Surrounded by Genius

[contracycle]

Here, for example, is a previous post with a systematic, comparitive approach by me dating back to 2002:

Well, I came up with these terms for the four layers, as I read 'em.  I'm not keen on seeing them as a matrix at this point as I feel they are not arranged on easy axes.  So I've come up with these to toss into the pot:

Human Social
Character Relative
World Realisation
Activity Vector

I would label the categories as above, on my readings of the initial description and subsequent discussion. 

Human social: the human level of interaction among the participants, including support and leadership behaviours as outlined by fang.

Character Relative: The relationship between the characters in terms of how they interact with other and the resonance that has for player-player interaction.  This can occur in terms of duty slots (thief, fighter) or stereotypes (sneaky ventrue, brash brujah) or job description (fixer, assassin).  These are the roles they take on relative to the group of characters.

World Realisation
This is the level at which the characters are defined in terms of the game: the abilities are broken up and defined in game terms.  The place in society of the role is defined, as well as the impact it has on society and its material context.

Activity Vector
Packaging of abilities and the like, merits and flaws, the specifics of the commitment the player makes to fulfilling certain tasks and informed b certain motives.


Analysis of AD&D
Human Social: There was discussion of a caller and hence efforts to mandate leadership among the group of players.  The players are implicitly encouraged to adopt functional roles in proportion to a stock distribution of classes for efficiency purposes.

Character Relative: The only motivation for character relationships addressed is that of efficiency and filling each of the broad effectiveness slots, combat, combat magic, healing, sneaking.  Although social interactions are implicit in its class structure, no mechanism is provided for addressing them nor are they addressed.  Personal interactions are addressed only in terms of alignment.

World Realisation: This is expressed almost exclusively in terms of the objective impact a character may have on the world through positive action; they make little mention of the world pushing back, bar weapon restrictions on some of the classes, and selecting a church according to alignment.  No specific context is designed in and hence much remains nebulous, frex the ambiguous status of alignment languages and assembly of weapons.

Activity Vector
Controlled by classes, spells, and proficiencies and magic items.  These were not consistent across classes even by type: thieves had on set of special abilities resolved a certain way, clerics had another.  As a result it was actually very explicit, both in terms of what actions a character was expected to carry out and how they were to do them.  The only exception was magic items, which allowed the GM a measure of influence over how the characters were empowered to act.


Vampire
Human Social: the game advocates that the dynamic of play should be conscious of moral consequence and reflective of the personal experience.  There is no pressure supporting a standard distribution of roles, and hence the group is may have a diverse array or concentration on functional/social groups from whatever human motive.

Character Relative: First of all, all characters are co-conspirators and therefore share a common interest.  Characters are empowered to act on each other through factions of the conspiracy and their historical/stereotyped interactions.  In this sense, a gangrels stock suspicion of a tremeres stock sneakiness is strongly supported.  Characters also often have a lot of power to effect other characters emotionally through mechanical action.

World Realisation: each group is rendered from its own perspective with commentary on stock opinions of other groups, with objective abilities to influence the external world.  There is a form-follows-function literalism in the expression of the characters power over the context and their niche within that context.  Back-story elements are primarily limits to action, or more accurately the abrogation of implicit limits, although the descent/mentor structure enables a lot of embedding in the world.

Activity Vector: Activity is strongly typical, in that characters are most empowered to act along the lines mandated by their contextual group membership, which are highly functional.  These can be moderated or amplified through parallel selection of complimentary abilities (skills etc).  However, strongly expressed resource shortages impel certain sorts of activities.

Cyberpunk 2020
Human Social: the players are expected to adopt an efficiency/problem-solving stance in relation to objective challenges.  An optimum minimum set focussed on division of labour is expected to motivate character selection, although this is not strongly required. 

Character Relative: Division of labour of the implicit group, the band of antiheroic freelancers, may prompt inter-character relationships and dependencies.  Characters are not obliged to be on truthful terms, but are expected to be on amicable terms, with each other.  Back-story is supported and may lead to a wide array of (uncoordinated) interactions and motivations.

World Realisation: Character groups are quite strongly defined through a special ability, but are not heavily prejudiced thereafter in terms of activity selection.  Back-story is strongly exploited to present particular pressures in the past and/or the likely future.  Personalisation through crunchy bits allows a lot of fine-tuning of the characters identity because of default resource shortages and the need to explain how the implicit limits were overcome.

Activity Vector: The character special ability as special ability (rather than default ability) lends a lot of versatility to the vector of activity the character adopts through other mechanical devices, the crunchy bits (cyberware, skills, weapons).  Most of these are available regardless of character identity, although many are focussed on avenues coincident with character functional roles.  The implicit functional motivation tends to produce specialisation around the character ability as a variation on a theme.  Only one notable exception exists, the decker, who operates quite literally in a parallel universe with its own rules.

Blue Planet
Human Social: Nothing mandated in terms of character interdependencies.  There is weak support for a "law on the wild frontier" structure that might encourage the proficiency niche approach amongst players, but this is not strongly reinforced.  The potential exists for a need for a specialist aquatic character of one of several varieties, but this is neither strong nor taxing.

Character Relative: Back-story hooks are provided but no mechanism or encouragement is advanced to interlink the characters beyond task-driven cooperation.  Background in terms of origin (incorporate, native, colonist) is important to character identity and perhaps implicitly inter-character relationships but this is not strongly reinforced.

World Realisation: This occurs through strong world-based background selection that governs abilities, although selection is freeform if limited. The individual experience of the world is reinforced and characters are not strongly grouped, bar the specialist aquatics. These are not especially difficult to explain/obtain, however, although resource limits do exist.

Activity Vector
This will have been heavily focussed by background selection and will focus on various functional areas, and there is encouragement for all characters to diversify into aquatics and combat.  Characters are not governed by post-creation prejudices, and may diversify where they see fit.[/quote

And as we also see:

Ron Edwards wrote:

I'm pretty convinced by Gareth's post. That makes a lot of sense to me. "Character Relative" is clunky as hell, but it's a bit better than my term.

... the principle did not appear to be as irrelvant then as it has since become.

Now I'd be more than happy to pick tnhat discussion up again and expand the list.  for one thing, the concepts I propose should be critiqued and challenged, and other peoples perceptions of the games I discussed in these terms should also be aired.  Thats the way this should work, multiple inputs, not one person declaiming the Truth from on high.

[Nathan P.]

Coming out of the Five Games post on This Is My Blog, I would argue that we have a whole lot of tools for Narrativist-inclined designs - games that focus on human issues, and focus on them hard. The bumper crop of such games (with more coming out all the time) shows that, in my mind.

Now, how did these games happen? Through actual play and reflection on the corpus of the first such games (Sorcerer, MLWM, etc). How long did this take? On the order of 4-5 years, if my timing is right.

So I think one - not the only, but one - process is established. Play the games that align with your design interests and learn lessons from them.

Now, what we can work on in a substantive matter is reducing that turnaround time for other goals of play. This is where analysis of techniques comes in, I think. Establishing what effects mechanics, or sets of mechanics, produce consistently. Starting the design process from a known baseline, instead of nothing. Combined with playing other games, could this make the "flash of brilliance" less critical and result in more games of good quality? I don't see why not.

I'm also gonna plug the work Joshua is doing on Game Foo as steps in this direction.

[Ron Edwards]

This is foul.

Gareth, you have a choice.

Either the reasons you're here are paying off, for you and others, or they're not. If not, then you must decide whether continuing to be here is worth your time.

I am telling you that from my perspective, clearly they are not. Plenty of ideas get proposed here and incorporated. If yours aren't, then either they aren't making some kind of cut, or you are being ignored or devalued in some way.

Stay or go. If you stay, and if you choose not to post in Actual Play or Indie Design, then you'll have nowhere to post when the forums change over. Which will solve the problem for everyone.

Folks, take valid topics to new threads. This one is polluted and I'm killing it now.

Best,
Ron

[contracycle]

Either the reasons you're here are paying off, for you and others, or they're not. If not, then you must decide whether continuing to be here is worth your time.

This is the fourth page of a thread ion which I was hardly the only poster, and in which others expressed interest.  Clearly, it is indeed paying off for some.  Please answer my question as to what your payoff for shutting the conversation down might be, as posted in site discusison.