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: 6099673" data-attributes="member: 4937">You just nailed it.  The problem (well one of the problems) I have with Ron Edwards is precisely the problem he is fond of using as a blanket term for what he sees as 'badwrongfun' - incoherence.   I don't find there to be any incoherence (necessarily) in many of the things he does, but for someone who is all about "We should be making games that are richer more mature experiences" his designs tend to just utterly blow away the very things that have in my experience made for the very things he says he's trying to achieve.  You want to RP as a rich, engaging, thoughtful, mature, and satisfying story, then why the heck are you asking me to engage in the game precisely in the moment I want to be most immersed at such a metagame level?  It's never been obvious to me at all that the best way to create a focus on say 'social conflict' or character growth was to create detailed tactical systems for arbitrating those things in great detail.  At some point, you want the rules to just recede into the background, not continually push themselves forward.  In my experience, 'social conflict' and 'martial combat' are served well by almost the exact opposite things.  Porting the mechanics of a wargame into your thespian agenda is a recipe for disaster in the same way that porting the mechanics of a theater game into your tactical wargame is a recipe for disaster.   The same group can play wargames and theater games using radically different approaches as they feel the scene demands without 'incoherence'.   But there is something fundementally incoherent about trying to make them mechanically the same, not because you can't or because you can't make a game out of it - but because often the players have totally different goals they are trying to achieve.Again, there is a fundmental mistake well known in game design of mistaking mechanics for the aesthetics of play.</blockquote>

Verification