Why Jargon is Bad, and Some Modern Resources for RPG Theory

[Campbell]

Incoherence in my mind speaks to two different core issues that are better off being talked about separately:

1. No Unity of Purpose: Players want fundamentally different sorts of play, and everyone is basically playing their own private game that happens to involve other people.

2. Counterproductive Procedures: We're all on the same page, but the game we are playing wants us to do things that do not help us achieve our shared agenda or even cut against it. A really good example is Vampire - The Masquerade's extremely detailed set of combat mechanics. In the Vampire groups I was a part of I remember the collective sigh that would come across the whole group the moment a fight was about to start, particularly if Celerity was a thing.

 

[loverdrive]

Funnily, I've spotted this thread as I was typing out "The Eastern taxonomy" in another tab. Huh.

 

[AnotherGuy]

2. Counterproductive Procedures: We're all on the same page, but the game we are playing wants us to do things that do not help us achieve our shared agenda or even cut against it. A really good example is Vampire - The Masquerade's extremely detailed set of combat mechanics. In the Vampire groups I was a part of I remember the collective sigh that would come across the whole group the moment a fight was about to start, particularly if Celerity was a thing.

Just as an aside I'm curious to know the issues. My experience I'd assess as limited and my memory a little foggy on VtM - all I remember was that celerity was pretty useful in a scrap.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Just as an aside I'm curious to know the issues. My experience I'd assess as limited and my memory a little foggy on VtM - all I remember was that celerity was pretty useful in a scrap.

Celerity gave extra actions when you activated it. Besides meaning you were resolving multiple actions for those with it, anyone who didn't have it was twiddling their thumbs waiting for those who did.

(This is over and above the fact that Vampire had a combat system that seemed to be belong in a different game with a different avowed focus).

 

[loverdrive]

Just as an aside I'm curious to know the issues. My experience I'd assess as limited and my memory a little foggy on VtM - all I remember was that celerity was pretty useful in a scrap.

Celerity is basically several extra turns. And with how VtM works, it's a real big time sink.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The podcast, I'm learning, is about academic game criticism in general. I liked how they tried to situate both White and the Forge alongside other intellectual history, for example, in talking about the way knowledge was produced through a web forum, how engaging with Edwards was similar to the scene of psychoanalysis, etc.

Anyway, not to jump back into it, but I'm actually still confused about Incoherence vs Hybrid. From everything I've read it seems that incoherence-->dysfunctional play and hybrid is functional play addressing multiple agendas. Is that basically correct?

I really have no idea. My impression of the way 'incoherent' is really meant to be used, or most usefully employed, is simply to label play as having more than one agenda without any real attempt to bring them together into a coherent whole. (and this definition of incoherent, as the antonym of coherent in its sense of 'having a single unified purpose and direction' is the one that the podcasters seem not to have grokked, they seemed to only want to use the definition which is a synonym for 'unintelligible'). So, that would be my contribution to any discussion of the term, it is merely a way to say "there are multiple agendas and they are not integrated into some sort of unified game process." Now, that may result in something 'unintelligible', but I don't think that's intended and it would be a rather extreme way to describe play of an RPG! I mean, in that sense of the word, no play I ever saw was incoherent, not even close. Yet I think Edwards' use of the term is acceptable once you parse out the different meanings. There are other words that might be used, like 'inharmonious', but they don't really sound that good to me.

As for 'hybrid', if you have blended multiple approaches into a single smoothly working whole, then it seems like a decent word for it. I don't know anything about the history of using this term in 'Forge Speak' myself. My understanding is that Edwards at some point wrote an essay or made some posts pointing out that it was not impossible to have multiple agendas, but that games catering to such would want to do so in a conscious way. This is not a surprising, given that the whole thrust of what was being hashed out at The Forge seems to be summarized by "RPGs should be consciously designed to achieve specific ends in light of XYZ."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Celerity gave extra actions when you activated it. Besides meaning you were resolving multiple actions for those with it, anyone who didn't have it was twiddling their thumbs waiting for those who did.

(This is over and above the fact that Vampire had a combat system that seemed to be belong in a different game with a different avowed focus).

Right, it basically has ALL the problems of AD&D 1e Psionics, except its not really an optional and avoidable part of the system...

 

[Thomas Shey]

Right, it basically has ALL the problems of AD&D 1e Psionics, except its not really an optional and avoidable part of the system...

Yeah. Its one of the few things I outright agree with Ron Edwards about; Vampire was a game where the mechanics and the theoretical point of the game don't seem to even have a passing relationship to each other for the most part (Humanity and Blood Points perhaps being the exception).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah. Its one of the few things I outright agree with Ron Edwards about; Vampire was a game where the mechanics and the theoretical point of the game don't seem to even have a passing relationship to each other for the most part (Humanity and Blood Points perhaps being the exception).

Yeah, the currencies seem like they could work. I've not actually played, so I'm a bit fuzzy on exactly how they get integrated into the flow of things.

 

[Malmuria]

Incoherence in my mind speaks to two different core issues that are better off being talked about separately:

1. No Unity of Purpose: Players want fundamentally different sorts of play, and everyone is basically playing their own private game that happens to involve other people.

2. Counterproductive Procedures: We're all on the same page, but the game we are playing wants us to do things that do not help us achieve our shared agenda or even cut against it. A really good example is Vampire - The Masquerade's extremely detailed set of combat mechanics. In the Vampire groups I was a part of I remember the collective sigh that would come across the whole group the moment a fight was about to start, particularly if Celerity was a thing.

Those seem to be both causes for dysfunction, correct? That is, incoherence-->dysfunction unless supporting multiple agendas is a design goal (hybrid) or play moves to one agenda over another (drift). It can be solved either at the level of design or the level of play, but it is a problem that needs to be solved or else you end up with something dysfunctional. Is that a decent reading of it?