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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5207516" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's very kind of you to say so.I don't see Edwards as offering arguments so much as analysis. The method strikes me as similar to Weberian historical sociology - from an overview of a wide range of cases, certain ideal types and relationships between them are posited. It's not about an argument, or a scientific theory. Rather, it's an interpretive analysis of the RPG experience. The payoff is meant to be a better grasp of what factors in a situation interacted to produce the current state of affairs that puzzled or intrigued us. (Obviusly Edwards' analytical goals are a bit more prosaic then Weber's! - understanding RPGs rather than the nature and origins of industrial modernity.)I don't have a view on whether there is widespread dysfunction among gamers. From my own experience, I think there is - or at least was, back when AD&D ruled - some dysfunction among some gamers, and that for various reasons AD&D figured prominently in this - the main reason for it being concentrated in AD&D would be that players experiencing dysfunction were likely to move away from AD&D to other games in an attempt to resolve the dysfunction.To make it crystal clear - I'm not just judging the games of others here. I'm also talking about games that I played in. Whereas Edwards is interested mostly in RPG publishing and what makes RPGs an appealing passtime for various sorts of actual and potential players, my interest in his ideas is a lot more personal - his essays gave me the tools for understanding what was and wasn't working in the games I played, and what aspects of the mechanics undermined or supported the play experience I am looking for. It also helped me make sense of stuff that I'd read and thought hard about in Dragon back in the 80s (the last time I read Dragon on any regular basis) and of debates about class, alignment, hit points etc on usenet 10 or so years ago. Like Weber, not everything that Edwards says is true. But like Weber, his analytical categories and the relationships between them help me to make sense of things. The payoff, for me at least, is real.If I had to summarise what the essays made clear to me, I would say: the logic of purist-for-system gaming (I'm a long time RM player), and the resemblance and difference between high concept and narrativist play, in terms of the role of the GM and of various sorts of mechanical techniques. If I had to reduce it to one word, I'd say that Edwards taught me to understand the significance of the metagame.The concrete experience that confirmed, for me, that Edwards had useful ideas was posting on the ICE boards a few years ago. The discussion turned to character building (a big issue in HARP and RM), and what parts of the character have to be paid for using what sort of character building resource, and whether PCs and NPCs must be built according to the same mechanics. I suggested that giving an NPC additional character points for (eg) spells was no more objectionable in principle than making him a prince for free - which is very common, even though in HARP, at least, nobility is a status that costs points for starting PCs.  I mentioned that in some games even equipment was something that costs points (it does in HARP also, but again only for starting PCs). These ideas were met with utter incredulity by the overwhelming majority of the posters there, who apparently simply could not fathom that a viable RPG might use a non-ultra-simulationist approach to character building and action resolution.I'm not saying that the games of any of those posters are dysfunctional. But the twists and turns that RM players and GMs can get themselves into as they try to extract heroic fantasy play out of the austere RM action resolution and PC reward mechanics can make one wonder whether other approaches aren't at least worth thinking about. Whether default assumptions about what playing an RPG must involve can't be questioned a little. And I've found Edwards' writings very helpful in this task. (They also helped me survive the edition wars, by giving me a framework in which to make sense of the opinions of the various warring sides.)In case it wasn't clear - this is not meant to be a defence of Edwards. If he cares, that's his job. It's just an explanation of why I take what he says seriously.</blockquote>

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