Procedure of Play, Determined by Nothing but the Group

[lumpley]

Spun off from The Role of Fortune

Hi Ivan, welcome to the Forge! I'm Vincent.

which is why we're discussing the roles dice mechanics or other randomness play procedurally. we're interested in how dice are used in specific games, and which games use randomness to drive the general procedure of play.

[/i]
hmm. The general procedure of play is determined by nothing but GM and players. They are usually inspired by the system, or adopt it's general procedures of play into their own unique design.

That's true of much roleplaying, no doubt.

However, many of us here, including me for certain, consider that to be a real problem, a real indictment, of conventional RPG design. Anybody can create some isolated resolution mechanics, slap on a setting, and say "here you go! You figure out what to do with them! If you have fun with them, good job, it's not my fault!" That's a pretty crap game.

As far as I'm concerned, a well-designed game forces me and my group to play in a way that a) is fun, but b) we wouldn't have come up with on our own. It makes us adopt a whole new set of general procedures, a whole new way to play.

Otherwise - look, the kind of fun my group comes up with itself? We can have that kind of fun whenever we want. We don't need any new game to teach us that.

-Vincent

[Judd]

As far as I'm concerned, a well-designed game forces me and my group to play in a way that a) is fun, but b) we wouldn't have come up with on our own. It makes us adopt a whole new set of general procedures, a whole new way to play.

That's an interesting way to put it (as usual).

So many people are scared to game a new way.  I see it everywhere I look.  Yet, at the same time so many people are hungry for a new way to play.  Its a really interesting line I see all over our sub-culture.

[ewilen]

Where do various treatises on scenario design, GMing,and playing fit into all this? Either in the game texts or in third-party books (modules, advice guides, magazine articles, etc.), they provide guidelines but not what I would think of as clearcut procedures? How rigid does a guideline have to be in order to be a "procedure"? When if ever is it best to leave a guideline "loose"?

[matthijs]

I'm Analogy Man. I like to think of food recipes in relation to RPG rules. Some people say, "I don't need any recipes, I can make anything I like"; sometimes that means they've read all the recipes for macaroni with cheese, and determined they're pretty much the same; sometimes that means they're master chefs who have years of education and experience and can make stunning new things nobody's thought of before.

If the rules are pretty much like what you've played before, you just look to see what's different, and decide whether to use it. ("Oh, cream cheese instead, hey, that's a good idea"). But some rules change the way you play, and you have to follow them to understand how. (You don't just slice up some raw fish and call it sushi; you have to learn how to make it right, or you might get food poisoning).

People are used to rules that all describe the same type of game, basically, and assume all rules are like that. They just need to play some really different games. When I read Capes, I had a lot of trouble understanding wtf it was all about - now that I've tried it, I have a whole set of new techniques to use.

[Jason Lee]

hmm. The general procedure of play is determined by nothing but GM and players. They are usually inspired by the system, or adopt it's general procedures of play into their own unique design.

Emphasis mine.

This property is one of those things that always comes up during lumpley principle or character existence threads.  Just jargonize the sentence by replacing the italicized "general procedure of play" with "system" and replace "system" with "rules", and it just says only players can have or give credibility.  I don't see anything to disagree with - maybe I'm missing some context here.

[talysman]

hmm. The general procedure of play is determined by nothing but GM and players. They are usually inspired by the system, or adopt it's general procedures of play into their own unique design.

Emphasis mine.

This property is one of those things that always comes up during lumpley principle or character existence threads.  Just jargonize the sentence by replacing the italicized "general procedure of play" with "system" and replace "system" with "rules", and it just says only players can have or give credibility.  I don't see anything to disagree with - maybe I'm missing some context here.

you might be missing this other thing Vincent said in that post:

Otherwise - look, the kind of fun my group comes up with itself? We can have that kind of fun whenever we want. We don't need any new game to teach us that.

it's true that system is really just the way real people assign credibility/ it's an agreement that certain procedures will have a certain weight and meaning during play. "when we roll the target number or less on d20, we hit!"

and it's true that players can make changes to a published set of rules when the rules don't quite fulfill their needs.

but it's also true that the better integrated the rules system and the better designed it is to push play in a highly-focused manner, the more fun it will be. and, although players can make changes on the fly to a system, they almost certainly won't be able to create a highly-focsued system on the fly; it takes years to do that.

do you want to play a game for years before you have fun?

you see, players don't assign credibility by making up rules; they assign credibiility by selecting rules. if I say "let's play TOON", I'm telling you what rules would best lead to the kind of play I want.

but here's the problem: if a set of rules is nothing but a dice mechanic and a list of Color elements for a specific setting, and I and the other players have to make up all the other rules, what am I paying for? I'm certainly not paying for a rules book that I invest a lot of credibility in, because I have to make up 90% of the rules. why not buy a book or movie, get my setting from there, and make up all the rules, without paying anyone?

I joked recently that I should write a standard rant about how dice mechanics are the least important part of a game. maybe Vincent will write that rant for me, since that's what he's hinting at: it's not what dice you roll or what bonuses you added, but how this fits into the overall procedure of play and how it drives the events in the SIS. the conflict resolution system is only important insofar as it supports the other rules.

I would rather see a game that had the overall procedure down pat and said "use whatever dice mechanic you feel like" than I would like to see a game that had a dice mechanic and told you "make up whatever overall procedure of play you feel like". dice are just fluff.

[Jason Lee]

Hey John, 

I don't see anything you've said I'd disagree with either.  (Except the part about dice being fluff, as the level of randomness can have a significant impact the tone of the game and the rewards cycle if the rewards tie to effectiveness, but I don't think that's relevant to the topic.)  I'm still not seeing any conflict with what jmac said.  The rules the players choose to use become integrated into system, which matters, and the rules they don't use don't matter.

[jmac]

Sorry, I've read a little and talked too much :)
I've been using "system" and "rules" with meaning of all that stuff brought to a gaming party "in a box".

lumpley:
As far as I'm concerned, a well-designed game forces me and my group to play in a way that a) is fun, but b) we wouldn't have come up with on our own. It makes us adopt a whole new set of general procedures, a whole new way to play.
I don't want to be forced, actually :) I want to consider and accept (or reject).

My thoughts revolve not around creating a game that would be accepted and played with more or less guaranteed positive result (fun and original etc), but about percieving game design into something really playable by this particular group.
And thus modification and flexibility help us not only to adopt the original design, but to understand it's puprose, motivation and methods.
_Flexibility_, from this point of view, must have a separate meaning.

ps. I've read all those Articles, and now I can announce that I play in Illusionist kind of games.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi John,

Thanks for looking over the articles here. You're getting a major dose of posting-responses, so I wanted to acknowledge that you've already gone above-and-beyond, in terms of effort and patience. I greatly appreciate that.

Best,
Ron

[jmac]

I must say that I really love theories and systems and it was a pleasure to find one modelling RPG's, while being  so solid and consistent. Really amazing.

And one more thing I forgot...

Otherwise - look, the kind of fun my group comes up with itself? We can have that kind of fun whenever we want. We don't need any new game to teach us that.

I don't beleive that we will ever be satisfied with our actual games - demands are high enough not to allow that, at least for now.

[Mike Holmes]

Matthijs the analogy has one fatal flaw. It only takes a few minutes to make dinner, no matter how you do it. To make a better analogy creating an RPG system is more like creating a quilt. It takes a lot of effort over a lot of time. Yeah, you could start with a quilt that has parts you like, tear out the parts you don't like, and then replace them with ones you do. But that's still a lot of work to get what you want.

Basically creating RPG systems is not like cooking in that, if the output is bad, you can just make another one the next night. This is why being able to buy a quilt that you like off the shelf is important. No, it doesn't mean that you can't make your own quilt, it might be quite rewarding to do so. But if I have to make major adjustments to the quilt to get it to be what I want? Well, then maybe I should have just made my own quilt. And at the very least any quilt I buy should be nice to have as it is, even if it isn't perfectly what I want.

That is, RPGs that need to be fixed to play well are bad designs. There should be one clear way to play the game as designed that's fun.

Now we can go on extending this analogy and talk about how FUDGE is just a "quilt creation kit" and how that might be a functional product. Sure, let's allow for that sort of thing - as long as it's the intention of the design, then it will sell to whatever market needs that.

But for ages the standard RPG product has been a quilt that is missing parts of it, and has other parts that don't match. Such that nobody can use it as is, and you have to first disassemble it to find out what's wrong with it, and then put it back together. It seems to me that the reason we have so many chefs or, better, quilters in RPGs, as opposed to people simply using quilts off the shelf, is because the games presented are so in need of overhaul to play well that, in fact, it's no more effort to simply start from scratch. This is why there are literally thousands of RPGs in existance.

Call this the "Ratty Quilt" line. If people playing your game feel that it's easier to stop playing it, and instead build their own game, then you know that you've failed. To the extent that people are happy playing your game as it is off the shelf without any modification, you've created a true product. Only in RPGs has it become acceptable to have products that must be fixed before they play acceptably. In no other industry will you see the equivalent of the golden rule saying, "Here's a quilt: where it doesn't satisfy you, we authorize you to tear it apart and fix it." Would you buy such a quilt from a professional manufacturer?

The counterpoint to this is always: well RPGs are complicated things and people like modifying them. I propose that, in fact, the tendency for everyone in RPGs to be designers is not so much because RPG players have a tendency to tinker more, but because they've become good at it by neccessity. To the extent that they have to claim that it's fun to justify the effort they put into it. Which isn't to say that they don't have fun with it - I fall into this category with everyone else. Only that we've made it a fun thing because we were forced into it. I created my first RPG because D&D was so broken that I felt compelled to do so as I was tired of putting new patches in the quilt and having them also not match anything there. I figured that I could do no worse creating my own quilt.

Ask yourself, did you get into designing RPGs because you wanted to be a game designer? Or because you couldn't stand the rule systems you were playing? What does that say about the quality of RPGs?

Jmac, I'm finding more and more that there are designs that we are satisfied with. I think we are just now getting into an era where designs are so well focused that you really wouldn't need to ever fix one. Dogs in the Vinyard isn't perfect, but it's so good at what it does that I can't see a reason to modify it. No, it won't do a game about space merchants, but it's not designed to do so. There are other games for that. Just as you might own a quilt for rainy days, and one for cold nights, and one for watching TV, etc.

Mike

[jmac]

Jmac, I'm finding more and more that there are designs that we are satisfied with. I think we are just now getting into an era where designs are so well focused that you really wouldn't need to ever fix one.

I can hardly prevent someone from playing game as it is.
I would be happy to play it myself, actually :) but conditioning player and GM skills, or, more often, "fitting" those skills we have into our actual plays, imho, matters more than making or choosing or using a perfect design. (2)

Actual play (the goal) is a case of playing a game by group. So, to succeed, design should be "focused" on group type *(and) game type. But, considering (2), it's hardly possible/makes sense.
So, design should be focused on game type only and be able to endure a modification.

[Mike Holmes]

I'm sorry Ivan, but I can't make heads or tails of that post. Could you restate what you're trying to say?

It seems to me that you're saying something akin to "system doesn't matter" but I could just be misinterpreting you badly.

Mike

[lumpley]

Let's pretend that I design board games.

Ivan, you come to me and say "whatever game my group plays, we make it into a card game. Please design your board games so that they're easily made into card games."

I say "uh... no."

-Vincent

[jmac]

I wouldn't come to you and say that - I would do it myself, Vincent :)

It's not like whatever game my group plays, we make it into a .... It's like our group could play this game much better, if we change this and this

I will try to construct something understandable in the morning.
sorry.