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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9335782" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I don't want to completely dismiss the idea that games borrow from each other and that there are similarities in rules, genre, intended process of play, and potentially many other areas. What I'm saying is that, sure, draw a line around certain games and call that a 'family of RPGs' but I look at games as more like engineered things where only certain combinations of parameters really work. While it is possible to apply cladistic ideas here, we should be careful because there aren't any restrictions on the ways games can influence each other or borrow from each other. Some such borrowings and whatnot will work well, others probably not so well, but I think a better mathematical model than a continuous space (avoiding technical math here) would be something like a directed graph. Now, you can then evaluate the games and kind of position them near or far based on how you perceive their play, or your play of them, to be similar or different. That won't produce a neat graph though where all the things you like are both clustered in 'preference space' AND fall on the same part of the graph! I mean, OK, the two may even correspond a reasonable amount due to a 'school effect' (IE people who participated in the Forge and developed games based on or influenced by AW, so a lot of Narrativist preference space may also cluster close to AW on the 'got bits from' graph). But I want to keep reinforcing this, even within a play style preference, like Narrativist, there are just things that have no intermediates. I don't see how you can take PbtA and mix it with 4e and get something halfway in between. I mean, I went through this exercise, trust me, and it just doesn't really work. HoML has some ideas that reflect experiences with PbtA and such, but it is still pretty much built around a 4e-like chasis, you just can't mush together moves and skill challenges! There's no halfway point between those!</blockquote>

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