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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8652889" data-attributes="member: 82106">Sure, but I think calling that 'gamist' is wrong. Its just how games of all sorts work. It is just acknowledging that RPGs have a 'G' in them, that they are entertaining diversions out of which we get pleasure! Yes, some parts of play of ANY GAME may be more pleasing than others, but if that's your definition of gamism, I would say it is not a worthwhile definition, it isn't diagnostic of anything at all. GNS gamism thus includes more. It exists as a distinct agenda, in which the game design's contribution would be in terms of providing situations in which skillful play is required, and rewarded as part of play.I'm just saying that you cannot talk about the orientation of a game WRT the type of agendas that it is designed to support when discussing things that are not elements of the game at all, or at the very least specific intended outcomes. I don't think 'pleasing to play' is one that is agenda-related at all. In effect this is the agenda of ALL GAMES.Honestly, which SF games have had D&D-like advancement as a central element? I certainly don't know the rules of every SF RPG, but I've played a good number of them, and I cannot think of one! Certainly within the crop of early RPGs, which would have been likely to take root and spread widely without tons of competition (IE in the 1970s basically) there were none at all. Gamma World/Metamorphosis Alpha does use very D&D-esque rules, but character advancement doesn't really happen in that game. It does have some pretty D&D-like loot mechanisms though, and it was quite popular in the day (it was definitely on a par with Traveller back in the day). However, it is a pretty light-hearted one-shot sort of game where PCs generally die very quickly and the only factors that matter are luck with saves/mutation rolls, and whether or not your GM decides to give out power armor and laser weapons and such (or they come up on some random charts). Beyond that, the closest I can come up with is D6 Star Wars, but that obviously has the limitation of being heavily built on a specific setting and backstory. You can get some decent advancement in that game, but it is much less clearly focused on. There's nothing like 'levels' really, as there are in D&D. I ran some d6 Space, the modern version of the system with the Star Wars branding filed off, and yes, you can advance, but its slow and it certainly is not central to the game, nor is loot or any other specific measure of progress. So, no, I think the SF genre has not really taken up the idea in the way D&D did. I suspect the main reason is that SF is intended to be at least partially realistic, the fundamental SF conceit is "what is the world like IF X" where 'X' is something technological. A D&D-like game doesn't really support that conceit very well, and thus SFRPG developers have historically shied away from this sort of design. Now, maybe that is less true today with some of the Transhumanist kind of conceptions of technology and such, but that has its own challenges (like how do you play a PC that becomes transcendent for one). Besides, such games only seem to have appeared really in the last 20 years, and its unlikely one RPG will rise to D&D-like popularity in the current market, there's just too much stuff out there.So, I think it might have been possible for an SF game to achieve D&D-like popularity, if it had been written in the 1970s and utilized insights into RPG design that didn't arrive until nearly 20 years later! Mostly though, I think kitchen-sink fantasy was the richest vein to tap, and it matched up really well with the D&D design's focus on advancement. That combination is the central formula that makes D&D work.</blockquote>

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