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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TrippyHippy" data-source="post: 6350582" data-attributes="member: 27252">No, I don’t. I have strong views on what I enjoy or not, but I don’t accept a one-size-fits-all theory that tries to categorise why I like games or not. As such, I have no prescribed views on how people should design or play games. I’m sorry, but your post was just too long to answer all of your points. Of the bits I edited out - I agreed with some bits, disagreed with others - but found that a bulk of it was moving away from the salient points I was wanting to address. I will note that many of the quotes you cite were made later on and written in hindsight. Moroever, you are selecting quotes from a vast amount of online discussion - some of it was fine and dandy, but there was also an element of condescension, sometimes just implied, from some that was less than magnanimous towards particular games and groups. The issue over citing things like Heroquest, Ghostbusters, Ars Magica, Toon, Paranoia, RuneQuest, Vampire or indeed Joe Blogg’s D&D house rules from 1978 is that people were considering narrative devices and techniques way back throughout the hobby. Always. They just didn't make a big thing about them. For example, I used to be of the mind that Ars Magica ‘innovated’ the idea of ‘troupe play’, until another player pointed out that he had been doing the same sort of thing with Traveller for years. Now, very little of this is written about in the rulebooks - but the nuance of the premise (creating collectively owned spaceships and managing their maintenance like a business) does indeed lend itself towards rolling up multiple characters and creating a soap opera out of it - with multiple narrative angles for different selected characters on a scenario-by-scenario basis. Understated, perhaps - but there nevertheless. It is to AM’s credit that the author explicitly denounces any claim that the game’s ideas are somehow exclusive to it, and it’s this sense of humility which is lacking in games such as Sorcerer, et al. With regards to 4E and ‘arrogant design’, my point with all these games was that they created a theory based buffer for themselves that actually inhibited critical analysis. In the case of 4E, the whole GNS argument was that the game was made more ‘coherent’ by establishing a specific outlook for playing it. Without delving into edition warring, the problem I have is that by making the game rigidly stick to this agenda, it actually just served to disenfranchise players. Yet, the game design itself is somehow exempt from criticism insofar that it reached it’s stated goals and ‘purpose’. It encapsulates my entire viewpoint about The Forge games too - it became near impossible to simply say,  “I don’t enjoy playing Dogs in the Vineyard”, or The Burning Wheel, or whatever, without becoming embroiled in debate with people who were basically saying the reason you don’t like it is ‘you’re the wrong type of player!’, or ‘you’re not playing it right!’ or even more simply ‘you don’t get it!’. The whole GNS theory to me was just a bogus way of deflecting criticism rather than encouraging it. Do I think there has been any positive influence from these games? Sure. I’ve already cited Marvel Heroic as a game I admire a lot, and I also think Fiasco is brilliant. But there has also been a shift in the language of these games too - again, less interested in making claims of influence or revolution, or what type of game it represents, or demanding ‘rules as written’ play, and just getting on with the creative fun of the game itself. That is what I respect.</blockquote>

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