall under hostile. Balance it, create nuances for each monster design. Playtest. Plus, hostile is a word and Gary doesn't go into his design. So use the term for whatever is in yours.
When do hostile NPCs attack? Well I would think this goes right back to behaviors statted as Alignment again, plus whatever all the variations do for what is exhibiting the behavior - some monster variances, probably a personality system if you use AD&D. All kinds of stuff.
Marriage and dowry both fall under trade.
Attacks I covered above.
Culture is by monster type, but it's simply mass numbers of creatures behaving as one, something I find best aggregated into a single stat block, IMO
I don't know what exactly you have in mind by making a plot for the players to follow, but given that neither I nor Roger Musson advocate anything that would fall under that description, I'm not too worried about it.
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This is why Musson doesn't favour strictly random content generation - he thinks that it reduces the likelihood of the dungeon being interesting to explore, and hence undermines the pleasure in playing the game.
That many people have not played D&D as a game may be true, for some very restricted meaning of game. But Roger Musson is manifestly not one of those people.
Now those are some interesting ideas by him. Much better than the arbitrariness that short circuits players ability to play games. You see, what you relate about non-random adventure placement is going to bring arbitrary results into the pattern the players are playing. That's the referee disabling the players being able to play the game again. In the "random" case of dice rolls it isn't the randomness that matters so much as the variable pattern distribution the roll collapses into as part of the game. Yes, the roll is a determination of possible results. But it is more a derivation of the design manifested, the pattern being deciphered by the players. Not an indeterminacy at all, like when referees interfere.
The interesting part of a game is that it is design which can be gamed. Not that it looks cool. It sounds like Musson is saying he wants what amounts to contemporary fluff, while the goal of good game design is to get rid of fluff and instead enable players to interact with it as part of the game.
