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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6350402" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think this is a very precise description of what a "kicker" is. It's not this particular feature of "kickers" that makes Edwards' claim them as innovative. What Edwards claims to be innovative is the fact that the kicker is not just backstory but an immediate crisis in which the PC is located - so it's a type of player-authored scene-framing that the GM is obliged to incorporate into the opening fiction of the game.<a href="http://mearls.livejournal.com/146778.html" target="_blank">Mearls</a> has discussed the innovative nature of the "kicker", as well as developing it in a slightly "old-school" direction:So, years ago Ron Edwards (I think) introduced the idea of kickers and bangs in Sorcerer. I own Sorcerer, read it, and thought I understood them. . . . <s>o a lot of this stuff is basic RPG theory and covers some now fundamental methods to put characters into motion. The big reveal for me is that, for the past few campaigns, I've been unhappy with how the story has progressed. . . . So, yesterday, to kick off my Greyhawk Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, I trotted out a set of Traveller-style rules I built with an eye toward kickers and bangs. The rules lack significant mechanical impact on a PC. Instead, they build kickers right into the character's background. We ended up with some really interesting characters with lots of reasons to push the story ahead. The kickers it produced also suggest a number of bangs that can come up in play.</s><s></s><s></s><s>One of the distinctive aspects of a "kicker", as opposed to a "plot hook", is a more general aspiration of "story now" RPGing - narrow entrance, wide exit; or, tight framing that doesn't dictate outcomes. Edwards emphasises this in a <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=1321.0" target="_blank">post</a> that Mearls links to in the blog I've just quoted from:</s><s></s><s>I am warning the user from providing a Kicker that only gives the protagonist one reasonable thing to do. "My house is burning down," has pretty much only one reaction: get out of the burning house. "Guys are coming to kill me," is the same: defend yourself and try to turn the tables.</s><s></s><s>(Whereas "A guy tried to kill me with a hatchet on the bus" provides a more surrealistic or offbeat or perplexing problem beyond the actual physical danger.)</s><s></s><s>Thus the Kicker style I am aiming at, with that particular admonition, is that for which different people might have their characters react to differently. Otherwise you end up with the typical non-Narrativist character hook: "I'm a merc. A guy hired me to kill Bobby G." Well, duh, he's going to kill Bobby G now. So what?</s><s></s><s>None of this has anything to do with what I am perceiving you to be asking about: the description of a character's action or reaction in the Kicker itself. There is nothing wrong with this, at the most basic level. Including, "I barely got away from the guy by hurling myself out the emergency exit, when we took a corner at 45 mph," could easily be added to the hatchet Kicker.</s><s></s><s>However, permitting or encouraging such additions hits a practical problem very, very swiftly - players turn in elaborate short stories, essentially "playing before they play" in the way people have done for decades. You get reams of colorful events with ... as it turns out ... no entry into the act of role-playing. The reactions have been made and the Kicker is, for all intents and purposes, over before play has begun.</s><s></s><s>Therefore if I were to see Kickers with characters' actions and reactions as part of the text, I might be very picky about how much of that material would be acceptable.</s><s>Here is a passage from Edwards' <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">"Right to Dream" essay</a> in which he acknowledges an innovation present in Ars Magic:</s><s></s><s>High Concept play can be divided neatly into those which are greatly concerned with "the big story" and those which are not. Historically, the latter used to be the most common: Call of Cthulhu, Jorune, or more recently Dread and Godlike, in which "the story" only refers to a record of short-term events and set-pieces. However, following the spearhead for this type of game text, Ars Magica, now the long-term story-type is more common.</s><s>Here are some quotes from Over the Edge (1997 revised edition, as reproduced in the 20th anniversary edition):</s><s></s><s>Page 4</s><s>Over the Edge emphasises role-playing and story-telling over number-crunching. The mechanics are exceedingly easy and open to interpretation. . . . [C]omplex mechanics invariably channel and limit the imagination . . . When I look at the player characters that my friends have invented in my games, and I review the adventures they have had, they stand out as people and events that I had never before seen in role-playing games . . . [T]he rules in any game are a boat that takes you to the shore you want to reach. . . . [Y]our boat [in OtE] is a purely functional construction without the elaborate detail and complications. It is my hope that the boat's simplicity will encourage you to concentrate on your goal (enjoyable role-playing) without getting caught up in the vehicle (the rules).</s><s></s><s>Page 192-93</s><s>Role-playing is unusual among art forms in that the artists are also the audience. When you run a game or a character, you are doing it for your own enjoyment and that of your friends, not for a separate audience. . . .</s><s></s><s>The Literary Edge by Robin D Laws</s><s>OTE is, among other things, an attempt to further the development of role-playing as art. . . . [T]he GM is not a "storyteller" with the players as audience, but merely a "first among equals" given responsibility for the smooth progress of the developing story. . . . In roleplaying . . . the GM is oten called on to say "no" to players' desires for their characters . . . But GMs should also be prepared to say "yes" to players when a suggestion inspires new possibilites for the storyline. . . . The GM is not a movie director, able to order actors to interpret a script . . .  Instead, he should be seeking ways to challenge PCs, to use plot developments to highlight aspects of their characters, in hopes of being challenged in return. . . . Think of all yur actions as GM as literary devices. . . . When viewing role-playing as an art form, rather than a game, it becomes less important to keep from the plaers things their characters wouldn't know. . . . For years, role-players have been simulating fictional narratives the way wargamers recreate historical military engagements. They've been making spontaeous, democratized art for their own consumption . . . Making the artistry conscious is a liberating act . . . Have fun with it, and enjoy your special role in aesthetics history - it's not everybody who gets to be a pioneer in the development of a new art form.</s><s>I see at least two motifs in what I have quoted. First, there are quite deliberate claims about the distinctive and innovative character of OtE as a system - Tweet describes the uniqueness of the PCs and events he has seen, and Laws refers to the game's role in further developing RPGs as an art form.</s><s></s><s>Second, there are characterisations of the nature of RPGing and the function of RPG rules that are typical of the "indie" movement (eg Vincent Baker) and that are quite relevant to a discussion of when/how games can be played in a sim fashion. Tweet talks about rules as a vehicle, and Laws talks about GMing as the deployment of "literary devices". That is, the system is seen not in a process-sim fashion as a model of the fiction, but rather in a metagame fashion as a device to be used by the game participants to determine what the content of the fiction is to be.</s><s></s><s>OtE didn't invent such approaches, of course: you can see Gygax describing them in his DMG, most clearly in his discussion of saving throws, but it's also there in his discussion of XP, of the action economy and (perhaps to a lesser extent) of hit points. But he didn't make those discussions the centrepiece of his design, and as various posters on these boards have testifid over the years (eg   [MENTION=6698278]Emerikol[/MENTION]) those features of Gygax's rulebooks were regularly ignored - hence why many D&D players saw F/R/W saves as a sensible rationalisation of the saving throw rules, rather than the radical transformation that I regard them as being.</s><s></s><s>But OtE is distinctive in making this sort of approach to the game an overt centrepiece that can hardly be ignored in playing the game.</s><s></s><s>Here is Tweet on pp xv-xvi of the anniversary edition of OtE:</s><s></s><s>New Game Tech</s><s>. . . Free-form, story-oriented roleplaying has come a long way in twenty years. . . .</s><s></s><s>Fail Forward</s><s>A simple but powerful improvement you can make to your game is to redefine failure as "things go wrong" instead of "the PC isn't up to the task." Ron Edwards, Luke Crane and other indie RPG designers have champions this idea, and they're exactly right. . . .</s><s></s><s>Sorcerer's Kicker</s><s>Each PC's first session starts with some compelling event that the character cannot ignore. . . . The player invents his own kicker.</s><s>The passage on "fail forward" is reproduced almost word-for-word on p 42 of the 13th Age rulebook.</s><s></s><s>My view is that if Tweet regards certain designs as innovative ("new game tech"), and as improvements that he includes in his new games and retrofits to his old games, then there is a good chance that he is right. I don't think he is just being modest and failing to claim credit for things that he already invented.</s><s></s><s>I don't really see why this matters. Many people don't think that Gygax's games - even AD&D - were as impressive as he claimed them to be. Even if that's a minority opinion on AD&D, it's a very widely held opinion on Dangerous Journeys, which is as full of self-aggrandising descriptions in its intro material as any RPG I've read.</s><s></s><s>I don't think that Edwards is broadly, or narrowly, saying "your gaming experiences are invalid." He does claim to be able to help you improve your RPGing experience; if you don't agree, then the solution is pretty simple: ignore his advice!</s><s></s><s>That's just a special case of the general rule that, if you are going to read critics, you should read ones who speak to you. The world is full of literary critics, theatre critics, music critics, RPG critics etc.They have widely varying views. Many critics loved the film "Sideways"; I found it largely uninspiring and a bit insipid. The critics mostly preferred the second to the first Wolverine movie; my taste is the opposite, although the weight of serious opinion is strong enough the other way that no doubt I will one day give the second movie another chance.</s><s></s><s>I can't remember what led me to Edwards' "system matters" essay - I followed some chance link around 10 years ago. As someone who had thought about system for a long time (GMing Rolemaster, and discovering both its strengths and its many limitations, can do that), I found that essay, and the other ones on the site, hugely insightful. They have made one of the single greatest conributions to my GMing of anything that I have read, and for me that is the bottom line measure of whether or not something written about RPGing techniques is worthwhile. They improved my Rolemaster game; they laid a solid foundation for my 4e game; they helped me make sense of my Dying Earth and HeroWars rulebooks; they led me to Vincent Baker's blog and to a forum post by Paul Czege about scene-framing which both described my own GMing techniques back to me and helpd me to improve them. Edwards' posts also distilled GMing problems that had afflicted both my own game (hence enabling me to correct them) and other games that I had played in (hence enabling me to avoid them).</s><s></s><s>I've got little doubt that many of the leading personalities of the Forge would find my 4e game dull and shallow - mechanically clunky by their standards (but quite tolerable for someone who has 19 years of Rolemaster under his belt) and thematically simplistic. But that's fine - I'm not playing with them, I'm playing with my friends of many years. That doesn't mean that I can't benefit from their insightful advice.</s><s></s><s>The categorisations are not arbitrary. They are reasoned. The reasoning may not be perfect in all cases: it rarely is, particularly where criticsm is concerned.</s><s></s><s>As I posted upthread, I don't think Edwards' categories are all that salient on ENworld, although I do think that some ENworld discussions would be improved by greater recognition among participants that "immersion" is not the only reason people play RPGs, and that when White Plume Mountain or ToH or Against the Giants were written the main goal of play was not "immersion" but "beating the dungeon". (In Edwards's terminology, the two contrasting agendas here are some form or other of simulationism, and gamism.)</s><s></s><s>But the fact that some critic's categories are not relevant to some participants in the hobby does not make them arbitrary. My own background in RPGing is pretty mainstream, and I found the categories interesting and useful. I also have a lot of sympathy with Edwards's claim that narrativist or gamist goals will inevitably cause tension within simulationist play: in the case of high concept play, there will be balance-of-power issues between GM and players; in the case of purist-for-sim play there will be the issue that   [MENTION=8900]Tony[/MENTION]Vargas noted upthread, that the system won't reliably deliver the challenge or the story that the gamist/narrativist player wants. This sympathy is grounded on my own experiences as an RPGer, and reasoned projection from those experiences.</s><s></s><s>On the other hand, I think that Edwards exaggerates the contrast between gamist and narrativist play. A game like The Dying Earth bring this out, in my view: he classifies it as narrativist even though it doesn't satisfy his formal definition (which is, in my view, too narrow) and even though it can be seen as gamist in the same fashion as parlour games like charades and dictionary, the idea being to amuse your friends with witty quips. But I don't think this matters a great deal, especially as Edwards himself notes that a number of RPGs lend themselves to either gamist or narrativist play, depending upon the direction in which the participants take them (he names T&T and the original Marvel Super Heroes game; I think 4e and The Dying Earth could be added to the list).</s><s></s><s>Vincent Baker is thanked in the acknowledgements for MHRP, and its indebtedness to earlier games based around free descriptors as the mechanical core, and scene-based conflict resolution, is pretty obvious. The influence of this sort of design, especially the latter, on 4e is equally obvious, and Heinsoo noted the influence of indie games on 4e's design in a <a href="http://www.critical-hits.com/blog/2008/03/05/dd-xp-interview-sara-girard-rob-heinsoo/" target="_blank">pre-release interview</a>:</s><s></s><s>No other RPG’s are in this boat. There might not be anyone else out there who would publish this kind of game. They usually get entrenched in the simulation aspect.</s><s></s><s>Indie games are similar in that they emphasize the gameplay aspect, but they’re super-focused, like a narrow laser. D&D has to be more general to accommodate a wide range of play.</s><s>As a general rule, the influence and significance of an avant-garde cultural movement isn't judged by how many people actually paid attention to its immediate outputs. I mean, how many people have actually looked at or admired even a reproduction of DuChamp's "Fountain"? That doesn't mean that dada, and related movements like the surrealists, have had little influence on our contemporary culture.</s><s></s><s>I don't understand what this passage is trying to say.</s><s></s><s>For instance, why do you say "despited being cited by The Forge as a game they like, [Hero Wars] was actually commmissioned to primarily play in the Glorantha setting". What is the force of the "despite"? Everyone who knows of HeroWars knows it was written for Gloranthan play. Ron Edwards knows it was written for Gloranthan play, and talks about this in his discussion of the system (and also in his comparisons of it to Runequest; which - by the way - he describes in his "Right to Dream" essay as one vehicle, together with CoC, for "perhaps the most important system, publishing tradition, and intellectual engine in the hobby - yes, even more than D&D.")</s><s></s><s>And what is the significance of the fact that Glorantha players prefer some other system? Or that more people play 5e than DungeonWorld? Is that meant to show that the games spawned by the indie RPG movement are of little collective worth? Is your metric for worth "widely played"?</s><s></s><s>Is your metric for worth "I don't like it at all"? Many people find Rolemaster not worth the effort. Does that mean Rolemaster is of little worth?</s><s></s><s>As for 4e, can you point me to these "arrogant assetions" in the rulebooks? Do you mean James Wyatt's suggestion to skip colour encounters, like casual chats with gate guards? Is you metric for a game being of worth that you like the designer chatter?</s><s></s><s>It is hard to find a RPG book more opinionated, more full of admonitions to play one way rather than another, than Gygax's DMG - which tells both Monty Haul gamers and purist-for-system simulationists that they've been playing the game wrong all the years before. And the 2nd ed PHB is full of attacks upon system optimisers and hard-core gamist players (ie precisely the sorts of players who invented D&D!).</s><s></s><s>It seems that you yourself have strong views on how people should design and play RPGs. Is the difference between you and the Forge that you have a popular majority on your side?</s></blockquote>

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