Many games get criticised in reviews or by those who have read them for problems which, reading actual play threads for those games, rarely seem to actually arise.

Also, I've seen more than one designer comment that on their game's mailing list they could tell those who played from those who just read by the kind of comments they made.

The reading crowd come up with issues that, when you read about them online, seem like big deals.  The actual play guys notice that you're missing a Stealth skill and that the rules for parrying seem to throw up some odd results.

Anyone know what I'm talking about?  I'm wondering how many problems are real as opposed to notional, the Forge back in the day was all over this which is why they emphasised actual play so much, because stuff that seemed tricksy on a readthrough didn't matter in play while stuff that looked fine sometimes threw up odd results.

Anyone got any good examples?  I'm trying to develop a thought, but struggling slightly with it.  I'm wondering if there are category differences in the sort of problems actual play discovers as opposed to those just reading does.

Quote from: BalbinusAnyone got any good examples?  I'm trying to develop a thought, but struggling slightly with it.  I'm wondering if there are category differences in the sort of problems actual play discovers as opposed to those just reading does.

The crucial flaws in Spirit of the Century from actual play are usually around the fact that combat takes an inordinate amount of time compared to the rest of play.  This is not at all obvious from reading it -- when reading my concerns were more with whether the fate point economy would hold up and that was a non-issue.

I'm struggling to articulate a response here. I know exactly what you're saying but my feeble brain isn't giving out the words right now. And I desperately don't want to lapse into analogy!

I think that playing a game always gives you a better 'feel' for how it should work as opposed to how you think it might work.

Aha, I have an example:

We played Contenders last year. Now I'm not at all into boxing and thought that the mechanics for boxing in the game, from reading them alone, would be dull and procedural, lacking in any kind of roleplaying interest. Then I actually played the game and found the fight scenes to be full of drama and excitement. The way the mechanics worked encouraged you to describe and dramatise events, making it a very fun experience.

I'm not sure this at all articulates what you are getting at, so apologies for a lack of clarity here.

Cheers
Malcolm

Thinking more about the SotC example I used, the reason I was concerned about the fate point economy was because I have watched these things fail or stagger along many times before but I never really thought about *why* they fail so just kind of assumed they were inherently broken.  So I think the read-level criticisms may be unduly affected by bias whereas in play we don't really have room for a ton of bias (except in the extreme case where no one actually wants to play the game because of bias but do anyway).  In play there's a certain amount of enthusiasm for just playing a game that carries you well past the analysis inherent in reading and instead you get to encounter the problems directly as problems in play rather than as intellectual "what-ifs" from reading.

Quote from: Malcolm CraigI'm struggling to articulate a response here. I know exactly what you're saying but my feeble brain isn't giving out the words right now. And I desperately don't want to lapse into analogy!

I think that playing a game always gives you a better 'feel' for how it should work as opposed to how you think it might work.

Aha, I have an example:

We played Contenders last year. Now I'm not at all into boxing and thought that the mechanics for boxing in the game, from reading them alone, would be dull and procedural, lacking in any kind of roleplaying interest. Then I actually played the game and found the fight scenes to be full of drama and excitement. The way the mechanics worked encouraged you to describe and dramatise events, making it a very fun experience.

I'm not sure this at all articulates what you are getting at, so apologies for a lack of clarity here.

Cheers
Malcolm

Actually, that is getting there, it's the flipside.

Some games throw up problems on reading that don't come up in actual play.  The flipside is some games read well or poorly but perform differently in actual play.

I've not read Contenders, though it's on my want to play list, but that's an example of a game that read poorly but played better than it read.  For me, Savage Worlds is very similar, a routine comment from its fans is that you just don't get a feel for it until you've played it, on reading it doesn't seem that great but in actual play it's a blast (if you like what it's trying to do).

It's the same issue, judgements based on reading can be very different to judgements based on play, though it still leaves me wondering if there is some kind of pattern in how.

Quote from: HalfjackThe crucial flaws in Spirit of the Century from actual play are usually around the fact that combat takes an inordinate amount of time compared to the rest of play.  This is not at all obvious from reading it -- when reading my concerns were more with whether the fate point economy would hold up and that was a non-issue.

That and your follow up post are exactly the kind of thing I mean.

I think it's a very real phenomenon, Balbinus.  My token example (and the one that really opened my eyes) was with Savage Worlds.

I thought it was a gods-awful mishmash of Deadlands Classic and minis gaming.  When I actually got around to running and playing it, it was a frickin' dream.  I'd never had such a big disconnect between how something read to how it actually played before.

Nowadays I have a real problem with taking any opinion seriously unless it's backed up by actual play experience.

Quote from: RedFoxI think it's a very real phenomenon, Balbinus.  My token example (and the one that really opened my eyes) was with Savage Worlds.

I had the same experience with SW

I think I'll post later about my problems with Heroquest and the problems that come up in actual play vs reading through...

Regards,
David R

Well, some games work fine while playtesting them, but really suffer in a longer campaign. Just a few sessions won't really test a game where thoroughly, unless you actually plan your game that way. To achieve True Scientific Realism, you'd probably have to come up with a way to play the same plot with every new system, so that the lab environment is suitably comparable...

Same players, same amount of session, Keep on the Borderlands

Example: ORE sounds good on paper. Then we tried it (Godlike), two different times and found that the mechanics simply don't reproduce the "sample" percentage spread.

Also there is no "Slinging" power for webslingers in Godsend Agenda, which was a problem when creating characters. But that's a "this isn't in here" vs "this doesn't work the way its written when applied."*

I think the phrase Balbinus is looking for is "theory vs practice." With a roleplaying game book, theory involves one person reading the thing, the practice involves a group playing it. A group playing it will show what the game's emergent properties are, an individual reading it won't.

The problem is simply that many gamers don't realise exactly what an rpg is. It's a rulebook. It is not the "game" which is the game session. Reading the rules for D&D tells you exactly as much about a D&D session as reading the rules for chess tells you about a chess match.

If you just read the rules for chess, without having any pieces before you or another player, you would never guess that those few different pieces with their few different moves could lead to so many different games, and that the mastery of it could be something people spend quite literally decades of their lives on.

It's what in philosophy and science calls "emergence" - "the way complex systems and patterns, such as those that form a hurricane, arise out of relatively simple interactions."

There's also what they call "weak emergence", and "strong emergence." The weak version is where you could see the complex property coming, pretty much; the strong version is where you couldn't - "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Something like chess has weak emergence - simply by considering all the possible moves you could see that it'd turn out to be much more complicated than the page of rules is; you might see and be able to predict a lot of the more compex things that arise. But something like roleplaying is strongly emergent, because on top of the rules people put their own creativity, people come up with things the game designer never thought of, but the rules somehow deal with it anyway; you can't really predict any of it.

I would say that the main difference between theory and practice in games is personal taste, whether it's passive or active. Just reading an rpg, I'll apply my personal taste to see what's good or not, the personal taste is aplied passively - I'm just reading. But when playing an rpg, I'll apply my personal taste actively, to make the game more like what I like.

But because I play the game in a group, you get the personal tastes of several people applied to the rules, and this is what gives roleplaying games their strongly emergent stuff. A group of (say) five people will come up with stuff that those five people working alone would never have come up with.

That's why I've always said that rules influence play, but do not determine play. That's why (for example) I describe how I played Dogs in the Vienyard and didn't like it, and droog says, "it doesn't even sound like the same game, I don't know how you got that result." It's because the rules don't determine play, they only influence it.

Emergence is the way I think about these things too.

Balbinus:  What I've seen a lot of is a situation where some people who have read the game say "There's nothing to stop players from doing X, and so X will happen," whereas people who have played the game say "Actually, the emergent properties of the game are that X never happens ... but we can't articulate why in a convincing manner until you too play the game."

Now that's cultish, and it doesn't in fact prove anything.  There are two easy possibilities (and a world of lower-probability explanations):

• 1.  The game does, in fact, have emergent properties encoded into it which prevent X, and if the readers played the games they would see X being prevented left, right and center.
• 2.  There are no such emergent properties encoded in the rules, but they are coded into the expectations and habits that the players bring to the game.  In that case, only people with those expectations and habits will find the game operating the way they want it to.

Really, this is one of those places where the game's quality is much easier to disprove than to prove.  If you've got any substantial number of people who are finding that the rules don't provide the emergent property that other people claim then it's easy to say that it only does so in some circusmtances.  But if everybody finds the same thing going on, you're still stuck with the possibility that you just haven't yet encountered the group that would break the game.

I know people who advocate for the idea that you should explain the emergent properties that you (the designer) expect to see from the game.  I'm not really sure where I stand on that.  I get a queasy feeling about it in the pit of my stomach, but I haven't properly figured out why.

Mage was notorious for these kinds of things. The online communities were obsessed with discovering some principle that would clearly determine which things were consensual and which were vulgar, and different people disagreed about what the principle should be.

In actual practice, you made snap judgements and relied on precedents and the whole business mostly sorted itself out with maybe a thirty second discussion before you got back to zapping the bad guys.

Quote from: JimBobOzI think the phrase Balbinus is looking for is "theory vs practice."

I'm aware, I was just nervous that using the term theory would derail the thread before it started...

Quote from: David RI had the same experience with SW

I think I'll post later about my problems with Heroquest and the problems that come up in actual play vs reading through...

Regards,
David R

I had the opposite problem with SW: it looked okay on paper and then ran horribly for us. We played about six four to five hour sessions (24-30 hours) with several combats against varying mixes of opponents and with different sets of magic items (it was a fantasy venue).

Now, I'm not a SW-hater. We had a notably bad experience with it, but I still think it's a reasonably clever game and simplifies things in some good ways--but the fact is that the 'actual play' experience is highly subjective in a way reading the rules isn't.

I also think that in actual play, the experience of examining the rules is usually secondary to actually ... playing. In our Sorcerer game, the GM made some decisions and calls to speed play--if we'd been rigorous, the experience might've suffered (and in one of the combat tests we had my sorcerer get killed by two thugs with guns--perhaps a fluke--but the kind of thing  that would've colored an AP experience pretty strongly).

On the other hand, extensive play will make one far more familiar with a game system than most analysis will--my experience with GURPS 3rd was deeper than I'd ever have gotten on a read-through.

So I think there's merit to both analyzing the text and playing the game--but as with the SW experience, when someone says "I thought it was terrible--but then I played it and it was great" I think it's just as likely that if you give that more credence than "I read it and here are the problems I see" you'll get yourself into trouble as well.

-Marco