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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6732797" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think you are slightly misreading me here.  I'm not sure it matters too much to this conversation, but that's not the way I think about system, and I'm telling you that now in case it comes up later.Ok, my first response to that is, "Yes, you are absolutely right.  That's a direct consequence of Celebrim's Second Law.  Even if you present a complete rules set, if you don't tell players how to play, and if you don't show and tell GMs what to prepare and what to do during play, at best you've actually produced multiple parallel games that will be played in many different ways as groups improvise techniques.  And at worst, you haven't produced a game at all, and no one will play it because even if everyone knows the rules, no one will know how."  However, my second response is, "Strictly speaking, those directives regarding how to prepare for play, and how to think about playing your game, aren't actually part of the system of the game.  The system is a complete game without those directives.  The system of the game is the part of the game that describes mechanical process resolution."   Ultimately, those directives are just suggestions by the designer how to approach the game if you want to play the same game that they intend.  It's not however wrong to take the same system and repurpose it to a completely different game by ignoring the suggestions.   This is a concept Edwards never fully grasped.What's very important and so often overlooked is just how well Gygax understood that D&D was more than its system, and just how well D&D - particularly 1e D&D - defined by example how the game could be played.  Note, not the way the game would or should be played which Gygax left up to the group, but the way that it could be played.  (Let's leave aside for now Gygax's vacillation on this topic and sometimes difficulty in expressing his preference for moderation leading to him simultaneously expressing two extreme dichotomies as if they didn't contradict each other.)  More so than any other early game system, D&D created those examples of play.  "Here is a module.  You can use this to play D&D in a functional manner."  Or consider the very lengthy example of play in the 1e DMG which remains relevant to this day.Again, I'm not sure that we do.  I'm just insisting that the definition of the game's system be kept distinct from these other things, so that we can note how system differs from these directives about how to think about the game precisely because I think they are different and that difference is not appreciated as much as it should be.I am very glad you brought these two up, because here we very much disagree and in a way that gets down to the heart of what I'm saying.The V:tM original rulebook is a work of art in its presentation.  And it's in many ways a very original work with what could potentially be a functional and innovative rules system.  But when you closely examine it, what you discover is that there is an almost complete disconnect between the examples of play, and what the system provides for and how the system is likely to be used.   The author does an absolutely terrible job telling the player how to use the system to create the game that the gamebook seems to provide for.   On obvious way that it goes horribly wrong is that the examples of play all involve a single character.  But presumably, we aren't intended or expected to play the game with only a GM and a single character (which would be about the only way to play the game the book describes).   So the real terrible failure of the V:tM rules is it creates a game that no one played in the manner described by the book.  People invented for themselves ways of playing the game and ways of thinking about the game, and were often innovative and had a lot of fun.  They played gothic super heroes.  They played magical mafia lords.  They played D&D or Top Secret with vampires.  But none of those were game described by the book or the game the author seemed to intend to create, which ostensibly was a game about exploring the loss of humanity, dealing with ones inner monsters, the descent into madness and depravity, and the possibility of redemption.  And to the extent that the game was supposed to be about that, the system didn't naturally support it and lead people in that direction so without lots and lots of examples of play, it was never going to get where it said it was going for.People captivated by the game described by the book, were likely going to be rudely disappointed by what most people actually played.  Wraith is even a stronger and more extreme example.</blockquote>

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