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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5728455" data-attributes="member: 2205">But I think this is wrong.  You're right in pointing out that it was easier to integrate new players into the game, but not in implying that the game itself is easier to pick up and understand.  And I also firmly believe that there was a huge influx in the market that came with those tastes hard-coded already--simply put, they wouldn't have been very interested in adopting the very gamist, all we do is explore the dungeon type games that were more common in the 70s, and which was the paradigm Gygax played by and no doubt assumed.  In other words, the hobby doesn't grow, or even sustain itself just based on the ease of integrating new players into any particular game if it's not a game that they're interested in being integrated into, or playing longterm.Of course, you could disagree with me that that's what players want--I only point this out because I'm the kind of player who would never have become a gamer under that older paradigm.  I might have tried it, but I wouldn't have been captivated enough by it to become a customer.  For that matter, almost everyone I've gamed with in my entire career is more or less the same.  Yeah, I know, that's just my anecdote and somebody else could have had the exact opposite experience.I think it isn't true also.  But I also believe you set up a little bit of a false dichotomy below, which I'll get to in a moment.  There's more than one way to run a "story first" feel game, and it's not a dichotomy between preplotted "adventure paths" and completely plotless dungeoncrawls.  There's a much more diverse suite of options for how to run a game.Actually, no, that isn't true.  Preplotting is not at all a condition of a "story first" paradigm.  Granted, many actual games end up working out that way.  But they don't have to.  It's not the only method to achieve the "story first" feel, either now or in the 80s and 90s either one.I'm not sure what you mean by "story game" and based on the last comment there, I'm not sure I have any idea what an example of such a "story game" might be.  For the record, I run D&D games, and my houserules are to get the tone and setting I want, not the play experience in terms of "story first" or anything else.  And I've been running games the same way since the 80s--although in the mid-80s I tired of D&D and played other games, like Top Secret, Call of Cthulhu, MERP, and later Werewolf and Alternity a bit, and even some homebrew systems and esoteric games like The Window.  And I certainly believe my games have a "story first" feel.  And they definately are not pre-plotted arcs.  I rarely have the foggiest idea what the next session is going to entail, although I do usually have a vague plan at least for the session I'm in the middle of running while I run.I will admit that this is something my games don't handle all that well without starting to feel silly.  And I rarely am on the lookout for new gamers at my table.  And my ideal number of players is much smaller than those gigantic Gygaxian dungeoncrawls used to do.Is that really true?  It seems to me that a lot of other scenarios would make "more sense" to new GMs.  After all, how much are they exposed to the concept of the dungeoncrawl in the source material that they're probably used to before running?  Plus, dungeoncrawls are actually mechanically fairly challenging--you have to know how to run all kinds of different monsters.  You have to deal with all kinds of traps and challenges and puzzles.  You need to be well organized and juggle a lot of information during the session.I think a lot of other scenarios would be much more intuitive as well as less mechanically challenging (i.e., therefore easier for new GMs to comprehend and run without any prior experience) than dungeoncrawling.Certainly a challenge!  Probably the best way would be to focus on the session as a discrete unit of play.  The "story first" feel perhaps better meets this goal not by emulating fantasy novels nearly so much as it emulates fantasy short stories, or focuses on the session as if it were an episode of an ensemble cast TV show, with a fair bit of conclusive finality of sorts to the end of each session.  A much more episodic approach, I guessOf course, the question is, do gamers who prefer the "story first" style want episodic play, or are they actively searching for long-term type games--more The Lord of the Rings rather than a fantasy version of The A-Team or Hawaii 5-O.  I think here is where we get to the real dichotomy.  The hobby could grow easier if people didn't have story first preferences, and could come and go into the hobby easier.  But people do have the story first preferences in large numbers, and the hobby can't grow if it doesn't appeal to the preferences of potential players.  There's been little support or discussion officially, or in print, or anywhere else, on how to run the game that focuses on this issue; how to run the game for different tastes, how to maintain group cohesion, etc.  It's a little too "meta" for most GMing advice chapters in most games I've read, but I think it's something that deserves some attention.  I believe publishers presume that most gamers either play the way that they play, or that they optimize around their own preferences.  I believe that a lot of gamers actually play suboptimal games because they don't know any better and it never occured to them that there might be another way of doing things.</blockquote>

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