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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8667352" data-attributes="member: 82106">Its an interesting question. So, I think it may, to a degree, be a perspective-dependent thing. Sticking to RPGs, there could be coherency at a certain level, but maybe not at all levels. Like, an example might be the combat system in V:tM, which as I understand it (being not super familiar with this particular game specifically) is rather 'crunchy' and seems intended to be pretty gamist (rewarding expert play and requiring an exercise of skill to achieve the greatest success, possibly including a reward system for such). This seems fairly coherent, in and of itself, its a game, you play the game well, you win. Now, is the WHOLE GAME very coherent? Maybe not so much.Maybe more generally yes, I think its possible for things that have different purposes to form a coherent whole. Aesthetic consistency certainly seems like a way to express that. There might be other ways, in specific fields too, I'm not personally wedded to aesthetics as the only possible measure.Well, maybe, I'm not sure. I mean, as forms of entertainment with goals and tastes that are primarily coming from the participants its hard to say what 'objective' ultimately means. I think the objective part is in terms of being able to say "gosh, if 100 different people play this game, AD&D 2e, its likely they will run into this certain kind of situation in play, often." Now, ULTIMATELY, you can only say objective things like that, you can't judge anything at all. There are no known criteria by which to render objective judgment on the world (at least that more than about 3 people will generally agree on). I like the Buddhist formulation of this concept: Om, gate gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi soha! Roughly "the world is empty of meaning and this is a truth beyond meaning."Eh, I don't know. I'm not that much of a Forge Guru, lol. My impression is that he meant incoherent in the sense of 'not sticking to one agenda coherently', and thus that any 'multiple agenda' game is in some sense incoherent, but that it might be designed in such a way as to achieve overall aesthetic consistency at some level (presumably by resolving the issues raised by the clash of agendas in some deliberate way). This would then be a 'hybrid agenda situation' and presumably functional. Would it still be incoherent? You would have to ask Ron how he would answer that, but again maybe [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER], having a rather good mind for quotations, can cite something on that. I really have a lousy memory for such things!</blockquote>

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