Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5166856" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, sure.  I thought I'd provided some evidence, but if you wanted more evidence of that there was such a trend, I can understand.  I'm not sure the evidence will be forth coming, because as I said, I'd need to spend hours googling up examples, and then having done that, I'd have to deal with people providing counter-examples and then we'd end up in an unwinnable debate based on impressions of something that can't be directly measured.  All that is however something I can understand as a reasonable objection or method of objection.What I don't understand is people demanding I provide evidence of perfectly ordinary and generic RPG experiences.  That's were I've been stuck most of the thread.As for the more reasonable objections, I don't think that there is much contriversy that both 3e and 4e designers said that they were taking some inspiration from video games (or that were it wasn't said it could be noticed), and I don't think that there is much contriversy that PnP game designers have frequently wrote articles in which they implied that PnP games were in a compitition with video games or that video games had something to teach PnP designers (whether you agree with the claim or not).  Likewise, I don't think there is much argument over the fact that increasingly video game design and PnP design is seen to overlap (by designers on both sides of the divide), and in fact, the only thing that might provoke argument in that claim is 'increasingly' because very clearly, video game design has been heavily influenced by and often outright attempts at emmulation of PnP games or at least some aspect thereof.  Less clearly, but I think obviously, as cRPGs mature, they've been back pollenating the PnP games that inspired them.  I felt like there were obvious influences from Fallout (released 1997, the same year that WotC acquired TSR and started work on a new edition) in the rules of 3e D&D.   For a simple example, feats every 3 levels paralleled Fallout's perks every 3 levels.  I feel that trend has continued as 3e evolved and into 4e.   I can't prove that at all, because there is no way to measure this.  I could provide evidence, but I don't intend to because its more trouble than its worth.Now, so far I've said nothing negative about the trend.  I don't really have anything against cRPG design inspiring aspects of PnP design so far as it goes.  Where I have problems is with attempting to get PnP's to capture the aspects of the play experience of cRPGs which are inherently superior to PnP's, and very high on that list would be the tight action/reward loops that cRPGs can provide.  Game theories that are perfectly applicable applied to creating Mrs. Pac Man or even WoW and providing entertainment in that medium, do not necessarily apply in the PnP world.  Therefore I cringe whenever I read some designer or blogger saying something like, "I was playing some video game and I noticed that I never had to wait for my reward, and I was always engaged, or how much it sucked to be stunned... and I was thinking how great it would be if I could apply this design lesson to the PnP world."  I think I've provided at least some recent examples of design ideas being floated in those terms.  I personally think that there is very little that can be directly ported between turn based designs and the real time designs that increasingly dominate cRPGs, and vica versa, and I think that in attempting to do so you decrease the competitiveness of the satisfaction PnP's provide with respect to that of cRPGs.</blockquote>

Verification