Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9693817" data-attributes="member: 7040941">When it comes to simplifying games, I wonder how many have really tried to understand how the hobby as a whole remains so niche and apparently inaccessible, despite having plenty of examples of simplifying and minimalizing down to practically nothing. Fundamentally I think the hobby is still too married to the oral tradition that has to be conveyed to new players, even with the simplest of games, the simplicity of which only serves to remove frictions but not add any accessibility. One could blame a lot of different things for that. My consistent take has been that fundamentally TTRPGs, every single one to date, are hybrid improv games, where all of the focus is placed on whatever the hybrid is, and virtually none on the improv game itself. People will "recognize" that improv is a part of RPGs, but most if not all will seldom consider just how deep that goes, and just how very much it affects how accessible the hobby is. The hobby has all these idiosyncratic cultural artifacts to it that, as I argue, all stem from Improv and can be rapidly understood from that perspective, and yet nobody seemingly wants to really take it seriously. Improv isn't taught by any of these games in any serious, transparent way, and most end up having to learn via that idiosyncratic oral tradition, which itself isn't often taught directly by the game either. And its not just a matter of actually making these games more inclusive to people who don't get taken in by, or simply never receive that oral tradition. It actually affects the design of the games too, with the slavish chasing of minimalism and simplicity, for very little gain to the hobby, being an example. But it also holds back designing the games to avoid all these idiosyncratic problems, which are all just variations of common improv problems at the end of the day, caused by the game not being treated as an improv partner, and its mechanics and systems (if there even are any) being designed to work with the improv dynamic. But to go further, Improv is also a useful way to simplify not by substraction but simply by interface. In other words, Improv can make a complex system very simple to engage with, and you end up with the best of both worlds. Painless engagement with depth. Obviously tooting my own horn, but thats what I've been doing with my own game, and while its no longer an RPG in any conventional sense (i was apparently reinventing gamebooks, so I'm leaning towards describing it that way nowadays), it does accomplish that, providing an immensely complex "Engine" comprised of multiple interlocking subsystems that simply are not complex at all to actually play with. You still have to learn to play of course, and that is part and parcel to the whole "its not an rpg anymore" bit, but once you do its smooth to play, and what you receive in return is a game that plays like an amalgamation of Dwarf Fortress, the Sims, Shadow of Mordor, and Morrowind, whilst being built into a single book with ~10 pages of rules to learn, which the book will teach you step by step as you play. A book which, as an emergent property of playing it, will generate a genuine Living World that can cause and solve its own problems, even if you're charging your character into the fray. The complexity of building a game like this is in doing what RPGs generally don't do, or largely do poorly, and that involves not just subtracting elements expecting it to be easier or smoother to play. There's more to what produces clunky or complex gamefeel than how many mechanics or systems you have.</blockquote>

Verification