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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7906214" data-attributes="member: 42582">No one is asserting that because they're art they're not technology. Industrial design is a real thing. A transistor radio can look attractive or look ugly. And the fact that it's a transistor imposes demands on the asethetics that are different from an older radio with valves.People are denying that they are technology because they aren't more-or-less function-oriented devices for achieving utilitarian ends. Throwing dice is a technique or, if you like, an instance of technology. Deciding whether it is good or bad that your game should tend to generate tied results on its dice throws is not about technology. It's about the aesthetics of play. One thing I like about the dice pool systems I've been playing in recent years (Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant) and about the narrower 2d6 range in Traveller is that they produce quite a few ties. In conjunction with some other adjudicative techniques (eg Let it Ride) this can be used to force the conflict into new unexpected fields.D&D used to have ties be fairly common in the context of initiative. WotC D&D eschews ties. I (and I assume [USER=4348]@GreyLord[/USER]) am denying that the move in D&D away from tied results is an instance of technological improvement. It's a difference in feel that (presumably) reflects a difference in taste and desired experience.How can one empirically measure whether individual or "side" initiative is better? Whether ties (for initiative or for anything else) are desirable or should be reduced/eliminated as much as possible?And if rules design really was comparable to technological advance, how come it peaked with Prince Valiant and then again, perhaps, with Apocalypse World, but with so many dips between and since? Or if those are not peaks, why not? Do you think this can be shown empirically?What about RPGs which don't feature worldbuilding or adventure storylines? The two I mentioned arguably fall into this camp. There are others which do also.Is it technological improvement, or not, to have worked out how to reliably use mechanical systems to produce shared fiction with no need for single-person authorship? And what should we make of systems which (like, in my play experience of it, Classic Traveller) which go a lot of the way there twenty to thirty years earlier? Are they nevertheless now obsolete like Model T Fords are? In what way is 1977 Traveller an obsolete RPG system?</blockquote>[/QUOTE]

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