Person vs. `Puter

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Sticks and stones, Dr.

Saying you aren't insulted by a critique isn't the same as addressing the critique, but I appreciate your willingness to continue with this dialogue.

Not true. Chapter Three of a book always has the same outcome, no matter how many times I visit Chapter Two. The media are completely different in regards totheir continuity. An ongoing RPG is, by its nature, unfinished, whereas a novel is, by its nature, complete.

This is playing fast and loose with the scope of your argument. The two genres are certainly not completely different with regards to continuity.

And even if they were you either have to recognize that Novels don't fit your definition of narrative or that your definition of narrative is lacking in ways that implicate your critique of CRPGs.

Why? The fact that tomatoes have no wings and cannot fly does not mean they had a flying state in the first place.

If tomatoes have a state in which not flying causes them to stop or pause in their function as tomatoes then clearly they must have a flying state.

No, it's not the same. In a TRPG, you keep playing. Some ruling is made and the story continues. In a CRPG, the game crashes, end of the road.

Again, you're being obtuse. The CRPT and the TRPG are neither likely to keep playing. The ruling may very well be, that didn't or doesn't happen and then you keep playing, which would violate both your claim that the story continues and your definition of narrative.

And a crash is by no means the end of the road. That's like claiming that a DM saying they're stopping the game and meeting again next week is the end of the road.

You just restart the program.

We could go on all day about limitations they have in common, but that's not the point. We want to discuss differences. There are some limitations CRPGs have that TRPGs simply don't.

Not all limitations are significant. The only ones that matter to this argument are limitations that would somehow qualify CRPGs as not RPGs. I would submit that none of the limitations you have mentioned function as good criteria for that decision. Some for specific reasons, but most because they apply just as well to TRPGs which would seem to invalidate your base sample for determining the genre.

That sounds like a resolution to me. Perhaps you can explain yourself again, since I have no idea what you are talking about. I see the words, but I do not see in them an argument against anything I am saying. I agree that the player can make a new character or the GM assigns some kind of damage. How does this contradict what I said?

Both the CRPG and the TRPG allow you to leave the game and make a new character. If, as you say, you are intersted in differences this is another example of an insignificant difference.

Both types of games are equipped to provide the player with the intentional option, and either type of game can be poorly equipped to provide a mechanical option for resolving this situation.

And on a seperate tangent: I have played CRPGs where suicide was a reasonable and well scripted part of the story. To the point where it's clearly much better handled than it could be in TRPGs where the player would be hard pressed to show how such an action was anything other than a jerk move.

I never said anything about genre. Genre is the kitchen maid in RPGs. Immersion is the queen. Genre concerns the game designer, and concerns an immersive roleplayer to the extent they view their character as belonging in genre, but it does not restrict the possible range of actions. How a game system reacts to out-of-genre decisions tells you a lot about its design.

This is actually close to a significant argument.

I disagree on the face of it, of course, but at least this is a significant movement in the dialogue. I don't think anyone who's studied literature could possibly argue that genre is anything other than the Mistress of Immersion.

The more basic flaw is that once you've disregarded genre you then need to answer what could possibly be your criteria for immersion .

This is particularly problematic since your stake in this argument is that CRPGs do not qualify as being in the same genre as TRPGs. If you really don't care about genre then how do you qualify any difference between the mediums as significant at all?

Your sentence reads "If you are playing a TRPG.... are you ... not playing in an RPG?" I am forced to conclude the answer is "no" or "This question has no logical answer." It seems to me you have phrased the question strangely.

If I have, I offer my apologies. I was simply trying to deal with an odd significance to your reasoning here.

Namely, if I am following you correctly, the differences you are pointing out should invalidate CRPGs as RPGs.

But TRPGs frequently fail at either manifesting these differences or at even meeting or caring about the criteria you are using as your starting point.

Are you then saying that these TRPGs then fail at being RPGs?

If you are, how do you account for the fact that both mediums can fail your criteria at the same rate? Doesn't that indicate that the genre is somehow transcendant of medium.

If you aren't then how do you make this exception? Do you need to reevaluate or abandon your criteria altogether?

Or at least that was the thrust of my argument.

If the game makes no allowances for the action... you are still playing a RPG, if the action is nonetheless still permissible. This is not a legal move in Monopoly, but is in an RPG.

This seems like an appropriate answer to my argument. I think it's still problematic, but what I'd like to focus on how your next argument contradicts this one. Or rather how given what you say next I don't understand your idea of permissable and how it doesn't apply to CRPGs.

If you limit the character to certain actions... who is limiting the character? If the game forbids it, then the action is resolved (it doesn't work) and the principle still holds.

But this is the most common resolution of such problems in CRPGs. If the principle still holds here how can it not hold for CRPGs?

Though the GM can forbid an action, he cannot prevent a player from choosing the forbidden action, so unless the rules change, they are still playing an RPG. They may reach an impasse, but that's a social metagame problem, not a failure of the game to provide a resolution.

Here you're introducing a new facet to your argument, which I think needs clarification.

If both a GM and Videogame forbid an action, but if when a GM does it he does not prevent a player from choosing the action then how does a VG prevent the player from choosing the action? As far as I am concerned there is no functional difference between a player yelling at me in my MilSF game that he turns into a dragon and my yelling at my game of Halo that I want Master Chief to turn into a dragon. Neither are going to happen in the shared game world. If I'm still playing an RPG in the first case how am I not playing an RPG in the second?

The new facet to the argument is your claim that social metagame problems are both outside the context of the game and can't represent failures of the game. This seems awfully arbitrary, but that same stroke I could claim that crash enducing bugs are failures of the hardware or code rather than the game. Solid social metagame dynamics are as important and pivotal to a functional TRPG as good code is to a CRPG.

I don't particularly know that this facet is really necessary or relevant, I'm just interested in how you deal with this problem.

If the GM has the right to narrate the action, within the rules, and in fact, no player can dictate the actions of any character within the choices provided by the rules, then it is in fact not a role-playing game, by my definition. I call that kind of game a storytelling game or interactive fiction game. RPGs don't allow this kind of action, but then, neither do CRPGs; the computer can't make you press any particular macro key or whatever.

All right, I can accept this for the moment. I assume this isn't the only way an RPG can fail to be an RPG by your criteria. Is this the only way a TRPG can fail to be an RPG? If so why is it different from CRPGs in this regard.

"Putting someone on rails" is too nebulous a concept to argue for or against.

All right. We can except that argument for the moment. I don't really know that it's that nebulous, but I am interested to see that you don't have a strong opinion on this concept.

Short answer: my definition covers all these situations and more without strain.

I think my issue is that it's actually a problem for you if it does. To really make your point about CRPGs not being RPGs you need definitions that clearly exclude their limitations from RPGs and none of these criteria seem to, at least not without excluding TRPGs as well.

 

[Family]

Mass Effect is pretty well designed, but only a GM could say what would happen if I decided to assassinate the council and crash land the Normandy on Earth.

Each has thier place... when I tried to tie a GM up in my den my wife complained, so table top gets limited time each week.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

RPGs don't do any such thing, bad GMs do.

A good point, in TRPGs we can blame the DM rather than the game. We don't seem to be able to do that with CRPGs, we can't just blame the writer or the code and not the game.

As a side note, however, I think one important function of both CRPGs Code and TRPG DMs is to crash the game when people make decisions that are horrible for the game.

Once in my career I made a decision to indulge a player who was deciding to take an action that broke the rules, the spirit of the game, and the social dynamic of the table.

I did it because I was a human DM and I had a lot of improvisational power.

It was the worst mistake I'd made as a DM since junior high. Everyone would have been better off if I'd made like a CRPG, crashed the game, and booted the offending player.

All too often personal freedom is just code for new tyranny. CRPGs can be very effective at preventing that.

Case in point:

Mass Effect is pretty well designed, but only a GM could say what would happen if I decided to assassinate the council and crash land the Normandy on Earth.

Each has thier place... when I tried to tie a GM up in my den my wife complained, so table top gets limited time each week.

And if I were as a good DM as the Mass Effect game designers I simply wouldn't allow you to do it. Or rather, like Mass Effect, I'd refuse to interact with you until you chose another action.

It's possible that there's a good game in going after the council and crashing on earth, but it wouldn't be a good game in terms of the narrative value of Mass Effect. And in a TRPG it would also probably be a jerk move with regard to the DM and the other players.

On the other hand, it's perfectly possible for Mass Effect's designers to game that story and decision tree, it's just not the one they chose to spend their incredible immersive resources on. You as the player could still make that decision, work it out in your mind in terms of what you know of the Mass Effect universe, and then write it out as frankly pretty awesome fan fiction, but you'd be missing the Mass Effect version of the DM by doing so and all the sensual bells and whistles that go with it.

If at a TRPG I have more freedom then the Mass Effect designers its because I'm sacrificing a huge amount of immersion from other sources.

Again, I'm not arguing that there aren't differences. Just arguing that the RPG hobby covers both TRPGs and CRPGs.

 

[hong]

Ppl, it is very simple.

You can kill monsters and take their stuff in CRPGs.

You can kill monsters and take their stuff in p&p.

Therefore, if you know CRPGs, you should know p&p.

Of course, there may be other things to do in p&p besides kill monsters and take their stuff. That's for later.

 

[WayneLigon]

TRPGs are not CRPGs, mainly because of the freedom aspect many have mentioned. Esepcially once one goes beyond 'kill things and take their stuff'.

Having said that, I will say I have played in games where things were so strictly defined and our actions so strictly limited that we might as well have been playing a CRPG. In fact, in a CRPG like Morrowwind or WoW, I would have at least had the freedom to decline the quest or go wander away to do something else.

 

[pawsplay]

Saying you aren't insulted by a critique isn't the same as addressing the critique, but I appreciate your willingness to continue with this dialogue.

Actually, I was saying I was. Using "obtuse" more than once in a post is not a very friendly.

This is playing fast and loose with the scope of your argument. The two genres are certainly not completely different with regards to continuity.

Are too!

And even if they were you either have to recognize that Novels don't fit your definition of narrative or that your definition of narrative is lacking in ways that implicate your critique of CRPGs.

Novels are a series of logically connected events in time, and hence meet that definition easily.

If tomatoes have a state in which not flying causes them to stop or pause in their function as tomatoes then clearly they must have a flying state.

There are a lot of flying tomatoes in my house, then. However, I have so far been unsuccessful in getting them to un-pause.

I would like you to explain to me why the lack of a function implies that the function exists but has been halted. Tomatoes also are not mammals, do not read serious literature, and rarely have anything worthwhile to say. Does that mean they must, then, have all those traits but have them somehow suppressed?

A computer is a tomato. It does not and does not ever fly. if you drop a nonflying tomato, it falls. If you go off the map, a computer-based game stops.

Again, you're being obtuse. The CRPT and the TRPG are neither likely to keep playing. The ruling may very well be, that didn't or doesn't happen and then you keep playing, which would violate both your claim that the story continues and your definition of narrative.

What on Earth are you talking about? It takes about five seconds, usually, to patch or alter a tabletop game enough to keep it moving.

And it has nothing to do with narrative. Until the action resolves, the narrative is not doing anything. Narration is a series of events. Until the resolution occurs, there is no event.

And a crash is by no means the end of the road. That's like claiming that a DM saying they're stopping the game and meeting again next week is the end of the road.

How is it like that?

Not all limitations are significant. The only ones that matter to this argument are limitations that would somehow qualify CRPGs as not RPGs. I would submit that none of the limitations you have mentioned function as good criteria for that decision. Some for specific reasons, but most because they apply just as well to TRPGs which would seem to invalidate your base sample for determining the genre.

Show me. Give me an example of a role-playing game that lacks any one of those criteria. Obviously, I am going to reply that some things, like Capes and the Baron Munchausen game, do not comfortably fit my definition. But try to come up with an example of a game that embarrasses me and my definition by being a commonly accepted RPG that fails to meet a single one of those criteria.

Both types of games are equipped to provide the player with the intentional option, and either type of game can be poorly equipped to provide a mechanical option for resolving this situation.

The difference is that a lack of a good mechanical option is not always a problem in TRPGs. There's one for significant differences.

And on a seperate tangent: I have played CRPGs where suicide was a reasonable and well scripted part of the story. To the point where it's clearly much better handled than it could be in TRPGs where the player would be hard pressed to show how such an action was anything other than a jerk move.

Suicide is an option in CRPGs that program for it and not in ones that don't. Simple.

It is an option in every TRPG, although not necessarily a welcome one. It may be a "jerk move" but it's not an invalid one. Such decisions have a certain subjectivitiy to them anyway.

I disagree on the face of it, of course, but at least this is a significant movement in the dialogue. I don't think anyone who's studied literature could possibly argue that genre is anything other than the Mistress of Immersion.

I've studied literature. Genre is "where you shelve the books at Waldenbooks." It doesn't mean anything except as a shorthand for a body of work. It has no theoretical meaning.

Genres are vague categories with no fixed boundaries. Genres are formed by sets of conventions, and many works cross into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. The scope of the word "genre" is sometimes confined to art and culture, particularly literature, but it has a long history in rhetoric as well. In genre studies the concept of genre is not compared to originality. Rather, all works are recognized as either reflecting on or participating in the conventions of genre.

The more basic flaw is that once you've disregarded genre you then need to answer what could possibly be your criteria for immersion .

Genre isn't even an immersive element. It's a metagame goal.

This is particularly problematic since your stake in this argument is that CRPGs do not qualify as being in the same genre as TRPGs. If you really don't care about genre then how do you qualify any difference between the mediums as significant at all?

Actually, I said media, but that obviously puts them in a different genre, too, depending on how you slice it.

How do I qualify the media as significantly different? By identifying the numerous aspects in which they are dissimilar and concluding the dissimilarity results in a different experience.

I do care about genre. Not a problem. But it doesn't mean anything definitive about a given work.

Medium, however, is different.

Namely, if I am following you correctly, the differences you are pointing out should invalidate CRPGs as RPGs.

Correct.

But TRPGs frequently fail at either manifesting these differences or at even meeting or caring about the criteria you are using as your starting point.

I have yet to encounter such a game. Show me.

Are you then saying that these TRPGs then fail at being RPGs?

If you are, how do you account for the fact that both mediums can fail your criteria at the same rate?

This is just extended rhetoric. II am not saying that, and hence I don't have to account for anything.

Doesn't that indicate that the genre is somehow transcendant of medium.

yes.

If both a GM and Videogame forbid an action, but if when a GM does it he does not prevent a player from choosing the action then how does a VG prevent the player from choosing the action? As far as I am concerned there is no functional difference between a player yelling at me in my MilSF game that he turns into a dragon and my yelling at my game of Halo that I want Master Chief to turn into a dragon. Neither are going to happen in the shared game world. If I'm still playing an RPG in the first case how am I not playing an RPG in the second?

Games have rules. They might have rules for turning into a dragon, or they might not. It might make sense, or it might not. The limitations of a game engine and the limitations of a story are similar only in that they are both limitations. The rules in this case include an imaginary reality which must be adhered to.

The freedom principle does not allow the player to cheat, to pull a gun on the GM and shoot him, to commit bank fraud on the internet, or to change the rules of the game. It only allows him to make a decision "as if" the character, however he chooses to resolve that decision.

If the character cannot turn into a dragon, he cannot choose to do so. If the character can turn into a dragon, he can choose to turn into a dragon or not to turn into a dragon.

The new facet to the argument is your claim that social metagame problems are both outside the context of the game and can't represent failures of the game. This seems awfully arbitrary, but that same stroke I could claim that crash enducing bugs are failures of the hardware or code rather than the game. Solid social metagame dynamics are as important and pivotal to a functional TRPG as good code is to a CRPG.

Solid social metagame mechanics are important to a good game, but they are also outside the realm of game design. No game design can prevent the GM from giving his girlfriend two holy avengers or shooting someone in the chest with a paintball game to show a player "how it would feel" to be shot.

All right, I can accept this for the moment. I assume this isn't the only way an RPG can fail to be an RPG by your criteria. Is this the only way a TRPG can fail to be an RPG?

A game fails to be a RPG by failing to meet any one necessary criterion. I have described four which I use, which I feel includes virtually everything that is an RPG and excludes virtually everything that isn't.

Hong uses a different definition, and that's fine for him. I find my criteria more functional.

 

[Aria Silverhands]

Re: Hong's comment. This is so easy to refute it is almost not worth bothering.

computers = finite/formulaic
human imagination = infinite/dynamic

No imagination eh?

http://www.kloonigames.com/crayon/

 

[Mark]

That's for later.

Why wait?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Why wait?

*trying to channel hong*
Character Building of course!



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