Chess is not an RPG: The Illusion of Game Balance

[Umbran]

As far as what the point of categorisation is, well, it provides tools in order to assess issues with a game.

Here's some wood to build the frame of a house. And a pipe wrench. Go!

I have noted, several times, that you need to be more specific about the goal before you figure out what definitions you need. You cannot just define terms, and expect that they'll be useful in general. That's like expecting a tool picked from your toolbox at random to be applicable to a particular home repair job you're trying to do. What issues are you trying to assess? In what games? Or, do you figure somehow your non-purpose-built definitions will be good for all issues in all games? Define yourself a hammer, and every game will look like a nail!

In the world of physics, I might point you to coordinate systems - your choice of system can dramatically simplify, or dramatically complicate, a job you are trying to do. Any flat three dimensional space could be described with spherical coordinates, or rectangular coordinates. Writing down the motion of our local planets in, say, Earth-centered rectangular coordinates is insanely difficult. Doing it in Sol-centered spherical coordinates is far easier. Meanwhile, you'd likely not use spherical coordinates to describe the addition you'd like to build onto your home to the contractor. But it is still just a flat 3D space we are talking about.

Case in point: Forge Theory and the 1999 WotC survey give us two differing perspectives on games and gamers. Different language, defining different things, but both looking at the same phenomena.

Pick the job first, then pick the tools, not the other way around.

 

[Bedrockgames]

But, again, we're back to duelling anecdotes. "Many player", "many tables", "lots of people", who knows how many these actually are? Is the Charops board at the WOTC site indicative of how the mainstream player plays D&D? I don't know and neither do you. Voices of what fans? Fans who post on websites like En World? Good grief, we've seen poll after poll where the average age of respondents on EN World is about a decade or two older than the average D&D player. I mean, the average age of a Paizo Dragon reader was about 22 - at least according to their own magazine poll done a few years back. The average age here is darn near 40.

So, what's the truth here? Are gnomes a beloved element of D&D, or a minor element that got blown out of proportion? I don't know. And, again, neither do you.
.

Sure but this is the nature of designing for a niche hobby. Concrete data is not widely available and we have to base much of what we do on things like 1) direct customer feedback, 2) what we see and expect at our own table, 3) what we see online and what we see at other tables, 4) sales, and 5) what little data is out there.

Unless a designer has the pocket book of WOTC, in depth market research is unlikely. And when people do conduct in depth market research they usually keep the useful information to themselves (at least in gaming).

So on the one hand, yes this is all anecdotal based on peoples experience, but on the other hand there isn't much more than that to truly go on.

I keep seeing you talk about having categorizations and analytical tools. Those sound great but to make useful tools you need real data and I don't think many of the models people have proposed have enough of that. And I don't think us constructing a definition of RPG here in this forum based on the arguments you, I or anyone else puts forward, is going to do us much good. So far all I have seen are definitions that narrow the hobby in a bad way. At worst I've seen definitions that try to sneak in one play style over others. think an honest definition simply describes what RPG means to people who play such games and identify as such players. The best way for us to do that is share our different experiences of what RPG means at the tables we play at.

 

[Bedrockgames]

As far as what the point of categorisation is, well, it provides tools in order to assess issues with a game. @Profislaes talks about Vampire, and I'm assuming OWoD here. Now, was original Vampire a story game or a traditional RPG? It billed itself as more of a story game, but, mechanically, it was pretty much stock standard trad RPG. And, IMO, therein lie the problems with the system. As a trad game, it lacked the rigourous math that trad RPG's need. It was ludicrously easy to break VtM during chargen. You almost had to actively try to not break the system, it was so easy to break. But, as a story game, it lacked all the elements that story games need - the devolution of power and authority over the game from the DM (or Storyteller in this case) to the players. It was too much of a traditional game to really work very well as a story game.
.

Tools and Categories are just models when it comes to game design and they can blind us to things as well as help us. There are models for all sorts of things in this world and while frameworks of understanding are helpful they usually have a downside too. If you cut the world up in to four groups, you only see things in terms of those four groups. In a hobby made up of highly individual groupings of gamers with 4-7 individual people at each table, that can be a problem. I think this is why for example, highly focused games tend to be niche. Most tables tend to be (in my experience) a sloppy mixture of styles, tastes and motivations. And many individual gamers themselves are a blend of styles, tastes and motivations. When you start establishing categories and definitions in conversations like this one, it can be very difficult to fit them to real people and groups. This is why I have pretty much abandoned the things I've picked up on the internet in terms of how I see gaming. It just never really aligns with the reality.

I think Vampire and the Forge is an example though of how "categories" and "tools" can create blindspots. Sure Vampire billed itself as a storytelling game (though it is important to understand they in no way meant this at all like people at the forge do when they say story game). And yes some people felt the system didn't live up to the hype in the text. On the other hand there are lots and lots of people who love white wolf games and believe fully in the storyteller concept. It might not of worked for you, and it might not have worked for me (probably for different reasons) but I know for a fact there is a huge community of people (probably bigger than the community of people you or I belong to) who think it is the best thing in the world. I think it is odd to hold up vampire as a failure of design when it was the first game to ever truly give D&D a run for its money before Pathfinder (and pathfinder is really just D&D). In hindsight, some of what they did seems a little odd, but at the time it worked and it converted a lot of people from D&D to Vampire.

That said, I don't want to take away from the fact that something productive did come out of that discussion. Vampire did upset some players. Some took this and made things like story games, others took this and thought more in terms of character agency and immersion. But still in my experience, the majority of gamers were not at all concerned with this discussion. If they were I don't think things like adventure paths would be so popular. For all of our complaining about railroading or people complaining about mechanics not producing story, people still very much play games like D&D and Pathfinder the way they've been played for years. A few concepts from both camps have been brought in here or there, but very, very lightly I think. Still I think there is a danger in reading the success of Vampire from our small online enclaves and the gaming philosophies they produce.

So I think more than models and definitions (particularly definitions because SOOOO often I see them used to establish the primacy of one style over others), we would do better to just game and learn from the tables we play at. That is limited. But it is real. It isn't abstract like these discussions. I can be persuaded by a good argument online that GMs should always do X or games should always do Y but 99% of the time, it doesn't pan out at my actual table in my experience. At the end of the day I am there to make sure people at the table have a good time. So I find it much more helpful to listen to the table than well constructed arguments about definitions and models.

 

[prosfilaes]

Are gnomes a beloved element of D&D, or a minor element that got blown out of proportion?

That's not an objective question. It doesn't matter how much data you could have, you could redirect the budget of the NSA, FBI and CIA to surveilling gamers, wiretapping their houses, installing cameras over their gaming tables, and analyzing the data, and you still couldn't answer that question. I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to get some counts of how many people are playing gnomes, even if they're rough and partial, or counts on sales of gnome orientated books versus elf orientated books.

As a trad game, it lacked the rigourous math that trad RPG's need. It was ludicrously easy to break VtM during chargen. You almost had to actively try to not break the system, it was so easy to break.

I don't know what means coming from the text of the game. You have to study how players make characters to know that. You'd have to know what power meant in game. One argument about wizards vs. fighters in D&D I saw here recently said that AD&D 1 was balanced because the hoards of hirelings protected the wizard at low levels and empowered the fighter at high levels. That doesn't mean anything until you study how people played the game, whether they played it with those types of hirelings.

So, you wound up with a game that looked like an R rated Supers game.

I believe that was sometimes true. I also believe it was sometimes not true, and I know that without looking at how people actually play it, you can't tell the difference. It's easy to play D&D as R rated Supers; how many people do? You can't tell without looking at how people play the game.

Having the categorisation and analytical tools that categorisation brings to the table means that you can look at a game and judge it's flaws and good bits much better than if you treat each game as a unique item with no relationship to other games.

What flaws? That's like looking at an airplane engine and talking about judging its flaws while refusing to put it in a windtunnel or on an airplane. And that's something that can theoretically be simulated, unlike human behavior.

 

[Hussar]

Here's some wood to build the frame of a house. And a pipe wrench. Go!

I have noted, several times, that you need to be more specific about the goal before you figure out what definitions you need. You cannot just define terms, and expect that they'll be useful in general. That's like expecting a tool picked from your toolbox at random to be applicable to a particular home repair job you're trying to do. What issues are you trying to assess? In what games? Or, do you figure somehow your non-purpose-built definitions will be good for all issues in all games? Define yourself a hammer, and every game will look like a nail!

In the world of physics, I might point you to coordinate systems - your choice of system can dramatically simplify, or dramatically complicate, a job you are trying to do. Any flat three dimensional space could be described with spherical coordinates, or rectangular coordinates. Writing down the motion of our local planets in, say, Earth-centered rectangular coordinates is insanely difficult. Doing it in Sol-centered spherical coordinates is far easier. Meanwhile, you'd likely not use spherical coordinates to describe the addition you'd like to build onto your home to the contractor. But it is still just a flat 3D space we are talking about.

Case in point: Forge Theory and the 1999 WotC survey give us two differing perspectives on games and gamers. Different language, defining different things, but both looking at the same phenomena.

Pick the job first, then pick the tools, not the other way around.

But your analogy falls flat. Genre classification isn't as specific as a pipe wrench. It would be closer to, "You want to build a house? What kind of house do you want to build?" Without classifications, you can't ask that question. You can't ask, "Do you want a log house, or a split level or a back split or a three storey house or what? "

I can say, "I want to design a game". The obvious question here is, "What kind of game is it?" Without genre classification, all you get are things like, "Well, it's kinda like A, not like B and C is right out the window". Same goes for "I want to play a game". What kind of game do you want to play? What kinds of games do you enjoy? Do you enjoy games like X or games like Y? Which is where your genre conventions come into play.

That's why your physics analogy also falls flat. You are applying a mathematical model to genre. Good grief, genre is never that specific. It's porous and there are all sorts of things bleeding over from one edge to the other. That sort of thing usually doesn't happen in physics until you get into the really wonky stuff.

That's like looking at an airplane engine and talking about judging its flaws while refusing to put it in a windtunnel or on an airplane. And that's something that can theoretically be simulated, unlike human behavior.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...Illusion-of-Game-Balance/page41#ixzz3HVJrXTXO

And yet, we do that all the time. In the design phase, you can exclude all sorts of designs long before you get to the wind tunnel. You certainly don't need to build a working model to tell that some designs are flawed. A steam engine won't work, for example, to fly an airplane (at least, not easily) and we can reject steam power for airplanes. We can look at the design of an engine and know, fairly well, how much thrust that engine will produce and know, while still in the drawing on paper (or computer screen) that an engine might not be powerful enough or too powerful for a particular air frame.

All of this we know because we have all sorts of theoretical models for how engines work.

After forty years, tens of thousands of hours of play time, hundreds of thousands of players, why can't we start building theoretical models for RPG's? I don't need to sit a group down and play test to know that a game that uses farting for a random generator is likely not going to work. Why can we not look at the body of work that is out there and not create genres for that body of work?

 

[prosfilaes]

After forty years, tens of thousands of hours of play time, hundreds of thousands of players, why can't we start building theoretical models for RPG's? I don't need to sit a group down and play test to know that a game that uses farting for a random generator is likely not going to work. Why can we not look at the body of work that is out there and not create genres for that body of work?

Err...

But, again, we're back to duelling anecdotes. "Many player", "many tables", "lots of people", who knows how many these actually are? Is the Charops board at the WOTC site indicative of how the mainstream player plays D&D? I don't know and neither do you.

If we don't know how the mainstream player plays the most common game on the market, how on Earth are we going to build a theoretical model of how a game acts in play?

 

[Bedrockgames]

After forty years, tens of thousands of hours of play time, hundreds of thousands of players, why can't we start building theoretical models for RPG's? I don't need to sit a group down and play test to know that a game that uses farting for a random generator is likely not going to work. Why can we not look at the body of work that is out there and not create genres for that body of work?

You absolutely can if you want, but people don't have to accept your model or your definitions if they fail to reflect their experience at the table. You yourself point out we know very very little of actual play (we don't know how much char-op boards reflect widespread use at real tables for instance). I don't know what basis there is here for a working model of RPGs (and I personally haven't seen one that I have found useful for design or for play). My concern with models and definitions is they so often seem to be about getting the hobby where folks would like to see it of (don't like min-maxing? make a model of RPGs that excludes that as a valid style of play. don't like story? make a model of roleplaying where story is the antithesis of roleplaying). We can do the same with definitions. Once again this is exactly what Wick is trying to do. Clearly he favors some kind of RP-heavy campaign and is redefining RPG to exclude groups that play differently than him (even though I think most of us know a huge chunk of people play the way he defines as not roleplaying). What is worse, he also clearly doesn't have much love for D&D and so he uses definitions to claim it isn't an RPG---which is an insane claim to make). Stuff like this is exactly why folks are so wary of models and people trying to control definitions in the hobby.

What I do know is players are pretty diverse and to get a game off the ground you need to please 4-7 people at the same time. Give me a model that allows me to do that, to sell lots of books and make lots of gamers happy, and I would happily use it.

 

[Janx]

What do we call Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea today?

I've forked a bit. I think you missed my point though.

In the 21st century, a story written now, about a guy captaining a star ship is Science Fiction

In the 24th century, a story written then, about a guy captaining a star ship is just contemporary fiction.

 

[Hussar]

Err...



If we don't know how the mainstream player plays the most common game on the market, how on Earth are we going to build a theoretical model of how a game acts in play?

Why would you claim we don't know this? Or are you now claiming that players who play entirely in Pawn stance, not assuming any roll at the table are the mainstream of play?

I'd say we have a pretty decent idea how the mainstream of players play. But, even without knowing how the game is being played at a given table, we should still be able to look at the rules themselves and figure out what the game is about.

Again, you are going in a very strange direction here. Why would you insist on including "how we play the game" in a definition of game genre? Why can't we simply look at the game itself?

I don't care how people are playing the game. It's pretty hard to know that. I care about what the game says it's trying to do.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't care how people are playing the game. It's pretty hard to know that. I care about what the game says it's trying to do.

That is fine, but it is the opposite of what I am concerned with. I care what people are doing. Certainly what the rules say are important too, but they cannot be looked at separate from how they are being used in my opinion if the goal is to improve design. Looking at just the text can lead you to conclude that something is imbalanced or flawed but then you see how it is used at the table and you realize it isn't a problem for 90% of people, or again looking at the text alone you might conclude a mechanic is perfectly designed for a particular goal, then you realize when you talk to people they have a lot of trouble implementing it.