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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 6418585" data-attributes="member: 85555">Tools and Categories are just models when it comes to game design and they can blind us to things as well as help us. There are models for all sorts of things in this world and while frameworks of understanding are helpful they usually have a downside too. If you cut the world up in to four groups, you only see things in terms of those four groups. In a hobby made up of highly individual groupings of gamers with 4-7 individual people at each table, that can be a problem. I think this is why for example, highly focused games tend to be niche. Most tables tend to be (in my experience) a sloppy mixture of styles, tastes and motivations. And many individual gamers themselves are a blend of styles, tastes and motivations. When you start establishing categories and definitions in conversations like this one, it can be very difficult to fit them to real people and groups. This is why I have pretty much abandoned the things I've picked up on the internet in terms of how I see gaming. It just never really aligns with the reality. I think Vampire and the Forge is an example though of how "categories" and "tools" can create blindspots. Sure Vampire billed itself as a storytelling game (though it is important to understand they in no way meant this at all like people at the forge do when they say story game). And yes some people felt the system didn't live up to the hype in the text. On the other hand there are lots and lots of people who love white wolf games and believe fully in the storyteller concept. It might not of worked for you, and it might not have worked for me (probably for different reasons) but I know for a fact there is a huge community of people (probably bigger than the community of people you or I belong to) who think it is the best thing in the world. I think it is odd to hold up vampire as a failure of design when it was the first game to ever truly give D&D a run for its money before Pathfinder (and pathfinder is really just D&D). In hindsight, some of what they did seems a little odd, but at the time it worked and it converted a lot of people from D&D to Vampire. That said, I don't want to take away from the fact that something productive did come out of that discussion. Vampire did upset some players. Some took this and made things like story games, others took this and thought more in terms of character agency and immersion. But still in my experience, the majority of gamers were not at all concerned with this discussion. If they were I don't think things like adventure paths would be so popular. For all of our complaining about railroading or people complaining about mechanics not producing story, people still very much play games like D&D and Pathfinder the way they've been played for years. A few concepts from both camps have been brought in here or there, but very, very lightly I think. Still I think there is a danger in reading the success of Vampire from our small online enclaves and the gaming philosophies they produce.So I think more than models and definitions (particularly definitions because SOOOO often I see them used to establish the primacy of one style over others), we would do better to just game and learn from the tables we play at. That is limited. But it is real. It isn't abstract like these discussions. I can be persuaded by a good argument online that GMs should always do X or games should always do Y but 99% of the time, it doesn't pan out at my actual table in my experience. At the end of the day I am there to make sure people at the table have a good time. So I find it much more helpful to listen to the table than well constructed arguments about definitions and models.</blockquote>

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