EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
I apologize; I gave the impression that ALL one has to do is integrate one single superficial mechanic to duplicate an entire experience, and I agree that that is incorrect. You do need to consider the impacts at a wider level, and these things can become involved and cumbersome if you need to hit pitch-perfect matching of things, I totally agree on that too.
But the point wasn't to be pitch-perfect, or at least mine wasn't (whether or not that was the point of the thread at large). The point, for me, is that it's essentially impossible to, say, integrate the "bases" mechanic of baseball into fútbol, even WITH all that extra playtesting...because it has nothing whatsoever to map with. Or integrating the basketball concept of "travelling" into hockey; it's not just difficult, it's effectively not possible without genuinely creating an entirely new game that operates by genuinely different rules from either of its "parent" sports. But integrating, say, oyster sauce into my shrimp alfredo, some swing into my waltzes, or some action-adventure into my puzzle games? Not at all the same level of "well you have to reinvent from the ground up."
Yes, you absolutely SHOULD test! Just adding a different seasoning to a dish without considering other factors is not likely to produce a satisfying product, and that goes doubly for outright fusion cuisine where you're blending two dishes together. But fusion cuisine is everywhere, and some of it is really quite excellent....while fusion sports are basically only the province of comedy ("sportsball" jokes or silly fake sports "like zoozittacarzay, a roller-skate type of lacrosse and croquet!") Ditto games and novels that mashup genres, music that blends two or more distinct styles/cultures (some more successfully than others...), and artistic works that draw on distinct eras or movements. TTRPGs, like video games and cuisine, exist in a strange middle-ground where the tools and techniques and materials matter, but tend to be subservient to more abstract notions that can, at least some of the time, be integrated together into a product that truly respects all of its origins simultaneously.
I'm aware (well, I didn't know BitD stuff because I've never read it, but otherwise). But I don't see how (for example) it is equally a logical contradiction to combine basketball and fútbol, where the former sport specifically has a bunch of rules about touching the ball with your hands, and the latter has a bunch of rules for specifically NEVER touching the ball with your hands. Like, these aren't just distinct sets of behaviors that pursue some experience, they're legitimately rules that can't be combined without developing something entirely new.
I don't see an in-principle reason why a person couldn't, with some intuition and playtesting, generate a home game that either includes most of those rules with relatively light changes, or takes one of those systems and adds in new rules that, while not identical in function, accomplish meaningfully equivalent experience-level AND rules-level functions. E.g., having played Dogs in the Vineyard (well, sort of--DM adapted its rules to the Exalted setting), I could see a game that has "spells" with "Range, Duration, etc etc." that require some amount of wagering your dice pool in order to work in the first place, as a sort of "safe bet," just to spitball an idea. And, again, this absolutely requires playtesting to be sure it works consistently, but as a first-pass, "well we could try this," it doesn't sound anywhere NEAR as problematic as "let's add travelling rules to soccer" or "let's have rules for the 8-ball in tennis," where these things genuinely make no sense whatsoever.
I think this is a big deal. What is "physical" about "govern[ing] play interactions/collisions"? To me, for a TTRPG, those "interactions" and "collisions" are much closer to "abstract" than the vast majority of rules in a sport.
What examples of "sport blending" do you have? I honestly can't think of any, which is part of why this is sticking so hard for me, and why I have been making the examples I have. If you have some examples, I'd love to hear them, because that would force me to reconsider a pretty fundamental aspect of my argument.
Oh, I don't at all deny that refereeing is super important, and that that is an important similarity between TTRPGs and sports. My problem is more that a referee is expected to be impartial and, as much as possible, avoid any deviation from the rules unless inarguably necessary for the game to continue--indeed, that their adherence to those rules whenever possible is part of the "spirit of play" for a sport. By comparison, it's been a BFD in the D&D community lately that Rule Zero is all-important and that that absolute freedom should never be abridged for any reason, no matter how well-considered or articulate. (Even when it may do the game a disservice to do so, IMNSHO...)
Oh, gosh, no. Truly sorry for giving you that impression. I absolutely think system matters. That's why I think that taking the time to ask, "What parts of this system are truly necessary? What parts are optional, but really useful? What parts are both optional and not strictly important?" is such a good idea. Further, it's why I think that, if you have one or more people you expect to be dissatisfied with the current system, it's worth your time to consider what you can tweak (whether at the level of tone, of adjudication, or of the actual rules themselves) so that your system is more palatable to those players, without thereby becoming unpalatable to the players who like it already.
As I said, there may end up being bright lines--there may be things that just can't be compromised upon, without compromising (in the negative sense) what makes that style/system enjoyable for its fans. But I'm pretty inclined to think that any given mechanic is not actually a "load-bearing" one for its system. Some of them absolutely will (or at least should!) be. But, for example, I don't really think the initiative mechanic is load-bearing for any edition of D&D--hence why you see so many variations of the same thing, even if you only consider a single edition: Popcorn, side-by-side, freeform, elective, round-by-round...there are a lot of ways to do initiative. This tells me that, while some kind of "who goes now?" mechanic is important for D&D-as-it-stands, the specific details really aren't important and could easily be changed if doing so would improve the experience of some of your players. (I, for example, find re-rolling initiative every round incredibly tedious, and am thus very glad that my W20 Storyteller does not do that, even though the rules say you should.)
I'm....not sure. I do think it's less concrete than something like sport, because sport is tethered to specific bodily motions, specific physical tools, and (usually) specific locations. I do not think it is less impactful in any absolute sense. But I do think that specific instances are likely to be less impactful, in that (say) changing the rules for initiative (while still having something like it) is going to be a lot less impactful than changing the rules for....I dunno, the amount of points scored for a field goal in American football. Mostly because people actually do change the initiative rules a lot, certainly a lot more than changing the scoring rules of American football.
Perhaps the word "abstract" was incorrectly-chosen. @AbdulAlhazred used the word "intangible" earlier; that covers more or less the meaning I was going for.
To the best of my knowledge (admitting that my memory is poor), I have never heard of an example where someone took two sports as reasonably well-defined as "American football" and "hockey" (just for two random examples) and attempted to suture them together into a new sport. Whereas it is quite common in the various activities I've listed for people to attempt to suture together two completely different things and try to make it work. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it does. But you don't see people kicking hockey pucks into field goals...ever, as far as I'm aware.
The "wandering monsters" thing was obviously a bad idea, considering how many people have IMMEDIATELY jumped on how that's, like, the worst proposal ever™. Surely, though, the fact that we have a proliferation of initiative rules, or HP-regain rules (to use another "appears in almost every edition" example), or different approaches to the idea of "class" (race-as-class, different XP advancement rates, à la carte multiclassing, explicit vs implicit roles, etc.), demonstrates that there are numerous ways of doing effectively the same thing that, while possessing meaningful differences and context-specific nature, are amenable to revision and review in a way that basketball (where players must touch the ball with their hands, but not hold it overlong) and soccer (where only very specific players are even allowed to touch the ball with their hands) are not.
Wasn't the whole point of Dungeon World that its creators wanted to recapture how it felt to play their favorite early-edition D&D games? As far as I had understood it, that is why people compare DW to B/X (and World of Dungeons to Gygaxian 1e, AFAIK). Whether or not it mechanically manifests the same, the experience of play for the people who designed it is meaningfully how they remember enjoying early D&D. Memory is, of course, a funny and fickle thing, so perhaps Adam Koebel and Sage LaTorra have invented a game that resembles their memories only and not any part of early-edition D&D. If so, it at least seems to resemble the memories of other players too, which was the whole point anyway.
