Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9197943" data-attributes="member: 7040941">Or it shows that the game wasn't designed for that, and Arneson shoehorning in an improv game after the fact doesn't change that. (Especially when the accounts Ive read of Arnesons take on DND all paint his game as basically an enigma of cobbled together house rules)If you can't spell out where the improv game is in the actual text, it is not a part of the game. And don't mistake this as value judgement; pointing this out isn't intended to be an accusation of badwrongfun, so lets not get too wrapped up in the emotions we associate with these games and get over-defensive. Trying to be accurate isn't about otherizing you.Keep in mind too that this is a problem that is still plaguing DND where its constantly plugged as a do-anything improv game when it fundamentally can't support do-anything without external intervention that goes beyond just making rulings.Which coincided with new versions that incorporated and acknowledged how people were using the game.That fuzziness is also why it really isn't accurate to assert oDND was an RPG, because what we now recognize as one didn't exist yet. Roleplaying did, and had been for a long time by 1974, but DND didn't become an RPG until it was rewritten as one.  Any notion that roleplaying was involved could not be derived from the text itself.There very well could have been and probably were individual games that were being run in a way that could have been indistinguishable from a more typical, modern RPG, but those aren't the games you got out of the box. Thats the GM integrating a new game into what was in the box.Responding out of order, but this is more or less a direct consequence of exactly what Im talking about. The oral tradition of DMing stems from the fact that DMs were teaching each other to learn and integrate an entirely separate game from what was actually in the books, and even today thats still a hugely prominent problem, made all the worse by WOTCs sheer reluctance to ever suggest to anyone how their game should be played.That wasn't what I meant. The age of the game obscures what is generally known about it. I'm simply not expecting the book to exhaustively examine a 50 year old game that quickly got supplanted by newer versions that are clearer examples of whats generally known as an RPG.Their comment on oDND bucking the trend of the vast majority of everything that followed it is still true, and its simply not in the scope of the book to debate if that makes oDND an RPG or not. Its a fun fact about a game thats commonly called one, and nothing more.Its pretty easy to see the relationship just from the stated definition of playstyle reinforcement. Skyrim and DND at a fundamental level are based around an experience point economy.Take this passage:[ATTACH=full]331448[/ATTACH]While oDND doesn't utilize playstyle reinforcement specifically, it does use this and the book covers that as also being typical of RPGs.And to preempt the idea that I wasn't considering this, i'll note that playstyle reinforcement as a pattern is typically derived from this sort of economy, as one can see in the machination for it:[ATTACH=full]331449[/ATTACH]This isn't strictly limited to the rote, rigid Class or Skill system based games. Any game that cares about character progression in some form is riffing on these underlying mechanics.You do start to leave this space if you start running into stat-less games, and Id argue such games are the ones we can't truly call RPGs. They may still be progression games, but if the progression isn't tied to a specific character's individual capabilities that the player is meant to embody to some degree, you have stepped firmly away from the genre.Which, doesn't mean roleplaying itself as a form of improv game can't be involved. They often are. But that is, again, a distinct game unto itself thats being hybridized with it.What might bake your noodle is that improvisation isn't actually impossible or non-present in cRPGs. It just looks considerably different as a result of the medium, but its there. Thats where we get into things like emergent gameplay that cRPGs are more than capable of providing, even if the possibility space can't approach infinity.For example, Pokemon has a massive and fairly well documented emergent game that results from the kid friendly and very simplistic JRPG style party combat. The improvisation that results comes from the semi-randomness of match ups and the dwindling party structure as Mons are knocked out.Skyrim meanwhile, not being a competitive game, has considerably less of this, which makes sense given the character skill emphasis and the soft progression game, but even so it does have a little. Random events and such play into this, as does the basic exploration gameplay that, even with the terrible traversal mechanics, does still invite players to engineer their own ways around the map. (See, mountain scaling horse malarkey)</blockquote>

Verification