D&D General RPG Theory and D&D...and that WotC Survey

[Blue]

Just like language is living, and in the US you can say "podium" and mean lectern as opposed to what the lectern is on, so do game description terms get picked up and morph with usage. (cough*Hit Dice*cough)

Reading the original articles about GNS is quite interesting from a historic point of view, but from a practical point of view the words mean what they have popularly come to mean. And that involves waves of usage from people who have heard about them second hand, third hand, and so forth.

So if I talk about 13th Age's recovery mechanism being undocked from characters sleeping, and someone calls that "too gamist for their tastes", gamist in this example is more about what that word has come to mean in popular usage rather than a callback to the meaning in the first presentation.

It's interesting from a historical perspective where these terms came from, but could cause miscommunication to use them in those specific aspects when the majority of those reading the terms will understand them as they are commonly used now.

 

[Reynard]

I think there’s an interesting idea here in using the wargame concept of strategy vs. tactics as an analogy for the interplay between long-term narrative vs. immediate character interaction.

That is interesting. I might be inclined to suggest that while these two things CAN be related, they don't HAVE to be related. If you have a one shot, for example, you can have a high degree of immediate character interaction with next to no long term narrative. Similarly, in a megadungeon campaign with high PC death rates you might have a long term narrative independent of immediate character interaction. That isn't necessarily a refutation. I am sure there are wargame models that fit with that paradigm.

 

[overgeeked]

The video game industry absolutely is not younger than tabletop RPGs. Pong was mass marketed in 1972 but the first electronic games were developed in the 1950s. By the early 1960s university systems were being regularly used for games. When D&D arrived in 1974 it was so quickly picked up and adapted to computer gaming (again, largely at universities) because the infrastructure and appetite was already there.

It all depends on where you draw the line and how you define these things. You can trace all RPGs back to D&D, that to Arneson’s Blackmoor, that to Wesley’s Braunstein, and on back to early 19th century Kriegsspiel if you are so inclined. Without a working definition of RPGs we can’t really make a comparison. Whereas video games have a clear definition and a clear starting point, the invention of computers. Not so much with RPGs.

 

[overgeeked]

That is interesting. I might be inclined to suggest that while these two things CAN be related, they don't HAVE to be related. If you have a one shot, for example, you can have a high degree of immediate character interaction with next to no long term narrative. Similarly, in a megadungeon campaign with high PC death rates you might have a long term narrative independent of immediate character interaction. That isn't necessarily a refutation. I am sure there are wargame models that fit with that paradigm.

In wargames it would be a skirmish/battle vs a campaign. You fight the skirmish/battle to win some immediate objective whereas a campaign is made up of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of skirmishes/battles, played or unplayed, where the objectives are much bigger and more long-term. To secure the planet (campaign) you first need to secure these seven key points and hold them (each at least one skirmish/battle each).

 

[Helldritch]

Seeing as it's a survey about D&D done by a company attenpting at the time to redesign D&D, I think it's fair to allow them to assume a D&D-like structure.

Or data manipulation.

For example, all survey responses from people over a certain age (35, I think) were tossed*; meaning most of those who had started in the early days had no voice in the data.

This makes the results and conclusions drawn from the survey, in my view anyway, highly suspect.

* - this is noted in Dancey's report, a copy of which @Morrus has booting around somewhere in here. EDIT stored under the "Features" dropdown at the top of this or any page, it's the second option.

I am fully on your side here. At one time I was answering all surveys and in some I was going very deep into what I would like to see. But as the game evolves, I get the distinct feeling that my voice does not matter one IOTA simply because I am no longer the target audience. Or at least, I feel that I am no longer a target audience...

 

[Bacon Bits]

I find it rather ridiculous the claim from the end of the article that bias has been removed. The questions entirely focused on game structures that are like D&D, with some pretty hefty assumptions built in

I'm not sure you understood that statement. Sean wrote, "Unlike some of the discussions which rage from time to time about the nature of game design paradigms, the above information was extracted from general market research data that had as much bias as possible removed."

So he's not claiming it's without any bias. Quite the opposite. He's just saying it's actually had some control for bias, whereas anything else was barely above speculation and rumor and anecdote.

Now, yes, the research study was just done on D&D players. WotC just bought TSR, so it makes sense that they study who their customers are and what they want, especially because TSR had absolutely no information at all. Which is kinda why they imploded.

However, as far as I'm aware, it remains still the largest professional market research ever done on the TTRPG industry that we have any information about. In spite of its flaws and age, it's still the best thing we really have.

I don't even see where in their model someone that enjoys/ prefers PbtA games would fit -- there's no category that fits at all.

I don't understand. Are you claiming that PbtA players don't fall on a strategic-tactial axis or that they don't fall on a story-combat axis? Or that there are zero PbtA players who could be Thinkers, Power Gamers, Storytellers, Character Actors, or generalists?

Like I get that PbtA doesn't have a lot of mechanical tactics, but you can still be a tactically minded player in the typically very combat focused Dungeon World. A player can still interact with a PbtA scene tactically.

Or are you just not happy that a study done in 1999 on D&D didn't account for a 2010 game system? I don't think that's seriously what you mean, but you kind of skipped the part where you explained it.

 

[overgeeked]

It is odd to note how the definition of power gamer has changed over the years. The definition given under the tag “thinker” is how most people define power gamer now. And their “power gamer” is what we’d call murder hobos.

 

[Lanefan]

Just like language is living, and in the US you can say "podium" and mean lectern as opposed to what the lectern is on, so do game description terms get picked up and morph with usage. (cough*Hit Dice*cough)

Reading the original articles about GNS is quite interesting from a historic point of view, but from a practical point of view the words mean what they have popularly come to mean. And that involves waves of usage from people who have heard about them second hand, third hand, and so forth.

So if I talk about 13th Age's recovery mechanism being undocked from characters sleeping, and someone calls that "too gamist for their tastes", gamist in this example is more about what that word has come to mean in popular usage rather than a callback to the meaning in the first presentation.

It's interesting from a historical perspective where these terms came from, but could cause miscommunication to use them in those specific aspects when the majority of those reading the terms will understand them as they are commonly used now.

Never mind that the term "gamist" was, at least around these parts, informally being used as an opposite to [we didn't have a term for it then, but it's called simulationism now] years before any of the GNS stuff saw the light of day.

 

[Lanefan]

However, as far as I'm aware, it remains still the largest professional market research ever done on the TTRPG industry that we have any information about. In spite of its flaws and age, it's still the best thing we really have.

A sad commentary in and of itself, to quote Jack Sparrow.

 

[Lanefan]

Sure, but that's hardly bias free.

Well, there's no bias (in that regard at least) if one sees the survey as only asking about how people play D&D specifically rather than how they play whatever RPG(s) they happen to be playing at the time.

I don't, for example, think they cared overly much how people were playing Vampire; as that wasn't the game they were trying to redesign.

And can anyone explain to me how I ended up in the position of defending this awful survey?!?