What is "The Forge?"

[Aaron L]

Gaming doesnt have to be about fun?

Um....


Im certainly not going to engage in a hobby that isnt fun.

Or am I doing something wrong?

 

[GQuail]

Actually, the big secret of successful game design (that someone actually passed down to me) is this:

Most gamers are really bad at gaming.

Lots of stuff proceeds from this, but we also can't directly tell gamers they aren't that good at it, because it sounds bad to say about one's audience. Disguising this while trying to solve it eats up a great deal of effort.

You either have no fun, have fun at the expense of someone else, or have fun in a way that destroys the ability of your group to maintain fun gaming.

That covers most people, but nobody will admit it.

I'll be hoenst, eyebeams, and say that in the past I've come away from some of your posts not enamoured with your point of view: but truly, you are the superior human being, because this is flat out genius!

People often talk about the fact that RPGing involves talking to geeks, who are by their very nature not always great at interpersonal communication. This perhaps pins down the problem better: RPGs are a group experience, and when problem arise it's invariably because one persons fun is treading on the toes of another. Whether it's player/player, player/GM or GM/player is irrelevant: that's the core of most games' problems.

Slightly more on topic: I've never given the Forge a glance, and after this thread, I'm inclined not to. I enjoy reading articles on how to run a better game, and things like Robin Laws section in the DMG II proved great in helping me think more about how I go about GMing, but I'm hearing enough 'intellectually elite' horror stories to not really want to try and brave it.

 

[GQuail]

What of those who disagree? Do you consider viewpoints and insights that contradict yours, or only those that support them?[

Ignoring for a momen t this is a very valid point, his initial statement...

You have startship fuel rules not because it will be more fun for everybody. You have it as an option for the bean-counting player. If no such bean-counting player exists you, as a halfway intelligent designer, ought to have an explanation for why the option need not be used higher up in the hierarchy that begins at the core mechanic and devolves into various individual manifestations.

...seems pretty obvious to me. How often have you read an RPG and found rules for things like, say, encumbrance included with a note that you can just kind of wing it, but this is included for those who want a formal rule? More specifically, how many people here play where those kind of "bean-counting" rules are ignored for basically that reason? Certainly, my own players bought 100 arrows at charaacter generation and haven't worried hugely about them since, and none of them felt this was anything but the traditional way of playing D&D.

True, game rules are included because they're deemed relevant to the game: Cthulhu without sanity, D&D without hit points or D6 Star Wars without the wild dice would play very differently. But sometimes rules are included for more trivial reasons that: encumbrance and mundane equipment (food, fire etc) being the obvious ones. These things need to be acknowledged for those people who it matters to, be it people who want to control these factors in a realistic way, or those who play in a game where these are more than trivial matters. (Waterskins in my D&D game are irrelevant: but the post-apocalyptic game my player is going to run next would suffer a big mood change without it)

Perhaps this is just a design methodolgy thing. Certainly, RPG designers should accept that their system will be house ruled all over the place and played in a variety of different ways. You may design your game for a narrow play style but even that can have wiggle room: WFRP may only really be a game system for playing fantasy horror adventures in a Warhammer World-like place, but even there the choice between "nobles banding together to fend of the seedy underbelly of the town" and "peasants rallying to save their home from corrupt aristocrats" would affect how much I'd worry about the price of a normal meal. :>

 

[MerricB]

D6 Star Wars without the wild dice would play very differently.

If I can just bring up a point here: The first edition of WEG Star Wars did not have the wild die! It was an additional rule that entered with the 2nd edition game. My group had been playing SWd6 for a campaign of two years standing beforehand, and the Wild Die was greatly disliked. It complicated a game that had been working well as a lighter system beforehand.

I feel there was a design paradigm change between 1e and 2e WEG d6: the former was more a light "fun" system; the latter more seriously orientated, pushing the game in ways d6 didn't really handle that well (but d20 SW does).

Cheers!

 

[Wayside]

Gaming doesnt have to be about fun?

Gaming doesn't have to be about anything. Gaming doesn't even have to be about gaming.

Im certainly not going to engage in a hobby that isnt fun.

"Hobby" is just a part of the rhetoric (not in any pejorative sense) that's been attached to what most gamers do. The idea of "fun" itself is a bit reductive for my tastes. People can take gaming more or less seriously, theorize it in similar or wildly divergent ways. Nobody's right or wrong in any absolute fashion, though in specific cases one theory might suit a particular set of practices better than another. In this sense mythusmage's issue with "theory" earlier in this thread is entirely off base. Theory, properly speaking, in the sense most academis use it, isn't a hypothesis; it's a point of view (hence the origin of the word--philosophy, you might say, offers hypotheses). And since the mid-17th century our understanding of how we interact with the world has been grounded in the recognition that in every discipline what we see is determined by where we see from, what we see with, etc. There's nothing intrinsically valid about the concept of disciplinarity itself, for example, which is why it's begun breaking down in most academic institutions today (oh how I tire of hearing about "interdisciplinarity"). And this is not to say that nobody has any ground to stand on, only that all of us stand quite literally apart from one another, and that, until you posit some project, the desirability of which is itself debatable--the transparent, world-wide availability of gaming, maybe--there's nothing to say your ground is qualitatively different from mine.

That's all a bit abstract I suppose. Really I'm just agreeing with eyebeams' design philosophy, though not his belief in a telos of gaming. I see what we do, on a general level, as being open-ended, not goal-oriented. The goals only enter the equation, if they enter it at all, when specific gamers come together, form relationships, negotiate their interests, etc. (in eyebeams' terms); and it should be well within the realm of possibility for one group's goals to oppose another group's completely, including the idea that gaming amounts to nothing more than having "fun." But that's just my theory, obviously, since my group doesn't fit any of these molds. Whatever affective dimensions our game has, none of us would use a reductive word like "fun" to describe them. That would be a bit like calling your wedding night "nifty," or something to that effect. I'm sure it happens, but you're setting the bar pretty low by making it the norm.

 

[GQuail]

If I can just bring up a point here: The first edition of WEG Star Wars did not have the wild die! It was an additional rule that entered with the 2nd edition game. My group had been playing SWd6 for a campaign of two years standing beforehand, and the Wild Die was greatly disliked. It complicated a game that had been working well as a lighter system beforehand.

I feel there was a design paradigm change between 1e and 2e WEG d6: the former was more a light "fun" system; the latter more seriously orientated, pushing the game in ways d6 didn't really handle that well (but d20 SW does).

Cheers!

Well, there we go, I've learnt yet another pointless fact today. Ta, Merric! :>

And, to continue this ramble: my current group includes one person who loves D6 Star Wars, but another who despises it, and the topic came up recently when we dicussed using the D6 system for another game. The Wild Die was mentioned because the pro-D6 player felt it helped capture the cinemative feel of Star Wars, where things go spectacularly wrong or great, while the anti-D6 player felt that it boiled down to a 1 in 6 chance of failing any action, regardless of other factors.

 

[Umbran]

The proof is in the pudding, and in the market...if it truly is a better, purer product, then why isn't it reaching a broad audience?

Um, perhaps because quality of product doesn't mean diddly if you dont' have major marketing and distribution so that people hear about it and can get their grubby paws on it? Making a good product and reaching an audience with that product are two thoroughly separate activities.

 

[Aaron L]

Gaming doesn't have to be about anything. Gaming doesn't even have to be about gaming.

Im still confused. Maybe fun isnt the right word, or youre using it in a different way than I am. Enjoyment is what I mean by "fun". Do you enjoy gaming?

 

[Umbran]

That's true, but you've got to be reasonable about what you demand of the player...

Yes. There is a balancing act of responsibilities here. But from the talk I often see, both the designers and the players tend to forget that. Each talks about how the other guy didn't do his job, but fails to consider how they might have done their own work better.

But I do believe this. There are huge disparities in the quality of play between groups.

Hm. Interesting. Where I come from, disparity comnes from differences. I'd imagine that if most gamers are bad at gaming, then the quality of play in most groups would be rather uniformly bad. Only groups of collected good gamers would have high-quality play. If good gamers are in the minority, there should be few of these groups, and thus few incidents of disparity.

There is also a lot of self-deception, frankly.

Hey, don't exempt the game designers from self-deception - that there's some sort of definition of good and bad in gaming that extends beyond the fun had by the players

 

[mythusmage]

OK Alan, you win.

My purpose here is nothing so benign as trying to win. No, my purpose when replying to your statements and assertions is a cruel one. It is a vile and nasty one. My purpose is to make you doubt.