Quote from: Catelf;581866However, you forget a couple of important things here:
* Do you know the difference between one of "The Masters" and one of their diciples?
The difference can be so totally miniscule that people have to use x-ray and other means to find any notable difference at all!
And yet, if they find that it wasn't "he Master", but a diciple, it isn't deemed as the same "great art" as "The Master".
I find this sentiment towards "The Masters" to be utter rubbish, and it shows that "Tha Masters" are only dubbed thus due to "having been first" ...
Much like D&D, it was "first" and is utterly revered for that.
It doesn't matter that there are others that could be said as having been better, or just a bit earlier, somehow, they haven't gotten as well known.

The love for the masters has more to do with process than product honestly. Art was treated as technology almost back then, in that you had to learn everything from your master before giving kind of a push to what the medium could do to become a master yourself. Any shmuck can copy an existing technique (in the apprenticeship system) but fewer people were able to actually push the envelope.

If you draw and paint a lot you kind of know how much harder it is to learn things from studies than it is to learn things from people who already know. It's why we learn systems of perspective and color theory from books, rather than using trial and error. It's insanely more efficient.

Any asshole can make a Tesla coil today, but there's a reason the thing's got Tesla's name on it.

Quote* As far as i see it, "cubism" and Warhol only had one purpose, namely to change the view on "art".
As far as art goes, i consider most of Warhol's work, especially the most known ones, as rubbish. ... And the same goes for any cubistic work.

Cubism developed useful systems for selectively creating and annihilating space and form. Cubism itself may look pretentious, but the ideas it worked out have been pretty useful to comic artists and non-representational artists alike (I'm talking graphic designers as well as painters here).

I'm not enough of a fan of Warhol to really defend him.

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Now, the analogy ain't great 'cause RPGs aren't high art. There's a pretty limited utility to reinventing the wheel here, unlike in art, which is a pretty damn broad field both in terms of what it looks like and in terms of what it's for.

Quote from: Dr EvilIt got weird, didn't it?

I think taking the art metaphor too literally is going to somehow cause the thread to implode.
 
I think there's a continuum of good design/bad design, whether you want to chunk it into 4 categories (Master, Good, OK, Liefeld), rate it from * to *****, 1-10, or whatever. As with art (and I think this is Catelf's point) its difficult to get objective opinions on what is the best. Also as with comparing artists and disciples, you can say that RPG A) was great for its time - if it pioneered something - whereas RPG B) can have the same mechanics 10 years later and that's much less of an achievement, even though there's no difference practically speaking when you play it.
 
People do have all sorts of personal opinions as to what's good/what's not that will make it difficult to agree on what's a good design, however you chunk it - there's no system so retarded that someone won't defend it as being a good game.
 
Another observation: Every game design is a collection of choices - which dice to roll, how many stats, how many HPs; on the more abstract level a balance between realism/playability, flexibility/balance, etc. - every choice will have both positive and negative implications. Consequently, even completely random blundering should manage to produce a game with some redeeming features - its not just that people are stupid, they all have different priorities and so on.
 
Viewing each design as a set of choices also lets you see what the 'upper limits' on how good a design can be; to do anything extraordinary requires the designer to figure out a way to simultaneously meet goals that are normally in conflict - to build systems that are more elegant. For instance, to get simple mechanics that generate realistic results with the minimum of extra steps, exceptions and die rolls would be difficult, since these are contradictory. A good design might do both - with difficulty - and I think would be objectively better in the sense that the designer has surmounted greater hurdles to get there, but its still probably not quite as good as the specialized realism design to the the realism nut, or the simple game for the guy who just wants a quick game with few rules and doesn't care about exactitudes.

Quote from: Catelf;581866However, you forget a couple of important things here:
* Do you know the difference between one of "The Masters" and one of their diciples?
The difference can be so totally miniscule that people have to use x-ray and other means to find any notable difference at all!
And yet, if they find that it wasn't "he Master", but a diciple, it isn't deemed as the same "great art" as "The Master".

Yes, because copying is easier than creating from scratch. On a much lesser scale take an example such as Greg Land, who is infamous for lightboxing pictures. Now , undeniably it requires a great amount fo skill to even trace and alter a photo in the way he does, but it lacks the creative impulse behind it.

QuoteI find this sentiment towards "The Masters" to be utter rubbish, and it shows that "Tha Masters" are only dubbed thus due to "having been first" ...

Creating something is more important than reproducing another person's creation , yes, but its by far not the sole reason that such artists are held in such esteem. I feel like we're gravitating pretty far away from an RPG analogy, though.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581989I feel like we're gravitating pretty far away from an RPG analogy, though.

Yup.

First, Art =/= Design. Art IS subjective. Design is a combination of Form and Function, both Subjective AND Objective.

Second, you should design for what people DO, not what they WANT. It's a critical distinction often lost when setting design goals.

Finally, good layout is almost certainly part of good game design. It's an analog to the game controller on a console, or better yet the menu system, which was(is?) so bad on the XBox 360 that someone wrote an Indie game which satirized it by making getting through the menu system part of the game. So bad design can become good design (and part of play) by changing intents, which is often what players of 'badly' designed games do.

Quote from: Catelf;581341No.
Settings are:
Marvel, DC, Oddworld, World of Darkness(old), CoC, Rift, TORG, Resident Evil, WHFRP, L5R, Aberrant, Shadowrun ..... and all variants loosely based on those, more based on a genre than a distict, specific, world.

And each of those settings has completely different set of cause and effect.

You are not going to get the same results in Marvel as you will in WHFRP, and while taking on a hoard of Stormtroopers is the right thing to do in Star Wars, it's probably not a wise choice of action in Shadowrun. And I find it especially ironic that you mention TORG because it explicitly used setting to define system.

A setting is itself a set of rules which often have a bigger (though preferably synergistic) impact on the procedures followed in play than the actual mechanics. Ignoring that is the path to D&D4.

Quote from: Doctor Jest;581474Game mechanics are aesthetics of play, and nothing - absolutely nothing - more.

Game mechanics (procedures in play) are NOT simply aesthetics. The procedures of Truth or Dare, or a Ouija Board, produce a specific result across multiple play groups consistently. Now whether the results are aesthetically pleasing is an entirely different matter.

Again Design =/= Art. Design achieves a result beyond Interpretation or Appreciation.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581989Yes, because copying is easier than creating from scratch.

And what says the "Masters" didn't have someone they copied as well?

Quote from: chaosvoyager;582003First, Art =/= Design. Art IS subjective. Design is a combination of Form and Function, both Subjective AND Objective.

Second, you should design for what people DO, not what they WANT. It's a critical distinction often lost when setting design goals.
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And each of those settings has completely different set of cause and effect.

You are not going to get the same results in Marvel as you will in WHFRP, and while taking on a hoard of Stormtroopers is the right thing to do in Star Wars, it's probably not a wise choice of action in Shadowrun. And I find it especially ironic that you mention TORG because it explicitly used setting to define system.

A setting is itself a set of rules which often have a bigger (though preferably synergistic) impact on the procedures followed in play than the actual mechanics. Ignoring that is the path to D&D4.

First, i find the bolded part interesting.
I currently doesn't agree or disagree, i just find it interesting.

Second, if you would face a horde of Stormtroopers with the same gear as a regular runner in Shadowrun, it would still not be adviceable to take them on.
Or if it would, then the same stormtroopers would, if transported to Shadowrun, really be uncaracteristically bad at aiming and fighting ...
You confuse the settings with the games, and the games includes the rules you refer to.
With TORG, you do have a point, though, but not as big as you think, since there, the rules, and the actions in the game, may affect the setting, and it clearly affects the genres within the setting.
And yes, each setting affects the rules in each area, but it do not affect the system itself.
But those facts do not mean that the system and the setting is the same thing.
They are both parts of the Game, though.

However, i see a risk that you will misunderstand me, and therefor disagree, so i might not say more on that issue, to avoid another "bad design can still be well done"-argumentation that was in this thread for ... at least 7 pages, i think.

Ok, certain settings requires certain rules to be included or the setting will not be correct enough, but those rules can still be massively different.
Some settings are enforced by specific wording, while others are not.
... But, Some people are more used to some systems, so it may be easier for them to play with systems similar to the one they know, even if the system in case are flawed.
This part, what system is preferred, is what is subjective.

Quote from: Catelf;582039And what says the "Masters" didn't have someone they copied as well?

ooo...and what if they were aliens? And what if the moon was made of cheese? And what if that entire era of our past was programmed into our heads by the matrix?

Reductio ad absurdum is lots of fun.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;582003First, Art =/= Design. Art IS subjective. Design is a combination of Form and Function, both Subjective AND Objective.

My point was that art is not subjective (and it isn't, despite what people with no art education often insist online). There is a certain degree of subjectiveness, as with game design, but one can easily take a painting by Pino and compare it to an illustration by Erol Otus, for example, and one is very objectivelly a superior work of art. Most people are unaware of the standards by which a piece of "good" art is judged however, and lack the training to identify such measures in a piece of art, hence the commonly-expressed myth "all art is subjective".

However, this is only true within degrees, as I outlined. A "first tier" piece of artwork is better than a second or third tier, but within the broad range of the tiers themselves opinion is subjective. Who could say if Jim Lee is a better artist than Art Adams, or Alan Lee is a better artist than Brian Froud?

The point of my comparison is that RPG design can be viewed in exactly the same manner...there's identifiable tiers of game design...some systems simply are broken, some don't support the genre they were supposedly designed for, some are just a mess made with no awareness of how the experience of actually using the system during a game. Other games meet all these standards and more, but simply appeal to one group's specific playstyle or aesthetic taste. There's no objective superiority between, say, GURPs or Hero, it all comes down to taste. But there is an objective superiority between, say, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying and Fantasy Wargamming, or even AD&D 2e and The Imagine RPG.

I don't personally hold D&d to any level of reverance as the "first" (published) RPG, and there was no comparions to D&D and an artistic masterpiece. The original white box (or brown box for those with really long memories) D&D is actually a notably inferior game to later editions.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;581881 I think taking the art metaphor too literally is going to somehow cause the thread to implode.

Point taken. I'll try and not derail the thread with a discussion of the apprenticeship system.

Quote from: Catelf;582039And what says the "Masters" didn't have someone they copied as well?

But... but... but.... goddamnit!
 

QuoteI think there's a continuum of good design/bad design, whether you want to chunk it into 4 categories (Master, Good, OK, Liefeld), rate it from * to *****, 1-10, or whatever. As with art (and I think this is Catelf's point) its difficult to get objective opinions on what is the best. Also as with comparing artists and disciples, you can say that RPG A) was great for its time - if it pioneered something - whereas RPG B) can have the same mechanics 10 years later and that's much less of an achievement, even though there's no difference practically speaking when you play it.

Here I'm sort of with you, but again I'll note that it's important to separate the process from the product from the guy that made it. Innovation is good design (the process) but at the same time a less innovative game may have a better product by standing on the shoulders of giants and just cleaning up the little flaws that became apparent in the aftermath.

I don't necessarily buy into tiers in art, because different art serves different purposes. The best graphic design, the best illustration, the best representative painting, etc. can't be compared to each other. Likewise, Fudge and HERO probably shouldn't be compared.
 

QuoteViewing each design as a set of choices also lets you see what the 'upper limits' on how good a design can be; to do anything extraordinary requires the designer to figure out a way to simultaneously meet goals that are normally in conflict - to build systems that are more elegant. For instance, to get simple mechanics that generate realistic results with the minimum of extra steps, exceptions and die rolls would be difficult, since these are contradictory. A good design might do both - with difficulty - and I think would be objectively better in the sense that the designer has surmounted greater hurdles to get there, but its still probably not quite as good as the specialized realism design to the the realism nut, or the simple game for the guy who just wants a quick game with few rules and doesn't care about exactitudes.

Specialization vs compromise (even innovative compromise) as an indicator of quality seems off to me. I think that's more determining which category a game falls under before you can even decide on it's weight class or whatever.

Quote from: beejazz;582056Here I'm sort of with you, but again I'll note that it's important to separate the process from the product from the guy that made it. Innovation is good design (the process) but at the same time a less innovative game may have a better product by standing on the shoulders of giants and just cleaning up the little flaws that became apparent in the aftermath.

I think in many ways, the latter product incrementally moving things forward is often better than a quantum leap.  Which isn't to say the massive leap is bad, but I think a lot of bad design comes out of aiming for that as a goal, instead of a solid game that can be later improved upon.

QuoteI don't necessarily buy into tiers in art, because different art serves different purposes. The best graphic design, the best illustration, the best representative painting, etc. can't be compared to each other. Likewise, Fudge and HERO probably shouldn't be compared.

Absolutely.  The best that can be done is to ascertain if those games do what they do well as objectively as possible.  I don't care for Fudge, but as I understand it, sessions rarely get bogged down with rules discussions or huge detailed combat set pieces.  The action or story just keeps on keepin' on at a pace the group is comfortable with.  HERO, on the other hand, will always deliver information as precisely as possible.  It may take a bit longer to resolve combat, but it guarantees you won the old fashioned way.
 

QuoteSpecialization vs compromise (even innovative compromise) as an indicator of quality seems off to me. I think that's more determining which category a game falls under before you can even decide on it's weight class or whatever.

Expanding on the previous paragraph, common wisdom says that d20 is great for fantasy and D&D stuff, but other genres?  Not so much.  Likewise, I don't think Traveller would be a very good sword & sorcery engine.

I would guess that is at least part of the reason TSR didn't have one game to rule them all in the Elder Days.  What works for Gamma World doesn't necessarily work for Star Frontiers, and neither would be particularly well served with the MSH or D&D rules, even though Gamma World was very similar to D&D

There is a risk that this thread already has reached a deadend ... but then it continued.
Why do it keep going?
Because some thinks that it exist some "superior" game system, or at least systems that is better than others.
I'm one of them, but i'm massively biased towards the system that i have made myself ...
So in a way, i agree with TristramEvans, but i also severely disagree with him on what is and should be defined as "superior".


The idea that D20 works good for Fantasy but nothing else is a notion that i find simply ignorant.
Just because there haven't been done any good Horror, Sci-fi, Modern or such in D20 do not mean that it isn't possible!
... And this comes from me, who really prefer WW's Storytelling System and my own!
Heck, i even think Palladium's system could work for a lot of genres better if it just got enough of the wonky bits removed, replaced, or better yet, streamlined. ... And i severely dislike any "levelling system" in rpgs.

Quote from: beejazz;582056Here I'm sort of with you, but again I'll note that it's important to separate the process from the product from the guy that made it. Innovation is good design (the process) but at the same time a less innovative game may have a better product by standing on the shoulders of giants and just cleaning up the little flaws that became apparent in the aftermath.
 
I don't necessarily buy into tiers in art, because different art serves different purposes. The best graphic design, the best illustration, the best representative painting, etc. can't be compared to each other. Likewise, Fudge and HERO probably shouldn't be compared.

I don't see why they shouldn't be compared. They've very different things, of course, so you can only compare them using certain frames of reference. Asking "which is faster" or "which is more detailed" in a comparison between FUDGE and HERO is going to unfairly pick which is better, but you might still be able to judge them by which is better engineered - what skill went into building the mechanics and how advanced the design is in general.
 
This may be a different definition of "design" to what some of the other people in the thread are using - I'm looking not at if a thing does its job but how amazing it is. i.e. by way of example - using this definition a space shuttle that works 95% of the time is "better designed" than a glove that works 100% of the time, since although the glove meets its design objectives better, those objectives were much easier to reach).
 

QuoteSpecialization vs compromise (even innovative compromise) as an indicator of quality seems off to me. I think that's more determining which category a game falls under before you can even decide on it's weight class or whatever.

A compromise type design is not necessarily better if its not that good at anything (though it might be popular, since everyone may be able to handle it). I just think that the system that does more things well is an example of a system that would show good design work, since its harder to build. Also - this thread has been fairly good, but usually people argue about what systems suck because they all have different priorities as to what makes a system good (speed, realism, flexibility, whatever).

Quote from: Catelf;582095There is a risk that this thread already has reached a deadend ... but then it continued.
Why do it keep going?

Because we are friends, colleagues and fellow travellers here.  We like talking to (or sometimes at) each other.

QuoteThe idea that D20 works good for Fantasy but nothing else is a notion that i find simply ignorant.
Just because there haven't been done any good Horror, Sci-fi, Modern or such in D20 do not mean that it isn't possible!

Of course it is still possible.  It's also possible that I am the heir to the Russian Czars.  Popper's objections aside, a body of evidence really can point to a reasonable conclusion.  If there haven't been any 'good' d20 Horror, Sci-Fi or Modern games, the likely culprit is the system itself and not a dearth of people trying.

Quote from: StormBringer;582127Popper's objections aside, a body of evidence really can point to a reasonable conclusion.  If there haven't been any 'good' d20 Horror, Sci-Fi or Modern games, the likely culprit is the system itself and not a dearth of people trying.

There is also another culprit that i consider far more probable:
The makers of D20 Modern, Horror, and Sci-fi.

See, if someone sees that there already is a game like that or similar, then there is no reason to do one yourself, since that part of the "market" is currently occupied.
Then, when it is proven that the makers of those games just had been rushing them out, more or less, and the players gone to other games with other systems, the game developers, as well as others, draws the false conclusion that the system itself did not work, and looks towards other systems, not trying to Do a better job themselves, at it.

If you look at it practically, there is really no sensible reason as to why D20 would work for Fantasy and nothing else.
If you still disagree, give me one example on how D20 would mess up Modern, Horror and Sci-fi, one for each preferably, please.

Quote from: Catelf;582133There is also another culprit that i consider far more probable:
The makers of D20 Modern, Horror, and Sci-fi.

You can consider that more probable all you want.

QuoteSee, if someone sees that there already is a game like that or similar, then there is no reason to do one yourself, since that part of the "market" is currently occupied.
Then, when it is proven that the makers of those games just had been rushing them out, more or less, and the players gone to other games with other systems, the game developers, as well as others, draws the false conclusion that the system itself did not work, and looks towards other systems, not trying to Do a better job themselves, at it.

Clearly, you are not familiar with game designers.

QuoteIf you look at it practically, there is really no sensible reason as to why D20 would work for Fantasy and nothing else.
If you still disagree, give me one example on how D20 would mess up Modern, Horror and Sci-fi, one for each preferably, please.

I will give you three:  d20 Modern, d20 Cthulhu, and d20 Future.  None of these were written by light-weights or fly-by-night companies, and none of them are exactly flying off the shelves.  And I highly doubt people decided they sucked ahead of time; they got pretty good reviews all around.