Spun off from The Role of Fortune

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

jmac wrote:

talysman wrote:
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.

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.

lumpley wrote: 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.

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"?

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.

jmac wrote:
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.

Jason wrote:

jmac wrote:
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.

wrote: 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.

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.

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.

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

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...

lumpley wrote:
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.

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

Mike wrote:
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'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

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

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.

ewilen wrote: 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"?

Beforehand I must say that my statement about necessary modification and all my points are strongly dependent on my vision of rpg (which is quite narrow as I found out, and it can be called Illusionism, I guess).

Here are couple of thoughts explained.

So, there is a GM and players, they want to play a game. They choose a genre and stuff bla bla, at last they've got a game that fits. Now GM is to prepare something like a story or guidelines for a story to be developed during play. To work, these should fit the genre and meet other requirements, but most important - story events should be percievable by the players and make them react to them (hooks or whatever you call such stuff). Acceptable types of those hooks are limited by personalities of PCs, personalities of players and skills of players to play their respective PCs.
The system itself and it's application is definitely linked with this "mechanism", so design can't be done completely independent of particular players or, at least, GM.

The second point is about passing information through game media - game designer is actually passing information about system (including procedure of play) to potential players. It's hard to tell something without addressing particular general stereotypes and knowledge, which definitely differs from one gaming party to another. We read the rules, try to understand them and come across those referencing parts. Then, if reference is not intuitive enough we investigate, what author had in mind and try to replace it with something appropriate. That already is a modification, that can ruin a game - it's like localization in computer games.

I wonder what is better - to play original, but possibly misunderstood, or localized but actually different. But here - we make such "localization" on our own and conciously take  the responsibility. Something from Open Source Software stuff comes to mind.

There is hardly a doubt that RPGs are very personal kind of entertainment - we can never blame another for his approach which helps you not, but any hint to positive or/and creative case of communication should be celebrated and encouraged, and never to be restrained in any way.

Elliot, Joshua: I use "procedures" to refer to the actual procedures in play, as enacted by the real people at the table. Thus I'll say things like "the procedures described in the game text" or "whatever procedures you're using, whether you learned them from a rulebook or not."

A "guideline," therefore, would be part of a description of a procedure, or a hint at a procedure, or a description of a class of procedures, or a description of a bound on a procedure, or something.

Seems straightforward to me.

Ivan: I think it's awesome too that you've identified your preferred approach to roleplaying. I can see that you're already thinking about how your attitude toward game designs goes along with your goals for play - all I can really do is point out that, for non-illusionist play, other attitudes toward game designs can be more productive.

Cool!

-Vincent

I'll put aside that there is no conflict between the original statements for a moment.  I think that's important, but I suppose not what is trying to be conveyed.

Good design does not, in my experience, endure modification well.  That's just part of having something focused.  The greater integration between parts of a system then the greater the consequences to changes within that system.  The nature of compromise is that neither person is happy.  From where I'm standing that makes "focused on game design" and "able to endure modification" paradoxical. 

Think of something like FUDGE with a clear purpose.  Though you can add alot onto it, the system itself is just a base and if you start changing elements of that base you're better off just starting from scratch.

If we take Illusionism as an example, my group has intentional engineered the ability to engage in Illusionism out of the system.  Because of the structure of passing information between players, it becomes impossible for the GM to adjust the results of player actions.  Changes to allow Illusionism would ripple throughout the design to the point of no longer having a Conception -> Proposal -> Validation -> Integration structure and resolution would be confusing, and again you're better off starting from scratch.