Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7570296" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's an extraordinarily deep and useful question, and my way of answering it depends on me discussing what I think an RPG is, and what I think makes a good and successful RPG.  My answers are radically different than the conventional ones The Forge offers, so bear with me.So to begin with, I believe an RPG is a game of structured make believe story-telling that is composed of a collection of mini-games which simulate aspects of the genera of the story that is being told.  An RPG is successful, if the different mini-games satisfy one or more of the potential aesthetics of play of the participants in a compelling way.That may require some breakdown to fully get at what I'm saying, but from that definition we can I think immediately espy the utility of complexity.   First, complexity is useful because more minigames means more different aesthetics of play that can be potentially satisfied by a game over the course of play, and the more different genera elements or conflicts we can resolve in a compelling way.  Secondly, complexity is useful because it can add depth to those minigames, making them more compelling in terms of the opportunities the player will have for decision making, the emersion that the player will experience in the minigame, and the way that the minigame will act to both prompt and aid the imaginations of the participants.   That is to say, by providing more structure and more details within a particular minigame, the more likely it is that the minigame can satisfy multiple aesthetics of play simultaneously.Now I want to contrast this with two specific claims made by 'The Forge'.  The first is that all correctly designed games only can satisfy at most one aesthetic of play (of which The Forge identified only three).  And the second is that a system should be tightly designed as a single coherent game to satisfy that one aesthetic of play.  These two claims lead one to think that the best possible RPG is one that is very simple and has a single unified system running through out it.   But by contrast I'm suggesting that the best possible RPG is one that has disparate, non-unified but interacting subsystems that each work to accomplish different goals of play by the different participants in the game.My idea here is that by catering to diverse experiences, not only are you attracting more different participants to the game, but you are preventing the participants from easily tiring of the ones perspective on play that a more tightly designed system would provide for.   To go back to my earlier food analogy, a good rules light game might be something like 'Cane's Chicken Fingers', which offers a very limited menu selection of simply prepared convenient food.  The problem with this approach is that while it satisfies your urge for fried chicken, when you assemble a crowd of people not only are you likely to have people that are tired of fried chicken or who are glutten intolerant, but you probably will not find a group that will want to go out for chicken fingers every week.  Whereas a diner with a more diverse menu, might reasonably offer something for everyone and sufficient menu diversity that you do not easily tire of the food.  There might be that one guy that likes cheeseburgers and always orders the cheeseburgers, but as long as the other participants in the party can order something else, everyone is happy.</blockquote>

Verification