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="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5105489" data-attributes="member: 4937">One of the things that I find increasingly annoying when trying to talk to someone is the tendency of language to be descriptive only when its binary, or at least the insistance people have that all uses of language must be binary.  This insistance leds people to assert that something that 1 molar sulpheric acid is the same as 12 molar sulpheric acid, because well, they are both sulpheric acid right?The fact that something had precendent in some form doesn't mean that we are unable to distinguish between it and something else.  3e D&D lets you invest skill points in purchasing skills and in some variants even lets you buy your attributes, but that doesn't mean its appropriate to call 3e D&D a 'skill based system' or to say that it has 'point buy character generation' because despite those features its clearly a class based system and in fact very far down on the 'class based' side on the axis of class based vs. skill based when we compare it to other systems.So, yes, there are some precendents and things that feel somewhat 'videogamey' like solo modules do have a long history in the game, but that doesn't mean that the term 'videogamey' isn't descriptive of something.  It justs means that a solo module is, by the definition of the term I've define, somewhat 'videogamey'.   In fact, it's also very 'choose-your-own-adventure-y' and very much 'Enormous Cave-y'.  Early attempts at creating RPGs on computers like 'Dungeon' feel very much like solo adventures and vica versa.  I don't see how this in the slighest harms my argument. And that's not true either.  Because to begin with, opening the 2nd edition M&M sitting beside me here we find several archetypes that as eshew powers either mostly or entirely (for example, the Martial Artist).  In fact, as I have defined 'spell-caster' (has limited resources which have a recharge time), arguably no archetype in M&M is by default a spellcaster because powers aren't depletable by default and the concept of a recharge is largely missing unless you do alot of work to build it in as a drawback or spell complication.  The fact that that the non-spellcasters effects and attacks in M&M are fancy, spectacular, or even flavored as arcane effects is irrelevant for the working (admittedly D&D-centric definition) I used in my write up.  From the D&D centric definition, an energy beam blaster is simply a fighter with a flashy attack descriptor for their ranged attack.  And, that is in fact how the archetype would play.No they don't.  As I can both play through Diablo till its end, and I can play the same campaign over again by recursively using my end-game character as the starting character of the next iteration of the campaign.  But even more importantly toward refuting this objection, the idea that they contradict each other involves focusing on some area that wasn't the focus of my #5 and comparing it something that was the focus of #4.   The fact that it allows endless iterations of play was NOT the focus of point #5.  The fact that with BALANCED MATH (how I titled the section) it would play basically the same at level 1 or level 10 was the focus.  In fact, points #4 and #5 aren't even directly comparable because 'Balanced Math' and being 'Closed Ended' aren't even directly related to each other, much less contridictory.  They may be indirectly related to each other in some cases (Diablo), but things that are indirectly related to each other would not be opposites by definition.  Balanced math could allow for either open ended or close ended games.  Close ended games may or may not have balanced math.First, at no point was 'name level' ever an end state.  At no point was it ever implied that once you hit name level the game ended, and that no further advancement or adventuring was possible.  And secondly, to the extent that some indy games have a close ended design, I would find this a 'videogamey' element.Are you under the false impression that for something to be 'videogamey' it must be utterly ubiquitous amongst all videogames?  So, for example, if I say something is 'American', then it must be the case that it is an aspect of every Americans social and cultural life, and if it is not, then it can't be said to be 'American'?  Because, if that is so we must discount baseball and hamburgers as being American.  It's not necessary that all video games feature something promentently before we can speak of this think as being of the provenance of video games, or of being more like the normal experience of video games (solo play without a moderator, for example) than of traditional RPGs.</blockquote>

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