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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7778241" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm of the opinion that RPG technology and science has advanced to the point that we are unlikely to make any real breakthroughs in the design of game mechanics, and that at this point we have such a range of strong and well designed systems that serve such a wide variety of purposes that any effort to improve upon such a system with an entirely new system is wasted effort compared to the minimal value of even successfully doing so.As such I'd prefer that almost all of the focus on writing new systems cease.  We now have good engines to run our games on.What we do not yet have is a lot of widely accessible good examples of play.  That is to say, having built the framework for creating stories, we are not yet doing a good job of writing or sharing those stories.   All the words communicating rules are wasted compared to value that would be created by investing the same amount of words into the art of RPGs.If you want to impress me now, write a good adventure, campaign, scenario, or adventure.I was just talking with a novice DM about his early experiences in DMing, and he was coming to the unhappy conclusion that I had had long ago, which is that even a scenario or adventure with a very strong concept still required almost a complete rewrite to use in play owing to the usual sloppiness of the standards which such adventures are written in.  They fail to provide obviously needed information.  They fail to provide good props and play aids.  They often fail to communicate what the writer is imagining clearly to the end user.   They are often incoherent, often fail to take into account obvious things that the PC's might try to do, often depend on railroading without calling out the technique simply because the writer failed to imagine that the PC's would do anything other than what is imagined.   They are rarely well play-tested.   And they are often lacking in imagination in the details.   If it was just a matter of the effort required to repaint the setting to the GMs aesthetic standards, that would be one thing.  But they often fail to even run well unless the GM takes tremendous effort on their own.And these are just things that I would think are minimal standards, akin to writing an essay with good grammar and punctuation.  I'm not even getting into the fact that at this point, we ought to be aspiring to create art.  We ought to be with this literary medium, as with the novel or the movie before us, pushing past the point of mere novelty of experience and creating things of artistic merit and lasting value.  As young man, when I read the Dragonlance modules for the first time, I thought, "This is it.  This is were our hobby begins to achieve relevancy and legitimacy."  I thought of people like Hickman and Weiss the way we might think of writer's like Austin and Dickens - pioneers in a new artistic country. And yet, now 30 years later, where have we gone?  What have we achieved?   What have we done that has improved upon what was done in the past?</blockquote>

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