Ryan Dancey on Redefining the Hobby (Updated: time elements in a storytelling game)

[pawsplay]

I would never advocate such a system without including a suitable selection of premade spells for player convenience. Those would, ideally, fit onto cards which would either come in the game box or be in the back for photocopying, like character sheets often are.

With that said, what 'campaign flavor' is it that draws people to the game, again? The bestselling fantasy game of all time, Final Fantasy 7, used the naming convention 'Fire,' 'Fire 2' and 'Fire 3' in its English-language release. It had plenty of 'campaign flavor,' but it sure as heck didn't come from the names of the spells.

I assume you mean the 'campaign flavor' of 'Jack Vance's elaborate and quirky spell naming structure,' which is, I'm sure, even more eminently marketable and widely known today than it was when D&D first came out.

Can I point out that Harry Potter uses dog latin names for the same effect? Thanks to The Sword and the Stone and Shakepeare's The Tempest, we all know how bipidy-bobbidy-boo type spells work.

 

[Delta]

No, it wouldn't, your inability to conceptualize notwithstanding.

Thanks for the insult. I'm done here.

 

[T. Foster]

Good lord, not Swordquest, are you kidding?

But Atari 2600 in general? You bet. There's a pretty substantial scene of videogamers owning and playing classic console games.

But I imagine the games they're playing are mostly/entirely the arcade-style ones that wouldn't normally be considered analogous to (or in direct competition with) tabletop rpgs. I agree that some console-games are endlessly replayable, the same way pinball, poker, chess, basketball, golf, etc. are, but not really the story-based/rpg-analogue ones -- you can play Space Invaders or Kaboom! forever, but once you've won/finished the Raiders of the Lost Ark game there's not a lot of appeal in playing it again. Maybe this has changed with later consoles and more elaborate games, but my experience with rpg-type console games in the 80s was that they'd be played obsessively for a couple weeks (however long it took to beat/finish the game) but then they'd be put away and rarely/never replayed after that, and as the complexity of the games increased the initial period of play increased but the replayability did not (and, if anything, decreased).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Or we've been meaningless participants in enough games that are essentially "drama queen's story hour".

I have been a vigorous opponent of doing this to players.

To equate story-driven games with "sit there and watch the DM tell you a story that he won't ever get around to doing as a bad novel" is just as inaccurate as saying the folks who want to focus on the game first, story second, should just be playing DDM. The extremes do not represent how it goes the majority of the time.

Hell, I've seen DM's people here seem to respect on this forum advocate this exact same crap because it might wreck their precious plot.

I'd like to see some links. Because when I've seen people advance that here, everyone jumps on them and screams like howler monkeys, and rightly so.

Its one thing to walk into an adventure with a vague outline, its another thing to walk in with a polished "story" because the latter presumes you know PC actions.

No argument. That's not what's being advocated.

You know, this is sort of the tequila syndrome: Lots of people have BAD tequila experiences and swear it off for good, many of them getting sick just from the smell of it. And many of them never realize it wasn't the tequila that was the problem, it was how it was handled.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

But I imagine the games they're playing are mostly/entirely the arcade-style ones that wouldn't normally be considered analogous to (or in direct competition with) tabletop rpgs.

You're changing the argument here.

It was originally "there are people getting 20 years of fun out of console games."

To start qualifying that argument now is bogus. Yes, there are people getting 20 years of fun out of arcade games. Maybe it's not you, but your standards (nor mine) do not determine what other people enjoy. Just look at the music sales charts for proof of that.

RPGs are great, but they are not unique in having long-lasting appeal. Bolstering RPGs by tearing down other sorts of entertainment hasn't ever worked. For all the high-fiving that went on when WotC put out their jokey ad about "if you're going to be sitting in the basement, pretending to be an elf, shouldn't you have some friends over?," does anyone think that ad made even one person say "hey, I should play tabletop RPGs instead of this MMORPG!"

Not even one.

RPGs need to be sold on their own merits, not by constructing problems with other forms of entertainment and presenting RPGs as the solution to these invented problems. Because if RPGs are going to be sold as a better mousetrap, they're inevitably going to get improved upon and passed by one of these days.

 

[GrimGent]

In my view, the beauty of RPGs is that when the Joker faces Batman, there is a real possibility of the Batman getting killed. Is that a "great story?" Or how about Legolas getting critted by an unnamed Harad?

Perhaps not a great story, no, but a story nevertheless.

A little while ago at another forum someone asked me how a game session can produce any kind of a story if there's a chance that it will all end up with a random TPK. I answered: "Then it's the story of a TPK, of course. And if your character is killed by a housecat right after the game has started, why, then it is the story of how he goes out one day and is killed by a housecat; and before his death, it is just the story of him going out, and right after that it's the story of him getting attacked by the ferocious feline, and finally it's the story of him dying at the claws of the murderous moggie." Only the beginning, the initial circumstances usually determined by the GM, can be fixed in place. After that, you will be in the middle of a story that is generated gradually, action after action, round after round, until the end in which whatever problems were involved with that original situation have been resolved properly. That might mean returning to civilization with newfound fame and loot, or it might mean suffering a gruesome death. Most RPGs don't guarantee happy endings. But a TPK is still an ending in a very concrete sense.

It's not the GM who's telling the story, you see. It's everyone at the table, and the tale only takes shape during the telling: as soon as you describe how your paladin slashes at a goblin, and as soon as the GM confirms the results, you have added another detail to it, although it won't be finished until later.

 

[buzz]

Why do they make a big deal about it? Because the diehard games spend the most money on gaming.

If I knew industry folk would post to it, I'd be half tempted to start a new thread on this subject.* Because, honestly, I have a really hard time buying that, e.g., WotC builds a booth half the size of a city block, with WW2 tanks, castle walls, and an army of demo teams that hand out free stuff so they can maybe sell some product to a thousand or so "diehard gamers", much less do a bunch of seminars (for which their staff gets paid) that cost attendees $0 to view.


* I did: http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?p=3701245#post3701245

 

[JustinA]

The Conan RPG is excellent. It along with True20 from Green Ronin, is my D20 ruleset of choice. Its what D&D can be without magic glut. Its a great D20 system. A new version is coming out soon that promises further improvements. Runequest is quite good though different from D20 and is OGL like Conan so publishers can capitalize on this.

So I've heard. Unfortunately for Mongoose, the last product I bought from them was Conan: The unplayable and unedited first edition release. After spending half an hour realizing that I had just been royally conned, I threw the book into a box.

When they announced the "great deal" of offering to sell me the same book a second time, it didn't compel me to give them more money or dig the book out of the box. The book remains there to this day.

My flip-throughs of Mongoose product at the LGS have not revealed any substantial improvements in editorial standards or game design. I already own several editions of RuneQuest, and nothing I've heard about the new release convinces me that the new edition offers anything to me.

Is Mongoose publishing better products than the unusable drek they were publishing a few years ago? Probably. Is it good enough to make me forget that they burned me over and over and over again? Not yet.

But the problem with the recent "Basic" sets, like the one you link to, is that it seems that they cut out the personalized character-generation step, which is so much what hooks people on D&D that I think it's nigh-madness on the part of WOTC. To my understanding, the Basic set:

- Has 4 fixed characters to choose from.
- Has no character-generation capacity.
- Doesn't even have ability scores.

Ding, ding, ding!

The D&D Basic Set used to be a complete and open-ended game. If you wanted higher-level adventures you could go out and buy the Expert Set. If you wanted a more robust, detailed, and complex version of the game you could go out and buy AD&D. But the game you were given was a complete roleplaying system in and of itself.

The more recent versions of the Basic Set haven't achieved this. Their primary design goal appears to be nothing more than a teaser trailer of what an RPG can actually be. The game is essentially not playable beyond the sample scenarios included in the set.

If I bought these Basic Sets out of the blue, I would be pretty disappointed. They're essentially WotC asking people to pay for an extended advertisement of the PHB. They have neither the extendability of an actual RPG nor the replayability of a board game.

Even more baffling, however, is that the game doesn't even serve as a decent introduction to D&D: The mechanics, while similar, are fundamentally altered and the entire approach of the game is distinctly different from an actual RPG.

Now, I will note that I have not purchased the most recent revision of the Basic Set. I bought the version immediatley prior to it, however, and was not impressed in the least. I had been planning to give it as a present to introduce a friend to RPGs, but decided -- after looking at it -- that it wasn't going to accomplish anything. I looked at the advertising copy and read reviews for the new revision and didn't see anything that these fundamental design flaws had actually been addressed.

In my ideal world, there would be three products:

D&D: The Boardgame
D&D: Basic Set
D&D (PHB, DMG, MM)

The boardgame would be similar to the old DUNGEON boardgame, but would use mechanics more directly derived from D&D. The result would be a replayable boardgame experience. This would be quite distinct from an actual RPG, but it would have the appeal of a traditional boardgame while introducing people to both (a) the D&D brand name; and (b) some fundamental concepts of RPGs. If you designed it right, the boardgame could be extended through "adventure packs" that would give new scenarios.

The Basic Set would feature a stripped down version of the core rules. It would be fundamentally the same game, but without the bells and whistles and options which lead to inaccessible complexity. Most importantly, it would be a complete RPG in its own right.

And D&D would continue to be D&D: A complex RPG with options and rules covering lots of diferent scenarios, continually extendable through a series of supplements.

This continuum of gaming would let people find their own comfort level in terms of complexity, gameplay, and preparation -- without trying to find the magic bullet, one-size-fits-all solution for "what people want". What people want varies considerably. You don't succeed as an automobile company by making nothing except SUVs.

Justin Alexander
http://www.thealexandrian.net

 

[T. Foster]

You're changing the argument here.

I'm not changing my argument at all, I just maybe didn't state it clearly enough the first time around so you misunderstood what it was. My point wasn't that no other game offers the same sort of long-term replay value as tabletop rpgs, because many other types of games clearly do -- a deck of cards or a chess set or a basketball is both a cheaper investment and has as much or more long-term replay value than even the cheapest and broadest rpg. I wasn't considering those in my comparison, though, because people don't normally see cards or chess or basketball as being in direct competition with tabletop rpgs because they offer significantly different experiences and rewards. I would place arcade-style console games into that same category -- playing "Frogger" isn't any more analogous to playing D&D than playing golf is.

However, "rpg-style" console games (later-generation ones from the 90s-00s at least) are frequently cited as direct competition for tabletop rpgs (and even as rendering tabletop rpgs "obsolete"), because they do have a lot of the same appeal -- explore a fantastic/imaginary world, participate in a story, take on a fictional role, kill things and take their stuff, etc. -- and because they have several distinct advantages over tabletop rpgs -- cool graphics, you don't have to read a rulebook in order to start playing, you can play at your own pace and don't need to gather together a bunch of like-minded friends in order to play, etc. But these advantages are balanced out by (among other things) the fact that they're finite and generally have minimal replay value -- it's assumed that once you've finished/beaten the game that you'll move on and buy another one.

That, nothing more or less, is what I meant to say originally.

 

[scourger]

The blog presents some interesting points. I agree that "roleplaying" and "D&D" have negative connotations. The biggest is the alleged satanic influence. It is not helped that the MM is full of demons, devils, etc. Those aspects are easy to ignore if you don't care for them, but they are very prominent to the outside observer. It is an element fo which I am reminded when I preview many new products, and I think it is one that the hobby could stand to lose.

I also agree that the game is about storytelling. But, power gaming, strategy and tactics are big elements, too. Sean Reynolds had a four-quadrant analysis on his web site that WotC commissioned several years ago, but his site is down. That analysis presented essentially those four elements as the composite of role-playing gamers. So, while storytelling is important, the other factors are important, too.

The game is just that at its base--a game. Players first want a consistent game that isn't too hard to understand and play. Then, the story evolves from their power, tactical and strategic choices.

I think the biggest thing missing in the RPG experience is collective play. The living games came close, but they just didn't get there. MMORPGs do much better because they have millions playing in a shared world.

For me, Savage Worlds presents a great new direction in gaming. It is finely granular enough for my players to be interested but remains coarsely granular enough to be easy for me to run. Now, if they would just offer living play at home like Witch Hunter promises, it would be a great combination.