System matters and free kriegsspiel

[Aldarc]

Do you enjoy searching the internet for recipes? What is your opinion/experience of using recipes specifically from non-professional food blogs?

Can we save time and skip this game to the pertinent point you want to make?

 

[overgeeked]

It does have guidelines for designing new characters, but not in the way most people expect. Characters are not created from a pool of points or options you pick. There are more detailed instructions, but you design the powersets that fit the character you want to play. Characters are not designed with balance in mind. Instead the game is designed so that if you are playing Ant Man you should have an impact even if Thor has a superior power set.

Right. The guidelines presented are basically “do what you think looks right” instead of “here are specific mechanics for creating balanced characters from a pool of points” as you see in many/most other games. It’s the “do whatever, man” approach to character creation. And this lead to endless arguments when it was new about whether this setup of character creation even counted as a system.

But, it still works because the game you play isn’t about who has a slightly better power set. Everyone can have an impact on the story because of how the mechanics work. Thor will have one extra die in his pools sometimes and maybe a higher die type when focused on strength-based tasks, but that character creation setup still works because the game is looser and not focused on balance. It’s focused on emulating the ebb and flow of superhero stories...not mechanical superiority. So the lack of strict character creation rules literally doesn’t matter to the game as played.

And that’s something people slowly learned over time as they played the game. The people who wanted strict character creation rules simply could not understand how it could possibly work because they were hung up on the character creation instead of just playing the game. But, because they couldn’t see past the lack of strict character creation rules, they missed out on a wonderful game.

A lot of things people in this thread are hung up on simply don’t matter in FKR games. You’re hung up on the lack on strict character creation rules and, as a result, you’re missing the game. It’ll be okay. It’ll work out. Just play the game.

 

[Campbell]

@Snarf Zagyg

I'm not really looking to have a conversation about the hobby as a market. I'm looking to have one about it as an artform that acknowledges the full diversity of play. I want to know what FKR adds to the design conversation in the same way I might ask what The Last of Us or Dark Souls added to the design conversation in the video game space even though Call of Duty, FIFA and Madden dominate actual play of the masses. Actually phone games do, but that's another conversation entirely. I'm posing an artistic question, rather than a marketing one.

I have some possible answers here for :

1. OSR
2. Forge descendants
3. Traditional games
4. Nordic LARP
5. Journaling Games

I just want some possible answers for FKR as well.

 

[overgeeked]

Can we save time and skip this game to the pertinent point you want to make?

Funny. That’s precisely the point I wanted to make. Most food blogs put this giant, pointless preamble about their great-grandmother’s knitted shawl and trip to Mexico City circa 1920...snore...in front of the actual recipe. I don’t need the preamble. Just gimme the recipe. Get to the point, right?

That’s how I see FKR games. They cut all the BS and get to the point. I don’t need 400 pages of crunch to tell me to emulate something. I can read, watch, engage with the media directly myself. When you cut to the chase, it’s a character in a tense situation throwing a randomizer to determine if they overcome the obstacle in front of them. Everything else is narration. The precise randomizer doesn’t matter. The precise modifiers to the randomizer don’t matter. The numbers on your sheet don’t matter. It’s all your great-grandmother’s knitted shawl hiding the recipe. Cut to the chase. Gimme the recipe.

You don’t need a 400 page book filled with numbers and charts. All you need is a setting, a character, and a randomizer. All you need to cook is the recipe, a kitchen, and ingredients. You don’t need the story about someone’s knitted shawl.

 

[overgeeked]

@Snarf Zagyg

I'm not really looking to have a conversation about the hobby as a market. I'm looking to have one about it as an artform that acknowledges the full diversity of play. I want to know what FKR adds to the design conversation in the same way I might ask what The Last of Us or Dark Souls added to the design conversation in the video game space even though Call of Duty, FIFA and Madden dominate actual play of the masses. Actually phone games do, but that's another conversation entirely. I'm posing an artistic question, rather than a marketing one.

I have some possible answers here for :

1. OSR
2. Forge descendants
3. Traditional games
4. Nordic LARP
5. Journaling Games

I just want some possible answers for FKR as well.

You’re framing the question in a way that precludes FKR from giving a satisfactory answer. You’re testing a fish by measuring its ability to climb a tree.

FKR seems to largely reject design as an end in itself. The design doesn’t matter, playing the game does. Play worlds, not rules. The world matters. The rules don’t.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Funny. That’s precisely the point I wanted to make. Most food blogs put this giant, pointless preamble about their great-grandmother’s knitted shawl and trip to Mexico City circa 1920...snore...in front of the actual recipe. I don’t need the preamble. Just gimme the recipe. Get to the point, right?

That’s how I see FKR games. They cut all the BS and get to the point. I don’t need 400 pages of crunch to tell me to emulate something. I can read, watch, engage with the media directly myself. When you cut to the chase, it’s a character in a tense situation throwing a randomizer to determine if they overcome the obstacle in front of them. Everything else is narration. The precise randomizer doesn’t matter. The precise modifiers to the randomizer don’t matter. The numbers on your sheet don’t matter. It’s all your great-grandmother’s knitted shawl hiding the recipe. Cut to the chase. Gimme the recipe.

You don’t need a 400 page book filled with numbers and charts. All you need is a setting, a character, and a randomizer. All you need to cook is the recipe, a kitchen, and ingredients. You don’t need the story about someone’s knitted shawl.

Okay, but you're including the recipe in the bits you don't need. We're not asking for the story, we're asking for how it actually works, in play, in the moment, and what controls or influences things. The answers we get are "fun" and "fiction," but this isn't any different from most other approaches to play. Where's the recipe?

 

[Ovinomancer]

You’re framing the question in a way that precludes FKR from giving a satisfactory answer. You’re testing a fish by measuring it’s ability to climb a tree.

FKR seems to largely reject design as an end in itself. The design doesn’t matter, playing the game does. Play worlds, not rules. The world matters. The rules don’t.

Design cannot not matter. FKR is game design. There's no avoiding it. Stating it's not design is like saying fish aren't matter.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Design cannot not matter. FKR is game design. There's no avoiding it. Stating it's not design is like saying fish aren't matter.

You’re framing the question in a way that precludes FKR from giving a satisfactory answer. You’re testing a fish by measuring it’s ability to climb a tree.

FKR seems to largely reject design as an end in itself. The design doesn’t matter, playing the game does. Play worlds, not rules. The world matters. The rules don’t.

To follow on this, I think you might be thinking that game design is about developing rules to play? That's part of it, but it's also the goals of play, the principles of play to support those goals, and the way you play. The rules are part of that third thing, but not all of it.

I'm an engineer. If you said that engineering design is just about specifying which screws hold a chair together and you'd rather just wing it with whatever you have at hand and works so you don't do design, I'd be very confused. Because just the idea of a chair is part of design -- what is it intended for, how will it be used, what shape does it need to be, how large, how strong, how pretty or utilitarian, how much can it weigh, how many do I need to make, how long will it last, how do we dispose of it, how does it need to be maintained. Screw specification is in there, as a part of how strong the chair needs to be and disposal and maintenance and even aesthetics, but that's not the entirety of design or even the barest fraction of how you design a chair.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

@Snarf Zagyg

I'm not really looking to have a conversation about the hobby as a market. I'm looking to have one about it as an artform that acknowledges the full diversity of play. I want to know what FKR adds to the design conversation in the same way I might ask what The Last of Us or Dark Souls added to the design conversation in the video game space even though Call of Duty, FIFA and Madden dominate actual play of the masses. Actually phone games do, but that's another conversation entirely. I'm posing an artistic question, rather than a marketing one.

I have some possible answers here for :

1. OSR
2. Forge descendants
3. Traditional games
4. Nordic LARP
5. Journaling Games

I just want some possible answers for FKR as well.

But that's just it. Not to reiterate what @overgeeked just said, but you're not asking the right question. And trust me, I get it. I really do- earlier in the thread I explained how it took me a year (really, I'm not exaggerating) to run my first diceless game eons ago because I just didn't get it. I couldn't wrap my head around it.

And it's the same here. You keep asking the same question about what this is bringing to the table in terms of design- which implies the rules. But that's roughly as helpful as asking, "What did Dogme 95 bring to special effects?" It's not just that the question isn't helpful, it's almost completely orthogonal to understanding.

And the reason is because the design (in terms of the rules) takes a backseat to the play. That might seem bass-ackwards to you, but that's how it works. This keeps getting reiterated by the same people who are trying it out, and the response always seems to be variations of, "What about the design? What about the rules?"

It's like someone trying to explain diceless games, and a person keeps asking, "Okay, but here's the thing. How do you play it without dice? I'm not trying to be difficult or anything, but ... there's no dice. So why don't you explain to me where the dice are?"

It's one of those Cool Hand Luke, failure to communicate, kind of things.

 

[Aldarc]

Funny. That’s precisely the point I wanted to make.

It has more to do with how I can spot bait for gotcha game when I see it.

Most food blogs put this giant, pointless preamble about their great-grandmother’s knitted shawl and trip to Mexico City circa 1920...snore...in front of the actual recipe. I don’t need the preamble. Just gimme the recipe. Get to the point, right?

Regardless of how I or anyone feels about those food blog preambles, there are reasons why they do that though that has to do with both intellectual copyright and search engine optimization.

When I normally look up recipes, I'm generally consulting cooking channels on YouTube that talk a bit more about the process. Written recipes tend to be fairly barebones and unhelpful. It's one reason why I have difficulties recreating some of my grandparents' recipes, because they leave a lot of details out. (Also some Southern ingredients are an absolute nightmare to track down in Austria. Finding the right corn meal in the US outside of the South is bad enough, but Austria? Ugh.)

That’s how I see FKR games. They cut all the BS and get to the point. I don’t need 400 pages of crunch to tell me to emulate something. I can read, watch, engage with the media directly myself. When you cut to the chase, it’s a character in a tense situation throwing a randomizer to determine if they overcome the obstacle in front of them. Everything else is narration. The precise randomizer doesn’t matter. The precise modifiers to the randomizer don’t matter. The numbers on your sheet don’t matter. It’s all your great-grandmother’s knitted shawl hiding the recipe. Cut to the chase. Gimme the recipe.

You don’t need a 400 page book filled with numbers and charts. All you need is a setting, a character, and a randomizer. All you need to cook is the recipe, a kitchen, and ingredients. You don’t need the story about someone’s knitted shawl.

Although I get the analogy you are trying to make, I unsurprisingly disagree with it. I think what you are mistakingly identifying as a food blog's "400 pages of crunch" is actually their "400 pages of fluff." The crunch is the recipe and preparation process itself. And just like with recipes, you can't put a copyright on game mechanics, hence the fluff. Also, I don't think this is entirely different from how many people approach a new RPG. They may skip the fluff and jump to the basic mechanics or character creation process.

Okay, but you're including the recipe in the bits you don't need. We're not asking for the story, we're asking for how it actually works, in play, in the moment, and what controls or influences things. The answers we get are "fun" and "fiction," but this isn't any different from most other approaches to play. Where's the recipe?

Ask Grandma.