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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yep. And "mostly HCS... driven by strong fiction first engine" is honestly pretty close to describing what Cortex Plus/Prime does as a game engine, which is why it's often used for simulating other media properties like Leverage, Smallville, Dragon Prince, and He-Man. Cam Banks said that one reason he likes his own Cortex system is because essentially the entire character concept - e.g., Distinctions, Values, Attributes, Assets, etc. - goes into assembling the dice pool for the roll.

Edit: I think one reason why the play principles can be difficult to glean from reading the Fate rules - at least in comparison to games like PbtA and FitD that scream their principles in your face - is because Fate Core, Accelerated, Condensed, and the Toolkit represent incomplete games. They are toolkit books for Building-Your-Own-Game. It's easier, IMO, once you look through at some shining examples of Fate games. It's likewise easier IME to get the play principles for Cortex from Tales of Xadia, for example, than it is from Cortex Prime. Again, this is in contrast to PbtA and FitD, which have no generic toolkit system for creating your own game.


Presumably Gods and Monsters.


That's pretty fun. DFA converts the idea of PbtA playbooks, but makes them more Fate-appropriate (i.e., Mantles). What really makes it sing is how it packages conditions and consequences into those Mantles almost like clocks. Engaging your abilities may eventually trigger a condition (e.g., appeasing your patron), before getting those abilities back.

Fate certainly is a toolkit, not a game, so I agree it won't necessarily give you a complete solution. As for Gods & Monsters, there was a version that was included in one of the FATE books. I'm pretty sure you can download it from their web site, along with most of the generic system stuff. It was designed as an example of a fairly limited focus RPG (the rules are pretty short and just reference back to the core material). I hadn't seen it in a standalone form before, but TBH FATE gets a bit tangled, they put out a slew of books that all overlap and partially replace each other, I never really was sure what was what after the original stuff came out.

 

[Malmuria]

A (very) long discussion of William White’s book about The Forge

47 – White – Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge – Ranged Touch

rangedtouch.com

I haven’t finished it, but it’s an interesting overview. So far more a long review and discussion of the book itself.

 

[Campbell]

A (very) long discussion of William White’s book about The Forge

47 – White – Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge – Ranged Touch

rangedtouch.com

I haven’t finished it, but it’s an interesting overview. So far more a long review and discussion of the book itself.

Thanks. I'm going to give it a listen later this week.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A (very) long discussion of William White’s book about The Forge

47 – White – Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge – Ranged Touch

rangedtouch.com

I haven’t finished it, but it’s an interesting overview. So far more a long review and discussion of the book itself.

almost 4 hours! Ouch! lol. I MIGHT be able to skim the book in less time...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

almost 4 hours! Ouch! lol. I MIGHT be able to skim the book in less time...

Essentially you can skip to minute 30:40 where the first substantive statements are made about what the book actually says about The Forge, which is summarized as:

1) The Forge community was organized around encouraging participants to design and publish actual RPGs. This was effective, as MANY titles can be seen to have been either launched there or gained some degree of inspiration and motivation there (it had a specific forum dedicated to this function).

2) The 'Big Model' is "Consistent with academic theories of role-playing Games." and White apparently goes on to substantiate this claim.

3) It is a forum, you should consider it as such, a whole lot of individual contributions by different people at different times, etc. (much like, say, EnWorld...) . My reading of this is that it is kind of an admonition to stop painting the thing with a wide brush and pretending it is characterized by 2 or 3 posts or posters. It isn't. There were over 4,500 members and several hundred thousand posts.

Beyond that White seems to think that the forum on actual play was extremely important and is often largely ignored. I mean, without reading the book its hard to say what White actually thinks overall, but the reviewers seem to feel that he's more just laying out and analyzing The Forge, and not passing a whole lot of judgment on it one way or the other. His statements about GNS/The Big Model etc. sounds to me a heck of a lot like he thinks it is a highly useful and theoretically sound analytical framework. Anyone who's thesis is "GNS is nonsensical BS which is rejected by academic game studies" would be best not to cite White! lol. Again, I don't have access to the book myself, but as much of the review as I've been able to go through seems to invalidate such a thesis.

 

[Malmuria]

Listed to the whole thing, and it's an interesting discussion. It's mostly an extended analysis of White's book, methods, thesis, etc. It seems that White's book is more what they call "reportage" and a kind of archive analysis, and in that sense is interesting from a media studies perspective. White was a participant at the Forge, so that seems to affect the point of view, and there's not necessarily a critical lens in the book.

Anyway, the discussion obviously (4 hours...) includes a lot more than that summary. One of the more interesting things about this podcast episode is the way they think about how online discussions can be archived and made available, the social dynamics of web forums, and the fact that much contemporary discourse occurs in ephemeral, private spaces (discord, twitter, slack) that will make this kind of book difficult to write in the future.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Listed to the whole thing, and it's an interesting discussion. It's mostly an extended analysis of White's book, methods, thesis, etc. It seems that White's book is more what they call "reportage" and a kind of archive analysis, and in that sense is interesting from a media studies perspective. White was a participant at the Forge, so that seems to affect the point of view, and there's not necessarily a critical lens in the book.

Anyway, the discussion obviously (4 hours...) includes a lot more than that summary. One of the more interesting things about this podcast episode is the way they think about how online discussions can be archived and made available, the social dynamics of web forums, and the fact that much contemporary discourse occurs in ephemeral, private spaces (discord, twitter, slack) that will make this kind of book difficult to write in the future.

Right about the 2 hour mark is the start of the review of the chapter on Forge Theory, haven't had time to listen to that part of the review yet, but I'll comment once I get a chance.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right about the 2 hour mark is the start of the review of the chapter on Forge Theory, haven't had time to listen to that part of the review yet, but I'll comment once I get a chance.

Seems like there's really not much said about GNS itself, except for a whole lot of reviewer griping about the word 'incoherent', who's meaning, oddly they don't seem to fully grasp (I mean the plain meaning, not the technical meaning as used in GNS). Anyway, it didn't seem terribly enlightening, although apparently White had some pretty strong praise for the way discussions were often handled, the kinds of really insightful questions that were asked, etc.

 

[Malmuria]

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?

 

[soviet]

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?

My recollection is that incoherence can lead to disfunctional play, but that some of the time this is averted by the users drifting the game towards one agenda or the other in the heat of play, by ignoring the input that doesn't seem to 'make sense'. Hybrid play is as you say, a deliberate and functional combination of two agendas.