Why Jargon is Bad, and Some Modern Resources for RPG Theory

[Ovinomancer]

Mmmmmm, I kind of both agree and disagree at the same time... There's usually an instigator, someone who acts as the 'driver' in these sorts of things, and having a 'DM' who can put together and be in charge of the lion's share of the experience works pretty well with that paradigm. OTOH I don't disagree with you in terms of one way being 'more natural' in a conceptual sense. Its also partly a question of how the rest of society tends to work. Your time is organized by a manager, a teacher, a parent, etc. throughout most organized activities, certainly when talking about younger people.

You disagree that people who don't have a set idea about how RPGs work tend to pick up on non-D&D RPGs pretty easily? Because the rest of this seems to be talking about something else, and I'm not following.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You disagree that people who don't have a set idea about how RPGs work tend to pick up on non-D&D RPGs pretty easily? Because the rest of this seems to be talking about something else, and I'm not following.

I'm saying there are logical reasons why the sort of play that is common in D&D games tends to happen, and its not just 'RPG tradition'. OTOH I agree that this doesn't make it 'the most natural way' particularly, just one that arises fairly easily.

 

[niklinna]

I'm saying there are logical reasons why the sort of play that is common in D&D games tends to happen, and its not just 'RPG tradition'. OTOH I agree that this doesn't make it 'the most natural way' particularly, just one that arises fairly easily.

Ah, tradition.

 

[pemerton]

you don’t need anything that’s not in the book. If you’ve played an RPG before you can handle CD just fine without any extra procedures. If you want them, go ahead. But they’re not required.

This claim appears contradictory: clearly if the game relies upon having prior knowledge of how to use it, it does need something that isn't in the book.

Here are the passages where the author recognises that the book is incomplete (from p 4):

Unanswered Questions
Who decides when to roll Insanity? Who decides when it’s interesting to know how well you do something? Who decides when something disturbs your PC? Who decides whether you might fail?

Decide the answers with your group. Make reasonable assumptions. For example, some groups will let the Keeper decide everything. Others will share the decisions.

These rules are designed to play prewritten scenarios, run by a Keeper. If you try improvising scenarios or playing without a Keeper, let me know.​

Additional elements of incompleteness which are not called out, but are fairly clear, follow from p 2:

To know how well you do at something, roll: . . .

For example: you’re escaping from the window of an Innsmouth hotel. On a 1, you crash on an adjoining roof, attracting the attention of everyone around. On a 4, you land
quietly on the roof, but leave traces for pursuers to follow. On a 6, you escape quietly, while your pursers continue searching the hotel.​

There's no explanation of how to work out what the consequences are of doing something poorly (the example helps a bit, but leaves many questions unanswered, starting with "who decides who is around, and how they respond to having their attention attracted?"). It's a little bit clearer on dong something well, but not complete: what happens, for instance, if you leave traces?

Additional principles have to be brought in to answer those questions.

 

[Garthanos]

I saw them sold at a local gaming shop originally, I do not know what attracted my attention to them though they were not particularly visually impressive.

I remember what I noticed I noticed Lee Gold's name on the cover she had done a Samura rpg and I got curious.

i think this was it... Land of the Rising Sun (role-playing game) - Wikipedia

 

[Campbell]

Ah, tradition.

Not just tradition. Familiarity.

Linear, play through someone else's story type play feel comfortable to just about anyone who has ever played a video game.
That being said it creates a terrible load on most new GMs (especially the way we do it).

What is not true whatsoever is that you graduate to other sorts of play or that they are fundamentally more difficult to learn. Often the opposite is true. Playing more traditional games often makes learning other sorts of roleplaying games more difficult and learning the intricacies of a 500 page + game is fairly daunting.

 

[payn]

Ah, tradition.

 

[pemerton]

Exactly, but there seems to be a lack of understanding as to exactly HOW DIFFERENT the state of thought on RPGs is today than it was in 1974 (or '84, '94, etc.).

<snip>

I would not dismiss Evan Torner entirely out of hand. I would just say that it doesn't seem to be part of his agenda to actually see the huge gains in terms of effectiveness of analytical methods, which has completely revolutionized the views of game designers to the point where the vast majority of original RPG output today is both highly original and was pervasively influenced by those methods and the thinking behind them. If it was just "more of the same", then why the revolution in RPG design? I mean, Blades in the Dark would literally have been impossible to conceive of as an RPG in 1990. Not the most talented RPG designers and forward thinking members of the community yet grasped the conceptual framework that was necessary to have in mind in order to design that game. That's not repeating yourself!

I've got no particular view on Torner's work, which I haven't read. But I agree with your basic point.

I think that the sociology of gameplay isn't necessarily relevant to technical questions of game design: for instance, it seems to be within the scope of plausible results from sociological research into gameplay that playing games serves a similar function in American urban communities today as it did thirty years ago. (I'm not saying that's true, or even the most plausible conclusion on the question; just that it doesn't seem so implausible as to be fairly obviously false, or a result that would be greeted with incredulity.) But even if such a thing were true, that wouldn't tell us anything about game design and whether or not it's developed in some way.

The point of a system like Apocalypse World or Blades in the Dark, relative to D&D, isn't to change the social system within which gameplay occurs. Nor to change the fundamental reasons why people play games.

The same thing could be said about recipes. Good chefs are inventing new recipes all the time, but not with the goal of changing the basic social logic of food, eating, dining out, etc. That doesn't mean that no chef has ever developed anything new. Likewise for cinema: Citizen Kane didn't revolutionise the social logic of cinema - other inventions from outside the domain of film-making, perhaps most obviously television, have done that - but that doesn't mean it didn't make significant technical innovations within the domain of film-making.

I made a post in a similar vein to yours nearly a decade ago:

Lewis Pulsipher was a prominent contributor to White Dwarf in its early days. The following quotes are from his article in an early number of White Dwarf (my copy is in Best of White Dwarf vol 1, 1980):

D&D players can be divided into two groups, those who want to play the game as a game and those who want to play it as a fantasy novel . . . The escapists can be divided into those who prefer to be told a story by the referee, in effect, with themselves as protagonists, and those who like a silly, totally unbelievable game. . . In California, for example, this leads to referees who make up more than half of what happens, what is encountered and so on, as the game progresses rather than doing it beforehand. . . . [T]he player is a passive receptor, with little control over what happens. . .

<snip>

Gary Gygax has made it clear that D&D is a wargame, though the majority of players do not use it as such. . .

The referee [in a skill campaign] must think of himself as a friendly computer with discretion. Referee interference in the game must be reduced as much as possible

<snip>

Referees must resist the temptation to manipulate the players by changing the situation. Every time the referee manipulates the game on the basis of his omniscience, he reduces the element of skill. . .​

<snip>

It was around 1986, with original Oriental Adventures, that I started to discover a way of GMing in which the GM would make stuff up on the spot, while still allowing players the scope to make choices which are genuine in their consequences, thereby avoiding the railroading that Pulsipher warns against. (More than 15 years later I discovered that this approach to GMing had been refined and theorised by Ron Edwards and others at The Forge.)

It took time, experimentation, reflection and ultimately a particular group of designers to work out how to do this stuff. You mention Blades in the Dark, but I think the clearest technical realisation of it is Apocalypse World.

 

[pemerton]

I do think it is the most conceptually simple paradigm for people to understand.

There's usually an instigator, someone who acts as the 'driver' in these sorts of things, and having a 'DM' who can put together and be in charge of the lion's share of the experience works pretty well with that paradigm.

<snip.

Its also partly a question of how the rest of society tends to work. Your time is organized by a manager, a teacher, a parent, etc. throughout most organized activities, certainly when talking about younger people.

For non-GM-driven play, a big question is "who instigates, and how?"

That's why most RPGs designed for non-GM-driven play include elements of PC build that give players a reason to have their PCs do certain things. In AW, this set up the parameters for instigation phase is extended into the first session.

It's no coincidence that the play I stumbled into in the second half of the 80s (as per my self-quote just upthread) involved OA and then an all-thieves game. PCs in OA have instigations (families, martial arts masters, etc) built into them; and so do AD&D thieves (ie they want to thieve things!). If PCs don't bring any trajectory with them (and by default, AD&D PCs don't, Traveller PCs don't, RM PCs don't, CoC PCs don't, even Pendragon PCs don't) then getting non-GM-driven play moving will be hard!

 

[pemerton]

The framing does not matter, in the sense that, given a path, what motivates you to get to the path doesn't change the path itself. Whether you get on the water slide because you have been shamed into it by your little brother, or to escape from a loan shark's goons - the water slide goes down, regardless.

<snip>

Adventures have a shape, a topology. It can be a line. It can be a branching tree. It can be a web of multiply connected nodes, and so on. This topology does not have to be physical. An adventure (say, a mystery) can take place all in a single room, but the topology is of information. Clue A -> Clue B -> Clue C -> Proof D.

<snip>

The adventure isn't just a set of locations. If you have a linear adventure in which the PCs go through five linear rooms, and kill a dragon in the sixth, if they go to that location the next day, the dragon's going to be dead. So, clearly the next day isn't the same adventure, even if it is the same location.

Where does the "topology" of an adventure come from, if not the framing of scenes?

It's not from the physical structure of the book. It's not from the map ("the adventure is not just a set of locations"); and of course not all adventures have maps. (The Green Knight doesn't have a map. The Crimson Bull doesn't have a map, and as I think I already posted, I reckon it's a candidate to be one of the best published adventures of all time.)

I'm reaching the conclusion that it is from the instructions to the users.

I'm also reaching the conclusion that linearity is a relatively uninteresting property of adventures. Node-based design produces non-linear adventures that nevertheless seem to me to be railroads. The Green Knight is a linear adventure, yet is not a railroad.