NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8167142" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think your 'evolution' perspective is good. I mean, surely wargames came first, and then 'Free Kriegsspiel', which included open-ended refereed elements, and that idea was then incorporated into hobby TT wargaming sessions, resulting in the first gen RPGs, which all feature a centralized structure with the referee describing the scenario, arbitrating the action and rules, and then describing outcomes. So, yes, modern 'Story Game' RPGs, which are 2nd or maybe 3rd generation games obviously started with the central RPG concept that was present in Arneson's games and blended that with ideas from other spheres (theater perhaps). However, I think there's not as much space between the structures of play as some people propose. Role Play, and thus the centrality of the fiction, and of the narrative that spins out of the frame, act, arbitrate, frame loop is pretty much the same in Dungeon World, for example, as it would be in Holmes Basic, which is utterly classic early D&D. I agree that you could play Holmes Basic in 'pawn stance' and it works, whereas DW really won't, so they aren't identical, but they both produce the same basic result, which is a narrative description of characters in a fictional world depicting actions selected and described by game participants according to a process and rules structure with an open-ended character. I think that speaks to your kit-bashing point. I wouldn't use that term myself, because I think the process is more generative of new elements and often a lot less informal than just wiring stuff together until it 'works'. I think it is plain that modern Indy RPGs, regardless of where they fall on the techniques and rules structure side of things, incorporate a LOT of theory and analysis in order to produce robust, well-functioning systems. D&D itself I would describe as a 'kit bash'. I mean, it literally is an amalgam of Survival, Chainmail, and some structure taken from the Blackmoor and Great Kingdom wargame/Braunstien-like campaigns. There is obviously a bunch of novel stuff in it, and taken as a package it surely represents a qualitative step into a new paradigm, but I would say something like PbtA is vastly less of a 'kit bash' than that! DW deliberately and consciously emulates D&D in terms of taking a few elements and recontextualizing them (classes, races, ability scores, hit points, genre elements) but one should not mistake that for simply picking up found pieces and jimmying them together. Instead the designers went through a long process of analysis and creating a conceptual framework, from which they extracted principles. Those principles were then applied to construct a core framework of a '3rd generation RPG' (and if you look at Apocalypse World you will see that it owes only its general structure as an RPG to D&D, not any particular mechanics or other elements). Dungeon World might fool you because it goes back and picks up D&Disms DELIBERATELY and reworks them in the context of this new framework and principles. So it is an RPG, and it is on your spectrum, but it is not simply a few different mechanics glued together in a slightly different way, it is a whole different beast. Maybe not as big a qualitative step as D&D is from Chainmail, but still qualitatively different (though clearly there are '2nd generation RPGs' which did all these things before PbtA, it is just an example of the type).</blockquote>

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