Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9033279" data-attributes="member: 82106">No offense, but IMHO this technique is ineffective. A lot of what you post, its harder to relate to anything in the actual practice or professional criticism of RPG design than simply reading the rules of actual games, playing them, etc. My advice would be, drop all the philosophical posturing and simply go back to basics, observe what the actual roles are at the table during play in various sorts of games, and what the real concrete processes and outcomes actually are. THEN try to construct a hypothesis based on that, and maybe eventually build up to a more generalized theory. Use plain English, avoid all these academics, etc. I'm not saying they're a total waste of time, just that jumping around picking this and that from philosophy texts to fit some existing notions and then trying to explain your subject from there is a less than likely to bear fruit exercise.Baker is one of the clearest of all writers IN EXISTENCE on ANY SUBJECT in my experience! The Process in Apocalypse World is one of the clearest and best documented (especially 2e) sets of procedures relating to the organizing and executing of a team activity I have ever seen. All of this is VERY VERY clear and explicit in his text. I'm happy to go over it with you and answer specific questions, but I'd suggest simply purchasing a copy of AW 2e, its not expensive, and simply reading it cover to cover, maybe a few times.Why are you incredibly fixated on this dichotomy between rules and norms? The only functional difference between something written in the book and something that is simply agreed between the participants is perhaps the degree of clarity that may exist in terms of the quality of agreement, but you don't seem to be really drawing on that for any useful insights that I can see. Its also not that useful to dwell on disagreements of this sort, as they simply represent an inability to execute the process of play of a game, and so have very limited value in terms of analyzing that process/structure/system. Certainly an examination of how games fail is potentially valuable on its own, but the most cogent discussions I've ever seen on that subject originated with Ron Edwards!  Uh, this all seems obvious to me, that is "Rules don't enforce themselves, its up to people to decide what they will actually do in practice. Sometimes this is different from what is written down." Yes indeed! All Baker seems to be saying is that the best approach to writing a game system would be to leverage the actual core set of processes of social interactions between people and build your rules around that. Again, I invite you to really thoroughly read the Apocalypse World rules and then perhaps Vince's essays on hacking AW and the 'Onion Structure', etc. where you will learn exactly how he approached this in a very transparent and obvious manner. I'm not saying his approach is the ONLY good one, but I will observe that the majority of RPGs being developed today are based on his work! Pardon me, but I find this whole point to be rather uninteresting and a side issue, at best. Yes, you could try to analyze Baker's statements and game designs in these terms, but IMHO it is an unfruitful approach. I can see two possible types of norms, ones which govern overall process of play, and those which address more specific issues like what are the criteria for evaluating a specific fiction. Baker takes what underlies all of this, the social dynamics and process existing in a typical RPG activity involving several people sitting around a table having a conversation about something. Now, there are certainly norms of behavior associated with that, but they have little to do with the specifics of RPGs! Instead what Baker focuses on is the conversational structure, and he builds a game and its process OUT of that analysis.In terms of the whole 'activation of rules' thing, this is a SECONDARY consideration! I mean, sure, its a very useful technique and it's obviously employed with great frequency in a very transparent and direct fashion in AW. I don't dispute that one can, and should, evaluate the effectiveness of a given game on how well it manages to utilize this mechanism. That is, a GM who is careless and unprincipled in its application is probably going to run into issues while running a PbtA. I think this is, again, a fairly unremarkable observation. At most it tells us that this 'mapping' as you insist on calling it, needs to be done pretty consistently or else play may degenerate.Yeah, I think you (and I admit this is a failing of mine also) probably need to write all our posts out in a text editor someplace on the side, wait a couple hours, and then remove 50% of the words! Vince Baker is a genius at being extremely clear, and generally what is unsaid by him is either extremely apparent or relatively unimportant. Like this mapping thing, yeah, its kind of important, but it only exists in the SECOND of the 4 onion layers, so even if there's an issue there, its not going to crash your game, or certainly not as much as a misunderstanding of the layer one stuff, the conversation itself and the MC principles and agenda. So I would posit that the 'triggering' issues you focus on won't be an actual problem unless the GM (or players I guess) is abusing that process to undermine layer one! In other words, if I misapply Read a Sitch but in a way that still honors my principles and agenda, I'm probably OK. It might not be the best practice, but chances are the game will still work. So I would focus my primary attention on that layer one! <a href="https://lumpley.games/2019/12/30/powered-by-the-apocalypse-part-1/" target="_blank">Lumpley PbtA design part 1</a></blockquote>

Verification