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The nature of the GM role is going to vary from game to game. A survey of practices could be useful, especially if it includes discussions of why a particular practice would be used and cases when you’d want to include it. I would not want those to be put into taxonomies. Thanks for the...

When I read “runtime”, I’ve been mentally substituting “in play” in place of it. I agree that “runtime” is a notion that doesn’t really make sense for non-digital games, but it’s easy to devise a meaning that works. Alas, yes. I’m not a fan of the default assumptions of how things work in our...

I wasn’t even thinking of anything like that (and if that’s where @Thomas Shey was trying to go in his reply in post #283, then I apologize for my confusion). I was just thinking if your game is trying to be like a John Wick movie, but play navigating from the Continental Hotel street by street...

It depends. Some games have systems that produce events autonomously. I linked Boatmurdered earlier, which was a shared game of Dwarf Fortress that produced an amusing recap based on how the various players interacted with it. These kind of emergent stories are pretty different from what a...

I think there’s some missing context? I was responding to post #275, which had replied to my discussion in post #273 of using MDA to examine where a hypothetical game purporting to be full of action was having problems.

That could be one place to start. Another thing to consider might be whether the game is using zoom appropriately. Perhaps the game is spending too much time focusing on situations lacking any kind of action and needs to do a better job of putting characters into exciting situations, so the...

Sure. Being able to create your own VP-based encounters is useful. I generally like the VP subsystem. My question was more about how those instances played out in practice. I remember playing a 4e adventure once when we got to a skill challenge, and it felt pretty bad. We were supposed to clear...

I don’t think MDA (or DDE or other similar frameworks) will answer that directly. It’s a framework for reasoning about the process of designing a game. If a game is full of uninteresting play, and the dynamics suggest it should be full of action, then MDA would tell you to look at the mechanics...

The audience for the commentary is other designers and tinkerers. Games are complex systems, and understanding the thinking of a designer can be informative and illustrative. A few examples I’ve seen: WWN uses System Strain to let you be at full HP at the start of combat. This is how it...

That probably helps as well, though I believe Paizo has used VP-based subsystems in their adventures. I never ran pre-written adventures when I ran PF2, so I don’t know how they were operationalized there or how people received them. I used it once in my home campaign for a convince conflict...

I hadn’t really intended this conversation to take the direction that it did when I offhandedly mentioned MDA, but I appreciate that it happened and took the direction it did. In particular, it prompted me to rediscover the DDE paper, which I recall having liked more than MDA on its own before...

It makes me wonder if one of the issues with skill challenges is that they were presented as form of an existing dynamic (as “an encounter in which your skills … take center stage”). If they had been presented as a new dynamic (like how the VP subsystem is treated¹ in PF2), would they have been...

I don’t know how appropriate it would be for the DMG since it’s more of a designer’s tool or one for advanced tinkerers, but that would be better than it is now. Even just doing post mortems and retrospectives like you see done with other types of games would be an improvement.

MDA specifies what it means by mechanics. Insisting on a different definition doesn’t allow us to say anything useful about or using MDA anymore. If we want to use MDA as a framework, we have to use the structures it provides. We can call them other things (as DDE does), but the meanings are the...

Except that as noted in post #189, that’s the wrong answer. While I do want a number of traditional dynamics, I don’t want them all. I discuss some them in post #207. That is why I am so critical of taxonomical approaches. It leaves gaps into which possible designs can fall, leaving them with...

What I find useful are the parts that can be used analytically followed by ideas that can serve as a source of solutions to problems I have, especially if it provides context to explain what particular mechanics are trying to do. As I mentioned in post #211, I’d like to include a commentary with...

I assume you are referring to this article? Lantz isn’t challenging the framework itself. He’s pointing out issues with the terminology and how its usage is confusing. If that’s the only issue with using MDA with tabletop RPGs, then there’s no functional issue with it. I was expecting a...

Alas, quite a bit of discourse is of poor quality. However, I think I feel less down than you regarding RPG theory. There’s some poor stuff (particularly anything overly concerned with taxonomies), but I think there’s some that can be useful or provide insight, especially when they are...

GNS could be a source of aesthetics and dynamics. For example, there isn’t an aesthetic that really captures the nature of Story Now. You would need to supplement it with dynamics that correspond to PC protagonism (and other elements of SN depending on the nature of what you want such as whether...

I’ve rearranged things a bit because these seem related, but I think we are too. I view game design as fundamentally about engineering. You are creating something with a purpose (for play). There are a lot of ideas about how to do that well (and to understand how well you are doing it), which I...