Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2782187" data-attributes="member: 812">Yes, let's. What's the point of baseball?Why, to win the game, of course.So naturally we find that there are optimal strategies for winning the game, strategies that tend to work regardless of other factors. No surprise there. We should expect to find a similar quality in roleplaying games -- with the caveat of course that the point of roleplaying games is not to win but to have fun.Are there optimal strategies for having fun? That apply to everyone? You seem to think so. But I don't believe you can say to somebody, "I'm sorry but you're NOT in fact having fun." I know for a fact that many things I think are fun (hand-editing HTML code, watching fight scenes frame-by-frame, etc) are clearly NOT considered fun by other people.Maybe there are very general things we can say are fun: things that challenge your brain, things that involve tension, things that are funny -- but these are so general as to be useless, and only defer the goofiness to another level. Now we have to argue about whether or not someone can be wrong about what they think is funny.Ah. Well, if you want to say, "There are things that more people find fun than other things," I have no further objection. But if you want to say that playing in one style is better than playing in another style (which is the issue I've been arguing), I'm afraid popularity doesn't enter into the equation.Just because only a few people find something fun doesn't mean they're wrong. It just means that they enjoy something other people don't. If they are playing their game in the manner that they enjoy, they aren't playing it incorrectly. They aren't playing it poorly. They're just playing it differently, and nobody has any basis to tell them they're wrong.You can suggest a change in play style. You can say, "Hey you should try this, you might like it better." But if they try it and say, "No, thanks, not for us," they aren't wrong. Nor are you.Again, I'm not saying there aren't trends in popularity.But it seems that you want to argue that popularity leads to correctness. As your example you suggested Shakespeare -- universally recognized as a fine writer and a genius (these days, more or less) -- and went from there to suggest that things that are popular are likely to be better.But the example is wrong because roleplaying games aren't art in that they don't have to please anyone besides the creators. And, unlike a game like baseball, they have no object other than to please the creators.(and we're just pretending that the notion that popularity = correctness is unproblematic, just because)There's no reason for a roleplaying game session to happen other than to amuse the people playing it. If it amuses them, it is successful. There are no other considerations.Agreed. Gaming MATERIALS can be objectively better or worse, no question. As you point out, they don't necessarily have any bearing on the quality of the GAME, which is the territory I'm trying to explore here.I agree that it's popular. But somebody playing the game in a fashion so as to ignore those paragraphs or pages isn't playing an objectively worse game.If you want to say, "In order to design a game system that will please a large number of people, there are certain criteria that will probably help," I agree. If you want to say, "In order to run a campaign that will please a wide variety of players, there are certain qualities you ought to provide," I agree.But when you say, "No matter who you are, or what you like, playing in style X is worse than playing in style Y," you only betray your own preconceptions as to what a good game is.Allow me to sum up. Two facts about roleplaying games:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">A legitimate object of roleplaying games is to have fun (people may play for other reasons, indeed, but it is the case that having fun is a legitimate object of playing these games).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The only people who need to have fun in a roleplaying game are the people playing it. There is no audience or external review board that needs to be pleased.</li> </ol>The above two facts distinguish roleplaying games from most other games (which have objects above and beyond having fun) and from art (which has an audience by whose reaction the art can be said to succeed or fail), and explain why examples using those types of practices do not shed much light on the issue of determining a correct or optimal way to play roleplaying games.Further, and finally:A person cannot be wrong about what they consider fun.The above two facts, combined with the latter observation, make it clear that attempting to claim any given play style as objectively better or worse than another is simply illogical. ANY style of play that a player finds more fun than another is a BETTER play style.</blockquote>

Verification