NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8624758" data-attributes="member: 71699">You might like to look at the GEN two tier model <a href="http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/threefold/GEN01.html" target="_blank">discussed here on darkshire.net</a>. By taking a tiered approach, it avoids implying at the definitional or categorical level a detrimental polarity between them.Incoherence: Play which includes incompatible combinations of Creative Agendas among participants. Incoherent play is considered to contribute to Dysfunctional play, but does not define it. Incoherence may be applied indirectly to game rules. Abashedness represents a minor, correctable form of Incoherence.Abashed: Game design which displays features of one or more Creative Agenda that, in their applications, are operationally contradictory. It is a minor form of design Incoherence. However, an Abashed design is easily correctable by ignoring or altering isolated portions of the rules (minor Drift) during play. See Abashed Vanillaism and my review of Little Fears.For me it would be better to have used a neutral word, like "multifaceted", were the intent to define multiple agendas as a neutral concept. However, [USER=48135]@Fifth Element[/USER]'s comment seems reasonable: taking incoherence as a synonym for dysfunction which is right there in the definition. Regarding your first question - is incoherence necessarily bad - the defintion implies to me that no question is intended on that score. Regarding your second question - can it be ameliorated - one answer is provided, but notice that the correction is only done by avoiding the incoherence during play... there is no suggestion that a game can be incoherent and successful at the same time. Which is really [USER=48135]@Fifth Element[/USER]'s point as I read it.Applied to the overall questions in the thread - through abashedness a game like 5e can delight players and achieve a degree of success almost unparalleled in RPG design only because those players are all tacitly correcting for its incoherence during play. Abashedness would then seem to be a profoundly valuable concept for game design. Alternatively, the conclusion is questionable in some way.</blockquote>

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