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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Indaarys" data-source="post: 9215022" data-attributes="member: 7040941">It is fascinating that one can read me saying pretty explicitly that I want people to actually talk to me and not at me and will just not register it, and instead invent alternative facts about what a person thinks.Case in point.Is it really so intolerable to you that I feel the opinions I derive from my analysis are relevant to the conversation and subsequently share them?Perhaps one has gotten a little too caught up in identifying with certain things and are feeling under attack when they have no reason to be?Any inkling of badwrongfun you believe is at play here are entirely imagined.Gameplay is the cumulative emergent result of mechanics, and this is an important thing to note especially when certain kinds of games are being merged together, as is the case with RP/Gs as we know them today.If you drop the RP, whats left? Not a whole lot thats worth doing, and anecdotally we can observe that being a desirable distinction given the biggest RPGs in the world right now all have much more substance, at least, in the G Elements than your typical rules light or storygame experience. So theres value in a substantive G. (And surely we'd want that substance to be fun)But even in those cases, stripped of the RP, the experience becomes lackluster in a lot of cases. Some, like your Tactical RPGs, fare better, and older style games do too with non-combat elements.But many just don't.  Without the RP, the game loses what makes it fun, because the G isn't the fun part.And what that tells us is that the overall experience being generated by these games, with RP and G Together, is that there's a lot of room for improvement. These games are less fun because an portion of the game may as well not be there for what it actually adds to the experience.I don't believe I ever recognized it for it, but thats something I think ICON is going to find success in, simply because by design is going to emphasize both relatively equally, and from what I've seen, some okay integration between the two. Combining the generally "best" ideas of storygaming with tactical combat is a nobrainer, and I can appreciate it on that basis even if I have different preferences for approaching narratives in the fantasy genre.There's a million and one anecdotes about people playing 5e for the improv and then finding it a drag whenever initiative gets rolled. Many have just as much fun doing both, but as related above, it can be better.G that can stand on its own can only add to the overall fun, and its the Designers job to ensure that it doesn't impact the RP.Hence, the analysis of RPGs having a fundamental improv game, as that then leads to the practical design methodology, in other words, stating clearly what the design problem is so we can actually address it and prevent issues from emerging in our games, and address them when the human element inadvertently causes them anyway.The design problem I identified is this: RP/Gs commonly struggle with one of its two primary elements being unviable as an independent game, limiting the overall potential of the game to be fun for any given audience, in turn limiting the appeal of the game.This then leads to the intent of the methodology: To maximize the overall potential of a given RP/G, every element of both RP and G must simultaneously integrate with each other, never contradict one another, and be independently interesting.And then on to practical design: if we run into an issue, we can quickly identify if its an issue of integration, contradiction, or independent interest, and from there seek out solutions that address the issue.As posited in other topics (I can't remember if I did here), the single biggest thing any RPG could do, without changing any single thing about the rest of the game, is just including a section that acknowledges improv, teaches how to use it in the context of the game, and provides advice on fixing improv issues.Going farther than that is preferable, of course, but this is the bare minimum, and theres not a single game that'd be made lesser for doing this. Every single one would get better.5e is 4e with a lobotomy. Of course it has a tactical element, but 5e isn't about tactical combat, just combat in general.If you can't step away from a conversation you enjoyed and evaluate it honestly, you're a little too lost in the sauce. Whenever I, for example, lose myself and elaborating on something interesting my game does, it isn't lost on me that there could be a lot of context missing if I'm not on point about it, nor for that matter that it can come off as though I'm marketing or even bragging.But, I also still do it because often times its the best way I can use to illustrate an idea I'm trying to discuss, as opposed to providing a half-baked example I made off the top of my head. My games ideas are proving successful at what I intend them to do, and so it follows that they're the best way to illustrate the ideas.I just don't get upset if someone picks up on those unintended elements and says something about it.Likewise, when one spends 25ish pages engaging in a lot of ephemeral talk and virtually nothing practical, one has to step back and wonder what the point is and what we expect to produce. I saw the linkage of the Six Cultures essay and then read through the entire topic, and as I observed, it was yet another topic of what I could describe as theory for the sake of theory, which I've frankly read so much of at this point (and gotten no where) that I can't really help but point out that it doesn't really produce much.I've said elsewhere that I don't think its a coincidence that my efforts in game design only started going somewhere when I stopped relying on theory for the sake of theory for help.I'd rather see people spend their time like I did when I wasted it doing things like reading 20 years of RPG hobby discourse looking for answers, because they won't find very many doing it that way.</blockquote>

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