Flawed/Incoherent Games explained?

[Kenway]

Mike's #1 rant (and Ron's articles) bring up lots of examples of flawed (and incoherent) games.
I've only pieced together some of the flaws from various threads on The Forge, such as:
-Vampire fails as a narrative game
-Palladium is a Heartbreaker attempt at correcting AD&D
-GURPS' stat/skill loophole
-AD&D's incoherency, even
-etc.

Could someone who understand these, explain them and maybe list some other of the more famous/important problems?
I don't mean for this to be a big gripefest.  I think it would be helpful to create a reference for the novice gamers who don't understand what the big deal is.

[Mike Holmes]

First, the Vampire debate can get kinda flamey. But the point is that all the sim detail that's provided purportedly leads to sim play. As opposed to the sort of Narrativist play that the text could be interpereted as delivering. The thing is, that it's just as likely that the "story" referred to in the text is a sim story; in which case there is no disagreement in the text. However, experience shows that the confusion over the meanings of the text, and the different areas of support that the mechanics provide does all conspire to cause a greater than expected amount of incoherency in play. That is, people approach Vampire from all sorts of angles, and the game, instead of making this all work together, tends to alienate the minority players.

But for a group that's coherent in the first place, all playing the same mode, Vampire seems to do pretty well with only minor drift.


For my detailed explanation of the GURPS stat/skill problem, see Mike's Rant #4: Stat/Skill Systems.


The question of Palladium is complex. For one, it is likely the most functional Heartbreaker in existance, and hence possibly not fitting of the description. Further, it's evolved some since it's inception. But one can still see the attempts to solve the problems of early D&D. SDC is a Sim fix of hit points, for example. As such you get a game that's only somewhat better than D&D, and only in some ways.


AD&D's incoherency stems quite a bit from the fact that it's the only game that a plurality of players play. As such, early attempts to "fix" the gamism of D&D led to more and more drift from play as written, and into Sim and Nar play. Which have become traditional forms of D&D play. Despite the fact that there are plenty of other systems that support these modes better.

But the system itself has always been fairly straightforwardly Gamist, with some moves to Simminess in the second edition.


But all-in-all these are going to be YMMV sorts of complaints. As Ron always points out, GNS is only applicable to explaining the situation when it's gone wrong. There is lots of play of these games that's totally functional. GNS just helps to describe what the problems often are when there is aa problem. And therefore how to design a game such that these problems are less likely to occur.

There's nothing wrong with an "incoherent game" other than that means that they have a propensity towards these sorts of problems.

Mike