Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4274685" data-attributes="member: 42582">Not at all. Tunnels and Trolls and Rolemaster are both pretty coherent games. As Skeptic is arguing in another thread, 4e is probably also quite coherent with only a minimal amount of drifting.As someone else said in one of Skeptic's threads, getting together to play D&amp;D is like the blind men and the elephant - who knows what you're going to get? The incoherence is not a result of the themes of the game - it's rather the tension between various aspects of the game system, which most groups resolve in actual play by houseruling away one or more of the problematic elements.An explanation for this phenomenon would, I imagine, be related to an explanation why Tom Clancy and Stephen King are more widely read than (for example) Graham Greene, despite the fact that the latter is a far superior novelist. Or why a bad action movie will generate a bigger audience than a great Hal Hartley movie. What explains these pop-cultural tropes? This thread is probably not the place to try and resolve that question, and in any event I'm not all that qualified to answer it. At least part of the answer, though, I think relates to certain cultural assumptions about the depiction of conflict.Suppose roleplaying games had been invented in Russia, or in Paraguay? Would we necessarily expect them to adopt the same tropes as they have inherited from American culture?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 4274685, member: 42582"] Not at all. Tunnels and Trolls and Rolemaster are both pretty coherent games. As Skeptic is arguing in another thread, 4e is probably also quite coherent with only a minimal amount of drifting. As someone else said in one of Skeptic's threads, getting together to play D&D is like the blind men and the elephant - who knows what you're going to get? The incoherence is not a result of the themes of the game - it's rather the tension between various aspects of the game system, which most groups resolve in actual play by houseruling away one or more of the problematic elements. An explanation for this phenomenon would, I imagine, be related to an explanation why Tom Clancy and Stephen King are more widely read than (for example) Graham Greene, despite the fact that the latter is a far superior novelist. Or why a bad action movie will generate a bigger audience than a great Hal Hartley movie. What explains these pop-cultural tropes? This thread is probably not the place to try and resolve that question, and in any event I'm not all that qualified to answer it. At least part of the answer, though, I think relates to certain cultural assumptions about the depiction of conflict. Suppose roleplaying games had been invented in Russia, or in Paraguay? Would we necessarily expect them to adopt the same tropes as they have inherited from American culture? [/QUOTE]

Verification