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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9000327" data-attributes="member: 71699">Are you familiar with design languages (also sometimes called design systems) or with SDKs (software development toolkits). Or perhaps know the concept of design patterns?There are two observations one can make about the job of designing products that might help explain the worth<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">There's a lot of problems-in-common for which ideal solutions have already been found. Say the problem of presenting a button for a user to click. You could design that from first principles. Or you could use a toolkit that already gives you the down-click, hold, up-click, hover, lighting, animation and audio behaviour. Essentially, don't reinvent the wheel: it'd be a waste of your time and you might overlook some opportunities for finesse that others have already thought of.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">In a sense, anything that lets you add and store text is sufficient to design an RPG. And if you have a toolkit (Cortex Prime is one example) you have a head start. And this is my second observation: a game isn't just an assemblage of components with no interaction between them: it's a system in which the components interact. A great toolkit (like PbtA) is one that also gives you a headstart on your game as a holistic system. When you wrote your move, which I took to be within a PbtA design-language context, you were able to take advantage of surrounding methods that would make it more likely to be successful as part of a complete game.</li> </ol>So what would flexibility mean, given those observations? When I think of flexibility I think of being able to achieve whatever design I set out to achieve. In one world, that might mean having some sort of uber-flexibile toolkit (Unreal comes to mind) that can do absolutely anything. Often, though, it means choosing a rather idiosyncratic toolkit that uniquely does the thing of particular value to the design you have in mind. In some real world cases, narrower toolsets are chosen for other reasons, too. Like security. (The less the toolset can do, the more securely it might do those things.)The bottomline for me is that toolkits are very useful for game design. Year Zero Engine. Messerspiel. PbtA. FitD. Cortex Prime. BRP. And you can also examine these for whether they have had work put into making them good toolkits. Sanitizing your rules of IP and making them open source is not without value, but it also is not as helpful as investing the additional effort. For one thing, a good toolkit explains the purpose of its tools! And flexibility? It's of doubtful relevance.Perhaps we find ourselves in agreement. If the play I want on some occasion has the narrowest imaginable set of affordances - such as We Are But Worms - then any putative flexibility to experience something outside of the experience I'm aiming for has zero value to me. For a Lyric RPG, inflexibility is almost certainly a virtue (except in the most literal sense, haha!)And I continue to say that it simply does not matter. It doesn't matter if the label was chosen because those who chose it saw a deep and fundamental connection. It doesn't matter if they are right about that, and folk here are wrong. And it does not matter if folk here are right about that, and they are wrong. It doesn't matter if what these groups count among deep and fundamental connections are different things altogether. It's a label for a contemporary movement in gaming that has specific attributes (rules-light) in the way it is practiced today.You may have those objectives. If so, possibly FKR is not for you. It's impossible to really teach FKR. Perhaps it can be done through osmosis and satori. The proposer of invisible rulebooks might argue that you already possess them.Useful for teaching, but I for one do not play RPGs in order to teach them. EDIT I see I have agreed by disagreeing. Yes! You are right. Visible rulebooks are good for teaching.If you find giving GM absolute latitude harmful to your play, it would be better to choose games that don't include that to achieve your purposes.It may be that we read the same thing and reach differing conclusions, so here is more of the relevant text (also worth reading the post it responds to.)Does FKR satisfy 1? Yes, moment-to-moment assent is at the heart of FKR. The play is fluid and fast.Does FKR satisfy 2? Yes, the group assign at least some authority up front. The never ignore the fact of point 1 in doing so.Does FKR satisfy 3? Yes, FKR does not take assignment of authority to be the point of RPG design. It wholly focuses on driving the moment-to-moment play.The final point is worth restatingFKR assigns authority in strict service to setting expectations and granting permissions.I would argue that assigning authority is an important consideration - particularly when one wants to propose assignments that diverge from norms to date - but it's not the endpoint. Does that put us in agreement?</blockquote>

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