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Simulation vs Game - Where should D&D 5e aim?
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<blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6301644" data-attributes="member: 87792"><p>No. It's written at a point in time (the end of the 90s) talking to a specific audence (one that came through White Wolf and was disillusioned by it). D&D was, to that group, deeply unfashionable.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Guess what? <em>It isn't the 1970s</em>. I wasn't even <em>born </em>in the 1970s.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>And now you are using definitions that are 2E only to support your argument about what happened in the 1970s.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>False.</p><p></p><p></p><p> </p><p>False.</p><p></p><p></p><p> </p><p>"I do not like why these games do this. Here's how we should do things better." <> A smear campaign. Another false statement.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Right.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>There are a number of them that turn from game into computer game. Because people like the gameplay and because they are very easy to code. They are a tiny niche, normally played by people who <em>already</em> know the boardgame. You might as well say that because movie tie-in novels sell then novels are like movies.</p><p></p><p></p><p> </p><p>Role playing games <em>in the 1970s</em> grew out of wargaming. They then started changing and broadening and becoming an art form of their own rather than a modified form of wargaming. Many RPGs are built like wargames. </p><p></p><p>But even though <em>D&D</em> might have been built based on wargame rules (and has always been the RPG closest to wargames) it was not built like one. For designing a wargame you do not make up what you want in a wargame the way the actual original players played things like Balrogs. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The main issue at point is that you have a dogma that RPGs are and must be built near identically to wargames. You are unwilling to allow an RPG to be built by any other means (even if there are examples since the 80s - and had any wargame been built the way Vampire: The Masquerade was with its in the book objections to "Rollplaying not roleplaying" for people actually using the rules it would have been laughed out of the wargame community.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I own over <em>three dozen</em> books for each of GURPS and D&D. Once more you are missing the target fairly massively.</p><p></p><p></p><p> </p><p>There is <em>massively</em> more uniform identity to the OSR than there is to Storygames (which is a world away from claiming that the OSR is one thing). But you seem to want to lump Storygames under one banner.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I had no idea that you considered yourself a part of the OSR. If I'd put you with any group in this hobby based on what you are advocating for, it would have been with The Gaming Den and that approach to D&D 3.5. I linked to the OSR's Short Primer because the mainline OSR is demonstrating that older games were played a <em>completely different way</em> to the one you are advocating.</p><p></p><p></p><p> </p><p>You are putting words into my mouth. I believe that the multi-billion dollar videogame industry is undertaking what amounts to a brute force attack on the entire space playable with objective and impartial arbiters. One fraction of this is to take Avalon Hill style designs, weld them to real time tabletop wargames, and get the Total War series. Which is a great series of games that has almost entirely eliminated the problems of actual Avalon Hill games. Does this mean that this is the only thing they do? <em>No</em>. Wii Sports (second best selling video game ever, after Tetris) is not designed the way you'd design a tabletop wargame. If anything it's designed the way you would actually design an immersive storygame along the lines of Monsterhearts - throw out all the existing ideas, concentrate on what the people you are trying to model actually do, and turn that into a game. A </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>If you can fit a game on the back of a cereal box selling that game is never going to be profitable. How is that a turnabout?</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>How nice and how impossible. Large swathes of the OSR are advocating Rulings, not Rules. Your tastes are a minority interest - but you seem to be declaring that people with other tastes are trying to destroy the hobby.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I could not read that sentence without laughing out loud. If you have no context <em>you have no story</em>. A narrative is something that is ongoing. Your summary there literally couldn't be further from "story now" if you tried.</p><p></p><p>What Story Now is saying is that you don't need to worry about the small stuff. There is no reason to tie up sheets with such things as carrying capacity unless that is likely to be a vital aspect of the story. On the other hand if things <em>are</em> likely to be vital (like relationships) include them. And the biggest thing that every storygame I am aware of does is has a way to establish a context as fast as possible. Far from rejecting the context, context is <em>critically</em> important to Storygames.</p><p></p><p></p><p> </p><p>This is specific to Sandbox D&D. Not all D&D is Sandbox D&D. And I have never said I dislike D&D (I dislike some versions of it - but that's a different story).</p><p></p><p>Also that you are saying this is another example of you wanting only One True Way. Rules Cyclopaedia D&D does things one way - it's a good way. Monsterhearts another - and that too is a good way.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Played D&D for years, run D&D for years. Even the way you outline. DMing such a game is about logistics - and you have far more to remember than the players do. Far more notes.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I've done it. It's fun. It is also a <em>minority</em> interest within roleplaying circles. That you are equating all roleplaying games with that one particular mode of play that has been a minority interest ever since D&D started getting read by people outside Gygax' extended circle simply shows how narrow you want to make it. Dwarf Fortress and Nethack are both fine games, and the computer equivalent of what you are talking about here.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>"We made some <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> up we thought would be fun" was Mike Mornard's consistent summary of D&D <em>pre-1974</em>. It is also an excellent summary of your "Storygame mechanic" (which isn't a mechanic that shows up in many storygames). So apparently D&D was based on the storygame mechanic.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This has more to do with you not understanding the idioms than anything else. Writing a storygame involves in most cases controlling the emergent gameplay, and it's often subtle. If we look at <a href="http://www.halfmeme.com/nicotinegirls.html" target="_blank">Nicotine Girls</a>, does it read like a PVP game to you? Because it is. There are masses of patterns in Apocalypse World, and more in the tighter written Monsterhearts (and Monsterhearts is unequivocally a Storygame - it says so right on the cover).</p><p></p><p>As for "actual game play", this is another example of your One True Way approach. Dogs in the Vineyard is a cross between Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken, with some tactics involved on top of that. That's gameplay. Apocalypse World and co (especially Monsterhearts) have a lot of patterns to decipher, and Torchbearer might just be the only game to do old school logistics-based dungeoncrawling of the sort you love better than either Brown Box D&D, BECMI, or Rules Compendium D&D. Does this mean that all Storygames do? Fiasco isn't a game in the restricted sense you are using it in. That much I will accept. (That said, there are choices, and there are patterns in there).</p><p> </p><p></p><p> </p><p>As far as I know that's only a property of Sherlock Holmes.</p><p></p><p>Now please stop trying to restrict Roleplaying Games to one specific branch of exploration focussed D&D that was definitely not the dominant mode of play by the time DL-1 turned up in 1984 and that would abolish the entire White Wolf canon. And please stop trying to project your own prejudices onto Storygames when very few of them are like that.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Neonchameleon, post: 6301644, member: 87792"] No. It's written at a point in time (the end of the 90s) talking to a specific audence (one that came through White Wolf and was disillusioned by it). D&D was, to that group, deeply unfashionable. Guess what? [I]It isn't the 1970s[/I]. I wasn't even [I]born [/I]in the 1970s. And now you are using definitions that are 2E only to support your argument about what happened in the 1970s. False. False. "I do not like why these games do this. Here's how we should do things better." <> A smear campaign. Another false statement. Right. There are a number of them that turn from game into computer game. Because people like the gameplay and because they are very easy to code. They are a tiny niche, normally played by people who [I]already[/I] know the boardgame. You might as well say that because movie tie-in novels sell then novels are like movies. Role playing games [I]in the 1970s[/I] grew out of wargaming. They then started changing and broadening and becoming an art form of their own rather than a modified form of wargaming. Many RPGs are built like wargames. But even though [I]D&D[/I] might have been built based on wargame rules (and has always been the RPG closest to wargames) it was not built like one. For designing a wargame you do not make up what you want in a wargame the way the actual original players played things like Balrogs. The main issue at point is that you have a dogma that RPGs are and must be built near identically to wargames. You are unwilling to allow an RPG to be built by any other means (even if there are examples since the 80s - and had any wargame been built the way Vampire: The Masquerade was with its in the book objections to "Rollplaying not roleplaying" for people actually using the rules it would have been laughed out of the wargame community. I own over [I]three dozen[/I] books for each of GURPS and D&D. Once more you are missing the target fairly massively. There is [I]massively[/I] more uniform identity to the OSR than there is to Storygames (which is a world away from claiming that the OSR is one thing). But you seem to want to lump Storygames under one banner. I had no idea that you considered yourself a part of the OSR. If I'd put you with any group in this hobby based on what you are advocating for, it would have been with The Gaming Den and that approach to D&D 3.5. I linked to the OSR's Short Primer because the mainline OSR is demonstrating that older games were played a [I]completely different way[/I] to the one you are advocating. You are putting words into my mouth. I believe that the multi-billion dollar videogame industry is undertaking what amounts to a brute force attack on the entire space playable with objective and impartial arbiters. One fraction of this is to take Avalon Hill style designs, weld them to real time tabletop wargames, and get the Total War series. Which is a great series of games that has almost entirely eliminated the problems of actual Avalon Hill games. Does this mean that this is the only thing they do? [I]No[/I]. Wii Sports (second best selling video game ever, after Tetris) is not designed the way you'd design a tabletop wargame. If anything it's designed the way you would actually design an immersive storygame along the lines of Monsterhearts - throw out all the existing ideas, concentrate on what the people you are trying to model actually do, and turn that into a game. A If you can fit a game on the back of a cereal box selling that game is never going to be profitable. How is that a turnabout? How nice and how impossible. Large swathes of the OSR are advocating Rulings, not Rules. Your tastes are a minority interest - but you seem to be declaring that people with other tastes are trying to destroy the hobby. I could not read that sentence without laughing out loud. If you have no context [I]you have no story[/I]. A narrative is something that is ongoing. Your summary there literally couldn't be further from "story now" if you tried. What Story Now is saying is that you don't need to worry about the small stuff. There is no reason to tie up sheets with such things as carrying capacity unless that is likely to be a vital aspect of the story. On the other hand if things [I]are[/I] likely to be vital (like relationships) include them. And the biggest thing that every storygame I am aware of does is has a way to establish a context as fast as possible. Far from rejecting the context, context is [I]critically[/I] important to Storygames. This is specific to Sandbox D&D. Not all D&D is Sandbox D&D. And I have never said I dislike D&D (I dislike some versions of it - but that's a different story). Also that you are saying this is another example of you wanting only One True Way. Rules Cyclopaedia D&D does things one way - it's a good way. Monsterhearts another - and that too is a good way. Played D&D for years, run D&D for years. Even the way you outline. DMing such a game is about logistics - and you have far more to remember than the players do. Far more notes. I've done it. It's fun. It is also a [I]minority[/I] interest within roleplaying circles. That you are equating all roleplaying games with that one particular mode of play that has been a minority interest ever since D&D started getting read by people outside Gygax' extended circle simply shows how narrow you want to make it. Dwarf Fortress and Nethack are both fine games, and the computer equivalent of what you are talking about here. "We made some :):):):) up we thought would be fun" was Mike Mornard's consistent summary of D&D [I]pre-1974[/I]. It is also an excellent summary of your "Storygame mechanic" (which isn't a mechanic that shows up in many storygames). So apparently D&D was based on the storygame mechanic. This has more to do with you not understanding the idioms than anything else. Writing a storygame involves in most cases controlling the emergent gameplay, and it's often subtle. If we look at [URL="http://www.halfmeme.com/nicotinegirls.html"]Nicotine Girls[/URL], does it read like a PVP game to you? Because it is. There are masses of patterns in Apocalypse World, and more in the tighter written Monsterhearts (and Monsterhearts is unequivocally a Storygame - it says so right on the cover). As for "actual game play", this is another example of your One True Way approach. Dogs in the Vineyard is a cross between Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken, with some tactics involved on top of that. That's gameplay. Apocalypse World and co (especially Monsterhearts) have a lot of patterns to decipher, and Torchbearer might just be the only game to do old school logistics-based dungeoncrawling of the sort you love better than either Brown Box D&D, BECMI, or Rules Compendium D&D. Does this mean that all Storygames do? Fiasco isn't a game in the restricted sense you are using it in. That much I will accept. (That said, there are choices, and there are patterns in there). As far as I know that's only a property of Sherlock Holmes. Now please stop trying to restrict Roleplaying Games to one specific branch of exploration focussed D&D that was definitely not the dominant mode of play by the time DL-1 turned up in 1984 and that would abolish the entire White Wolf canon. And please stop trying to project your own prejudices onto Storygames when very few of them are like that. [/QUOTE]
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