TheRPGSite

Recap:

Discussion about using Dogs in the Vineyard with D&D, started on Pundit's blog, moved to theRPGsite:

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=18803

John Morrow made this post:

http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=422602&postcount=254

And said:  

Quote from: JohnMorrowPart of the reason I wanted to have this discussion with Ryan was not just to discuss the idea of Dogs in the Vineyard as a direction that D&D could go in but to discuss the implications of the hobby losing one or two playstyle segments forever to MMORPGs and other computer games and which elements of D&D could be weakened or discarded to improve the games overall appeal.

I want to have this discussion too, so I started this thread.

RyanD

So is the inclusion of daily powers etc. an attempt to get the lost players back as this and the battle game/skill challenge focus mimics certain aspects of Comp. games etc.?

Is the hobby better of without these players (not from the commercial aspect)? ie. what aspects would you consider the best to discard.

or are you referring to something else...?
:hmm:

Quote from: RSDancey;426246I want to have this discussion too, so I started this thread.

Can you be specific about which segments you think have largely left the RPG hobby for good for MMORPGs and what elements of game play were there to cater to them that might be discarded, in your opinion?

I'm going to copy the whole post you quoted from over here.  Also, a link to your 2000 explanation of the player segments and what they want out of a game here (http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html) for reference.

Original Post:

I'm going to steal a quote from another thread to make a point here:

Quote from: RandallS;422581Generally, if "rules mastery" is a part of the game it isn't something I will run except under great duress. Most of the players who enjoy my campaigns simply aren't that into learning rules (let alone mastering them). They generally don't want to think much about rules during the game, they prefer them to fade into the background.

Part of the reason I wanted to have this discussion with Ryan was not just to discuss the idea of Dogs in the Vineyard as a direction that D&D could go in but to discuss the implications of the hobby losing one or two playstyle segments forever to MMORPGs and other computer games and which elements of D&D could be weakened or discarded to improve the games overall appeal.  And, in particular, I had "rules mastery" in mind.

D&D 3e was specifically designed to have appeal to people who enjoy "rules mastery" (see here (http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mc_los_142)):

Quote from: Monte CookWhen we designed 3rd Edition D&D, people around Wizards of the Coast joked about the "lessons" we could learn from Magic: The Gathering, like making the rulebooks -- or the rules themselves -- collectible. ("Darn, I got another Cleave, I'm still looking for the ultra-rare Great Cleave.")

[...]

Magic also has a concept of "Timmy cards." These are cards that look cool, but aren't actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others.

[...]

There's a third concept that we took from Magic-style rules design, though. Only with six years of hindsight do I call the concept "Ivory Tower Game Design." (Perhaps a bit of misnomer, but it's got a ring to it.) This is the approach we took in 3rd Edition: basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help. This strategy relates tangentially to the second point above. The idea here is that the game just gives the rules, and players figure out the ins and outs for themselves -- players are rewarded for achieving mastery of the rules and making good choices rather than poor ones.

The problem with "rules mastery" is that, while it appeals to certain types of players, it makes the game harder to learn, harder to play casually, harder to GM, and has a hand in driving rule bloat.  

Part of what I was curious about was whether "rules mastery" was one of those things that role-playing systems could dispense with if one assumes that certain segments have been lost forever to computer games and MMORPGs and whether the traditional role-playing advocates here think that it serves a critical purpose or not.  Personally, I don't have much use for it, even though I can do it if I have to.

Ok, as I begin, I want to address two issues meta to the primary topic.

The first is "what is an MMO".  If you think all MMOs are World of Warcraft, you have a lot of self-educating to do.  WoW isn't even the biggest MMO in the world (that's a Chinese MMO called Giant Online that has 40 million players, about 4 times the total of World of Warcraft).

WoW is what the MMO industry calls a "Theme Park" MMO.  There are two basic design paradigms for MMOs.  Theme Parks and Sandboxes.  In Theme Park MMOs, the experience of play is typically all about going through various pre-planned scenario content, and the way most of these games are designed you don't usually do the same content more than once until you reach the end-game.  While there may be other things to do in between the pre-planned scenarios, those things are usually filler, designed on purpose to suck up time so that you can't rush through all the "Theme Park" content and then quit the game.

The other kind of game is a Sandbox.  The first sandbox game was the 2nd commercial MMO, Ultima Online.  UO had some Theme Park elements, but its core design was that player interaction and player choice would determine most of the game state most of the time.  A Sandbox design provides players with many opportunities to create emergent behavior, that is, unscripted gameplay synthesized by the players from the elements provided within the gamespace.  EVE Online is the largest current Sandbox MMO, and while it has "Theme Park" elements in the form of missions, they are tertiary to the "real game" of player on player activities.

People who have only been exposed to Theme Park MMOs often come away thinking that the format is very limited.  People who play Sandbox MMOs have a hard time convincing those with limited Theme Park experience that there is more to the genre.  On some level it has to be experienced to really be understood.

In both forms of MMO there is extensive roleplaying.  In the Theme Park this usually takes the form of players who choose to follow along with the IP storyline and avoid anachronisms (sometimes even playing on RP-specific servers where anachronistic behavior is grounds for removal).  In the Sandbox, players often invent "roles" to play and then elaborate on them iteratively.  The "pirates" in EVE, for example, sometimes are just kids looking to gank someone and trigger emorage, but often they are adults who engage in quite extensive roleplay including the messages they exchange with their targets, their inter-Pirate alliances, their message board personas, etc.

If you are interested in the depth of RP in MMOs, I highly encourage you to spend some time reading the materials that Nick Yee has created at the Daedalus Project:  http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/

In the following discussion, be careful not to make the assumption that MMOs are all like WoW, or that there's no "true" RP going on in them - both are incorrect and you do yourself a disservice if you believe either of those things to be true.

In addition to the Theme Parks and Sandboxes there are some untyped virtual worlds like Second Life.  Second Life is more of a construction set than an actual product, but people have used its tools to create some amazing virtual worlds including a very faithful reproduction of the Masquerade era World of Darkness.  Fully explaining Second Life is beyond the scope of this thread, but if you ever find yourself saying "computer games can never do X", you should know that in Second Life, they probably can.  (The barrier to using the SL tools at that level is quite high though, and not for the code-squeamish).

And a last intro note about MMOs:  What you see today is not what you will see in the next 3 years.  The MMO field is about to undergo a massive graphic & AI upgrade driven by Moore's law.  The "immersion" of the MMO will soon start to approach Turing Test levels - you'll never be sure if the NPC you're interacting with is a human or an AI.  And the visual experience in terms of lighting, shadows, clothing, physics, skin tones, etc. is all going to become so much better that you'll soon think of the current generation of MMOs the way we think about the old Kings Quest adventure games.  Its going to be that big an evolution.

Ok, now onto tabletop RPG players.

The Segmentation Study we released when I ran the D&D business at Wizards of the Coast was designed to show 2 important things.  First, it was to show that unlike what was the conventional wisdom at the time, the TRPG hobby was not dominated by people who cared more about publisher-driven metaplot rich "worlds".  It was also to show that most people who played TRPGs actually did have a "segment" of play they enjoyed most - that is, the audience was really a set of overlapping heterogeneous segments rather than a monolithic homogeneous "gamer" segment.  

People had been talking past each other for years - which was one reason we did the segmentation study in the first place - because it was obvious that different people were getting different value out of the TRPG experience but were being taught by the community that everyone was really the same which then created friction and dissonance when the segments all tried to talk about the hobby whilst assuming everyone was just like them.

Its at this point that people start asking/talking about GNS.  GNS is an analysis of games not gamers.  Unfortunately, for many people, the idea of boxing into one of the GNS segments made sense at least anecdotally.  One of the things I love about GNS at its root is that it gives designers an excellent way to talk about their games in a way that can be understood by other designers.  It just doesn't work when people try to use it to categorize people.

There have been other attempts to segment TRPG players.  One of the best well-known is Robin Law's system.  In the MMO field, Richard Bartle created a segmentation classification that is taken as the Truth by many people in that field.  In the end, these attempts are all flawed because they are based on an individual (or group) looking at what players say about what they like about games and then trying to reverse engineer segments from those reports.

The correct way to create a segmentation study (and the methodology we used at Wizards) is to try and start with as few pre-conceived notions as possible, and then give people a very wide variety of questions about what they like, what they don't like, what they play, what they don't play, what they have played, what they want to play, etc. and then search the resulting data set for clusters of people giving similar answers.  If you make your initial survey broad enough, and you get a large enough sample size, experience shows that you will find such clusters and they tend to have a high degree of correlation to reality.  We did, and we found them.

http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html

(it's important for me to note that Sean Reynolds hosts this page but the contents are mine, he's not responsible for any errors or omissions that may be contained within.)

There are some critical things to understand about the Segmentation Study.

Everyone within the domain of the study results is a TRPG gamer.  That makes them a sub-segment of the tabletop gaming population, and a sub-segment of the gaming population, and a sub-segment of the overall population.  They tend to have more in common with each other in their sub-sub-sub segment with regard to their TRPG preferences than they do with anyone in the larger segments which contain them.

A quick analogy.  If you had a group of people who were segmented into a cluster called "fans of rock music", if the segmentation was good, those people would in general express a preference for a mixtape of ACDC, Motorhead, Judas Priest, and Wolfmother over a mixtape of Mozart concertos.  The existence of people who might prefer the reverse does not invalidate the segmentation; it just shows that there are outliers in any human population.  You need to think about segments as groups with diffuse edges - not hard geometric shapes with dark boundary lines.

OK, so from the Segmentation Study we know that most people who are within the classification "prefer tabletop RPGs" have 8 things in common that they prefer to find in the games they play:

*  Strong Characters and Exciting Story
*  Role Playing
*  Complexity Increases over Time
*  Requires Strategic Thinking
*  Competitive
*  Add on sets/New versions available
*  Uses imagination
*  Mentally challenging

These 8 things are the core of the overall TRPG segment.  If you make a TRPG without them, you will be addressing a completely different audience.  (Maybe a good thing, but certainly a different thing).

You can self-check this:  Have you ever played a successful TRPG that didn't have most (if not all) of the above features?  If you had a chance to play an TRPG that didn't offer these features, would you think it likely that your game group would embrace it?  If this all resonates with you, we're on the same page.

OK, now there are sub-segments within the domain described above as people who prefer tabletop RPGs.  Remember that everyone in the sub-segments inherits the need/desire for these 8 features; they are the baseline on which the segments divide.

The segments are:

A Thinker is a player who most enjoys the game when it delivers Strategic/Combat Focus. This kind of person is likely to enjoy min-maxing a character, spending hours out of game to find every conceivable advantage available in the system to deliver maximum damage from behind maximum protection, even if the min-maxing produces results that are seemingly illogical/impossible. This kind of person wants to solve puzzles and can keep track of long chains of facts and clues.

A Power Gamer is a player who most enjoys the game when it delivers a Tactical/Combat Focus. This kind of person is likely to enjoy playing a character that has a minimum of personality (often, this kind of person plays a character that is simply an extension of the player). This kind of player enjoys short, intense gaming experiences. The consequences of a failed action are minimized for this player, who will roll up a new character and return to the fray without much thought for the storyline implications of that action.

A Character Actor is a player who most enjoys the game when it delivers a Tactical/Story Focus. This kind of person is likely to enjoy the act of theater; using voice, posture, props, etc. to express a character's actions and dialog. This player will have a character that makes sub-optimal choices (from an external perspective) to ensure that the character's actions are "correct" from the perspective of the character's motivations, ethics, and knowledge.

A Storyteller is a player who most enjoys the game when it delivers a Strategic/Story Focus. This kind of person finds enjoyment from the logical progression of the narrative of the scenario. There should be a beginning, a middle and an end. Characters should develop over time in reaction to their experiences. This player will look for a non-rules answer to inconsistencies or anachronisms in the game experience.

When I use these terms in this thread, I am referring to these specific segments.

There is a 5th type, who does not segment; they sit right in the middle of the domain and get value from the entire domain.

22% of players fall into one of the 4 named groups, and 12% fall into the "basic roleplayer" segment.  I often refer to "quarters" or "one fourth" when I talk about the segments which is lazy of me but its a shorthand that most people can visualize quickly so I do it anyway.  (There are of course, 5 quarters therefore in my numbers.  My maths teachers would be so proud.)

Next message I'm going to talk about what the MMOs have done to this player population and how it affects us in 2011 and beyond.

RyanD

When I talk about "MMOs", I'm going to be talking about MMOs primarily played by people in the West.  Eastern MMOs are a whole different kettle of fish.  They have a different business model, different value propositions, are played in public rather than in private, are highly segmented by nationality, etc.

I'll also note that the player segments "prefer MMO" and "prefer tabletop RPGs" overlap but neither contains the other.  Their overlaps are considerable and are the root of the problem.  They overlap so much because both share the 8 common elements.  MMOs add "community" to the mix, but its an addition not a subtraction.

Right off the bat we know that the Power Gamer segment is going to have a better play experience in general in the MMO environment than on the tabletop.  Pre-MMO, the tabletop gave this person a unique experience and they put up with the parts that bored and distracted them.  Post-MMO era, they don't have to, and they won't (at least not over any length of time).  Sure, you can get "the old group together" for a once-a-year game night, but you're going to have an almost impossible time getting any 12-16 year old kids with that segment to sit still for a tabletop experience of any length or repetition.

That's bad.  We know that TRPGs are really network externalities.  The value is external to the products - it is the combination of the product & the social network that uses the product which creates the value.  Knocking a quarter of the social network out of the mix has got to play havoc with the whole system even if all other factors were equal.

Maybe the damage could be limited if we ended up with a 3-segment player base, with some odd and unknown number of Power Gamers who are too old, too set in their ways, or too stubborn to play MMOs sticking around for flavor.  That might be addressable (somehow) by just tweaking existing games.  But I don't think we even get that much luck.

There's another group that's being seduced by the MMOs: The Character Actors.  These people are getting tremendous value out of the current generation of MMOs.  I've seen people who have filled up every available character slot on every available server with City of Heroes characters, for example.  I know people who have produced (and I kid you not) tens of thousands of message board posts in character, about their character and interacting with others also in character.

These people are getting crack cocaine in the form of a mutable, controllable graphic representation of their character.  For tabletop RPGs the best they could hope for was a hand-drawn "character portrait" and maybe a metal miniature, which might or might not be painted.  In the MMO realm they get a living, breathing, 3-D avatar who moves, dances, emotes, and does all the other things these people can dream of.  And, not to keep hammering this point home, the technology about to come on-line will blow these people's minds.

With the Power Gamers out, and the Character Actors leaving, that leaves us with a 2 segment audience, plus the "generic RPG players".  Basically, the Storytellers and the Thinkers.  It just so happens that the tabletop RPG format is nearly perfect for these people.  The MMO format is not good at all for the Storytellers (they won't get their needs met probably for 1 and maybe 2 more generations of software, so around 2020 or so when they can begin to easily create virtual content for others to interact with).  The Thinkers can get their needs met in many different ways, but one downside to MMOs is that all the secrets are revealed in near-realtime.  There's very little joy of discovery or thrill of success when you know that some 12 year old in Minot North Dakota did the same thing in a fraction of the time and then posted a step by step walkthrough.  On the tabletop Thinkers still have the ability to shine in real-time, without being worried about the FAQ.

That's too much damage to do to the audience of tabletop RPGs to continue with the games in their current format as anything other than an aging hobby with dwindling numbers.  We could easily see TRPGs turn into the model railroad hobby, which has become primarily a rich-man's hobby focused on expensive, highly accurate reproductions, and large track & terrain setups that fill whole rooms.  Or we could see it become like stamp collecting - a hobby where the underlying business has all but evaporated and along with it support systems like periodicals, community organizations & gatherings, and recognition.

The fact that Pathfinder, which is at heart a tuned up D&D 3.5, is selling about as well as D&D 4th Edition should scare the hell out of all of us.  We know that there's very little new player acquisition into the 3.x family of games.  We know that the game is aimed at a market of pre-existing 1e and 2e D&D players who are in their 30s to 60s.  While it's a great game, it still can't regenerate an entire hobby.

4th Edition is in my opinion, an even bigger problem.  It's basically a game designed to be attractive to Power Gamers and Thinkers, while de-emphasizing Character Actors and Storytellers.  In other words, its a game primarily focused on only a quarter of the audience (because the Power Gamers have already left).  No wonder its not selling well.  It may be the best Power Gamer/Thinker tabletop RPG ever created, but that's like saying it's the best prop-driven fighter aircraft ever made:  A technically great achievement with zero chance of being successful in the market.

It's late, I'm tired, and I've now got a decent head start on this topic.  I will write more tomorrow.

What I'd like to know, and I don't recall seeing in the study, is how exactly a person was put into one of the four groups.

For example, I've seen a very poor study (not the WotC one) where players were basically asked to rate their agreement with the statement "I enjoy a good sense of story". The problem with this approach is that, first, it recapitulates the confusion over "story" which has appeared repeatedly in gaming, especially TRPG. An interest in "story" can mean many things not only in terms of content (it might mean having a beginning/middle/end, it might mean NPCs with real personalities, it might mean non-combat oriented activity), but also in terms of approach to content (it might mean scripted plots, it might mean GM-centric improv, it might mean player-distributed improv with lots of out-of-character input).

Second, it basically violates the idea of single-blind evaluation, let alone double-blind evalution, of survey results.

Third, it doesn't really provide much guidance for addressing the putative groups' interests, if they're expressed in ambiguous terms which will mean different things to different people.

The best approach is to ask a variety of questions which may or may not contain overt reference to high-level concepts like "story" (e.g., some questions could ask about preferred frequency & length of combats, acceptable rates of character death, etc.), and then to identify objective clusters of respondents who are broadly similar. Only then should the clusters be given names--and then the characteristics of the clusters can be generalized from how they answered the question.

Now, it could be that this is how the study was done, and either I just don't remember, or the detail has been missing in public reports. But it's really crucial to seeing just how valid any conclusions we draw from the study might be.

Quote from: John Morrow;426263*snip*
The problem with "rules mastery" is that, while it appeals to certain types of players, it makes the game harder to learn, harder to play casually, harder to GM, and has a hand in driving rule bloat.  

Part of what I was curious about was whether "rules mastery" was one of those things that role-playing systems could dispense with if one assumes that certain segments have been lost forever to computer games and MMORPGs and whether the traditional role-playing advocates here think that it serves a critical purpose or not.  Personally, I don't have much use for it, even though I can do it if I have to.

If the assumption is true that those segments are "lost forever" then "rules mastery" and the resultant "bloat" for the sole purpose of in-game "rewards" is a paradigm best left to wither...playing the game for the rules is a bore IMO and defeats the spirit of RPGs as originally concieved and at the highest level of play.
I would add that the propensity for designers to include their setting materials in the "core book" is a trend that has at it's heart commercial underpinings and has damaged the creative aspects of the hobby.

If folks are finding their fix with other mediums great. Lets not have RPG's cater to those segments in an attempt to remain a viable commercial interest. Nothing wrong with a "cottage" industry especially in this age of print on demand and self publication. With inovative designs and compelling supplements I think the hobby has many robust years ahead. More is by no means better in all regards.

Did you have a chance to check out the link that showed the middle schoolers playing AD&D 1ed.? Will try to locate the thread...:)

Quote from: skofflox;426286Did you have a chance to check out the link that showed the middle schoolers playing AD&D 1ed.? Will try to locate the thread...:)

I think that is what you are talking about (http://www.gazette.net/stories/03172010/silvnew183031_32555.php), from this post (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=425348&postcount=297) and that thread (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=16774) prior to it.

Quote from: RSDancey;426264And a last intro note about MMOs:  What you see today is not what you will see in the next 3 years.  The MMO field is about to undergo a massive graphic & AI upgrade driven by Moore's law.  The "immersion" of the MMO will soon start to approach Turing Test levels - you'll never be sure if the NPC you're interacting with is a human or an AI.  And the visual experience in terms of lighting, shadows, clothing, physics, skin tones, etc. is all going to become so much better that you'll soon think of the current generation of MMOs the way we think about the old Kings Quest adventure games.  Its going to be that big an evolution.

I find this incredibly difficult to believe. MMOs have always lagged off-line games in terms of graphic quality - for this to be true we'd have to be seeing the levels of quality you're talking about already in single-player games, and we're not. Sure, things are improving, but I think you're overselling it here.

Quote from: RSDancey;426264The Segmentation Study we released when I ran the D&D business at Wizards of the Coast was designed to show 2 important things.  First, it was to show that unlike what was the conventional wisdom at the time, the TRPG hobby was not dominated by people who cared more about publisher-driven metaplot rich "worlds".  It was also to show that most people who played TRPGs actually did have a "segment" of play they enjoyed most - that is, the audience was really a set of overlapping heterogeneous segments rather than a monolithic homogeneous "gamer" segment.  

So the survey was designed to show what it showed? You make it sound better when you talk about it later, but beginning a survey with an expected result is a fairly classic error in statistics.

QuoteOK, so from the Segmentation Study we know that most people who are within the classification "prefer tabletop RPGs" have 8 things in common that they prefer to find in the games they play:

*  Strong Characters and Exciting Story
*  Role Playing
*  Complexity Increases over Time
*  Requires Strategic Thinking
*  Competitive
*  Add on sets/New versions available
*  Uses imagination
*  Mentally challenging

One of these things is not like the others... I wonder how the "active gamers" were selected for this survey, considering you've come back with a bias towards people who are buying new products.

Quote from: RSDancey;426264...
Its at this point that people start asking/talking about GNS.  GNS is an analysis of games not gamers.  Unfortunately, for many people, the idea of boxing into one of the GNS segments made sense at least anecdotally.  One of the things I love about GNS at its root is that it gives designers an excellent way to talk about their games in a way that can be understood by other designers.  It just doesn't work when people try to use it to categorize people.

Firstly, I'm fairly sure you are wrong about the purpose of GNS:- Edwards himself has used it to classify gamers, as well as games (I've followed links to the Forge which demonstrated this). At its most fundamental, GNS is about what drives decisions during play - a decision, on Edwards' model, can be G, N or S, and a repeated tendency to do one of those makes a gamer G, N or S, and a game set up to encourage one of those is G, N or S and any other game is "incoherent". Whatever.

I need hardly add that I fucking hate GNS, but I think I have cracked where it went wrong. Edwards is a scientist and presumably therefore is used to approaching things empirically via externally observable evidence - he talks in his essay about how you have to game with someone for a while and watch what they do in order to categorise them, and disregard what they say about their own preferences. (Possibly contrast your segmentation study which, though it did not rely on high-level questioning of subjects, plainly DID rely on low-level questioning of subjects.) So GNS bears the hallmarks, IMHO, of an approach based on observation of the subjects, rather than on feedback from the subjects (possibly unlike your segmentation study). GNS might be passably OK (though not brilliant) as a bland external model of how roleplayers appear to behave; what it does not satisfactorily address is why people appear to show those preferences, or what their internal experience of the game is, or how to enhance that experience. For starters it tramples on the idea of immersion, which is fundamental for many people here. Now, GDS may have been a far better theory, but the D is GDS is broader than the N in GNS, and the S in GNS is broader than the S in GDS. I suspect I might be a D in GDS, but I don't think I fit GNS at all. I am not G, I am not N, and I would feel insulted to be called S. It's an incomplete theory.

I have also seen GNS misapplied and misdescribed by people who get caught up in some broad general meaning of "story" as "anything which isn't combat-focused or rules/randomisation-focused" and then think that any game where the characters and tensions between them are interesting is somehow an N-game. That's not how N is meant in Edwards' actual essays, at least not the ones I've read.

My next post may be slightly more interesting, however...

QuoteThe correct way to create a segmentation study (and the methodology we used at Wizards) is to try and start with as few pre-conceived notions as possible, and then give people a very wide variety of questions about what they like, what they don't like, what they play, what they don't play, what they have played, what they want to play, etc. and then search the resulting data set for clusters of people giving similar answers.  If you make your initial survey broad enough, and you get a large enough sample size, experience shows that you will find such clusters and they tend to have a high degree of correlation to reality.  We did, and we found them.

I suspect that considering the vast set of conceivable RPGs and storygames as a whole, the VAST majority of players have only been exposed to a small segment of those RPGs, and NO-ONE has been seriously exposed to them ALL, not even to all the ones currently in existence. Network externalities as well as marketing will be a massive factor in this; also, many conceivable RPGs, which might have the ingredients of success if written and marketed properly, may have no close analogue among the RPGs which have so far been written. This means that no matter how good your methods, a careful statistical analysis is always at risk of producing flawed results. There are also at least two things in your results which suggest inherent bias in your methodology, of which more later. But the impossibility of satisfactory statistical sampling means that ultimately we are thrown back on a scientifically unsatisfactory combination of personal judgement, anecdotal evidence, individual feedback, empathy and intuition in attempting to fathom what players really enjoy or in future may enjoy about games, and how to enhance their experience. I would rather go by my gut and acknowledge that that's what I am doing than convince myself that I have found some scientific method which is somehow valid and then use it as a guide which may lead me up the wrong path entirely.

QuoteOK, so from the Segmentation Study we know that most people who are within the classification "prefer tabletop RPGs" have 8 things in common that they prefer to find in the games they play:

*  Strong Characters and Exciting Story
*  Role Playing
*  Complexity Increases over Time
*  Requires Strategic Thinking
*  Competitive
*  Add on sets/New versions available
*  Uses imagination
*  Mentally challenging

And... face-to-face socialising??? - or to be facetious - you've missed the tabletop in tabletop roleplaying...

In other words, you missed the Cheetos off your list, Mr. Dancey. And that shows a huge flaw in your study - or it might be fairer to say, your study is only really about TTRPGs, and you can't therefore use its results to consider other media of entertainment. Of course, it was understandable at the time, back in 2000. World of Warcraft was announced IIUC in 2001. Back in the late 90s there were text-based MMOs and probably graphics-based ones, but the whole landscape was vastly different to today. Would questions about "roleplaying without your friends present in the same room" even have been valid back then? (PBM games being perhaps fairly niche.) Now, I appreciate that people CAN socialise online. In a manner of speaking, here we are doing it now. But I refuse adamantly to believe that it's the same thing as face-to-face socialising. What about body language, human contact, all those subtle cues which enhance human interaction? Sure, in WoW you can presumably hook up your mic to the computer, and you might know your fellow gamers offline. People also play TTRPGs by Skype, frequently. But to me, that has far less appeal than playing face-to-face. Even playing on the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise loses part of its appeal if there are not other real humans involved in face-to-face contact with you (or TBH I suppose humanlike androids like Mr. Data, at least if they have continuous offline personality and you can get to know them offline so it has a social purpose of sorts). A holodeck generated mask for your face or voice, etc. might be OK, I will concede that.

FWIW in terms of your segments I'm probably either a general roleplayer or a character actor.

QuoteA Thinker ... is likely to enjoy min-maxing a character, ... even if the min-maxing produces results that are seemingly illogical/impossible. ...

What you have described is not a thinker, but a munchkin. I refuse to believe that 22% of people are munchkins. I have in me an element of what I suspect the survey really identified as "thinker". Possibly a big element. But for me, if the game is a credible one (and not a hack-n-slash munchkinfest), the results have to make sense - min-maxing can be OK, but the results must not be "illogical/impossible". E.g. Str 3, Con 18 - WTF. And this, from someone who will spend hours poring over the rules to identify optimal combinations of abilities. Not at the expense of ruining the credibility of my character if the wider game has roleplay credibility! And if the wider game lacks roleplay credibility, that makes it far less shiney for me.

QuoteA Storyteller ... Characters should develop over time in reaction to their experiences ...

Is this really a trait of storytellers rather than character actors? How can you be a Character Actor and not have a tendency for your characters to develop over time in relation to their experiences? I know that mine do, without any conscious desire to show some narrativistically interesting development in their personalities. It's called roleplay. It partly comes from a developing and changing wealth of IC knowledge and experience, and a more intimate understanding of your character.

Quote... 22% of players fall into one of the 4 named groups, and 12% fall into the "basic roleplayer" segment. ...

Clue number two to the bias in your survey. The results seem to be too good to be true. They seem to be too symmetrical.

Now perhaps you can prove me wrong by showing me your scientifically valid data, but the way it comes across, you might as well say:-

50% of people are more Tactical than (median) average, and 50% are less Tactical than average, but we'll cluster the middle 34.6% as approximately averagely Tactical.

50% of people are more Story than (median) average, and 50% are less Story than average, but we'll cluster the middle 34.6% as approximately averagely Story

These two factors are independent of each other.

Hey presto we've got 12% of people being averagely Tactical and averagely Story, and of the 88% of people who are left, we can divide them equally according to whichever one of their 2 axis tendencies is more pronounced compared to the average.

Now, I'm not insinuating that this is what you actually did. Plainly it's not. But I suspect that there may have been a certain subconscious bias in what questions you asked and how you correlated the answers, what weight you gave to each answer, etc. - based on your own preconceptions. This tallies with your notion that the results seem intuitively right for you (which is what I understand by you saying that they fit reality).

You see, obviously in a relative sense approx. 50% of people are going to be more Tactical than bang-on median average, and approx. 50% will be less Tactical than bang-on median average. Likewise with Story.

But that doesn't mean that for instance elements of story or strategy are irrelevant to powergamers. Plainly most powergamers like their powergaming to be framed in some kind of a story which makes some basic minimum kind of sense and they like to keep a character from one game to the next. They're not playing Chess or Go. It doesn't mean that elements of story are irrelevant to the thinker. An avid love of min-maxing does not preclude an insistence on roleplay-credibility parameters to constrain that min-maxing.

I don't know very much factually about your study. I don't know whether you've proven me wrong on this point to your satisfaction, empirically. But I know from my personal experience that even people with a strong tendency in one direction or another generally have a limited tolerance for neglecting things unrelated to their predominant tendency. Power gamers and thinkers who appeal to realism. Character actors who want to be where the action is and don't like suboptimal characters. Storytellers who like tactical combat. This is not the exception. It's the norm.

Sure, power gamers who get pissed off at excessive character acting and who have no patience for broader story - I know people who fit that mould. But they still appeal to realism. Likewise dedicated character actors who will complain like Hell if the game stagnates and the story doesn't develop, and who don't like being diddled into suboptimal CharGen choices. This kind of synergy of tendencies is not the exception. It is the norm, with differing areas of emphasis.

Most importantly of all:- MMOs cannot currently compete with tabletop RPGs for the shared face-to-face social experience. I don't see them competing with tabletop RPGs in that regard in the near future. A wider audience they may have, but people who like that kind of socialising will be drawn to tabletop games. This includes people from all 5 of your segments.

I can see MMOs gaining ground in this regard as the experience becomes more and more immediate, but not completely catching up. For instance, with a webcam taking players' images and transforming their facial expressions into the expressions of their characters, the illusion of face-to-face contact could be created. Computers could of course one day become a critical component in tabletop gaming played in a kind of holodeck environment.

To some extent, the position of LARPs is stronger than tabletop games in this regard because they involve physical activity.

Overall conclusion:- the rate of uptake of Power Gamers to TTRPGs may be reduced by the availability of MMOs which may be better suited to SOME of them. The same is potentially true to a lesser extent of ALL the other segments IMHO. Thinkers may enjoy optimising in the more complex environment which a vast computer system can provide and may be happy to ignore how-to guides posted by 12-year-old kids from North Dakota, or there may be a way to vary the options available to each player so that easy cheat-guides cannot be produced, if that's desired. Storytellers may be able to enjoy more complex narratives on dedicated RP-type servers because of the vast number of players and vast landscape. Character Actors may get something from it too.

Speaking as someone who is primarily a character actor myself, I can't personally imagine getting ANYTHING from WoW which would REMOTELY compare with my experience of character acting in LARP, as as for tabletop, whatever the strict analytical comparison, its the face-to-face social contact which wins out.

All this said, I think MMOs are and will remain a far larger hobby than ours. IMHO that's because they suit people who want immediate, easy entertainment and because you don't have to have likeminded friends to play an MMO, nor to reveal your interest in gaming to anyone you know. I'm not denying the tens of thousands of IC posts people post. I have done similar on IC forums supporting LARPs I play. But the ease of access of play is there in MMOs in a way it isn't for TTRPGs. You don't have to read a load of rules. You don't even have to have a friend who reads a load of rules. And you have snazzy graphics. But for the essence of what Character Actors really enjoy? No thank you. You have too much faith in the "science" of your methods and in taking it to its logical conclusions. Character Actors like the feeling of immersion. It's a feeling which is cultivated by the social environment. It's not an abstract thing to do with the depiction of a character. It's how you feel inside when you are playing the character. And your social environment is IMHO YMMV a critical aspect of that.

I'm not saying there aren't loads of people effectively Character Acting on MMOs. But they are getting a different kind of buzz IMHO. The social-immersive buzz of Character Acting in TTRPGs/LARPs is more powerful - or at least the social aspect augments the immersive buzz itself. Online immersion in a character's perspective may be not quite a contradiction in terms but there's a tension there I think. The pay-off for doing it online is you get there far easier, and with better graphics; the pay-off of doing it socially is the direct face-to-face human feedback which heightenes your immersion.

Another thought:- aged in my 30s, I'm a busy guy. My time for socialising is limited. My time for playing games is limited. I don't want to waste time playing games if it means less time spent socialising. But playing games and socialising at the same time? It's a win-win situation. I'm sure I'm not alone in this view. Some people even like to use TTRPGs or LARPs as a crutch for their inhibited socialising. For instance I know one girl who LARPs who complained about the immersionists in our LARP insisting on a minimisation of "out-of-character" interaction during games because the LARP simply WAS her social life as far as she was concerned. It's a shame she doesn't feel more socially able generally (she vastly underestimates her social abilities), but she and people like her (if not all quite to her extreme) ARE a part of the market. They may also be responsible for any "geekiness" of its image, although she doesn't seem geeky to me (but she would probably claim to be - whatever).

Apologies if the bloviations have increased beyond the socially acceptable norm...

Quote from: RSDancey;426273There's another group that's being seduced by the MMOs: The Character Actors.  These people are getting tremendous value out of the current generation of MMOs.  I've seen people who have filled up every available character slot on every available server with City of Heroes characters, for example.  I know people who have produced (and I kid you not) tens of thousands of message board posts in character, about their character and interacting with others also in character.

These people are getting crack cocaine in the form of a mutable, controllable graphic representation of their character.  For tabletop RPGs the best they could hope for was a hand-drawn "character portrait" and maybe a metal miniature, which might or might not be painted.  In the MMO realm they get a living, breathing, 3-D avatar who moves, dances, emotes, and does all the other things these people can dream of.  And, not to keep hammering this point home, the technology about to come on-line will blow these people's minds.

Speaking as someone who probably would fall in the character actor segment, I have trouble buying that this segment has MMOs beating out RPGs. The best computer interface can not compare to face to face interaction. Yes people who have not tried TRPGs or who do not have a group available can get something out of the computer based interactions. That does not make the MMOs crack cocaine. Just the opposite.

Metal miniatures, character portaits, and even avatars matter a lot less than the chance to inhabit the character and play it as directly as possible. MMOs have not gotten there yet. Give me a virtual reality where I can see everything my character sees and I can interact with the virtual world with a minimal interface and yeah that would tempt me. Watching things on a screen and typing commands does not work for me.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426283What I'd like to know, and I don't recall seeing in the study, is how exactly a person was put into one of the four groups.

That's not how it works.

The result set of the answers to the survey were searched for clusters - that is, places where a substantial number of people all shared the same answers in common.  Once you identify the clusters, then you look at the questions they had in common and you extrapolate a meaningful categorization from those answers.

In other words, we put the segments into the people, not the people into the segments.

Those clusters don't have to have any meta-organization like the two-axis system we showed in the segmentation study.  Ours just happened to have such a meta-organization.

RyanD

Quote from: RSDancey;426264What you see today is not what you will see in the next 3 years.  The MMO field is about to undergo a massive graphic & AI upgrade driven by Moore's law.  The "immersion" of the MMO will soon start to approach Turing Test levels - you'll never be sure if the NPC you're interacting with is a human or an AI.  And the visual experience in terms of lighting, shadows, clothing, physics, skin tones, etc. is all going to become so much better that you'll soon think of the current generation of MMOs the way we think about the old Kings Quest adventure games.  Its going to be that big an evolution.

"It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, "Because the pictures are so much better."

Quote from: RSDancey;426363That's not how it works.

RyanD

OK. How about this part:

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426283For example, I've seen a very poor study (not the WotC one) where players were basically asked to rate their agreement with the statement "I enjoy a good sense of story". The problem with this approach is that, first, it recapitulates the confusion over "story" which has appeared repeatedly in gaming, especially TRPG. An interest in "story" can mean many things not only in terms of content (it might mean having a beginning/middle/end, it might mean NPCs with real personalities, it might mean non-combat oriented activity), but also in terms of approach to content (it might mean scripted plots, it might mean GM-centric improv, it might mean player-distributed improv with lots of out-of-character input).

What were the questions? Could we see a copy of the questionaire somewhere?

It was late and I was busy with other things, so I completely missed the part of Ryan's post where he describes the cluster analysis used in the study. So that gets one question out of the way.

What I find suspicious, is that the clusters divided so evenly. I would expect there to be identifiable clusters with more variation in relative size. Saying "22% all around" suggests the data may have feen fudged, or the sample may be systematically biased. But that is only a suspicion.

However the point is well-taken that the study presupposed trpg players, so it may fail to capture preferences that differentiate trpgs from other entertainments. E.g. socializing with friends. It's also difficult to see how a study of existing gamers will identify what's needed to attract new gamers. And unless the study asked questions pertinent to interest in other entertainments, it would be hard to say which ones are drawing players away.

 Also, the analysis can only develop clusters based on the questions that were actually asked. If nothing addressed issues of the method of play--such as social combat mechanics, or shared narrative authority--then cluster divisions based on those will be missing.

Quote from: Omnifray;426322And... face-to-face socialising??? - or to be facetious - you've missed the tabletop in tabletop roleplaying...

Agreement. "The human dimension of role playing games is a feature, not a bug. It should not be pushed aside, or ignored: it should be embraced, and nurtured. That's one of the fundamentals of role playing games that's being neglected today, I think." (self-quoting from there (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=426211&postcount=333))

Quote from: RSDancey;426264A Thinker is a player who most enjoys the game when it delivers Strategic/Combat Focus. This kind of person is likely to enjoy min-maxing a character, spending hours out of game to find every conceivable advantage available in the system to deliver maximum damage from behind maximum protection, even if the min-maxing produces results that are seemingly illogical/impossible. This kind of person wants to solve puzzles and can keep track of long chains of facts and clues.

What's the possibility of "Thinker" types just walking away completely from tabletop rpgs, and moving on to something else that isn't gaming related?

The type of individuals I've known over the years who were "Thinker" types when it comes to tabletop rpgs like D&D, were frequently the same type of individuals who would be searching for loopholes and security holes in things like computer systems, video games, reverse engineering/disassembling computer code, cracking passwords, etc ... as well as other offline activities such as:  picking locks, hotwiring car ignition systems, modifying guns, Blackjack card counting, etc ...

Quite a few "Thinker" type D&D players I've gamed with over the years, stopped playing rpg games altogether when significant numbers of DMs started banning many splatbooks (both WotC and 3PP) from 3.5E D&D games.  4E D&D is an edition they have very little to no interest in, when they saw how much harder it was to abuse the rules.

For reference, a number of technical questions about the survey were discussed in this thread from a few years ago: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=2603

In my experience, there is one reason why MMO's are killing tabletop.

When I want to play WoW, I log in and play. I don't have to call my friends, set up a time, get food and drinks, do all the prep work for the adventure, and then find out someone can't make it at the last second.

Quote from: Grymbok;426301I find this incredibly difficult to believe. MMOs have always lagged off-line games in terms of graphic quality - for this to be true we'd have to be seeing the levels of quality you're talking about already in single-player games, and we're not. Sure, things are improving, but I think you're overselling it here.

Modern MMOs take between 5 and 7 years to develop.  In pre-production they can cost anywhere from $1 to $5 million a year (and the closer they get to full production the more that figure ramps up because you can't just hire 150 people all in one day).  They cost about 10-15 million dollars a year once they go into full production which takes about 3 years.  This is a much much higher commitment of time & money than a single-player game will ever get.

MMOs have budgets about 2-3x single player titles.  Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 for example cost about $50 million to make.  (Starcraft II was rumored to cost $100 million but Blizzard has stated that number is baseless).  A typical AAA MMO will have an all-in release budget around $75 million (plus marketing, and not even talking about post-release expenses).  Some have cost more than that (Tabula Rasa cost over $100 million).

The best developers tend to go where the most funding is (unless they're exceptionally wealthy and in control of their own destinies like John Carmack).  Thus, MMOs have aggregated the cream of the tech crop for the past half-decade.  Because these games take so long to ship, most of their work has yet to be seen outside closed industry demos.

Take a look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ccpgames?blend=1&ob=4#p/c/67C46A980E7C1EE0/0/Gf26ZhHz6uM

This was state of the art at the beginning of 2010.  The people who worked on it consider it to be a barely adequate demo of the tech - what they're working on now blow this away.  It is now being deployed into EVE Online as a revamped character generator:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5i_mgF7Vas&feature=fvsr

I'm a bit hamstrung here because a lot of what I know is confidential, but you'll all see it soon enough.  And CCP isn't the only company working at this level.

If you remember what it was like when 3D cards suddenly became standard gear, and games transformed almost overnight from pseudo-3D or 2D+1 to true polygon based 3D, it will feel like that level of change.

Most MMOs are also moving to a shared framework for things like graphics.  That means that investment in one game usually ripples across several.  So the aggregate investment into core graphics & AI tech is massive - probably hundreds of millions of dollars across the whole MMO industry.  People move around in that industry too so there's a fair bit of cross-pollination of best practices and clever solutions.

The industry spent a good part of the last 5 years in the "Uncanny Valley"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

But the hardware and middleware has finally caught up to the graphic designers' needs and huge amounts of forward progress are now being made.

QuoteSo the survey was designed to show what it showed?

You misunderstood.  I said we released it to demonstrate that all TRPG players were not vested in metaplot nor was it a monolithic audience. It was an answer to people like Mike Stackpoole who questioned the design direction of the 3rd Edition of D&D in a quantitative way rather than a qualitative way.  I think the results speak for themselves.

QuoteOne of these things is not like the others... I wonder how the "active gamers" were selected for this survey, considering you've come back with a bias towards people who are buying new products.

First, there's no mention of price in the criterion.  Add on sets and new versions does not require a commercial transaction.  DM created content in the form of new magic items, monsters and scenarios absolutely qualifies.

Second, gamers were selected in a multi-step process which you can read about in the overall survey results here:

http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/WotCMarketResearchSummary.html

(We also busted our asses making sure that the survey would clearly distinguish between "computer RPGs" and "tabletop RPGs" as well).

Quote from: Omnifray;426322And... face-to-face socialising??? - or to be facetious - you've missed the tabletop in tabletop roleplaying...

This was without question one of the most surprising results of the survey.  It doesn't segment.  And it's not central to the experience.  People talk about it until they're blue in the face, but what actually happened is that when a virtual game experience came along where most people play alone and can't see (and often can't hear) their companions, well, they had no problem whatsoever embracing it.

The physical aspects of gaming are vastly over-rated.  In fact, my pet theory is that they're actually a band-aid on how challenging the hobby is to engage with.  Many people who might have given it up in frustration or disappointment kept playing because they just liked hanging out with their friends.  But when a better format came along, they switched, and found other ways to socialize.  Anyone who thinks that social contact is a unique value proposition of tabletop games has to question why people's actual behavior doesn't seem to back that up.

In fact, the MMO network is actually much more focused on community than the TRPG audience.  TRPG networks rarely extend to more than a dozen people or so (but there are many links to other networks).  MMO networks rarely have less than a hundred.  In EVE, there are multi-thousand person organizations.  This sense of larger community is actually more social and more likely to produce off-line friendships than the tighter knit, smaller TRPG network.  Its extremely attractive to people with poor social skills but who crave social contact.  Plus, it's where the girls are.

BTW:  TRPG theorists are not the only ones to make this mistake.  The Poker community never thought on-line play would ever become significant; there's no way to use body language skills to deduce strategy, its easy to cheat, collusion is rampant, and "people like to see who they're playing with", etc.  Turns out, not so much - on-line play offers people a play-anywhere, play any time, easily trackable, anonymous, "don't have to go to a scary casino full of scary poker pros" experience that was a better fit for many people than live casino games ever were.

Quote from: RSDancey;426398Second, gamers were selected in a multi-step process which you can read about in the overall survey results here:

http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/WotCMarketResearchSummary.html

Ryan, just making sure I'm right about this:

Out of the people that replied to the first mail-shot, 1,000 were sent the 100 question survey.

And "The particular individuals chosen to participate in this expanded
survey represent the population, as determined by the screener."

In the screener, 6.00% or so or so of the population had played TRPGs.

So of the 1,000 people surveyed, 60 had played TRPGS? And the data on TRPGs is therefore based on the views of 60 players? Is this right?

Thanks for the detailed answer. The first video was deep in the uncanny valley, as you say. The character creator is very impressive though.

The other challenge for MMOs, of course, is moving lots of PCs around at once, which makes all this stuff a lot harder to do at high-quality than in single player titles.

Will certainly be interesting to see how things shape up if this happens as you predict. In the past few years launching an MMO has seemed like nothing more than a good way to lose a lot of money, with only WoW and your own EVE being successful launches in years now. I'll probably just be an observer rather than a player though - I spent several years playing EQ and am not in a position to give any MMO the commitment levels they demand anymore.

Quote from: RSDancey;426398First, there's no mention of price in the criterion.  Add on sets and new versions does not require a commercial transaction.  DM created content in the form of new magic items, monsters and scenarios absolutely qualifies.

Gotcha, makes sense, misunderstood your phrasing.

Quote from: Glazer;426405Out of the people that replied to the first mail-shot, 1,000 were sent the 100 question survey.

The 1000 surveys were sent to people who self-identified as people who played games (not just TRPGs).

RyanD

Now this is thread worth reading. Glad I was pointed towards it.

I may not agree with what's said in it. But it's still interesting even so.

Quote from: Grymbok;426407The other challenge for MMOs, of course, is moving lots of PCs around at once, which makes all this stuff a lot harder to do at high-quality than in single player titles.

This is a huge problem, but not on the quality level.  Quality is on the client side, and even average game rigs in the 2010s will be able to support this level of detail for 100s of avatars.  The problem is the N^2 interprocess communication problems that stress the servers and the network connections.  But those are also problems that are being solved by Moore's law and by faster broadband rollouts.

QuoteIn the past few years launching an MMO has seemed like nothing more than a good way to lose a lot of money, with only WoW and your own EVE being successful launches in years now.

Actually EVE predates WoW.  But there has been a noticeable change in the MMO market in the past 24 months.  We now live in an era where there are between 1 and 2 million "MMO Hobbyists" - people with allegiance to no game, but to the genre.  They switch from AAA to AAA MMO as they ship (virtually all of which are Theme Parks), burn through the content faster than the developers thought possible, and then quit with complaints that the game is "boring" or "too short".  This creates an "s-curve" of player participation which is actually really bad for MMOs - they have variable costs that scale with the size of the player base (servers, bandwidth, customer service, GMs, billing, etc.), but they take much longer to ramp up and ramp down than the length of the initial spike.  

Star Trek, Conan, Warhammer, and Aion all suffered from this problem spectacularly.

One of the things the next generation of MMOs is going to address is finding ways to moderate this effect.

On the other hand, there are games that are doing quite well.  Runescape has 5 million players (1 million paying $5/mo).  Aion still has about 200K Western full price subscribers, and a much much larger business in Asia.  Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons online have had a huge renewal once they went to a hybrid free-to-play/microtransaction model.  The next AAA MMO likely to ship will be Star Wars: The Old Republic (but it is barely an MMO in my opinion and should probably be classified into its own special category).

The market for subscription based Western MMOs is between 5 and 10 million people (its very hard to narrow that down because many people play more than one MMO at a time).  The market for some kind of F2P/MTX model is probably 50 million.  So there is a lot of upside yet to come from this space - it's barely been tapped in some ways.

RyanD

Quote from: RSDancey;426412The 1000 surveys were sent to people who self-identified as people who played games (not just TRPGs).

RyanD

And out of those 1,000, six per cent had played TRPGs?

Sorry to nag, I just want to make sure I understand where the numbers are coming from!

Quote from: Glazer;426417And out of those 1,000, six per cent had played TRPGs?

Sorry to nag, I just want to make sure I understand where the numbers are coming from!

No.

We're talking about something I worked on nearly 12 years ago, so my memory is a little hazy.  We wanted to ensure that we had a statistically significant response from people who would be TRPG, CCG, CRPG, and miniatures wargamers (the 4 categories we expected to be producing for).  I think the goal was to have 200 of each in the response pool, and then 500 people who profiled as gamers but not people who were clearly in those 4 categories.  Because of overlap, that consumed the other 100 respondents.  Those actual numbers might be higher or lower, but there were more than 60 people in the TRPG category.

RyanD

Quote from: ggroy;426379What's the possibility of "Thinker" types just walking away completely from tabletop rpgs, and moving on to something else that isn't gaming related?

First, remember that we're not talking about Thinkers in general.  We're talking about Thinkers who want the 8 basic elements in their gaming experience.

I think that 4e did a lot to drive these folks away.  One of the joys of being a Thinker is seeing how you could build a character to achieve a certain result.  The 4e system essentially forces characters into pre-defined "builds".  Thinkers also feel rewarded for planning ahead and being ready to react to a circumstance that everyone else didn't anticipate.  4e gives few of these kinds of challenges.  At each stage of the game the players know pretty much what they should be prepared to cope with, and flexibility in abilities allows them to adapt on the fly based on conditions.

So I agree with you that a lot of Thinkers may have just stayed with 3.x (thus, Pathfinder being so successful.)  My intuition tells me that a lot of books being sold for 4e are being bought by storytellers but never used in games (ala 2e).  That can only last so long ... at some point, if that game isn't being widely played, now that there are options (OGL/D20, MMOs, etc.) the player network should decay much more rapidly than it did in the 2e era.

Quote from: Glazer;426405And "The particular individuals chosen to participate in this expanded
survey represent the population, as determined by the screener."

In the screener, 6.00% or so or so of the population had played TRPGs.

So of the 1,000 people surveyed, 60 had played TRPGS? And the data on TRPGs is therefore based on the views of 60 players? Is this right?

It sure looks like that to me. That seems like a pretty small number. [EDIT: see Ryan's answer above and my response below.] According to this paper (http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1286&context=commpapers), "the minimal sample size [ought] to include no less than 2^k cases (k = number of variables), preferably 5*2^k". In other words, if the number of questions asked, prior to doing the cluster analysis, was 100, you'd want an astronomical sample size (2^100). Even if many of those questions are considered duplicates (included for data checking), reducing the number of "significant" variables to 10 or so, you'd still want a minimum sample size of 1024 before you could have much confidence in your identification of clusters.

Quote from: RSDancey;42626422% of players fall into one of the 4 named groups, and 12% fall into the "basic roleplayer" segment.

If I am reading this correctly, that's only 34% of the players (22% in the four named groups, 12% in the "center" group). What about the other 66% of players? Where do they fit in to the picture. I think this is especially important to know as from these numbers it looks like a large majority of players don't fit into the segments at all.

Quote from: RSDancey;426423No.

We're talking about something I worked on nearly 12 years ago, so my memory is a little hazy.  We wanted to ensure that we had a statistically significant response from people who would be TRPG, CCG, CRPG, and miniatures wargamers (the 4 categories we expected to be producing for).  I think the goal was to have 200 of each in the response pool, and then 500 people who profiled as gamers but not people who were clearly in those 4 categories.  Because of overlap, that consumed the other 100 respondents.  Those actual numbers might be higher or lower, but there were more than 60 people in the TRPG category.

RyanD

I think they have extrapolated from the data that 6% of the 65,000 people initially surveyed play TRPGs... those 3,900 people may have been disproportionately represented in the post-screen study population who filled in the questionnaires?

Quote from: RSDancey;426423No.

We're talking about something I worked on nearly 12 years ago, so my memory is a little hazy.  We wanted to ensure that we had a statistically significant response from people who would be TRPG, CCG, CRPG, and miniatures wargamers (the 4 categories we expected to be producing for).  I think the goal was to have 200 of each in the response pool, and then 500 people who profiled as gamers but not people who were clearly in those 4 categories.  Because of overlap, that consumed the other 100 respondents.  Those actual numbers might be higher or lower, but there were more than 60 people in the TRPG category.

RyanD

This is reasonable on its face--the followup survey could have deliberately selected a higher proportion of game players than in the general population, and then statistical methods could be used to re-weigh and extrapolate. I would be wary of saying much about the non-gaming population using the followup survey, but that wouldn't be something you'd do anyway.

However, sample sizes in the hundreds might still be too low for reliable cluster analyss, depending on the number of variables.

Quote from: RSDancey;426404This was without question one of the most surprising results of the survey.  It doesn't segment.  And it's not central to the experience.  People talk about it until they're blue in the face, but what actually happened is that when a virtual game experience came along where most people play alone and can't see (and often can't hear) their companions, well, they had no problem whatsoever embracing it.

The physical aspects of gaming are vastly over-rated.  In fact, my pet theory is that they're actually a band-aid on how challenging the hobby is to engage with.  Many people who might have given it up in frustration or disappointment kept playing because they just liked hanging out with their friends.  But when a better format came along, they switched, and found other ways to socialize.  Anyone who thinks that social contact is a unique value proposition of tabletop games has to question why people's actual behavior doesn't seem to back that up.

In fact, the MMO network is actually much more focused on community than the TRPG audience.  TRPG networks rarely extend to more than a dozen people or so (but there are many links to other networks).  MMO networks rarely have less than a hundred.  In EVE, there are multi-thousand person organizations.  This sense of larger community is actually more social and more likely to produce off-line friendships than the tighter knit, smaller TRPG network.  Its extremely attractive to people with poor social skills but who crave social contact.  Plus, it's where the girls are.

BTW:  TRPG theorists are not the only ones to make this mistake.  The Poker community never thought on-line play would ever become significant; there's no way to use body language skills to deduce strategy, its easy to cheat, collusion is rampant, and "people like to see who they're playing with", etc.  Turns out, not so much - on-line play offers people a play-anywhere, play any time, easily trackable, anonymous, "don't have to go to a scary casino full of scary poker pros" experience that was a better fit for many people than live casino games ever were.

I'm kind of flabbergasted that it didn't occur to anyone that the type of socialization that exists in role playing games is not the same that exists amongst players of MMOs. EVEN if we consider these things to be equal/similar enough for people who have moved on to MMOs to not care about them, it still surprises me that it didn't occur to anyone that people who are choosing to stick with role playing actually do see a difference between the two, whether it is accurate or not.

It further puzzles me that someone would suggest that from there, the solution to the conundrum would be to apply an MMO logic to RPGs, discard its socialization aspects altogether, modify TRPGs mechanics as to make them more in line with a public familiar with MMOs, all the while ensuring that TRPGs would be put in direct competition with MMOs (instead of promoting them as a medium of their own), thus ensuring that TRPGs would LOSE the favor of BOTH people who chose to stick with them in the first place, AND people who have already moved on and are satisfied with their MMO experience and have no reason, whatsoever, to revert back to TRPGs when all things being equal, MMOs are just more convenient.

The logic of it all just baffles me.

Quote from: RandallS;426429If I am reading this correctly, that's only 34% of the players (22% in the four named groups, 12% in the "center" group). What about the other 66% of players? Where do they fit in to the picture. I think this is especially important to know as from these numbers it looks like a large majority of players don't fit into the segments at all.

No it's 22% (of TRPGers) + 22% (of TRPGers) + 22% (of TRPGers) + 22% (of TRPGers) + 12% = 100% (of TRPGers)

I'm curious, though, Mr. Dancey -- why the emphasis on MMOs, when home-console and portable sales still dwarf them in the Japanese and Western markets?  Isn't the fact that home-console/local multiplayer games are the new cultural gauges for social competence among males in Western society more of a threat to tabletop games than MMOs, which tend to attract a more dedicated "hardcore" market in the West?  Do you really think virtual worlds will outpace "traditional" video-games in the Western markets?

Quote from: BenThe logic of it all just baffles me.

It's weird, but psychologically speaking, it works. It's just a matter of how the mind perceives things.

Quote from: RandallS;426429If I am reading this correctly, that's only 34% of the players (22% in the four named groups, 12% in the "center" group). What about the other 66% of players? Where do they fit in to the picture. I think this is especially important to know as from these numbers it looks like a large majority of players don't fit into the segments at all.

No, that was worded poorly. He means 22% fell into each of the four groups, and then 12% in the center group. I'm skeptical about the validity of that result (as I mentioned earlier in the thread), but at least it adds up to 100%.

Quote from: Omnifray;426432I think they have extrapolated from the data that 6% of the 65,000 people initially surveyed play TRPGs... those 3,900 people may have been disproportionately represented in the post-screen study population who filled in the questionnaires?

Exactly, that seems to be what was done.

Quote from: RSDancey;426404This was without question one of the most surprising results of the survey.  It doesn't segment.  And it's not central to the experience.  People talk about it until they're blue in the face, but what actually happened is that when a virtual game experience came along where most people play alone and can't see (and often can't hear) their companions, well, they had no problem whatsoever embracing it.

The physical aspects of gaming are vastly over-rated.  In fact, my pet theory is that they're actually a band-aid on how challenging the hobby is to engage with.  Many people who might have given it up in frustration or disappointment kept playing because they just liked hanging out with their friends.  But when a better format came along, they switched, and found other ways to socialize.  Anyone who thinks that social contact is a unique value proposition of tabletop games has to question why people's actual behavior doesn't seem to back that up.

In fact, the MMO network is actually much more focused on community than the TRPG audience.  TRPG networks rarely extend to more than a dozen people or so (but there are many links to other networks).  MMO networks rarely have less than a hundred.  In EVE, there are multi-thousand person organizations.  This sense of larger community is actually more social and more likely to produce off-line friendships than the tighter knit, smaller TRPG network.  Its extremely attractive to people with poor social skills but who crave social contact.  Plus, it's where the girls are.

BTW:  TRPG theorists are not the only ones to make this mistake.  The Poker community never thought on-line play would ever become significant; there's no way to use body language skills to deduce strategy, its easy to cheat, collusion is rampant, and "people like to see who they're playing with", etc.  Turns out, not so much - on-line play offers people a play-anywhere, play any time, easily trackable, anonymous, "don't have to go to a scary casino full of scary poker pros" experience that was a better fit for many people than live casino games ever were.

Well, I dunno. I know plenty of people who play WoW and LARP, and plenty who play TRPGs and LARP, and plenty who do all three. A lot of them are young adults aged 18 to 25. A conurbation of 1 million people can easily support two specialist retailers with significant space devoted to RPGs. (Even in the age of Amazon etc.)

I mean, your hair falling on shoulders graphics and cloth interacting with environment graphics are amazing, but I would rather play monopoly with a bunch of mates than the most amazing online game ever.

Also, from Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0:-

One conclusion we draw from this data is that people who play electronic
games still find time to play TRPGs; it appears that these two pursuits are
ìcomplementaryî or ìnoncompetitiveî outside the scope of the macroeconomic
ìdisposable incomeî competition.

If that logic still holds true, WoW won't be stealing gamers. It may even be supplying them. And this fits my experience. I know gamers through MET-LARP who are avid WoW-players and who also play TRPGs. I know gamers through boffer LARP who are avid WoW-players. Most of them rate LARP highest as an experience, though I do know TRPGers who also LARP but rate TRPGs higher (I can't quite understand that, as LARPing is a lot of effort if you don't love it... I guess they play what's available, and a large LARP may be less likely to cancel on you at short notice or have small-group type issues). Or - are you saying that this finding is no longer valid because the electronic games now completely replace TRPGs because they are so much better than they were? (But my LARPer WoW-gamer friends rate LARP higher! - OK, by definition these people are people willing to go to the effort of LARPing, but still.)

This "play-anywhere, play any time, easily trackable, anonymous, 'don't have to go to a scary casino full of scary poker pros' experience" you mention - this is exactly what I was suggesting were advantages of online games, and yes they draw lots of people. But there is still room for people who want to play tabletop, I feel.

Quote from: Peregrin;426438It's weird, but psychologically speaking, it works. It's just a matter of how the mind perceives things.

Maybe I could have been clearer, but I wasn't talking about the logic of people migrating from one medium to the other. It is what it is (assuming the data is correct in the first place, of course). I was thinking of the analysis of the data, what RPG designers chose to do with it. How TRPG design evolved from there. Read my post again. (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=426435&postcount=39)

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426434This is reasonable on its face--the followup survey could have deliberately selected a higher proportion of game players than in the general population, and then statistical methods could be used to re-weigh and extrapolate. I would be wary of saying much about the non-gaming population using the followup survey, but that wouldn't be something you'd do anyway.

However, sample sizes in the hundreds might still be too low for reliable cluster analyss, depending on the number of variables.

I suspect the 6% figure was arrived at from the initial postcard survey, not from the follow-up survey, as the data needed to arrive at the 6% figure was part of the data needed for the screening process as described... and you appear to be right about the sample sizes in theory, but I suspect the sample is large enough (if say 200 people) to provide interesting/useful conclusions even if not ultra-reliable, assuming the right questions are asked

BTW is there any hard data on what proportion of the population still plays TRPGs/LARPs/specifically boffer-LARPs on a regular basis? Is there any firm evidence that it has declined dramatically as Dancey appears to suggest?

Quote from: Benoist;426446Maybe I could have been clearer, but I wasn't talking about the logic of people migrating from one medium to the other. It is what it is (assuming the data is correct in the first place, of course). I was thinking of the analysis of the data, what RPG designers chose to do with it. How TRPG design evolved from there. Read my post again. (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=426435&postcount=39)

My bad.

And yeah, I agree.  I'd much rather play Final Fantasy Tactics or run a border skirmish in EVE than run straight through a series of 4e encounters -- the encounter rules for 4e are not the reason that I play D&D.  The logic of applying MMO design to TRPGs is borked, when the creative and flexible aspects of TTRPGs are what should be promoted.  An example being the Gamma World game we played last night, where our GM let us re-skin our weapons to be whatever we wanted them to be, since the weapon rules are so simple.  While there's no mechanical benefit to making something different, the immediate validation you get from others going "Yeah, that's cool, let's roll with that" is what makes TT fun, IMO.  MMOs and video-games can't provide that sort of shared imagination that everyone gets in on.

It's why I like story-games.  BUT, also why my next campaign of D&D is going to be OD&D/S&W. ;)

Quote from: Omnifray;426443One conclusion we draw from this data is that people who play electronic
games still find time to play TRPGs; it appears that these two pursuits are
ìcomplementaryî or ìnoncompetitiveî outside the scope of the macroeconomic
ìdisposable incomeî competition.

If that logic still holds true, WoW won't be stealing gamers.

Computer RPGs and MMOs are two entirely different beasts.  One is a solitary experience (i.e. no network externality), the other is a social experience.  Also, the MMO overlaps with the 8 Core Values very strongly, whereas many CRPGs did not.

The MMO was too embryonic for us to study it in 1999.  I wish I had the money to repeat the survey today though...

RyanD

Quote from: Omnifray;426443Well, I dunno. I know plenty of people who play WoW and LARP, and plenty who play TRPGs and LARP, and plenty who do all three.

This is a well known bias in polling and market research.  "Everyone you know" are selected by demographic, geographic, and other criteria and are more likely to be similar to you than different from you.  This is why it is impossible to use anecdotal evidence to generate high-confidence market research conclusions.

Quote from: RSDancey;426450Computer RPGs and MMOs are two entirely different beasts.  One is a solitary experience (i.e. no network externality), the other is a social experience.  Also, the MMO overlaps with the 8 Core Values very strongly, whereas many CRPGs did not.

The MMO was too embryonic for us to study it in 1999.  I wish I had the money to repeat the survey today though...

RyanD

Maybe it's the Internet which gives me the power to hunt out gaming experiences. Maybe it's my car. Maybe it's the fact that I'm an adult with disposable income. Maybe it's that I live in a conurbation with 5 times the population of the conurbation where I lived as a child.

Whatever it is, I find it far easier to find roleplayers now than I did as a child, or even 5 years ago. And there's a strong (very strong I'd say) immersionist contingent among them. Plus, when people finally "get" (grok?) immersion, they tend to prefer it to what I will disrespectfully call shallower forms of play such as how you describe the Powergamer and Thinker styles of play.

So, I suspect your survey would not produce as pessimistic results as you believe, if you repeated it now. I certainly don't see MMOs sucking the life out of Character Actor TRPGing any time soon, and DEFINITELY not out of LARP, which has a stronger hold on the participants' psychologies IMHO. I guess the difference between us is that you care about the commerciality of RPGs, and I care about being able to find a LARP I can turn up to and join in with, and a tabletop group I can game with. I am in a better position now than 5 years ago in both those regards, and better than 15 years ago too. And I suspect I'm not alone. But I do meet TRPGers through LARP and conventions, and the ones I game with regularly I either meet through LARP or have known for ages. I wouldn't really bother seeking out new blood other than through LARPs.

Did your survey questions get at the essence of immersion?

Quote from: RSDancey;426450The MMO was too embryonic for us to study it in 1999.  I wish I had the money to repeat the survey today though...

This was the key bit of information I was hoping to see. Thanks.

(Edited my previous post quite a bit.)

As I say the majority of roleplayers that I know, I know through LARP groups, partly because LARP groups tend to be large; 12 would be piddly, 70 is kind of reasonable, and 200 is quite feasible, and 1,000+ is not unknown. I LARP for the sake of LARPing, but it also provides me with more random encounters with TRPGers than I would ever have through other means except TRPG conventions or TRPG clubs. Having said which, actually, I'm popping along to a TRPG club soon. A regular club with 12-18 people turning up, which serves basically a small part of the city where I live, with maybe a population of 20,000 people (based on a 2001 census) in the immediate target area. Quite a large student population nearby and I imagine they or recent graduates supply a fair proportion of club members. I don't think TRPGing can be desperately unhealthy.

But there might be a slowdown in sales if people are using old products, freely downloaded stuff, etc.

Quote from: Benoist;426288I think that is what you are talking about (http://www.gazette.net/stories/03172010/silvnew183031_32555.php), from this post (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=425348&postcount=297) and that thread (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=16774) prior to it.

bingo! Thanks Ben...:)

Quote from: skofflox;426458bingo! Thanks Ben...:)

From Benoist's link:-

Despite the popularity of spinoff role-playing games, including such hits as the "World of Warcraft" computer game ... the original D&D paper-and-pencil game — created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974 — has retained a sizable following. This is largely thanks to the open-ended freedom offered to players in the imaginary game, according to class facilitator Dave Burbank, a Takoma Park library specialist.

"A lot of kids nowadays don't get an opportunity to express their creativity; they spend a lot of time on the console playing games with their thumbs, but the limits of those games are as created by the game creators," he said.  ... [Dungeons & Dragons] at its base is playing ‘let's pretend.'"

Will WoW / online games replace this "creative" element? Is this what Dancey is saying may happen by 2020 for the Storyteller crowd?

Quote from: Omnifray;426437No it's 22% (of TRPGers) + 22% (of TRPGers) + 22% (of TRPGers) + 22% (of TRPGers) + 12% = 100% (of TRPGers)

While that makes much more sense than what I thought Ryan was saying, the fact that this adds up to 100% makes me somewhat suspicious of the results. There were no gamers surveyed who did not clearly fall into one of these five clusters? Possible, but it seems a bit unlikely.

Quote from: Omnifray;426460Will WoW / online games replace this "creative" element?

In my mind, it's like asking if television will soon have better pictures than radio (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=426366&postcount=18).

Quote from: RSDancey;426415This is a huge problem, but not on the quality level.  Quality is on the client side, and even average game rigs in the 2010s will be able to support this level of detail for 100s of avatars.  The problem is the N^2 interprocess communication problems that stress the servers and the network connections.  But those are also problems that are being solved by Moore's law and by faster broadband rollouts.

Yeah, I was talking about the client side thing. I no longer play games on my PC, preferring the console, so sounds like I'm out of touch in terms of what's possible client side in terms of detailed figures.

QuoteWe now live in an era where there are between 1 and 2 million "MMO Hobbyists" - people with allegiance to no game, but to the genre.  They switch from AAA to AAA MMO as they ship (virtually all of which are Theme Parks), burn through the content faster than the developers thought possible, and then quit with complaints that the game is "boring" or "too short".  This creates an "s-curve" of player participation which is actually really bad for MMOs - they have variable costs that scale with the size of the player base (servers, bandwidth, customer service, GMs, billing, etc.), but they take much longer to ramp up and ramp down than the length of the initial spike.  

Star Trek, Conan, Warhammer, and Aion all suffered from this problem spectacularly.

One of the things the next generation of MMOs is going to address is finding ways to moderate this effect.

Yeah, this is what I was thinking about when I was talking about bad launches. The S-Curve effect is so bad right now that it's hard to see how anyone can have a successful launch.

QuoteOn the other hand, there are games that are doing quite well.  Runescape has 5 million players (1 million paying $5/mo).  Aion still has about 200K Western full price subscribers, and a much much larger business in Asia.  Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons online have had a huge renewal once they went to a hybrid free-to-play/microtransaction model.  The next AAA MMO likely to ship will be Star Wars: The Old Republic (but it is barely an MMO in my opinion and should probably be classified into its own special category).

The market for subscription based Western MMOs is between 5 and 10 million people (its very hard to narrow that down because many people play more than one MMO at a time).  The market for some kind of F2P/MTX model is probably 50 million.  So there is a lot of upside yet to come from this space - it's barely been tapped in some ways.

Interesting stuff. F2P (in its current form) doesn't appeal to me but it's certainly having some success. I admit, I do have a tendency to forget about the F2P games in the marketplace.

Everyone I know who plays MMOs these days is playing WoW, unsurprisingly.

Quote from: Lorrraine;426326Speaking as someone who probably would fall in the character actor segment, I have trouble buying that this segment has MMOs beating out RPGs. The best computer interface can not compare to face to face interaction. Yes people who have not tried TRPGs or who do not have a group available can get something out of the computer based interactions. That does not make the MMOs crack cocaine. Just the opposite.

Metal miniatures, character portaits, and even avatars matter a lot less than the chance to inhabit the character and play it as directly as possible. MMOs have not gotten there yet. Give me a virtual reality where I can see everything my character sees and I can interact with the virtual world with a minimal interface and yeah that would tempt me. Watching things on a screen and typing commands does not work for me.

I agree with this. I'm not sure whether it means we're mis-segmenting ourselves or if Ryan is misunderstanding what attracts Character Actors to TRPGs.

I can certainly accept that the people who do IC play on MMOs (and I know they exist) would possibly approach a TRPG the same way as me. But for whatever reason I (and all the other TRPG "character actor" style players I know) haven't been sucked in this aspect of things. I think for me it's the fact that the MMOs I've played have been more on the Theme Park end of things, and so you're always just trying to RP in very incongrous circumstances, and you can't actually pursue character goals in any meaningful ways.

I mean, sure, if I was to meet up with the people from my old EQ guild, they would be a bit surprised that the guy behind the keyboard isn't quite the same as Grymbok acted. But it was a thin layer of RP on top of 95% OOC speech...

Quote from: Omnifray;426460From Benoist's link:-

Despite the popularity of spinoff role-playing games, including such hits as the "World of Warcraft" computer game ... the original D&D paper-and-pencil game — created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974 — has retained a sizable following. This is largely thanks to the open-ended freedom offered to players in the imaginary game, according to class facilitator Dave Burbank, a Takoma Park library specialist.

"A lot of kids nowadays don't get an opportunity to express their creativity; they spend a lot of time on the console playing games with their thumbs, but the limits of those games are as created by the game creators," he said.  ... [Dungeons & Dragons] at its base is playing 'let's pretend.'"

Will WoW / online games replace this "creative" element? Is this what Dancey is saying may happen by 2020 for the Storyteller crowd?

:hmm: no way for WoW/online games to replace the free flow creativity of face to face TRPG play. If the people who "left the hobby for good" are not into this aspect of the hobby ie. just playing to kill stuff and level up while filling their heads with rules to gain advantage and basically just killing time (which in turn kills us all) then I say good ridence and have fun with your thumbs...;)

Seems obvious to me that the direction the D&D namebrand has taken is a dead end for those who game for (primarily) creative (dare I say artistic?!) reasons.
MORE RULES/SETTING MATERIALS DO NOT SUPPORT IMMERSIVE FLOW OF PLAY.
Sure the creative element is still there though it is obfuscated by "rules bloat" which only hinders creativity and flexibility at the table. Someone relayed that a DM they saw had like 20 books at the table...pathetic...

The inclusion of daily/encounter powers is a sad attempt to please the MMO/Console crowd especialy when tied to such a slow resolution mechanic...if D&D goes the way of the dodo it is because it was killed through ignorance as opposed to natural circumstance.
:)

Quote from: RandallS;426463While that makes much more sense than what I thought Ryan was saying, the fact that this adds up to 100% makes me somewhat suspicious of the results. There were no gamers surveyed who did not clearly fall into one of these five clusters? Possible, but it seems a bit unlikely.

The 12% is the catch-all category.

It seems to me that mmos won't really hurt the creative aspect of rpgs until they can provide the imagination's ability to fill in details.  See, computers need everything defined, yes you can have random generators and such but even those need to be defined.

What imagination provides is a world of base assumptions that already fill themselves in.  You say "You see a dirty little village." and people's brains fill in a lot of the details.

Now my own Mmporg wish list is a bit different.  I want a first level character to be able to kill a 50 if they get the drop on them and a little luck.  I want half a dozen first level characters to be a fair match for a 50.  I want to be able to build a house and hire laborers to work my fields.  I want to be able to burn down other people's houses and murder their laborers.  I want to be able to fight from horse back.  I want to be able to buy a ship and sail it into uncharted waters in search of adventure, standing at the helm in the midst of the storm.  I want to ride my motor bike up the ramp into the hold of my ship, jump off and dash to the pilot's seat to make a daring getaway without shifting the game play interface.

Really, it's ridiculous.  Mporgs will NEVER get there.

More realistically I want WOW Kinect.  I want 15 minutes of cardio when I run from Goldshire to Sentinel hill.  I want to build muscle by wearing arm weights as I swing my sword.  Because combined with a headset for talking that would be really really cool.

Quote from: David Johansen;426480It seems to me that mmos won't really hurt the creative aspect of rpgs until they can provide the imagination's ability to fill in details.  See, computers need everything defined, yes you can have random generators and such but even those need to be defined.

What imagination provides is a world of base assumptions that already fill themselves in.  You say "You see a dirty little village." and people's brains fill in a lot of the details.

Now my own Mmporg wish list is a bit different.  I want a first level character to be able to kill a 50 if they get the drop on them and a little luck.  I want half a dozen first level characters to be a fair match for a 50.  I want to be able to build a house and hire laborers to work my fields.  I want to be able to burn down other people's houses and murder their laborers.  I want to be able to fight from horse back.  I want to be able to buy a ship and sail it into uncharted waters in search of adventure, standing at the helm in the midst of the storm.  I want to ride my motor bike up the ramp into the hold of my ship, jump off and dash to the pilot's seat to make a daring getaway without shifting the game play interface.

Really, it's ridiculous.  Mporgs will NEVER get there.

More realistically I want WOW Kinect.  I want 15 minutes of cardio when I run from Goldshire to Sentinel hill.  I want to build muscle by wearing arm weights as I swing my sword.  Because combined with a headset for talking that would be really really cool.

NOW YOUR TALK'N!...man would I ever love to have a rig like that...:cool:
hook me up and LET THE CLARET FLOW!

One thing which occurs to me is that people's preferences aren't fixed and consistent over time. I mean, I might be in the mood for MET-LARP at one point in time, then for boffer LARP later on, then for TTRPG after that. So, by that logic, there's no necessary reason why WoW would take a substantial portion of TTRPGers out of the hobby, or substantially diminish the new blood, though it might compete with TTRPGs for gamers' time.

Another thing is that MMOs are really partly competing with TV and general internet surfing, not strictly as "passive" entertainment, but as immediately accessible solo entertainment. Who's not going to be sick of WoW after a while if they play it every evening 7 nights a week? OK, so not many people can sustain that level of play into their 30s... but surely variety is the spice of life. People want their solo entertainment, they want their freeform socialising and they may want their structured socialising / organised group entertainment too.

Dancey gives the example of people not predicting that online poker won't be a hit. But do you see casinos disappearing off the face of the earth any time soon? Did TV destroy the cinema? Sure, it forced it to rationalise; we don't get the B-movies any more like we did once long ago. Casinos might be closing. But there will always be cinemas and there will always be casinos. People like the dedicated entertainment experience and they like the group atmosphere.

Maybe there might be fewer people playing TTRPGs now than if MMOs didn't exist at all. But I'd hazard a guess that the total numbers of TTRPGers playing now are still comparable to the numbers in the 1980s and won't dip much going forwards. There might even be a suck-up of MMO players who search on the Interwebz for RPG and find real RPGs.

Quote from: Benoist;426464In my mind, it's like asking if television will soon have better pictures than radio (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=426366&postcount=18).

Television did kill radio as a medium for fiction ("Video Killed the Radio Star"), and pretty much for news as well. It's not that I believe the argument Ryan's trying to make, but c'mon.

Quote from: danbuter;426473The 12% is the catch-all category.

Actually, the claim is that there were four distinct clusters and fifth cluster "in the middle". That's not a catch-all category; if it were, there'd be no fifth cluster, just a shallow "waterline" with the other clusters standing on top.

The best way to make sense of the claim is that that there may have been a few people who didn't closely match any of the "clusters", but they didn't add up to more than a couple percent and are rendered invisible by rounding.

I'm still very skeptical of any empirical study that results in four compact clusters that are almost exactly equal in size, plus a fifth cluster that sucks up all the remainder and sits precisely in the middle.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426496Television did kill radio as a medium for fiction ("Video Killed the Radio Star"), and pretty much for news as well. It's not that I believe the argument Ryan's trying to make, but c'mon.

You think I haven't thought about that? It's still an accurate comparison (quoted from Gary Gygax, by the way).

If you are comparing the two media under the terms outlined by Ryan, MMOs WILL kill TRPGs, if that's not already been done. In any case, making the comparison all the more obvious by copying MMOs structure (encountardization, strict scripts to follow therein, etc), rules, aesthetics and the like ENSURES this will/does happen. That's actually my first point.

But in any case, my second point is that radio DOES have better pictures than television, if you think about it a certain way, which happens to be completely compatible to what TRPGs are, appealing to imagination, your own personal view of the game world, and not the passive submission to the way designers choose to represent said world on a screen. This is one of the specificities of TRPGs which no amount of graphic beauty, photo-realistic and otherwise will ever be able to replicate, short of plugging electrodes right into your brain, reading whatever you visualize in your mind's eye and translating it in real time, as it unfolds, onto the screen for you to see. But then, one day, sooner or later, a guy would come in and ask: "why the hell do we need the machine to translate what I see in the first place? It's prettier in my mind!" So it'd still be a win for TRPGs in the end.

Quote from: Benoist;426500*snip*
 TRPGs are, appealing to imagination, your own personal view of the game world, and not the passive submission to the way designers choose to represent said world on a screen. This is one of the specificities of TRPGs which no amount of graphic beauty, photo-realistic and otherwise will ever be able to replicate.

absolutely,good points here...that is why people tend to "zone out" with comp. games and tune in with (well designed/run) RPG...well, at least those who engage the hobby on multiple levels.
:)

(cont'd)

The fact is that customers who do not care about distinctions such as the one I just made above are unlikely to stick to TRPGs in the future, and/or did migrate to MMOs already. That's it. That's a battle which, for these people, is over and done with.

What I do not understand is why making TRPGs even more comparable, through structures, rules, etc, to MMOs would help keep the people who stuck to TRPGs. It just destroys what is left in TRPGs that make them interesting as different, though maybe complimentary, activies compared to MMOs. There is no reason left to still be playing TRPGs whatsoever.

So in the name of seducing an audience that migrated to MMOs and doesn't give a shit anymore about TRPGs, and will not come back, we're just making TRPGs look more and more like contrived MMOs, which makes people who stayed wonder "If RPGs are going to suck so bad now, be so much trouble to play, or feel exactly like Final Fantasy or Warcraft or whatnot, with so much prep and this and that, why don't I play World of Warcraft/EVE/whatnot already?"

This is a truly moronic design logic, to me.

I guess if MMOs were going to take up a lot of people's time meaning they spent less time on organised social activities like TTRPG and more time on solo entertainment experiences... I wouldn't want to participate in that, as I don't think it's socially beneficial. So, this is the moral/purposive dimension, as opposed to the factual/speculative dimension.

One advantage TTRPGs will have for a LONG time, even if MMOs allow players to get creative, is the IMMEDIACY of creation with TTRPGs - you need literally but say the word, and it is so. Until we have Ziggy-level intelligence for our computers, you won't be able to conjure up whole worlds with but a word.

A very important advantage of small games is the special snowflake effect. This is automatically present in TTRPGs, though it could be present in CRPGs if you had, in effect, a private server, or if it were an offline game - but in the CRPG the smaller size of the server would mean you were relying more and more on the intelligence of the computer to make the game-world interesting, so TTRPGs win out for "special snowflake" games.

To explain:- the larger a game gets, the harder it is for YOU to be THE special snowflake. I mean, in games I ref, players can play legendary paladins, demigods who are the patrons of major cults, etc. There can only be a finite number of slots in the game-world for people with a particular level of reputation or people with a particular level of influence over the game-world. And it's not so great being the only Sk8rboi-Ninja with Poison-Bladed All-Stars if some 12 year old from Des Moines Iowa sees you at it and copies your style... in a small game, that can't happen.

Quote from: RSDancey;426424My intuition tells me that a lot of books being sold for 4e are being bought by storytellers but never used in games (ala 2e).  That can only last so long ... at some point, if that game isn't being widely played, now that there are options (OGL/D20, MMOs, etc.) the player network should decay much more rapidly than it did in the 2e era.

I can see the "storyteller" types picking up 4E titles like DMG1, DMG2, and maybe Manual of the Planes, Plane Below, Plane Above, etc ...

Though I don't really see the "storyteller" types picking up the more crunch heavy 4E titles like the Power books, Adventurers Vault, etc ...

Quote from: Benoist;426500...
But in any case, my second point is that radio DOES have better pictures than television, if you think about it a certain way, which happens to be completely compatible to what TRPGs are, appealing to imagination, your own personal view of the game world, and not the passive submission to the way designers choose to represent said world on a screen. This is one of the specificities of TRPGs which no amount of graphic beauty, photo-realistic and otherwise will ever be able to replicate, short of plugging electrodes right into your brain, reading whatever you visualize in your mind's eye and translating it in real time, as it unfolds, onto the screen for you to see. But then, one day, sooner or later, a guy would come in and ask: "why the hell do we need the machine to translate what I see in the first place? It's prettier in my mind!" So it'd still be a win for TRPGs in the end.

An interesting take on a classic argument. I dunno. I generally find LARPing (when it's done properly) considerably more vivid an experience than TTRPGs. But with the right GM, who knows. My current interest in acting methods as a route to immersion is born I suppose of a desire to replicate the intensity of experience that I get with LARP at the table. I would have thought I would find a holodeck-type LARP experience the most vivid of all and some of the graphics Dancey has linked to would definitely be competing with TTRPGs for vividness of experience for me, though not with LARPs. I still wouldn't touch the online games, but maybe that's just me. :-D

Quote from: Omnifray;426512An interesting take on a classic argument. I dunno. I generally find LARPing (when it's done properly) considerably more vivid an experience than TTRPGs. But with the right GM, who knows. My current interest in acting methods as a route to immersion is born I suppose of a desire to replicate the intensity of experience that I get with LARP at the table. I would have thought I would find a holodeck-type LARP experience the most vivid of all and some of the graphics Dancey has linked to would definitely be competing with TTRPGs for vividness of experience for me, though not with LARPs. I still wouldn't touch the online games, but maybe that's just me. :-D

Maybe you're more of a LARPer than you are a TTRPGer, and that this sort of holodeck MMO experience would strike a chord with you in particular that would make the TTRPG experience moot to a greater extent? Not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with that, mind you!

Quote from: Benoist;426514Maybe you're more of a LARPer than you are a TTRPGer, and that this sort of holodeck MMO experience would strike a chord with you in particular that would make the TTRPG experience moot to a greater extent? Not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with that, mind you!

As a player, I would put boffer LARP first, non-boffer LARP second and TTRPG third, but I would rather GM/design TTRPGs, not LARPs. In fact, I've never reffed a LARP. Also, boffer LARPs in particular take a lot of energy. I wouldn't want to play one every day. In my ideal world there's certainly a lot of room for me to be TTRPGing, as well as LARPing; if anything it's the non-boffer LARP which would get squeezed out, but only because there would be a boffer version of it built around the same style of social interaction...

Also the variations between individual games matter far more than the variations between boffer/non-boffer/tabletop. I'm currently putting MET-LARP ahead of two boffer LARPs that I COULD play with about the same effort and inconvenience in terms of travel. I can imagine circumstances where I would put TTRPGs ahead of LARPs. It would depend exactly what games were on offer and who was playing.

I doubt the holodeck would ever make the TTRPG completely moot, but computers could kind of help TTRPGs and LARPs to merge if you had Star-Trek level AI.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426498I'm still very skeptical of any empirical study that results in four compact clusters that are almost exactly equal in size, plus a fifth cluster that sucks up all the remainder and sits precisely in the middle.

So am I. Reality is seldom that "nice". I'm not saying it's impossible, but it seems a bit unlikely. I'd love to have access to the raw data, but I know that is much less likely than these "perfectly balanced" results.

Quote from: RSDancey;426273When I talk about "MMOs", I'm going to be talking about MMOs primarily played by people in the West.  Eastern MMOs are a whole different kettle of fish.  They have a different business model, different value propositions, are played in public rather than in private, are highly segmented by nationality, etc.

I am interested in this Eastern vs. Western MMO.  Where can I find some good info breaking down the differences?

Quote from: RSDancey;426273That's too much damage to do to the audience of tabletop RPGs to continue with the games in their current format as anything other than an aging hobby with dwindling numbers.

Bingo.

It will stay a niche.

Quote from: Benoist;426366"It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, "Because the pictures are so much better."

RPGs!  The hot new hobby for blind kids!

Quote from: danbuter;426393In my experience, there is one reason why MMO's are killing tabletop.

When I want to play WoW, I log in and play. I don't have to call my friends, set up a time, get food and drinks, do all the prep work for the adventure, and then find out someone can't make it at the last second.

The "ease of play" for both computer/console RPGs vs. TTRPGs is a major factor.  Quite possibly the numbero uno factor in the equation.

Easy = Better for 99% of people, even if the Easy option is a somewhat lesser experience.

Quote from: RSDancey;426404Anyone who thinks that social contact is a unique value proposition of tabletop games has to question why people's actual behavior doesn't seem to back that up.

Unfortunately, you are 100% correct.
 

Quote from: Benoist;426435I'm kind of flabbergasted that it didn't occur to anyone that the type of socialization that exists in role playing games is not the same that exists amongst players of MMOs.

Of course its different.  But apparently for most people, the tradeoff is just fine.  Their need for socialization is being fulfilled by the MMOs.

Quote from: David Johansen;426480Really, it's ridiculous.  Mporgs will NEVER get there.

I wouldn't bet against technology.

Quote from: Omnifray;426493But I'd hazard a guess that the total numbers of TTRPGers playing now are still comparable to the numbers in the 1980s and won't dip much going forwards.

Somebody has really good drugs!!!

Quote from: Benoist;426500But then, one day, sooner or later, a guy would come in and ask: "why the hell do we need the machine to translate what I see in the first place? It's prettier in my mind!" So it'd still be a win for TRPGs in the end.

And you prove why RPGs will be a diminishing niche.    You can't build an energetic, growing hobby on that population.

Quote from: David Johansen;426480More realistically I want WOW Kinect.  I want 15 minutes of cardio when I run from Goldshire to Sentinel hill.  I want to build muscle by wearing arm weights as I swing my sword.  Because combined with a headset for talking that would be really really cool.

Fucking hell yes.

Quote from: RSDancey;426404In fact, the MMO network is actually much more focused on community than the TRPG audience.  TRPG networks rarely extend to more than a dozen people or so (but there are many links to other networks).  MMO networks rarely have less than a hundred.  In EVE, there are multi-thousand person organizations.  This sense of larger community is actually more social and more likely to produce off-line friendships than the tighter knit, smaller TRPG network.  Its extremely attractive to people with poor social skills but who crave social contact.  Plus, it's where the girls are.

My experience in MMORPGS (been play various MMORPGS since the release of Ultima Online) and LARPS (NERO from 1992 to 2005) is that these groups are more ephemeral then the social groups growing around tabletop games.  

My observation that on the average they follow a three year rule. A first year of initial participation consisting mostly of the user gaining experience both with the group and the game. A second year of intense involvement. Then a third year of the group scattering and fissioning. Some groups can maintain a core and have continuity over multiple cycles.  LARPS follow much the same pattern.

I feel this is because the activity viewed as highly optional and that for the average gamer the slightest pressure from the rest of the life results in decreased involvement. Note I am being generic here for most folks just mundane stuff like having a kid, a new job, graduating etc, etc.  The reason it is three years is because by then enough of the original group had this happen to them to cause it to disappear or change beyond all recognition.

Tabletop roleplaying in my experience is more subject to the poker night syndrome. Because of the continual face to face contact during the intense phase of table roleplaying lasting friendship have a better chance to develop.  This is especially true if we are talking weekly gaming.

LARPS has the next best chance as it too is face to face. But my experience with NERO is that the face the events revolve around large groups of people which has it own problem if an issue being divide the community.

MMORPGS are the most ephemeral because of the lack of face to face interaction and that for the most part to walk away all you have to is log off unless you gave out personal information. But MMORPGS social group have the all the advantages of the internet the most important of which is the ability to draw off a large pool of people. They are not limited to a specific geographical area like Tabletop and LARPS. MMORPGS groups can grow very large and very fast.

This is based off of my experience being involved in gaming in Northwest PA for 30 years, and having owned a successful NERO LARP chapter ARGO which had an average attendance of 30 players per event from 1999 to 2005 (the last year I was involved).

Quote from: Benoist;426500You think I haven't thought about that? It's still an accurate comparison (quoted from Gary Gygax, by the way).

Yes, but we have two arguments going on here. One is, "Is TV better than radio?" That's a subjective judgment, even if, don't get me wrong, I actually agree with you that radio plays can be extremely enjoyable. The other is, "What's going to happen to the market?" If you can't separate the first from the second, you're talking nonsense.

Basically, I don't have any doubt that electronic gaming is going to become more and more compelling over time, and that kids in particular aren't even going to know or care what they're missing when it comes to TRPGs.

The blind spot in Ryan's analysis is that he, himself, only sees RPGs in a limited fashion, such that once the portion that he understands gets cannibalized by MMOs, all that's left is story games. We've gone over this before:

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=7786

It's actually very typical of the most zealous Forgites, that they they themselves are so used to viewing RPGs as either a series of combats or as railroady story, that they see the Forge approaches as a huge revelation...so huge in fact that it eclipses the possibility that anyone could have ever thought of anything else.

Quote from: Spinachcat;426521Bingo.

It will stay a niche.

The underlying thing that bothers me about this is that there seems to be this will to change RPGs into anything and everything under the sun to somehow make them appealing to just about anyone.

I guess... I just don't see what's so wrong about RPGs being a niche hobby?

Why the hell should we worry about RPGs being popular with the cool kids, somehow?

Fact is, it's already a hobby that does not generate a lot of income, that mostly people who are passionate about participate in and produce products for... the world is changing, FLGS close, but in the end, I don't see RPGs under any form just overcoming the "easy" factor MMOs represent, or changing so drastically as to become "un-nerd", or "mainstream." That's just silly talk. That's never going to happen.

What the hell is wrong with this hobby being a niche hobby, if it can sustain itself in its current form? If the answer is "well it does not sustain itself right now," I guess a better debate to have is how we could make RPGs more sustainable with the limited, dwindling size of the hobby, and not whether or not we could maybe change D&D into something "other" that would appeal to MMO-playing types, Forge adepts and otherwise.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426525...

The blind spot in Ryan's analysis is that he, himself, only sees RPGs in a limited fashion, such that once the portion that he understands gets cannibalized by MMOs, all that's left is story games. We've gone over this before:

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=7786

It's actually very typical of the most zealous Forgites, that they they themselves are so used to viewing RPGs as either a series of combats or as railroady story, that they see the Forge approaches as a huge revelation...so huge in fact that it eclipses the possibility that anyone could have ever thought of anything else.

Or to put it another way:-

Dancey's Storytellers are VERY ROUGHLY a bit like Edwards's Narrativists
Dancey's Character Actors are VERY ROUGHLY a bit like Edwards's Simulationists
Dancey's Power Gamers and Thinkers are VERY ROUGHLY a bit like Edwards's Gamists

In the World According to Dancey, the Simulationists/Character Actors and the less sophisticated half of the Gamists/Power Gamers really ought to be playing MMOs, and RPGs are best-suited to Narrativists/Storytellers and the more sophisticated half of the Gamists/Thinkers. Pretty much exactly as Edwards would see it I imagine, since Edwards seems to think that Character Actors are basically running a tedious simulation of something, and we all know that flight simulators and simulation games in general are best done on computer where the physics of the world can be accurately modelled.

OK, I'm being a bit facetious, but Dancey's argument does kind of lead to telling the Character Actors and Power Gamers to fuck off, and hogging the TTRPG territory for Narrativists and Thinkers, including playing down the importance of the central 12% from the WotC study, who would on Dancey's own model represent more than a fifth of the new TTRPG core market.

Quote from: Benoist;426528T
 If the answer is "well it does not sustain itself right now," I guess a better debate to have is how we could make RPGs more sustainable with the limited, dwindling size of the hobby, and not whether or not we could maybe change D&D into something "other" that would appeal to MMO-playing types, Forge adepts and otherwise.

1) Embrace any technology that compliments tabletop gaming and increase opportunities for gamers to meet and play games. This can be either tech that makes it easier to play a tabletop game or tech that make easy to get together and play. Virtual Tabletop Software is an example of technology that makes it easier for gamers to get together and play tabletop.

2) Train and help referee make exciting campaigns that alternative forms of roleplaying (LARPS, MMORPGs, etc) can't match. In effect this is the solution adopted by movies in response to television.  They took advantage of their bigger screen and pushed other technique to make an experience that television still have trouble matching. In effect turning each into their own "thing". For similar reasons theater continues to thrive doing their own thing in the face of movies and tv.

Tabletop roleplaying likewise has it's own strengths and should play to them to develop it own experience that differs from the alternatives. Because of the investment and limited audience at each sitting it will never likely be THE form of gaming like in the 70s and 80s but like Theater be a small but thriving niche of it's own. Like theater in relation to film and tv, tabletop can embrace technology and techniques that complement it rather than supplant it.

Quote from: estar;4265351) Embrace any technology that compliments tabletop gaming and increase opportunities for gamers to meet and play games. This can be either tech that makes it easier to play a tabletop game or tech that make easy to get together and play. Virtual Tabletop Software is an example of technology that makes it easier for gamers to get together and play tabletop.

2) Train and help referee make exciting campaigns that alternative forms of roleplaying (LARPS, MMORPGs, etc) can't match. In effect this is the solution adopted by movies in response to television.  They took advantage of their bigger screen and pushed other technique to make an experience that television still have trouble matching. In effect turning each into their own "thing". For similar reasons theater continues to thrive doing their own thing in the face of movies and tv.

Tabletop roleplaying likewise has it's own strength and should play them to develop it own experience that differs from the alternatives. Because of the investment and limited audience at each sitting it will never likely be THE form of gaming like in the 70s and 80s but like Theater be a small but thriving niche of it's own. Like theater in relation to film and tv, tabletop can embrace technology and techniques that complement it rather than supplant it.

Bingo.

I would just add that if we could somehow overcome the incestuous gamers play with gamers paradigm and just somehow make it easier for gamers to play games with other people, whether they themselves become gamers or not, that would be a big win for the hobby. It would take a change in culture, for one thing, and games that complement this change in paradigm (which may, or may not, already exist), for another, but that's not impossible, in my opinion.

Quote from: Omnifray;426532Or to put it another way:-

Dancey's Storytellers are VERY ROUGHLY a bit like Edwards's Narrativists
Dancey's Character Actors are VERY ROUGHLY a bit like Edwards's Simulationists
Dancey's Power Gamers and Thinkers are VERY ROUGHLY a bit like Edwards's Gamists

Roughly those categories and the four that showed up in the WotC survey were being discussed back in 1980. (http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/models/blacow.html)  I think it's no mistake that Glenn Blacow, rec.games.frp.advocacy, and WotC's survey all came up with similar categories.

Quote from: Omnifray;426532OK, I'm being a bit facetious, but Dancey's argument does kind of lead to telling the Character Actors and Power Gamers to fuck off, and hogging the TTRPG territory for Narrativists and Thinkers, including playing down the importance of the central 12% from the WotC study, who would on Dancey's own model represent more than a fifth of the new TTRPG core market.

While I don't agree with everything Ryan is saying, I don't think he's trying to toss anyone out of the hobby.  He thinks they are leaving on their own.  Argue to his argument, not what you think his motives are.

I made a couple of replies now but didn't directly address Dancy's OP of #5, and #6.

For my answer I am not going to debate the categories. I concur with the assessment that Power Gamers are largely lost to Tabletop Games. I ran into a precursor of this with NERO, a boffer LARP that allows Player vs Player combat in-game as their character (like early Ultima Online). I played and managed NERO LARP from 1992 to 2005 and spanned the rise of computer RPGs and MMORPGs.

Nearly every player I would classify as a Power Gamer found NERO LARP more satisfying than tabletop. Their athletic ability determined the route they took but they all to a person relished the challenge of taking out another player with all their skill. Late in the 90s when First Person Shooters came into their I heard many liking that. The same for MMORPG but most found it cheesy when Everquest and WoW limited the PvP options at first.

It been a long time since the last time I found a tabletop gamer a problem because he preyed on his fellow players.

MMORPGs are not the problem with the loss of Character Actors, shared fiction. MMORPGs are but the icetip of what going on with people writing and sharing stories and drawing. You would think this be a problem with Storytellers but many of these folks put themselves in the stories as their alt characters. LARPS likewise are filled with players that adopt a deep personae. Managing the interactions between these two groups caused my hair to fall out. (just kidding but it was a pain).

I could go on about the other groups. But the general gist is that in the 70s Tabletop was IT and had the means to satisfies the interest of many these groups. Since new forms of entertainment evolved each paring the original audience of roleplaying games.

It doesn't matter what categories for players you use there is simply more competition for everybody entertainment attention. Let me put in another way. My mother was the first girl's swimming coach in Meadville, PA. She was also the first women to coach a boy's swimming team in Pennsylvania. This happened in the 70's. While she was Girl's Swimming coach the team was undefeated for all five years she coached. Some like like 80 wins. Today girls (and boys) swimming team isn't so dominating.

The reason because now you have girl's basketball, volleyball, and a dozen other sport all competing for the same pool of girls in Meadville. The chance of another series of seasons like in the 70s for swimming is very low. Yet Meadville still has swimming and they still produce the occasional champion and have good years.

The pool of gamers has grown considerably but chances of tabletop returning to it's former dominance is very low. Even if it did it would likely be a result of a fad and within years or a decade return to it's former levels of participation.

So like Benoist and other asked earlier what does it take to make tabletop hobby and industry healthy.

The simple answer is to focus on the human elements of the games. The fact that tabletop sessions are a SMALL group of people gaming together. Which can be a more personalized game where people can do their things REGARDLESS of what category you dice them up into.

Rather than focusing on the elements that divide us. I want to focus on the elements that unites. The interest in drama, conflict, the feeling of triumph of overcome challenges, all happening because you are describing what your character is doing and a human referee is telling you the result.

I was not a brand manager of anything, I only ran a small LARP group in rural NW PA, and only have a small library of professionally written products.  So what do I know compared to those who have more experience in the industry?

I am not trying snarky at Mr Dancey's expense. He has hard earned experience and I respect. What I can offer is where I am come from let Mr. Dancey and the rest of you decide whether I am talking out of my ass or have a point.

The single biggest influence on my thoughts isn't my LARP experience or my publishing experience. But the simple fact that I am a GURPS referee in the middle of rural NorthWest Pennsylvania. Boom or bust in the RPG hobby I am alway lacking players. So I have to take what I can when the opportunity arrive.

So I had to deal with a lot of different types of players of different interest and abilities. Most gamers don't like a complicated game like GURPS. The single reason why I am able to be successful as a GURPS referee is that I run a compelling campaigna.

I don't care what you are interested in I can find a place for you in my campaign that is interesting and fun.  Since I started running Swords & Wizardry campaigns (I think it best if the author plays the games he writes for) two years ago I found what works in my GURPS campaign works in my S&W campaigns.

So I am thinking that there something about the roleplaying game that cuts across genre and system. For a lack of a better term I called this the roleplaying element. Too many in the industry focus on the games and the gamers themselves and not on the roleplaying. The idea that you are playing a character in a interesting setting with compelling adventure run by a human referee.

And not enough to have general advice even as good as those found in the 4e DMG or Robin Law's book. We need specific concrete advice, and aides to help referee create the roleplaying side of tabletop. Like my Steps to make a Sandbox, like the Adventure Design steps and tables like Benoist mentioned and so .

I consider good refereeing the most important tool in tabletop. A good referee is Tabletop's equivalent of a blockbuster. In the end a good referee can craft a game that uniquely suited for the players sitting at his table. Something that a LARP and MMORPG can never do by their very nature. So if you want to make Tabletop sustainable then make good referees.

Finally while I am focusing on referees in this post. There a bunch of stuff that can be written to help the players with the roleplaying side of tabletop.

Quote from: John Morrow;426550Roughly those categories and the four that showed up in the WotC survey were being discussed back in 1980. (http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/models/blacow.html)  I think it's no mistake that Glenn Blacow, rec.games.frp.advocacy, and WotC's survey all came up with similar categories.

At a staff meeting at a NERO LARP in the 1990s somebody read us the killer, achiever, roleplaying, explorer article and we are all nodding our heads.

But when we talked about it we quickly came to agreement that it's biggest flaw was that people are not just one thing at one time. People's interest change over time and depending on circumstances.

The only thing we universal agreed on that Killers sucked to no end. Which was ironic as there were several known killers at that staff meeting.

Quote from: John Morrow;426550While I don't agree with everything Ryan is saying, I don't think he's trying to toss anyone out of the hobby.  He thinks they are leaving on their own.  Argue to his argument, not what you think his motives are.

I get that and my main disagreement that that rather appealing to specific segments you should look for things of universal interest and use the roleplaying side of tabletop to make campaigns that are compelling regardless what category you fall in.

Sidestep the problem by focusing on what make tabletop unique.

Quote from: RSDancey;426273Right off the bat we know that the Power Gamer segment is going to have a better play experience in general in the MMO environment than on the tabletop.

OK.  I agree with you on this one.

Quote from: RSDancey;426273There's another group that's being seduced by the MMOs: The Character Actors.  These people are getting tremendous value out of the current generation of MMOs.  I've seen people who have filled up every available character slot on every available server with City of Heroes characters, for example.  I know people who have produced (and I kid you not) tens of thousands of message board posts in character, about their character and interacting with others also in character.

This doesn't match my expectations, but I think you raise some good points.

Quote from: RSDancey;426273These people are getting crack cocaine in the form of a mutable, controllable graphic representation of their character.  For tabletop RPGs the best they could hope for was a hand-drawn "character portrait" and maybe a metal miniature, which might or might not be painted.  In the MMO realm they get a living, breathing, 3-D avatar who moves, dances, emotes, and does all the other things these people can dream of.  And, not to keep hammering this point home, the technology about to come on-line will blow these people's minds.

The problem is that I would identify myself as a character actor (note the 100% Method Actor in my signature) and none of that interests me.  Why?  Because I have to fiddle with a game interface to make it happen.  For all it's flaws when it comes to information bandwidth, just describing what my character says and does is far superior, for me, than fiddling with computer controls and watching an external figure dance for me.  I say this as a person who can touch type at fairly high speed and who programs computers for a living.  Yes, it looks pretty but it's a lot of work to make it happen.  And despite your claims about AI and not being able to tell the difference, I think we're still a long way from anything near the depth that a real person provides.

But I can see that appealing to a certain segment of people who fall under the "Character Actor" umbrella, particularly those interested in the performance aspect of it.  I can also imagine kids who have grown up with MMOs might be bothered by interface issues less than I am.  So I'm willing to believe that some segment of Character Actors may be drawn away by MMOs, but I think it may be premature to write the whole segment off, perhaps simply because of categorization issues.  It's entirely possible that even though Character Actor seems to match what a lot of character focused players do, that we would have shown up as Storytellers in your survey results, because our perspective is more Strategic than Tactical.  But either way, I think the problem is that "Story Focus" suffers from the problem that seems to plague all role-playing theory discussions, which is what is meant by "story" and what's the best way to get it.  

Quote from: RSDancey;426273With the Power Gamers out, and the Character Actors leaving, that leaves us with a 2 segment audience, plus the "generic RPG players".  Basically, the Storytellers and the Thinkers.  It just so happens that the tabletop RPG format is nearly perfect for these people.

If that's the case and the hobby is left with Strategic/Combat Focus and Strategic/Story Focus, the common ground is "Strategic", which you defined as "'Strategic' means 'a perspective larger than the immediate future and surroundings'."  And if that's the case, then suggesting the hobby move in a Forge game direction is full of fail because the vast majority of Forge games, including Dogs in the Vineyard, are Tactical.  They are meant to be played as one-offs or at conventions or as mini-campaigns.  They often revolve around a particular limited scenario and limited character type.

I asked elsewhere in these discussions if anyone knows of any Dogs in the Vineyard campaigns that have lasted for years, or a year, or even for a dozen sessions with the same characters, the way many D&D games do (if I'm not mistaken, D&D 3.5 was designed with the assumption that a year of play would bring a character from 1st to 20th level, right?).  And even if one game did last that long, would they start another one?

It's my impression that Dogs in the Vineyard (and others like it) just aren't played that way.  In fact, the whole idea of "Story Now!" is Tactical, about story happening immediately, not over the long haul.  Dogs in the Vineyard drives tactical escalation in a tightly focused tactical setting where everything is immediate and accessible (If I'm not mistaken, doesn't the game even suggest that they players should be able to find anything that they look for?).  So how is this supposed to appeal two two segments of players that you've identified as "Strategic"?  Don't traditional games have far more to offer in that regard?

Quote from: estar;426556I get that and my main disagreement that that rather appealing to specific segments you should look for things of universal interest and use the roleplaying side of tabletop to make campaigns that are compelling regardless what category you fall in.

Well, that was Ryan Dancey's argument in 2000 (I've posted those quotes elsewhere) and how D&D 3e was designed so he's not inherently opposed to that idea at all.  And that's been my own stance, as well.  I'm a big fan of Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering, which is all about running a game for disparate player types.  But it's also clear to me that there is a certain amount of tension between the various styles of play (and present in your own characterization of the Killer player type) and that things that appeal to one play style can detract form another.  And it's also clear that dialing an element of play that might normally be tolerable to everyone up to 11 to please one style of play can ruin the game for everyone else.

In particular, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, game mastery appeals to certain segments of players but it is also behind many of the biggest complaints that other types of players make and is one of the key problems facing casual players.  If the segment that finds game mastery is leaving the hobby, then perhaps reducing or even eliminating that element of play and providing players with transparent rules that one doesn't have to master to use effectively would draw in new players that might be turned off by that aspect of the game.

John's sentiments regarding "character actor" mirror my own -- I played Neverwinter Nights online on role-play/persistent world servers before I played tabletop 3e with any consistency, and I much prefer the immediacy and flexibility of tabletop.

Of course, that's just me, but I remember it being hella hard to coordinate people for real "role-play" sessions on the servers.

Quote from: Benoist;426500But in any case, my second point is that radio DOES have better pictures than television, if you think about it a certain way, which happens to be completely compatible to what TRPGs are, appealing to imagination, your own personal view of the game world, and not the passive submission to the way designers choose to represent said world on a screen.

I think it is valid to wonder whether what applies to people in their 40s, 50s, or even older applies to younger people.  When I was a child, we went outside and played.  All day.  Usually without adult supervision.  Often in ravines and vacant lots.  Often doing dangerous or stupid things.  Lots of kids today don't have that experience.  Their activities are planned.  They have computers, video games, iPods, and cell phones.  They often don't seem to just go outside an play.  

A few years ago, there was a power failure in my neighborhood on a nice weekend day.  After a few minutes, I started hearing children playing outside.  Those children were always there, but I'd never heard them before because they usually weren't outside playing.  It was like the scene in the Simpsons where the parents turn off all of the TVs in Springfield and the children slowly and reluctantly go outside, where they squint in the unfamiliar sun.  When I was growing up, we were always outside playing or inside playing with physical toys  and a lot of that play was a precursor to what I do in role-playing games.

I also find myself wondering whether a child who has grown up with ILM special effects, computer graphics of the sort Ryan showcased earlier in this thread, and the ability to access a world of information at their fingertips really exercise their imagination or think it's better than what a computer gives them.  

Maybe kids today are the same as they've always been but maybe they aren't.  And I find myself wondering if a lot of what you are saying isn't analogous to people who wax poetic about the joys of longhand writing and cursive script and how it made people better writers because they had to think through what they were writing rather than counting on a quick edit with a computer.

Quote from: Spinachcat;426521I am interested in this Eastern vs. Western MMO.  Where can I find some good info breaking down the differences?

Do some google searches for "Asian online games news" and "Chinese MMO news" and you'll get a lot of it.  

The biggest things are:

1:  It's all microtransactions (very few Chinese have credit cards, or even checking accounts, for that matter).  The way these games work is that you buy a bulk unit of in-game currency, which you "deposit" in your game account using a code from the item you purchase in the store.  As you use the in-game currency your account depletes, and then you buy more.

2:  They are played in internet cafes and gaming kiosks.  Most people don't own their own computers, instead they spend long hours camped out in shared public internet hookups.  Its very rare for people to play from home (which would require a good PC, all the necessary software, and an internet connection).

3:  They're primarily themed with chinese mythology - mostly medieval.  Even games built outside of China tend to use chinese mythology.  Japanese mythology isn't popular (long memories of WWII).

4:  The games are tightly regulated by 2 big government agencies.  They cannot show sex, or even R-rated nudity.  Blood, guts, decapitations, amputations, and other graphic violence is not permitted.  Also, there can be no hint that the game in any way criticizes the government.

5:  All in game communication is monitored.  "Sexting" isn't permitted, nor is political activism.

6:  The games are often incredibly "grindy" from a US perspective.  The asian market tolerates about a 100x higher level of "boredom" than the western market will.  This is partly because many players use these games as a meditation tool - they drift off while they play and aren't really aware of what they're doing.  Think Pachinko.

7:  The koreans play with koreans, the chinese with chinese, the japanese with japanese, etc.  From time to time, these national divisions go to war, and its serious business.  Thousands or tens of thousands of people get mobilized to clash over real-world issues (again, a lot of angst over WWII).

RyanD

Well it took me way longer than I thought, but I finally got to the point where I'm ready to talk about changing D&D.  :)

Required Reading:

1e DMG:  Pages 97-100 (example of play)

3.0 DMG:  Pages 130-132 (example of play)

You notice what's missing here?

Playing this game with miniatures and maps with defined squares. This classic passage (retold by Monte in 3.0) is a great example of D&D, and yet it unfolds without:

* 5 foot steps
* attacks of opportunity
* reach
* line of sight
* movement rates
* terrain effects

What if we imagined an alternate universe where D&D never had miniatures or playmats, and instead, the entire game took place within the imaginations of the players?

For most of my time running D&D prior to 3.x, this is how we did it.  It was only very occasionally necessary to use miniatures - and when we did it was mostly to help keep track of the monsters and their locations.

What if we re-built D&D from the ground up excluding specific positioning?  If the default rule was "players can always do anything they wish during a conflict as long as it sounds reasonable and they succeed on their die rolls as necessary"?

"I run across the room and stab the orc with my sword" is just as valid as "I take a move action and go 3 squares, and then a standard action melee attack once I threaten the orc".  And it doesn't really matter if the distance was 3 squares or 13 squares.

I will tell you that this focus on miniatures and exact positioning was a commandment from Peter to the design team (and not something that most people including me really disagreed with).  The idea was that a part of the 3e design was that players could always figure out how to maximize their combat options; that required making these things defined and specific rather than DM fiat.  And in a world with all 4 segments participating, that wasn't a big deal (in fact it was a feature for the Power Gamers and the Thinkers, and the Storytellers and the Character Actors just asked other people to help them when necessary).

But in a world where we have a social network highly unbalanced in favor of Storytellers and Thinkers, this system, and the vast rules complexity it brings, and the reduction of drama and narrative to just those things permitted by the rules, is more of a liability than a benefit.

So let's toss it.  Our first commandment for D&D shall be "no more figures, no more maps, no more specific positioning".

(Of course, we'll sell a tactical combat rules supplement so that when that really big battle takes place where it just makes so much sense to use the figs and the maps the DM will have good rules for them.  But conflicts that use those rules should be exceptions, not the norm.)

The only bad part about that is both 1e and 3e were all about minis. 1e gave all measurements in inches, for example. 3e gave everything in squares.

Quote from: RSDancey;426580So let's toss it.  Our first commandment for D&D shall be "no more figures, no more maps, no more specific positioning".

What about a middle ground like Sally Forth (http://sallyfourth.wikidot.com/)?  I have a Japanese TRPG from the early 1990s (Legend of Double Moon) that has something similar in it.

Quote from: RSDancey;426580(Of course, we'll sell a tactical combat rules supplement so that when that really big battle takes place where it just makes so much sense to use the figs and the maps the DM will have good rules for them.  But conflicts that use those rules should be exceptions, not the norm.)

Optional rules and rule supplements is a good way to go, in my opinion.  It would help to give advice about what it means to use a particular rule option or supplement.

Quote from: Benoist;426536Bingo.

I would just add that if we could somehow overcome the incestuous gamers play with gamers paradigm and just somehow make it easier for gamers to play games with other people, whether they themselves become gamers or not, that would be a big win for the hobby. It would take a change in culture, for one thing, and games that complement this change in paradigm (which may, or may not, already exist), for another, but that's not impossible, in my opinion.

I think it is the greatest single failing of recent D&D to make the barriers to entry very steep, especially regarding rules and investment. Under earlier D&D, it was very easy for new players to have most of the full game experience without the rules...they could merely react to the DM's description and allow the DM or another player to make the few rolls necessary until they got the hang of it. The more a game insists an interaction insists on a very elaborate mechanic to represent it, especially one divorced from the action in perspective of the player/character - be it a 4e tactical battle, or a mechanical social contest - the higher the barrier to entry compared to "you are here. what do you do?"

Quote from: RSDancey;426580What if we imagined an alternate universe where D&D never had miniatures or playmats, and instead, the entire game took place within the imaginations of the players?

For most of my time running D&D prior to 3.x, this is how we did it.  It was only very occasionally necessary to use miniatures - and when we did it was mostly to help keep track of the monsters and their locations.

What if we re-built D&D from the ground up excluding specific positioning?  If the default rule was "players can always do anything they wish during a conflict as long as it sounds reasonable and they succeed on their die rolls as necessary"?

I would be very curious to know what the 1999 data had to say about the popularity of miniatures use among D&D games prior to the release of 3rd edition. In particular the popular basic sets of the 1980s had very limited language regarding miniatures, and the rules usually seemed to imply that the game would be mostly verbal. It has always been my understanding that Gygax did not use miniatures in D&D and the references to them in early products was mostly commercially motivated. It is telling that the 1e DMG example is one that focuses almost entirely on verbal description and open-ended reactions to that descriptions - IMO the basis of D&D play.

I think this true open-endedness, in which a player may try to do anything he can think up in response to his environment, is the heart of play and the greatest advantage over even an advanced MMO which will in the forseeable future only allow a limited range of options in response to a given situation. Even a next-level MMO with a sophisticated physics model more advanced than say, a "force unleashed" with many interactables only offers a marginally larger "menu." Existing MMOs really only offer a menu of reactions more limited than even fairly primitive games whose model they resemble (Ultima underworld, Daggerfall/Morrowind, for example.)

In my opinion the major flaw of miniatures use is that it is a contributing factor to making combat disproportionately time consuming relative to the amount of the action in an adventure that is combat. Most other in-game actions take less time to resolve at the table than they do for the characters. Combat is much the opposite. In some ways it is essentially a minigame that interrupts the main action of play which is - DM describes situation / PC reacts according to decription.

I think your "sounds reasonable" is an important point, though. Even if we are not catering to "power gamers" it should be reasonable for players to declare that the tougher characters are standing in front of the weaker ones, or use the environment to gain a concrete advantage within reason - i.e. fighting from a choke point, etc. This doesn't require miniatures or strict positioning rules - it just requires the understanding of the game environment as real.

So a rule that enforced abstraction, so that a character could "move and attack an orc" no matter what the lay of the (mental) landscape might be, whether or not the GM agrees, might be damaging to that "realness." But I'm not sure how strongly you mean "exclude." If you mean "does not require a mechanical model of specific positioning," that's great. If you mean "mechanically precludes any consideration," I think that's venturing toward what John's talking about - superfluous mechanics impeding play.

Quote from: John Morrow;426585What about a middle ground like Sally Forth (http://sallyfourth.wikidot.com/)?  I have a Japanese TRPG from the early 1990s (Legend of Double Moon) that has something similar in it.

That's interesting. I've used similar ideas to that, before, myself. For me the important point is that the abstraction of these ranges are useful and convenient, but that the described game reality should trump the abstraction. But for most cases this kind of abstraction would work well.

When Ryan mentioned "no maps" as a commandment, I took him to mean "battle maps," but I hope that maps of any kind would not be "forbidden."

In the "simple pleasures" thread, I talked about the sense of possibility a map implies. A map that's really just a flowchart or a story frame, in my opinion, lacks the independence from a preset chain of events that a concrete map gives.

Quote from: RSDancey;426580So let's toss it.  Our first commandment for D&D shall be "no more figures, no more maps, no more specific positioning".

I imagine that would make many fans of the current iteration of the game more than a little uneasy.

Others would see it has the next coming of Christ.

I have no idea how folks would fall into either one of these categories, or the middle, for that matter.

Personally, I like using miniatures, but I also do believe that their use should be an option, something that is added onto the default game play, not a requirement for people to play. So I don't see it as a bad thing. I'm finding the suggestion interesting, so far. Let's see where this goes.

Quote from: John Morrow;426550...

While I don't agree with everything Ryan is saying, I don't think he's trying to toss anyone out of the hobby.  He thinks they are leaving on their own.  Argue to his argument, not what you think his motives are.

He's not saying people should leave, but the logical conclusion of his arguments is:-

1. people of types 1 (PG, Gam1) and 3 (CA, Sim) ARE leaving and there's nothing we can do to stop it
2. soon only people of types 2 (Th, Gam2) and 4 (ST, Narr) and 5 (generic) will be left
3. type 5 (generic roleplayers) is of limited commercial interest because types 2 and 4 will be 78.6% of the market [(22+22)(22+22+12)] and because type 5 is relatively easy to satisfy somewhat (can enjoy any kind of game) and hard to satisfy completely (a game which combines all elements)
4. network externalities exaggerate this
5. therefore the commercially successful games will be ones which cater primarily to types 2 and 4
6. therefore games should be written for types 2 and 4
7. therefore no-one should bother their arse writing TTRPGs which types 1 and 3 might enjoy
8. therefore there should be no TTRPGs on the market for types 1 and 3
9. therefore types 1 and 3 should have no TTRPGs to play
10. in other words, types 1 and 3 can fuck off to MMOs which are better suited to their preferences, if only they understood what they actually enjoy, the dumb fuckers.

Quote from: RSDancey;426580...

But in a world where we have a social network highly unbalanced in favor of Storytellers and Thinkers, this system, and the vast rules complexity it brings, and the reduction of drama and narrative to just those things permitted by the rules, is more of a liability than a benefit.

So let's toss it.  Our first commandment for D&D shall be "no more figures, no more maps, no more specific positioning".

(Of course, we'll sell a tactical combat rules supplement so that when that really big battle takes place where it just makes so much sense to use the figs and the maps the DM will have good rules for them.  But conflicts that use those rules should be exceptions, not the norm.)

And here is an example of Dancey doing exactly this, only worse:- he's disregarded the logical Thinker position, which would be that consistent positioning is a part of consistent resolution of combat which is a part of consistent application of the consequences of good chargen decisions which is a part of the facilitating of Thinker style play. E.g. if I'm a Thinker why am I going to concentrate on movement-rate related stats if they are GM-fudged?

Quote from: John Morrow;426559...  So I'm willing to believe that some segment of Character Actors may be drawn away by MMOs, but I think it may be premature to write the whole segment off, perhaps simply because of categorization issues.  It's entirely possible that even though Character Actor seems to match what a lot of character focused players do, that we would have shown up as Storytellers in your survey results, because our perspective is more Strategic than Tactical.  But either way, I think the problem is that "Story Focus" suffers from the problem that seems to plague all role-playing theory discussions, which is what is meant by "story" and what's the best way to get it.  

QFT.

QuoteIf that's the case and the hobby is left with Strategic/Combat Focus and Strategic/Story Focus, the common ground is "Strategic", which you defined as "'Strategic' means 'a perspective larger than the immediate future and surroundings'."  And if that's the case, then suggesting the hobby move in a Forge game direction is full of fail because the vast majority of Forge games, including Dogs in the Vineyard, are Tactical.  They are meant to be played as one-offs or at conventions or as mini-campaigns.  They often revolve around a particular limited scenario and limited character type.

I asked elsewhere in these discussions if anyone knows of any Dogs in the Vineyard campaigns that have lasted for years, or a year, or even for a dozen sessions with the same characters, the way many D&D games do (if I'm not mistaken, D&D 3.5 was designed with the assumption that a year of play would bring a character from 1st to 20th level, right?).  And even if one game did last that long, would they start another one?

It's my impression that Dogs in the Vineyard (and others like it) just aren't played that way.  In fact, the whole idea of "Story Now!" is Tactical, about story happening immediately, not over the long haul.  Dogs in the Vineyard drives tactical escalation in a tightly focused tactical setting where everything is immediate and accessible (If I'm not mistaken, doesn't the game even suggest that they players should be able to find anything that they look for?).  So how is this supposed to appeal two two segments of players that you've identified as "Strategic"?  Don't traditional games have far more to offer in that regard?

IMHO on the whole people play Forge games because they are impatient to see dramatic things happen - they don't like to waste time noodling around when they could be getting on with the action. I prefer to immerse myself as the same character time and time again over a period of time. Having a substantial fleshed-out game-world to explore and freedom to stray outside specific kinds of scenario makes that possible.

But in a narrow sense Forgite games may be more "strategic" in the short-term in the sense that you are "strategically" controlling the story rather than "tactically" directing your character's actions "in the moment".

Quote from: John Morrow;426565...

In particular, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, game mastery appeals to certain segments of players but it is also behind many of the biggest complaints that other types of players make and is one of the key problems facing casual players.  If the segment that finds game mastery is leaving the hobby, then perhaps reducing or even eliminating that element of play and providing players with transparent rules that one doesn't have to master to use effectively would draw in new players that might be turned off by that aspect of the game.

Personally I will spend hours poring over rules to get the best out of a character because I don't like being "done over" by unfair rules, but I always try to design my games to make that either impossible or trivial because I don't want my players to be "done over" by unfair rules whether they are into game mastery or not. The idea of Timmy cards to deliberately trick people is repellent to me. For a long time I held the view that wizards in D&D 3.5 were inherently weaker than the spellcasting classes (at least in the game as run by the DM), but I still wanted to play a wizard for the sparkle; but resented the "Timmy-card" element of being gratuitously shat on by the rules. I've finally given up and play an Oracle in Pathfinder. I'm not playing a wizard again because I couldn't take being worn down by the constant shit of having ridiculously shit stats. (Of course, wizards could rule the world if the game were run differently - it does depend on the DM's style. But this guy's style was pretty much the default hack-n-slash style.) Are there really people out there who get a kick out of seeing other people swallowing Timmy cards in ignorance while they min-max it out to their heart's content? Do they think they're terribly clever? I mean sure, I sometimes like to feel I've got a little extra edge by the way I've arranged my abilities etc., but generally it's a question of just trying to keep up with the people whose preferences lie with inherently more powerful character classes, or in LARP who are more agile/athletic/experienced/all-round competent than me. I'd probably find it frustrating if I were all-round significantly more powerful than everyone else.

Related to some of this talk about minis:-

With a TTRPG, you can skip time according to whatever is of interest to your group. With an MMO, if everything is in realtime, time presumably has to be handled with a degree of uniformity across thousands of players. This may not be a problem in high fantasy games where you can teleport from one location to another, etc. But in low fantasy games - TTRPGs have an edge there.

My own view is minis should only be used when necessary to keep a rough idea of what's going on. If you have huge numbers of combatants, how on earth do you keep even a rough idea of where they all are so everyone's on the same page without using minis? Sure the GM can fudge it all by narration but it's not very satisfactory. But I see this sort of battle as anything involving 10+ combatants, which could easily happen once per session, or once per two or three sessions.

Quote from: John Morrow;426565Well, that was Ryan Dancey's argument in 2000 (I've posted those quotes elsewhere) and how D&D 3e was designed so he's not inherently opposed to that idea at all.

3.X is a great design. There are many thing in it that made me go "Yup if I thought of that it would been in my AD&D 1st campaign". However it was the latest in a long line of mechanic fixes. Granted it was needed at the time but I think trying to find the perfect set of mechanics to appeal to today's gamers should not be the primary goal of the game designer. That the heart of what Ryan Dancey proposed in earlier posts. New mechanics to make tabletop more appealing to today's audience.

For example take Aladdin the Disney Movie. I consider pretty funny at the time and a fairly good disney movie. However it is loaded with pop references that doesn't age. For example how many know Arsenio Hall? Which is one of the forms the genie changes into?  Contrast to the Lion King which requires no understanding of the times to fully enjoy. Doesn't mean Aladdin can't be enjoyed but it is not the same as it was in the 90s when it was released.

So rather than trying to chase your audience with mechanics. Focus on the roleplaying side and have your mechanics follow what you are focusing on. Build off of a core game, in short do what I did with the Majestic Wilderlands. Implement D&D for a specific setting, idea, or theme and create mechanics to support that.

Quote from: John Morrow;426565But it's also clear to me that there is a certain amount of tension between the various styles of play (and present in your own characterization of the Killer player type) and that things that appeal to one play style can detract form another.  

A side note: I feel Killers largely disappeared from tabletop in the early 90s. We have First Person Shooters to thank for that.

Quote from: John Morrow;426565And it's also clear that dialing an element of play that might normally be tolerable to everyone up to 11 to please one style of play can ruin the game for everyone else.

Yes that true, but I hope I made clear that the basic idea is that the human referee can look as his group and figure out what elements that works for that particular group. Give the referee the advice and tools make this easier for him. It is a more difficult route than trying to make a game orient to a particular play style. But it would make the game more sustainable in the long run. Players with different styles will be able to see how D&D can be adapted to their game and thus more likely to buy.  

Roleplaying Games can do this because of their nature. You have to really work to make a RPG that limited only to one thing.

Quote from: John Morrow;426565In particular, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, game mastery appeals to certain segments of players but it is also behind many of the biggest complaints that other types of players make and is one of the key problems facing casual players.  If the segment that finds game mastery is leaving the hobby, then perhaps reducing or even eliminating that element of play and providing players with transparent rules that one doesn't have to master to use effectively would draw in new players that might be turned off by that aspect of the game.

Roleplaying mastery then?

Quote from: RSDancey;426580What if we re-built D&D from the ground up excluding specific positioning?  If the default rule was "players can always do anything they wish during a conflict as long as it sounds reasonable and they succeed on their die rolls as necessary"?

.....

So let's toss it.  Our first commandment for D&D shall be "no more figures, no more maps, no more specific positioning".

(Of course, we'll sell a tactical combat rules supplement so that when that really big battle takes place where it just makes so much sense to use the figs and the maps the DM will have good rules for them.  But conflicts that use those rules should be exceptions, not the norm.)

I think it is a mistake to go either extreme. I myself used miniatures from day one because am 50% deaf and found my games a lot easier to run if I used miniatures. I also found a balance that allow me to use miniatures quickly to reinforce my verbal description so everybody understood what they were seeing.*

Swords & Wizardry, AD&D 1st, etc were all perfectly fine for this. The additional rules I used took two paragraphs to summarize. The basic idea is that you can do a 1/2 move and attack. Most of it was just listing what is a move and what is a attack and what doesn't count as either that you can just do.

And all you need for the verbal only guys and the miniature guys. No attacks of opportunity, facing (well maybe a flanking modifier), etc, etc.

Otherwise I agree with cutting down the detailed tactics for D&D style games.  I like using them with GURPS but there is price to pay in the length of time it takes to resolve combat.

Quote from: Omnifray;426635Related to some of this talk about minis:-

With a TTRPG, you can skip time according to whatever is of interest to your group. With an MMO, if everything is in realtime, time presumably has to be handled with a degree of uniformity across thousands of players. This may not be a problem in high fantasy games where you can teleport from one location to another, etc. But in low fantasy games - TTRPGs have an edge there.

Actually the problem is not combat length. For soloable encounters the ever leveling orc is pretty much the rule among MMORPGs. So pretty much you are fighting for the same length of time throughout the game if you are soloing.

The problem are encounters that can ONLY be dealt with by teams of players. I.e. the boss fights. Those suck time like you wouldn't believe. Time to assemble the group, time to get through the content to get to the actual boss fight. Then the boss fight itself which can only be dealt with by a timed choreography peformed by the team of players.

Quote from: Cole;426599That's interesting. I've used similar ideas to that, before, myself. For me the important point is that the abstraction of these ranges are useful and convenient, but that the described game reality should trump the abstraction. But for most cases this kind of abstraction would work well.

I don't know if Sally Forth would work for me and my group or the way several of us play, because the abstraction might not be representative enough.  But I could envision a game that has several combat systems, one that's entirely verbal, one that uses something like Sally Forth, and one that's square or hex based and letting the GM pick which one they'll use, not only for a while game but maybe even on an encounter-by-encounter basis.  A good explanation of the pros and cons of each approach and when they are optimal could help make that work.

Quote from: Omnifray;4266311. people of types 1 (PG, Gam1) and 3 (CA, Sim) ARE leaving and there's nothing we can do to stop it

Just as Power Gamers and Thinkers both rank as "Gamist" in the GDS or GNS so there isn't a neat mapping, I don't think there is a neat mapping between Character Actor or Storyteller to Simulationist or Dramatist/Narrativist in the WotC model, even though there are superficial similarities.  The "Story Focus" in the WotC survey seems to be "stuff other than combat" and "Tactical" and "Strategic" don't have a clear mapping to the GNS or GDS categories, which is where I think the problem is.

Quote from: Omnifray;42663110. in other words, types 1 and 3 can fuck off to MMOs which are better suited to their preferences, if only they understood what they actually enjoy, the dumb fuckers.

He's talking about commercial games.  If the player base doesn't exist to make a game economically viable, companies are under no obligation to be charitable.  He's talking about economic viability.

Many years ago, at a convention, S. John Ross talked about his Five Elements of a Commercially Successful RPG Setting (http://www.io.com/~sjohn/five-elements.htm).  For many years after that, I asked him to write it up and even offered to pay him some money to do so at one point (I'm the guy he mentions at the link above).  The reason he was so reluctant to write it up is that he was afraid that people would use his elements to say that a role-playing setting must have those elements and he doesn't believe that.  He was talking about commercial success.  Broad appeal.  And I think that's what Ryan Dancey is talking about here.

Quote from: Omnifray;426631And here is an example of Dancey doing exactly this, only worse:- he's disregarded the logical Thinker position, which would be that consistent positioning is a part of consistent resolution of combat which is a part of consistent application of the consequences of good chargen decisions which is a part of the facilitating of Thinker style play. E.g. if I'm a Thinker why am I going to concentrate on movement-rate related stats if they are GM-fudged?

OK, so then make that argument to his argument.  Does eliminating too much of the tactics and crunch alienate one of the segments he thinks hasn't left the hobby?  Feel free to argue it does.

Quote from: Omnifray;426633IMHO on the whole people play Forge games because they are impatient to see dramatic things happen - they don't like to waste time noodling around when they could be getting on with the action. I prefer to immerse myself as the same character time and time again over a period of time. Having a substantial fleshed-out game-world to explore and freedom to stray outside specific kinds of scenario makes that possible.

Yes, and I think that may have shown up as "Story Focus/Strategic" or "Storyteller" in the WotC data rather than "Story Focus/Tactical" or "Tactical", even though the focus is on the character.  So look at what the categories mean rather than what they are labeled.  

Quote from: Omnifray;426633But in a narrow sense Forgite games may be more "strategic" in the short-term in the sense that you are "strategically" controlling the story rather than "tactically" directing your character's actions "in the moment".

If the story focus doesn't extend beyond a single session, I'm not sure I'd call that "stategic".  I'm curious what Ryan has to say about my point that Forge games are Tactical rather than Strategic and thus don't match the segments that he thinks are the strongest in the TRPG hobby.

Quote from: RSDancey;426580What if we re-built D&D from the ground up excluding specific positioning?  If the default rule was "players can always do anything they wish during a conflict as long as it sounds reasonable and they succeed on their die rolls as necessary"?

This is how I've always played (and is why I mainly play older versions of D&D). I've also noticed that this style of play does not turn off all players interested in tactics. From 1977-2004, I lived in San Antonio which has a lot of military people. I had a lot of players over the years who were either in the military or were ex-military. Tactics was very important to them and they used them in almost every battle of any complexity.

Often this consisted of taking a minute or two to sketch out the area and quickly plan out what characters should do. We are talking a literal minute or two (real time) before the battle in many cases. This is what I can "real world tactics" -- no games rules involved just the same type of tactics one would use in a real world battle. 3.x and 4e stress tactics, but it is a very different type of tactics (in my experience). It's what I can "rules manipulation tactics" because it is all about using the game rules to the best tactical advantage in battle. It tends to make for battles take forever to game out, require the players to have an unrealistic overhead view of the battle, know exact distances and the like as well as possess a great deal of rules knowledge. Real world tactical training is of very little help in most cases.

My style of play does not turn off those interested in "real world tactics" tactical combat but those who want "rules manipulation tactics" tactical play tend to avoid my games like the plague (which is a good thing from my POV).

All I'm trying to say is that I have found the lack of minis, battlemats, the fiddly rules that go with them does not mean that all players interested in tactical combat are turned off.

Quote from: estar;4266383.X is a great design. There are many thing in it that made me go "Yup if I thought of that it would been in my AD&D 1st campaign". However it was the latest in a long line of mechanic fixes. Granted it was needed at the time but I think trying to find the perfect set of mechanics to appeal to today's gamers should not be the primary goal of the game designer. That the heart of what Ryan Dancey proposed in earlier posts. New mechanics to make tabletop more appealing to today's audience.

But D&D 3e was designed to appeal to the gamers at the time it was released.  That's what the survey was about.  And the quotes that I've been posted from Ryan Dancey here and in other recent threads is part of a much longer thread he posted on Pyramid where he discusses why D&D 3e was designed the way it was, including what was included, how the books were structured, why he thought earlier editions failed, and so on.  Basically, D&D 3e was designed to appeal in certain ways I think the evidence shows that it succeeded at those goals.

While I agree that one can take such things too far and wind up with, for example, rules that offend nobody but also appeal to nobody or simultaneously have something for everyone but also something that everyone hates, I do think there is value is trying to give people what they want, especially if you are talking about managing a market leader like D&D rather than designing small press independent games.  That's the perspective Ryan is talking about -- where D&D should go, not where all games should go.  And as something of a gatekeeper for the hobby, I think that D&D attracting the largest audience possible is good for the hobby as a whole.

Quote from: estar;426638For example take Aladdin the Disney Movie. I consider pretty funny at the time and a fairly good disney movie. However it is loaded with pop references that doesn't age. For example how many know Arsenio Hall? Which is one of the forms the genie changes into?  Contrast to the Lion King which requires no understanding of the times to fully enjoy. Doesn't mean Aladdin can't be enjoyed but it is not the same as it was in the 90s when it was released.

And I would argue that's what new editions are for.  If everyone was perfectly happy with OD&D in the late 1970s (which contains it's fair share of cultural reference that would be lost on children that didn't grow up on pulp novels, Greek mythology, and Ray Harryhausen movies), then there wouldn't have been an explosion of other games over the years, many of which were clearly designed to fix or change something that someone thought was wrong with D&D.  Timeless perfection isn't going to happen, even if it's a worthy goal to shoot for.

Quote from: estar;426638So rather than trying to chase your audience with mechanics. Focus on the roleplaying side and have your mechanics follow what you are focusing on. Build off of a core game, in short do what I did with the Majestic Wilderlands. Implement D&D for a specific setting, idea, or theme and create mechanics to support that.

I think there is certainly merit to designing from the assumption that mechanics are a "necessary evil" rather than the first thing you should worry about.

Quote from: estar;426638A side note: I feel Killers largely disappeared from tabletop in the early 90s. We have First Person Shooters to thank for that.

And Ryan's argument is that other less divisive segments are also disappearing from the hobby.

Quote from: estar;426638Yes that true, but I hope I made clear that the basic idea is that the human referee can look as his group and figure out what elements that works for that particular group. Give the referee the advice and tools make this easier for him. It is a more difficult route than trying to make a game orient to a particular play style. But it would make the game more sustainable in the long run. Players with different styles will be able to see how D&D can be adapted to their game and thus more likely to buy.

I agree that this is ideal but the problem is that it puts a lot of responsibility on the GM.  While there are groups with no shortage of GMs, there are plenty of other people who want to play but can't find a GM and don't want to GM.  One of the biggest complaints about D&D 3.x (and it matches my experience running a D&D 3.5 campaign) is that prep is just too much work.  So the question is, how does one quickly teach players to be a good referee and make subjective judgments about what should happen and how to make the game good for their players if they start out not knowing how to do that?

Quote from: estar;426638Roleplaying mastery then?

I'm not sure what you mean here, but I think I need to be more specific.

Role-playing mastery is what frustrates people who see the rules as a necessary evil and don't really care how the game works.  It forces them to learn how to use the rules well or they get punished for it.  But it's also what appeals to players who want a mental challenge and the sense of achievement that comes from figuring things out or doing them well.  Thus totally getting rid of it would probably create a problem, too.

But I think there are two elements of role-playing mastery.  One is based on tricks and the other is based on application.  When D&D 3e decided to include options that were sub-optimal ("Timmy Cards") and hidden synergies (combinations that could be used to great effect), it was basically hiding how to use the game well and expecting players to figure that out.  But there is also a sort of mastery that comes from using the rules well rather than being tricky.  For example, rewarding a player for good tactical choices in combat is not the same thing as rewarding the player for using a tricky feat at just the right moment to win.

Quote from: RandallS;426648My style of play does not turn off those interested in "real world tactics" tactical combat but those who want "rules manipulation tactics" tactical play tend to avoid my games like the plague (which is a good thing from my POV).

I think a big reason why my group uses Battlemats, tokens, and tactical movement is to avoid assumption clash about character can do and expect from what they do.  It lets players plan out their own tactics and solutions without having to wonder whether the GM will see things the same way and let their tactics work.  This goes back to two kids bickering about whether one shot the other while playing cops and robbers.  Even if neither has selfish or malicious motives (which they often do in the real world), there could still be a legitimate difference of opinion about what happened and what can happen and having objective rules to look to for those answers is very useful for keeping a game running smoothly and keeping everyone happy, at least in my experience.

Quote from: John Morrow;426651I think a big reason why my group uses Battlemats, tokens, and tactical movement is to avoid assumption clash about character can do and expect from what they do.  It lets players plan out their own tactics and solutions without having to wonder whether the GM will see things the same way and let their tactics work.

I have very seldom had a problem with this. In fact, I was often told by tactically oriented players that I gave far too much info in my descriptions: info that one would be unlikely to have in real life. (e.g. "How on earth would we know there were exactly eight orcs -- with crossbows yet -- in the brush?").

I guess this was because many of my tactically oriented players when I was starting to DM had combat experience in Vietnam and were used to not having anywhere near perfect information going into a combat. They did not expect their view of the battlefield to always match with "reality" (the GM's view) and were somewhat disconcerted when it was too close a match too often. They did not expect their tactical plans to be workable all the time.

Yes, outside of TFT, I've rarely used minis or tactical maps; at most the minis if present were for illustrating rough positioning. Other times when spatial relationships were at all important, we kept them consistent using a sketch, which wasn't even necessarily shown to the players. Years later I saw this was exactly the approach suggested in Feng Shui. And in fact, while Dragonquest, Gurps, and Champions used precise spaces and movement, I don't think it's been emphasized in many other games. As others have pointed out, D&D wasn't played on a battlemat by default, notwithstanding the range units. It was entirely optional, and I don't even think the procedures for regulating a game this way were very well spelled out in the rules, at least through the the mid-80's, leaving groups to improvise questions like whether facing can be changed at will, or whether you can zip by an enemy without giving him a chance to block you or attack.

Quote from: John Morrow;426651I think a big reason why my group uses Battlemats, tokens, and tactical movement is to avoid assumption clash about character can do and expect from what they do.  It lets players plan out their own tactics and solutions without having to wonder whether the GM will see things the same way and let their tactics work.

"Say yes, or roll dice".

That gets rid of the DM fiat fears that so many players have.  Either they get to do what they want, or, they have some chance of doing what they want decided impartially.  I've seen this in action so many times where a heated argument can be utterly subdued by just naming a number and telling someone to roll a die.  It cuts through the bullshit like a hot knife through butter.

DMs get one caveat:  They can, at any time, stop an action if they feel that it will damage the integrity of the game or that it is damaging the integrity of the group.

If the DM uses this power too much it's up to the players to tell the DM they don't like it.  Likewise, the DM doesn't get to complain if players seem to keep stretching the bounds of the possible past the breaking point - they have a tool to restore order if necessary.

(Although I fear that DMs raised through a whole generation of 3.x will be excessively fiddly about spacing, range, and distance - they've been trained to pay close attention to these things...  Convincing them that they should stop will be tough because it will break well ingrained habits.)

"Say yes or roll the dice" is poisoned by the particular implementation in DitV (which popularized the term), where the GM has no ability to add modifiers or set difficulties.

The 1e DMG though has advice to use dice to decide things, that puts it all in proper perspective.

Quote from: RSDancey;426725That gets rid of the DM fiat fears that so many players have.  Either they get to do what they want, or, they have some chance of doing what they want decided impartially. [...]

DMs get one caveat:  They can, at any time, stop an action if they feel that it will damage the integrity of the game or that it is damaging the integrity of the group.

I'm not sure what you mean here; it sounds like you are saying that "say yes" both eliminates fiat, and is overruled by fiat. Do you have a more specific definition of "will damage the integrity of the game?"

In practice, I have always found that it is good policy not to flatly disallow any given PC action unless it seems completely unreasonable for the character to actually do so - an ordinary person lifting a boulder too huge for a man to lift, "fixing" a magical artifact by kicking it (though there might be a comic campaign where this was plausible), etc. But I think phrasing the rules as "The dungeon master MUST either accede to a player request or allow the player a roll. Except when he decides he doesn't," is weird.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426740"Say yes or roll the dice" is poisoned by the particular implementation in DitV (which popularized the term), where the GM has no ability to add modifiers or set difficulties.

I wouldn't say it is "poisoned" but it's such a specific catch phrase that it's going to be confusing to people who are familiar with its DitV derived usage; to whose who aren't, this particular wording offers no advantage to its use.

Quote from: RSDancey;426725I've seen this in action so many times where a heated argument can be utterly subdued by just naming a number and telling someone to roll a die.  It cuts through the bullshit like a hot knife through butter.

This doesn't always solve the problem, such as with players who get physically violent when DM fiat or dice doesn't go their way.  Back in the day, I remember playing in games where a violent player would punch the DM in the face for making rulings they didn't like and/or the dice didn't roll in their favor.

Quote from: ggroy;426754This doesn't always solve the problem, such as with players who get physically violent when DM fiat or dice doesn't go their way.  Back in the day, I remember playing in games where a violent player would punch the DM in the face for making rulings they didn't like and/or the dice didn't roll in their favor.

There is nothing you can put in a set of rules that will fix the problem of a player who is willing to hit another player.

Rule #2 for design of NewD&D:

The description of place given to players will be as minimal as possible to allow them to act within reason.

Look at this quote from the 3.0 DMG:

Quote from: 3.0DMG Page 130You are in a chamber about 30 feet across to the south and 30 feet wide east and west.  There are 10-foot wide passages to the left and right as well as straight ahead, each in the center of its respective wall.  Looking back, you see the stairway entered the chamber in the center of the north wall.

Wow, is that a heck of a lot of useless info.  And in fact, the most important feature of the room, the overhead mass of webs, isn't even mentioned, nor is the big heap of crap in the dead center of the room.  But the players know the exact dimensions, as well as the cardinal directions of the passages leaving and entering the space.  I don't know about you, but if I was exploring a pitch dark underground chamber, I'd be a lot more worried about the threats in the immediate area than cartography.

Let's try this again, in a D&D where spacing, positioning, etc. doesn't matter.

QuoteYou enter a small chamber with masonry walls and a flagstone floor.  Above you is a tangled mass of webs which obscure the ceiling.  In the center of the room is a pile of decaying filth.

OK, now they know the room is not a natural cavern, they know about the webs, they know about the pile of spider garbage, and they have a sense of the size of the place.

Also, let's add a corallary to the 2nd rule:

Players get automatic information about the world they inhabit, provided it would be reasonable to assume they're alert to that knowledge.

QuoteEveryone make a Perception check, DC of 15.  Ok, those of you who succeeded can sense movement overhead in the webs.

(There's a monstrous spider in the mass of webs in the room!  Shocker!  How 2 generations of DMG PCs got surprised by this is beyond me.  Why would players have to ask to test this skill is also just busywork.)

If asked, the DM can tell the players where the exits to the room are and their rough location.  If we looked over the shoulder of the player keeping a map of the area, instead of seeing some architecturally precise graphic, we'd see something like this:

(http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash1/hs749.ash1/164011_10150150355971521_660376520_7897051_6327828_n.jpg)

Already, we're getting something more streamlined without sacrificing anything that made D&D great.

Quote from: RSDancey;426758Wow, is that a heck of a lot of useless info.  And in fact, the most important feature of the room, the overhead mass of webs, isn't even mentioned, nor is the big heap of crap in the dead center of the room.  But the players know the exact dimensions, as well as the cardinal directions of the passages leaving and entering the space.  I don't know about you, but if I was exploring a pitch dark underground chamber, I'd be a lot more worried about the threats in the immediate area than cartography.

[...]

Already, we're getting something more streamlined without sacrificing anything that made D&D great.

I agree with most of this post in principle, but you're mistaken in your interpretation of room dimensions. It's not a matter of whether a person is "worried about cartography;" it is a means of conveying a person's natural spatial awareness of his immediate surroundings. It is information the character cannot help but have conveyed in the most efficient, minimal fashion. Similarly the exits - they are immediately obvious.

It's problematic that the 3.0 description does not include the debris or webs, yes. I think it is probably better to describe the dimensions first, since it is the broadest, top level information, then exits, then the features in the room. It's just a natural progression of broader to more specific information. This doesn't have to do with positioning rules or cartography, it is just avoiding confusion in an quick, efficient way. "Small chamber" is not helpful information. My living room is a small chamber. My closet is a small chamber.

Exact room dimensions are not the first thing I notice when entering a room. The feeling of being cramped etc. is a more personal take on things and a generalized description would work well. Movement,colors,odd shapes etc. are the most noticable things right off the bat and this makes sense from a survival standpoint. Perhaps measurements could be convayed by terms like Strides,spans, etc. or just "large" "small" "Medium" as a first impression. If the players take time to actualy measure the room then more exact terms would be proper. (immersive anyone?)

Exact dimensions are a hold over from the whole "mapping the dungeon" syndrome and can realy ruin the vibe/flow of a game...I concur with Dancey here.
:)

Quote from: skofflox;426773Exact room dimensions are not the first thing I notice when entering a room. The feeling of being cramped etc. is a more personal take on things and a generalized description would work well. Movement,colors,odd shapes etc. are the most noticable things right off the bat and this makes sense from a survival standpoint. Perhaps measurements could be convayed by terms like Strides,spans, etc. or just "large" "small" "Medium" as a first impression. If the players take time to actualt measure the room then more exact terms would be proper. (immersive anyone?)

Strides, spans? That's just being deliberately obtuse about the same information. The "be vague in the room descriptions, you aren't measuring!" meme is one of the worst pieces of DM advice to come out of the formative 2e era. Interaction with this world is verbal. The DM's description should convey the automatic information a person passively recieves through his visual and spatial cognition. No, you don't know the exact measurements of a room you walk into, but you don't have to, because you can see how big the room is, and you know how far you have to walk to cross it, for example. Room dimensions is the quickest and easiest way for a player to see what his character immediately, effortlessly does, in words.

Quote from: Cole;426779Strides, spans? That's just being deliberately obtuse about the same information. The "be vague in the room descriptions, you aren't measuring!" meme is one of the worst pieces of DM advice to come out of the formative 2e era. Interaction with this world is verbal. The DM's description should convey the automatic information a person passively recieves through his visual and spatial cognition. No, you don't know the exact measurements of a room you walk into, but you don't have to, because you can see how big the room is, and you know how far you have to walk to cross it, for example. Room dimensions is the quickest and easiest way for a player to see what his character immediately, effortlessly does, in words.

Well said, thank you. :)

Quote from: Cole;426756There is nothing you can put in a set of rules that will fix the problem of a player who is willing to hit another player.

Another advantage of boxed sets is that you can include a taser in the box.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426793Another advantage of boxed sets is that you can include a taser in the box.

One of the awkward little nuances of my days tending bar was keeping a straight face while interacting with people you've seen tasered by the police.

Quote from: Cole;426779Strides, spans? That's just being deliberately obtuse about the same information. The "be vague in the room descriptions, you aren't measuring!" meme is one of the worst pieces of DM advice to come out of the formative 2e era. Interaction with this world is verbal. The DM's description should convey the automatic information a person passively recieves through his visual and spatial cognition. No, you don't know the exact measurements of a room you walk into, but you don't have to, because you can see how big the room is, and you know how far you have to walk to cross it, for example. Room dimensions is the quickest and easiest way for a player to see what his character immediately, effortlessly does, in words.

Quote from: Drohem;426787Well said, thank you. :)

:hmm: thought immersion was the goal not convenience and metagame...but to each their own.
 I have never walked into a room and thought "yeah...30x25 man..."but I do feel cramped or dwarfed etc. and have a sense of things spatialy. Especialy so if in a dank hole with the threat of slavering ghouls etc. As I aluded to in my earlier post...perhaps if the characters have measuring devices and employ them then that info is apropos.

If in your setting folk use those measurements ie. feet etc. then by all means let the info be convayed that way if it fits your take on emulation or whatever. Never heard of setting spacific terms refered to as "obtuse" but I understand your view.
Which obviously is not immersive...but perhaps you did not read all my post where I suggested using other vague terms at least initialy?
:)

What's wrong with describing the room in more visual, less precise terms and then providing the dimensions if/when the players ask for them? We all can envision a room if described well enough without resorting to the exact measurments (although the specifics might vary slightly from person to person). That's generally how I handle it in my games - I'll have a very precise map, but don't go into squares/feet/etc. unless it is important to what is happening at the moment. This is also generally how things are done in fiction, and I don't recall people complaining about not knowing the precise dimensions of the rooms in Saurman's tower, for example.

Quote from: Cole;426750I'm not sure what you mean here; it sounds like you are saying that "say yes" both eliminates fiat, and is overruled by fiat. Do you have a more specific definition of "will damage the integrity of the game?"

In practice, I have always found that it is good policy not to flatly disallow any given PC action unless it seems completely unreasonable for the character to actually do so - an ordinary person lifting a boulder too huge for a man to lift, "fixing" a magical artifact by kicking it (though there might be a comic campaign where this was plausible), etc. But I think phrasing the rules as "The dungeon master MUST either accede to a player request or allow the player a roll. Except when he decides he doesn't," is weird.

Yeah, we've been through this here a few times before. Here's an oldie but goodie. (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=1654) The upshot is: the maxim is a reaction to retarded GMing, presented as dogma; and taken as dogma, it's crap. It's especially awful if you don't acknowledge the importance of context. By "context" I mean not only the fictional environment (like, the GM must say "no" if the player's in a dungeon and asks if there's a bazooka in the corner) but also the sense of purpose of the game. Generally a game with more emphasis on exploration and puzzle-solving should have more "fixed" elements; otherwise, "find your way to the treasure chamber" or "figure out who killed the mayor" both become dice-rolling exercises.

Quote from: skofflox;426800:hmm: thought immersion was the goal not convenience and metagame...but to each their own.
 I have never walked into a room and thought "yeah...30x25 man..."but I do feel cramped or dwarfed etc. and have a sense of things spatialy. Especialy so if in a dank hole with the threat of slavering ghouls etc. As I aluded to in my earlier post...perhaps if the characters have measuring devices and employ them then that info is apropos.

If in your setting folk use those measurements ie. feet etc. then by all means let the info be convayed that way if it fits your take on emulation or whatever. Never heard of setting spacific terms refered to as "obtuse" but I understand your view.
Which obviously is not immersive...but perhaps you did not read all my post where I suggested using other vague terms at least initialy?
:)

Well, I wasn't commenting on your post, but on what Cole said in response.  

Perhaps having a room described in specific measurements is not immersive for you, but please don't presuppose that it's also not for me.  I did, in fact, read your post and vague terms don't suffice for me and would, inevitably, lead me to ask for more detail about the dimensions of said room.

Quote from: Werekoala;426803What's wrong with describing the room in more visual, less precise terms and then providing the dimensions if/when the players ask for them? We all can envision a room if described well enough without resorting to the exact measurments (although the specifics might vary slightly from person to person). That's generally how I handle it in my games - I'll have a very precise map, but don't go into squares/feet/etc. unless it is important to what is happening at the moment.

Sure. Put me in a room that's more than 20'x20' and I doubt I could estimate its size immediately to within 10'.

But this is all very old--it's really a case of later D&D going backwards from lessons learned and common practices from the early days of the RPGing.

If this is what it takes to de-MMOize the "flagship" game, though, great.

Quote from: Werekoala;426803What's wrong with describing the room in more visual, less precise terms and then providing the dimensions if/when the players ask for them? We all can envision a room if described well enough without resorting to the exact measurments (although the specifics might vary slightly from person to person). That's generally how I handle it in my games - I'll have a very precise map, but don't go into squares/feet/etc. unless it is important to what is happening at the moment. This is also generally how things are done in fiction, and I don't recall people complaining about not knowing the precise dimensions of the rooms in Saurman's tower, for example.

:hatsoff:

exact measurements in modern terms pulls me out of the game every time and is not indicative of the literature or an aid to immersion in the fantasy genre.

I prefer smells and sounds to be the first clues if apropos then generalized visual stuff as it comes to the fore...no hurry in my games as the feeling of it all is paramount.
Great to build atmosphere with the sensory bits...and I dont sense 15 x 15...;) though it may feel cramped and rough hewn with dripping dank...:)

Quote from: Drohem;426805Well, I wasn't commenting on your post, but on what Cole said in response.  

Perhaps having a room described in specific measurements is not immersive for you, but please don't presuppose that it's also not for me.  I did, in fact, read your post and vague terms don't suffice for me and would, inevitably, lead me to ask for more detail about the dimensions of said room.

:cool:...I was more questioning Coles response...and as far as immersive etc. I am refering to what the character would vibe not myself,though in some cases they are the same.

Perhaps an engineer or Dwarf type of character would have a grasp of spatial details in more exact terms (though still setting specific) but a woodsman? If a bowman then "paces" or "flights" or whatever setting spacific term would apply is more immersive IMO.
:)

Quote from: skofflox;426800:hmm: thought immersion was the goal not convenience and metagame...but to each their own.
 I have never walked into a room and thought "yeah...30x25 man..."but I do feel cramped or dwarfed etc. and have a sense of things spatialy. Especialy so if in a dank hole with the threat of slavering ghouls etc. As I aluded to in my earlier post...perhaps if the characters have measuring devices and employ them then that info is apropos.

If in your setting folk use those measurements ie. feet etc. then by all means let the info be convayed that way if it fits your take on emulation or whatever. Never heard of setting spacific terms refered to as "obtuse" but I understand your view.
Which obviously is not immersive...but perhaps you did not read all my post where I suggested using other vague terms at least initialy?
:)

I read your post, I just disagree with it. Different things are "immersive" to different people; I try to avoid the term myself. Is it a metagame convenience to have NPCs speak english? Well, yes, but it allows the players to understand the situation, and for the character to react as if they were there. Much as it often helps to translation in language, it usually is helpful to have a translation of visual or spatial information into the verbal. I think measurements translate that information in a clear and concrete way. This helps me as a player to recreate my character's perspective mentally and decide in the place of my character.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426806But this is all very old--it's really a case of later D&D going backwards from lessons learned and common practices from the early days of the RPGing.

What is the 'backwards?' I'm not clear on what you're pointing out.

Quote from: Werekoala;426803What's wrong with describing the room in more visual, less precise terms and then providing the dimensions if/when the players ask for them? We all can envision a room if described well enough without resorting to the exact measurments (although the specifics might vary slightly from person to person). That's generally how I handle it in my games - I'll have a very precise map, but don't go into squares/feet/etc. unless it is important to what is happening at the moment. This is also generally how things are done in fiction, and I don't recall people complaining about not knowing the precise dimensions of the rooms in Saurman's tower, for example.

Absolutely nothing, really.  However, if my character is in Saurman's Tower and is in a precarious situation, then I'm going to want the GM to give me some concrete details so that I have as much information as possible to make character decisions.

Quote from: skofflox;426813:cool:...I was more questioning Coles response...and as far as immersive etc. I am refering to what the character would vibe not myself,though in some cases they are the same.

Perhaps an engineer or Dwarf type of character would have a grasp of spatial details in more exact terms (though still setting specific) but a woodsman? If a bowman then "paces" or "flights" or whatever setting spacific term would apply is more immersive IMO.
:)

Cool.:)  I get what you are saying, and I agree with you to a point.  In my experience, having these kind of details expressed helps with everyone involved to be as close to mental image that the GM is trying to convey.

Quote from: Cole;426814I read your post, I just disagree with it. Different things are "immersive" to different people; I try to avoid the term myself. Is it a metagame convenience to have NPCs speak english? Well, yes, but it allows the players to understand the situation, and for the character to react as if they were there. Much as it often helps to translation in language, it usually is helpful to have a translation of visual or spatial information into the verbal. I think measurements translate that information in a clear and concrete way. This helps me as a player to recreate my character's perspective mentally and decide in the place of my character.

Dude, get the hell out of my head. :)  This is exactly how I feel.  Giving this kind of detail, although it might be considered 'meta-gamey' to some, is a tool that helps all participants involved reach the same point while cutting down on confusion that may arise from various different mental images of the same scene.

Quote from: RSDancey;426725"Say yes, or roll dice".
...

Frankly this is just dogma. As a general principle, if players want to contribute ideas to the game, I'm happy to encourage that, and if they want to try stuff, I'm happy to give it some chance of success. But I am not straitjacketing myself into "say yes, or roll dice".

For starters, my games have a certain internal logic and pre-envisaged atmosphere to the setting. If every time the players demand something which appeals to them I give it at least a chance of success, it's only a matter of time until one thing after another happens which little by little erodes the consistency and internal logic of the setting or prevents me from building up the atmosphere I've had in mind.

Secondly, it's not necessary.

Thirdly, what actually happens in my game is more like>>>

"Can I find a master-wrought arbalest?"

"Um, it's only a small town - the guards might have a spare arbalest, or you might be able to find a master-wrought heavy crossbow for sale - which would you prefer?"

"Oh, I'll just have a regular arbalest thanks if I can find one."

The players might not have appreciated what a small town it is. Sure, there might be a CHANCE of there being a master-wrought arbalest there, but it would be a very, very slim chance - so slim there's hardly any point even rolling.

The point is, I have to have a consistent internal picture of the game-world in my mind. If everything the players dream up has to have some chance of going the way they first think of, my internal picture of the world is going to get broken down and lose its integrity, maybe in initially non-obvious ways.

I do not buy this "say yes, or roll dice" crap. It's about Shared Narrative Authority. I do not want that.

Positivity and encouragement about players' ideas, I am all in favour of. An OBLIGATION for the GM to accept players' ideas unless he has a positively good reason for rejecting them which he can articulate and is analytically clear about - no. He needs to draw on the power of his subconscious organising the setting. He needs to do so freely, without impediment. Even if all he's forced to do is roll dice. No no no no no no no no no.

Quote from: Cole;426814*snip*
 Is it a metagame convenience to have NPCs speak english? Well, yes, but it allows the players to understand the situation, and for the character to react as if they were there. Much as it often helps to translation in language, it usually is helpful to have a translation of visual or spatial information into the verbal. I think measurements translate that information in a clear and concrete way. This helps me as a player to recreate my character's perspective mentally and decide in the place of my character.

(Interpreted your initial reply as a bit preachy/aggresive so I apologize for any escalation,my bad.)

English...? I call it "common" (;)) and as far as it being metagamey well it would depend on the setting.

Measurements,ranges in squares/hexes and the squares/hexes themselves draw me out of the setting and into the "rules" and are aspects brought to RPG via the wargame roots and are by no means indespensible.We all are having fun with our games I hope?!

When I use minis I like to do it with a blank dry erase surface so lots of the visuals can be transmitted without the increments being displayed. I do not pay strict attention to the movement limits etc. and just eyeball it. If it is off a few cm. who cares asides from rules lawyers? (:rolleyes:)

I fully understand and embrace the various takes on immersion or whatever you like to call it. Convenience and ease of play is an important consideration and if it helps folk to think in certain terms and have scenes discribed in certain ways that is awesome as long as it serves the intent and expectations of your group.
:)

2ed.: Most of my gaming nowadays is small group,usually 1 player!, so having definitive info for more players to keep everything clear is not so much a concern for me.

Quote from: skofflox;426832(Interprited your initial reply as a bit preachy/aggresive so I apologize for any escalation,my bad.)

English...? I call it "common" (;)) and as far as it being metagamey well it would depend on the setting.

Measurements,ranges in squares/hexes and the squares/hexes themselves draw me out of the setting and into the "rules" and are aspects brought to RPG via the wargame roots and are by no means indespensible.We all are having fun with our games I hope?!

When I use minis I like to do it with a blank dry erase surface so lots of the visuals can be transmitted without the increments being displayed. I do not pay strict attention to the movement limits etc. and just eyeball it. If it is off a few cm. who cares asides from rules lawyers? (:rolleyes:)

I fully understand and embrace the various takes on immersion or whatever you like to call it. Convenience and ease of play is an important consideration and if it helps folk to think in certain terms and have scenes discribed in certain ways that is awesome as long as it serves the intent and expectations of your group.
:)

It's okay, I'm just trying to be clear myself. Personally I don't favor the use of miniatures at all and prefer a fully verbal game. So for me at least, as a player, the descriptions are the one path into making that space mentally real so that my character can then act naturally in that space. The more abstracted that space is, the greater the degree to which it tends to become a backdrop for my character rather than his environment, and I don't want a backdrop. In my opinion this is part of the "magic" of D&D's dungeon game - the concrete environment of the dungeon chamber is easy for the player to mentally understand and accept as real.

Quote from: Cole;426835It's okay, I'm just trying to be clear myself. Personally I don't favor the use of miniatures at all and prefer a fully verbal game. So for me at least, as a player, the descriptions are the one path into making that space mentally real so that my character can then act naturally in that space. The more abstracted that space is, the greater the degree to which it tends to become a backdrop for my character rather than his environment, and I don't want a backdrop. In my opinion this is part of the "magic" of D&D's dungeon game - the concrete environment of the dungeon chamber is easy for the player to mentally understand and accept as real.

Good points here...interesting way to discern 'twixt "backdrop" and(/or?) "enviroment". Never thought of the distinction till now...:hmm:
Perhaps my literary leanings are informing my views in this regard?

I am planning on an all verbal direction for my next game of Atomic Highway. This is how I started RPG and it has it's magic for sure. And I can't afford to have a multi-genre mini's collection again (thank the gods) though the occasional chit might work depending on the player(s)...
:)

Quote from: skofflox;426838Good points here...interesting way to discern 'twixt "backdrop" and(/or?) "enviroment". Never thought of the distinction till now...:hmm:
Perhaps my literary leanings are informing my views in this regard?

Could be - I am of the opinion that the RPG emulates the world depicted in the literature, rather than the literature itself. Possibly my having a lot of background in theater/performance biases me to think heavily in terms of spaces.

Quote from: skofflox;426773Exact room dimensions are not the first thing I notice when entering a room. The feeling of being cramped etc. is a more personal take on things and a generalized description would work well.

It's really both. The thing is, the information you're conveying by saying "there's a 10-foot wide corridor to your left leaving the room from the center of the wall there" is something that, in RL, your mind grasps in the blink of an eye. Like what kind of distance you are away from someone, how high the ceiling is, and so on, so forth. But you also perceive atmosphere and features, registering unusual elements more readily, precisely because they are out of place.

So it's really not an either/or proposition to me, but something that most often will involve both types of descriptions, or more of one or the other given the actual situation the PCs are in, whether they are running through an area or carefully walking in, etc etc. You can see that in the Ptolus AD&D game.

I think the suggestion that all this information is "needless" according to Ryan really is in the eye of the beholder. It really depends what you actually do when playing the game, and what you actually do when designing your dungeon. The sign that a ceiling is higher up here than it is there, that the corridor is not in the middle of the wall, may be an important clue as to what's going on with the layout of the place. The fact that the corridor is 5-foot wide instead of 10 will tell you how many PCs can stand next to each other and walk through the area with weapons in hand, etc.

What Ryan is basically arguing, sounds like to me is that these aspects of exploration are useless, as is the simulation of the world. I just can't agree to that. Rather than formulating blanket statements of "this is vital" and "this is useless," I think one has to look at how the game itself is played first, and what information is relevant to what types of situations, and how they unfold.

In other word, Ryan's second new-D&D commandment is bullshit, from where I'm standing.

Quote from: Benoist;426840It's really both. The thing is, the information you're conveying by saying "there's a 10-foot wide corridor to your left leaving the room from the center of the wall there" is something that, in RL, your mind grasps in the blink of an eye. Like what kind of distance you are away from someone, how high the ceiling is, and so on, so forth. But you also perceive atmosphere and features, registering unusual elements more readily, precisely because they are out of place.

Well said. It's so easy for us to take for granted the sophistication and the layeredness of our cognitive processes. We get so much sensory information to process a space we experience in real life - the room dimensions are less than that, not overgenerous.

Absolutely. The same way, descriptions will vary enormously depending on particular situations. If you tell me for instance "Ulas Xegg enters the room cautiously, checking the floor as he walks, careful to not spring any trap as he proceeds" I'm going to describe the floor, how wet it is, the light of the torch you carry and how the flames are reflected by the puddles on the ground, that kind of thing. If you look around, I'm going to give you the dimensions of the room, where the exiting corridors are, and so on. If you check the walls, I'm going to describe the stones, the corridors and where they are, etc, whether there are cobwebs there, or holes, or whatnot. But if you are running through the room, I'm not going to give you this information, rather pointing out maybe one or two main features of the room that you notice as you are running through.

My point is that it is situational, and that as a DM, you pick up on the PCs cues to act as their interface with the game world, blending what actually is there with the subjective perspective the players imply by role playing their characters. Sometimes, it'll involve all sorts of details and dimensions and mapping and so on, and other times, that'll be more about mood, ambiance, and details standing out from the surrounding darkness.

Quote from: Benoist;426840It's really both. The thing is, the information you're conveying by saying "there's a 10-foot wide corridor to your left leaving the room from the center of the wall there" is something that, in RL, your mind grasps in the blink of an eye. Like what kind of distance you are away from someone, how high the ceiling is, and so on, so forth. But you also perceive atmosphere and features, registering unusual elements more readily, precisely because they are out of place.

So it's really not an either/or proposition to me, but something that most often will involve both types of descriptions, or more of one or the other given the actual situation the PCs are in, whether they are running through an area or carefully walking in, etc etc. You can see that in the Ptolus AD&D game.

I think the suggestion that all this information is "needless" according to Ryan really is in the eye of the beholder. It really depends what you actually do when playing the game, and what you actually do when designing your dungeon. The sign that a ceiling is higher up here than it is there, that the corridor is not in the middle of the wall, may be an important clue as to what's going on with the layout of the place. The fact that the corridor is 5-foot wide instead of 10 will tell you how many PCs can stand next to each other and walk through the area with weapons in hand, etc.

What Ryan is basically arguing, sounds like to me is that these aspects of exploration are useless, as is the simulation of the world. I just can't agree to that. Rather than formulating blanket statements of "this is vital" and "this is useless," I think one has to look at how the game itself is played first, and what information is relevant to what types of situations, and how they unfold.

In other word, Ryan's second new-D&D commandment is bullshit, from where I'm standing.

Having detailed information about the dimensions of a room is important if the situation demands it. If you continuously find yourself playing out situations which demand that kind of information and it's consistently numerical, you may have a dull, repetitive game. You can have fights going on where because there are only a small number of combatants involved and there is plenty of space, exact dimensions are not important, at least unless missile weapons are being used. On the other hand, nothing wrong with detailed info if it's pertinent. To me, it's a judgement call for the GM. But if you're going into details of all the dimensions of the room, that would seem to me to be a situation where the use of minis is called for.

Really though, the question of whether you use detailed dimensions or not is such a trivial question. The GM should be able to figure out the answer to that to his satisfaction without guidance from the rules.

Quote from: Omnifray;426844If you continuously find yourself playing out situations which demand that kind of information and it's consistently numerical, you may have a dull, repetitive game.

That's not what I'm saying. Read my previous post above yours.

Quote from: Omnifray;426844Really though, the question of whether you use detailed dimensions or not is such a trivial question. The GM should be able to figure out the answer to that to his satisfaction without guidance from the rules.

D&D is about exploration. This sort of information might actually be critical for your survival, depending on particular circumstances. How much D&D are you playing nowadays, exactly? I'm getting the feeling you're starting to talk about some random XX role playing game instead of D&D. Let's not get all mixed up here. We're talking about D&D specifically.

Quote from: Omnifray;426844Having detailed information about the dimensions of a room is important if the situation demands it. If you continuously find yourself playing out situations which demand that kind of information and it's consistently numerical, you may have a dull, repetitive game. You can have fights going on where because there are only a small number of combatants involved and there is plenty of space, exact dimensions are not important, at least unless missile weapons are being used. On the other hand, nothing wrong with detailed info if it's pertinent. To me, it's a judgement call for the GM. But if you're going into details of all the dimensions of the room, that would seem to me to be a situation where the use of minis is called for.

This has next to nothing to do with combat. The world isn't there to serve the combat rules.

I'm getting the feeling we are "that close" from getting all sorts of rants about how straight dungeon crawling is "boring" and "repetitive" and that "D&D could be so much more interesting if only it had this or that." Yeah. OK. So you want to make D&D into yet another fantasy heartbreaker out there. What a fucking stroke of genius. *shakes head*

Quote from: Cole;426849This has next to nothing to do with combat. The world isn't there to serve the combat rules.

I dunno, I think dimensions are mainly relevant when physical challenges are likely, and the main kind of physical challenge in most games is fighting. OK so there could be rivers to cross, traps to negotiate etc. But I'm not sure how much detail I bother going into with dimensions when there's no physical challenge likely. E.g. the players enter a tavern. I'm not sure I'd often even describe the size of the tavern in abstract terms, let alone its dimensions, unless there's some likelihood of combat. But if combat's likely, one of the players might draw me a map of the tavern*, or I might do it myself if the layout is important.**

* because I'm naff at art
** in the sense that I want it to be a certain way which only I can do

Quote from: Cole;426816What is the 'backwards?' I'm not clear on what you're pointing out.

Sorry, I meant "backwards" in the sense that "modern" D&D's focus on the board is (a) crap (IMNSHO), and (b) taking the game in the opposite direction from one of the fundamental innovations of RPGs, namely: they're not board games.

The same goes for the invocation of "say yes or roll the dice". Again, I don't have the DMG in front of me but there's a passage that clearly advises the GM to use dice to resolve uncertain situations, instead of arbitrarily saying "you can't do that".

If you look beyond D&D, these approaches have been even more widespread, going back to the 1970s. However, they shouldn't be confused with the dogmas of "mechanical conflict resolution", "social combat", or "shared narrative authority".

Quote from: Omnifray;426856I dunno, I think dimensions are mainly relevant when physical challenges are likely, and the main kind of physical challenge in most games is fighting.

I am interested in interacting with an imaginary environment, not a series of "challenges."

Quote from: Benoist;426851I'm getting the feeling we are "that close" from getting all sorts of rants about how straight dungeon crawling is "boring" and "repetitive" and that "D&D could be so much more interesting if only it had this or that." Yeah. OK. So you want to make D&D into yet another fantasy heartbreaker out there. What a fucking stroke of genius. *shakes head*

I play lots of straight dungeon crawls and I do often find them boring and repetitive. Possibly because of how they are DM'd. I used to DM them lots when I was a kid, say aged 14, to about the same standard.

I play lots of games with broader interactive roleplay, and they are far better. Among the kinds of gamers I play with, I think, on the whole, they are more popular. But that's only the kinds of gamer I play with.

I guess I wasn't really just talking about D&D. I was treating Dancey's arguments as levelled at D&D and broadly similar games meaning fantasy TTRPGs where you have broad explorational freedom.

D&D specifically - well, I think it definitely needs a 5th edition, but probably in about 3 years' time, and what that edition should be, commercially, well, fucked if I know - but I'm fairly sure that "narrativist" is NOT the answer. Happy?

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426858Sorry, I meant "backwards" in the sense that "modern" D&D's focus on the board is (a) crap (IMNSHO), and (b) taking the game in the opposite direction from one of the fundamental innovations of RPGs, namely: they're not board games.

Okay. We're definitely on the same page there.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426858The same goes for the invocation of "say yes or roll the dice". Again, I don't have the DMG in front of me but there's a passage that clearly advises the GM to use dice to resolve uncertain situations, instead of arbitrarily saying "you can't do that".

If you look beyond D&D, these approaches have been even more widespread, going back to the 1970s. However, they shouldn't be confused with the dogmas of "mechanical conflict resolution", "social combat", or "shared narrative authority".

I agree. I think mechanical approaches like these need to be weighed carefully against their cost in terms of how much they disrupt or supplant play itself - i.e. player is presented with a situation/environment -> player decides how to react to that situation.

Quote from: Cole;426860I am interested in interacting with an imaginary environment, not a series of "challenges."

Yes, that's a trivial truth for immersionist TTRPGs (although not necessarily for D&D as conceived since 3rd edition); but in building that imaginary environment, numerical dimensions are rarely the most important descriptive element. OK, sometimes they will be - the length of a ship might be important for instance, if you're going to sail on it. But if you're in the town, popping into the tavern for a drink, would you really expect the GM to tell you the detailed layout of the tavern, with dimensions? I'd rather he focused on stuff like the atmosphere, the architecture, the materials that it's built from, the kind of clientele, the ales on offer etc.

Quote from: Omnifray;426865Yes, that's a trivial truth for immersionist TTRPGs (although not necessarily for D&D as conceived since 3rd edition); but in building that imaginary environment, numerical dimensions are rarely the most important descriptive element. OK, sometimes they will be - the length of a ship might be important for instance, if you're going to sail on it. But if you're in the town, popping into the tavern for a drink, would you really expect the GM to tell you the detailed layout of the tavern, with dimensions? I'd rather he focused on stuff like the atmosphere, the architecture, the materials that it's built from, the kind of clientele, the ales on offer etc.

Generally if my character is an interior space I am going to want to know the physical nature of that space. As I have said before it makes the area more concrete and thus more interactable. If he is in an open field or something like that, it is reasonable that the topology might not be as detailed - that is a practical consideration. If he is in a dungeon, a cave, a temple, it is a high priority for me to understand the space concretely in order to interact with it with a kind of freedom. In cases like this dimension is a huge part of this, as a top level perception.

Quote from: Omnifray;426861I play lots of straight dungeon crawls and I do often find them boring and repetitive. Possibly because of how they are DM'd. I used to DM them lots when I was a kid, say aged 14, to about the same standard.

Not "possibly." It certainly is a failure of DMing, and not a failure of the game.

Straight dungeon crawling offers the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of environments, threats, with a wide variety of different entertaining activities (from resource management to cartography to building your company to treasure hunting to straight fighting to solving widely different types of problems and puzzles to interacting with NPCs and other player characters etc etc). If straight dungeon crawling feels boring, then it is a failure of the DM and/or players. Certainly.

In any case, that's what D&D is about at its core: exploration. The voyage down the rabit hole. Beyond the map. In the depths of the Oerth. That's what it is about.

Quote from: Cole;426868Generally if my character is an interior space I am going to want to know the physical nature of that space. As I have said before it makes the area more concrete and thus more interactable. If he is in an open field or something like that, it is reasonable that the topology might not be as detailed - that is a practical consideration. If he is in a dungeon, a cave, a temple, it is a high priority for me to understand the space concretely in order to interact with it with a kind of freedom. In cases like this dimension is a huge part of this, as a top level perception.

Yes, yes!  This is where I'm coming from as well.

Quote from: Cole;426868Generally if my character is an interior space I am going to want to know the physical nature of that space. As I have said before it makes the area more concrete and thus more interactable. If he is in an open field or something like that, it is reasonable that the topology might not be as detailed - that is a practical consideration. If he is in a dungeon, a cave, a temple, it is a high priority for me to understand the space concretely in order to interact with it with a kind of freedom. In cases like this dimension is a huge part of this, as a top level perception.

Just trying to understand here...from a designers take...

At what point do you like to get that type of info (first impression,situation dependent etc.)?

How do you feel about games that intimate the player roll for other sensory perceptions but not spatial ones?

Interactable how...with movement rates,weapon reach,feat use ie. the "rules" or something else...character feelings/expressions or...?

Does "top level perception" actualy tell us exact dimensions or just a general feel for the space and what may be likely?

:hmm:

Quote from: Cole;426860I am interested in interacting with an imaginary environment, not a series of "challenges."

I think this summarizes in one single sentence all that is wrong with the current iterations of the game.

Quote from: Benoist;426881I think this summarizes in one single sentence all that is wrong with the current iterations of the game.

from my limited 4ed. experience I would concur...:)

Quote from: skofflox;426886from my limited 4ed. experience I would concur...:)

Note that I wrote iterationS with an "s." Just to make clear this wasn't 4e-specific. ;)

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426858The same goes for the invocation of "say yes or roll the dice". Again, I don't have the DMG in front of me but there's a passage that clearly advises the GM to use dice to resolve uncertain situations, instead of arbitrarily saying "you can't do that".

If a player wanted to see if a magic crossbow was for sale in a tiny village, I'll happily toss him a D20 and say give me a 20.

So we got a 95% chance that there are no magic crossbows for sale, but I get to be surprised 5% of the time.

It's fun to get surprised by dice.

Quote from: Spinachcat;426888If a player wanted to see if a magic crossbow was for sale in a tiny village, I'll happily toss him a D20 and say give me a 20.

So we got a 95% chance that there are no magic crossbows for sale, but I get to be surprised 5% of the time.

It's fun to get surprised by dice.

Would rolling a 00 on d% be more appropriate for something like this?

Quote from: RSDancey;426758Players get automatic information about the world they inhabit, provided it would be reasonable to assume they're alert to that knowledge.

Generally your point is accurate but the examples are horrendous. Any referee who omitted the obvious overhead webs and the pile of refuse in the center is doing a poor job. The DMG guide example (either one) is a poor example in this regard. The 3.X example can be excused because it is a direct homage of the original example.

On the other hand there are several modules I know of for AD&D 1st that have overly long room descriptions. Really really long. I agree that concise, terse, description that only contain what the players absolutely need is a virtue.

Your first part is that the players get automatic information about the world they inhabit. HOW do they get this information? They can't mind read the referee so the only alternative is for the referee to describe it. Otherwise it effectively doesn't exist.

If you relying on the players to ask about it then you just turned encounters into a game of 20 questions which is what will happened after the first few times with this system.

Which leads to the problem of assumptions. Different people assume different things. If you don't include any spatial description then how they will know it is a large, small or medium size room?

The solution is to teach referees how to make good descriptions.

As for me I am of the school that a picture is worth a thousand words. I use a dry erase battlemat and have a small box of furniture/prop by me. I developed a patter that has me drawing and describing at the same time. For certain common situation I have a tube of mats that i just throw out. Like a forest, road, etc.

I refined this to the point where the players don't have to play twenty questions with me about the encounter and it gets laid out in a minute or two.  Things like Dwarven forge and many of Wizard's Dungeon Tiles are not used unless I have something already done before the session and laid aside.

The point of this is to illustrate there other methods of shrinking the description phase of an encounter.

I would be interested to know if you have any actual play account of doing this while refereeing a dungeon crawl.

Quote from: ggroy;426890Would rolling a 00 on d% be more appropriate for something like this?

I'm sure if the player keeps asking in every village, the GM is going to start asking for %ile dice or even d1000. Same if it's not a +1 crossbow but a +5 crossbow, +10 against lycanthropes.

Actually, in those situations, I'd probably ask the player to rephrase the question in more general terms (or rephrase it silently on the fly) so that there might be a crossbow, or a sword, or whatever. Or, in D&D terms, you could just have a Treasure Table letter associated with a given size settlement.

But those are just ways of regularizing something if it turns into more than a one-off. If the question doesn't arise very often, then the exact percentages don't have to be very precise.

Quote from: estar;426901The solution is to teach referees how to make good descriptions.

Bingo. Again.

Quote from: John Morrow;426649Basically, D&D 3e was designed to appeal in certain ways I think the evidence shows that it succeeded at those goals.

I think it's major virtue over previous editions of D&D was the ability to create and advance customized characters. Unified XP Charts, Feats for variable class/character abilities, prestige classes, etc were all brilliant in combating what always been the #1 reason, in my experience, for people to try other fantasy RPGs. The ability to customize their character through game mechanics.

Quote from: John Morrow;426649I do think there is value is trying to give people what they want, especially if you are talking about managing a market leader like D&D rather than designing small press independent games.  That's the perspective Ryan is talking about -- where D&D should go, not where all games should go.  And as something of a gatekeeper for the hobby, I think that D&D attracting the largest audience possible is good for the hobby as a whole.

That the second part of what I said earlier. The owner of D&D implements it for the widest possible audience using the core game as a foundation. Swords & Wizardry, Core Rules is a very simple version of D&D. Majestic Wilderlands implement S&W for my setting and it is no where near as simple.

The Core game can remain evergreen like Monopoly or clue and every edition cycle a new implementation is releasing taking the interests of current gamers into account.

For example a very simple form of 3.X could have been released that downplays the multi-class options just has fighter, rogue, wizard, and cleric, preselected feats and a slimmed down monsters and treasure list.  

Quote from: John Morrow;426649Timeless perfection isn't going to happen, even if it's a worthy goal to shoot for.

With circumstances the way they where there was no viable path other than what had happened. D&D was a fad, editions took hold, and so on. But knowing what we know now I don't see why an evergreen edition of D&D can't be produced.

Quote from: John Morrow;426649how does one quickly teach players to be a good referee and make subjective judgments about what should happen and how to make the game good for their players if they start out not knowing how to do that?

I don't have all the answer. I can only really tell you how to make good maps and how to create a sandbox fantasy campaign. In a year I may have more specifics. Right now it more of a general idea guiding my specific projects. It may gell into something more overall coherent. But I suspect given the diversity of what RPGs can handle that it will be largely as series of If you want to do X then doing A, B, and C will accomplish that.

Quote from: Benoist;426908Bingo. Again.

Also note there will be multiple answer that depend on the abilities of the referee. I was an early adopter of miniatures because I am deaf and had a lisp so.... a picture worth a thousand words was indicated my case. I played under referees who great at verbal description only and other that went the full dwarven forge route.

Quote from: RSDancey;426725"Say yes, or roll dice".

But I want the GM to say "no".  Seriously.  We just had a huge thread where I talked about that.  I don't want to know that just asking about something will make it possible if not likely that it will automatically exist.  That said:

Quote from: RSDancey;426725That gets rid of the DM fiat fears that so many players have.  Either they get to do what they want, or, they have some chance of doing what they want decided impartially.  I've seen this in action so many times where a heated argument can be utterly subdued by just naming a number and telling someone to roll a die.  It cuts through the bullshit like a hot knife through butter.

...I do think it can be a legitimate way to resolve a dispute where both sides have a point and it could go either way.  But that's not really the problem I have and we already do that to some degree.

The problem is not only assumption clash with the GM but between players.  And there is more to it that that.  The rules provide an objective physics for the game that everyone can count on and plan with and that avoids another problem I've seen: a game of 20 questions with the GM every time the player wants to do something to define the boundaries.  If I know my movement rate, damage, and so on, I don't have to ask the GM how far my character can move, whether his sword can hurt the guard wearing chainmail, what it means to run across a patch of ice, and so on.  I don't need the GM to "Say 'yes' or roll dice".  I don't need to consult the GM at all.  

Let me digress for a moment here on a problem I've seen that I don't think a lot of people notice.  Many games involve putting the PCs into an unfamiliar situation so that they have to investigate and make a lot of decisions based on little or no information about the big picture, including Dogs in the Vineyard.  GMs and game authors like that approach because it keeps the players off guard and puts the GM squarely in control.  But the problem is that for players and their characters to make meaningful decisions, they need to understand what they are doing and what their choices mean.  And for that reason, I prefer games that revolve around places that the PCs know.  When my group plays in the Champions Hudson City setting, we know it well enough that we can say where we go to eat or buy a new flashlight or talk about which neighborhoods we investigate and so on because we know the setting.  The GM doesn't have to lead us along.

At a very basic level, rules as physics work the same way.  They let the players understand what various situations mean and what various choices might do in the game without having to consult the GM or other players, without having to get confirmation or approval that they are right, and without having to ask the GM a lot of questions or roll dice to make it so.  If I have a good sense of what my character can do, I can make meaningful and sound decisions about what they do.  If everything is fluid, every choice is pending a consultation with the GM, even if he or she is saying "yes" or rolling the dice, because they can always roll the dice.

Quote from: RSDancey;426725DMs get one caveat:  They can, at any time, stop an action if they feel that it will damage the integrity of the game or that it is damaging the integrity of the group.

How about approaching it from a different direction?  Instead of assuming that the GM has to say "yes" or roll dice, if the GM says "no", they can spend a point that either lets them roll the dice or the GM has to figure out a plausible way for it to be so, subject to your caveat above.  Because, seriously, I'm not interested in the feel of "Say 'yes' or roll" and I'm pretty sure that a lot of the casual players I've played with over the years, many of which look to the GM to guide them through an interesting story and don't ask a lot of questions, aren't looking for that, either.

Quote from: RSDancey;426725"Say yes, or roll dice".

I'm going to "amend and expand" on what I said here.

I think allowing a die roll to resolve an uncertainty is excellent GMing advice and I'll go further than that.  When I GM, I often roll a die and interpret it using high = good for the PCs and low = bad for the PCs.  So if the players ask if they can buy pizza in a town, a very high roll might mean that they find an award winning "Famous Ray's" on every corner and a very low roll might mean that there is no pizza anywhere.  Steve Jackson gave similar advice in the original GURPS rules ("When in doubt, roll and shout!").

The problem I have with "Say 'yes' or roll dice" is that (A) sometimes "no" really should just be "no" (not only because it doesn't make sense for the setting but because the GM has planned that detail out and knows the answer), (B) I don't want or expect the queries of the players to automatically bring things into existence in the game, and (C) rolling dice is more complicated than the GM just giving an answer.  So I'd put the advice this way:

If the GM doesn't already know the answer to a question or have a good reason to say "yes" or "no", they should roll dice.

Not as militant as "Say 'yes' or roll dice" and accomplishes pretty much the same thing.

Quote from: RSDancey;426758Rule #2 for design of NewD&D:

The description of place given to players will be as minimal as possible to allow them to act within reason.

I'm good with this in theory, if not practice.  I think it's better as advice rather than a hard rule and some players are going to be more spatial than others, but shooting for sparse evocative details rather than precision dimensions is good advice.

Quote from: RSDancey;426758Also, let's add a corallary to the 2nd rule:

Players get automatic information about the world they inhabit, provided it would be reasonable to assume they're alert to that knowledge.

The way I see the two interacting is that the players get the basic description you talk about above and then have to spend time or make perception rolls if they want details.  If they want to look into the web, then they need to spend a round or two looking at it with a torch or make a quick perception roll to see what they spot.  The reason why a player should have to make a roll is simple to me, and often ignored by designers of sparse and abstract rules: timing and uncertainty.

The players see a web above them in the room.  Maybe they are reasonably sure it contains some giant spiders but is it wise to just assume it does and torch it or attack into it or should they take the time and be sure, for example, that there isn't a half-dead NPC wrapped up in there somewhere or a delicate scroll stuck in the web.  I think that decision is important, to act without full information or take the time to get the information but perhaps lose initiative or be surprised as a consequence.  The way I'd normally do that is that the PCs would notice the web.  If they want more information, they can spend one or more rounds staring in the web or they can ask to make a perception roll (or whatever passes for one in the game) to see what they can notice with a casual glance.  In other words, they don't notice it automatically, may notice it for "free" (from a timing perspective) with a perception roll, an will notice it if they spend the time to look carefully.

Going back to your earlier suggestions, the GM provides a sparse first glance description of the room that includes the web (something you'd easily notice) but not the spiders (hiding in the web).  If the players ask if there are spiders in the web, they've got two choice.  They can spend a moment staring into the web (the equivalent of a d20 "take 20" event) or they can roll the dice to see if they notice it with their glance around the room.  That's basically "Say 'yes' or roll dice."

By the way, Ryan, don't take my disagreements with you as harsh criticism.  I'm trying to test your ideas and see if they are necessary or could be made better if handled a bit differently (e.g., in the case of "Say 'yes' or roll dice" by stating it less militantly).  Overall, I think this is an interesting and constructive discussion and I'm interested to see where you go with this, even if I don't always agree with you or it doesn't mesh well with how I play.

ADDED:  I don't expect you to "Say 'yes' or roll dice". ;)  You can say "no" and move on to the next step of your argument.

Quote from: John Morrow;426917I think allowing a die roll to resolve an uncertainty is excellent GMing advice and I'll go further than that.  When I GM, I often roll a die and interpret it using high = good for the PCs and low = bad for the PCs.  So if the players ask if they can buy pizza in a town, a very high roll might mean that they find an award winning "Famous Ray's" on every corner and a very low roll might mean that there is no pizza anywhere.  Steve Jackson gave similar advice in the original GURPS rules ("When in doubt, roll and shout!").

A digression: you're misremembering that bit of the GURPS GMing advice. What it basically said was, if you (the GM) don't have a way of resolving things, including a preplanned outcome for an anticipated course of action by the PCs, then roll some dice as a cover for your made-up-on-the-spot improvisation. The text is on p. 181 of my copy of 3e; it's also an italicized item in the table of contents under Ch. 21, Game Mastering. In 4e Campaigns, it's on my p. 497, and in the TOC in Ch. 18.

If we don't want to use specific positioning, range or distance, how do we convey the size of a space?

Qualitative sizes, not quantitative sizes.

Cramped:  4 human-sized characters could squeeze in, but they couldn't do much.

Small:  Up to 8 human-sized characters could occupy the space, but combat would be hand-to-hand if a fight broke out.

Large:  The space could have tens of human-sized characters, and movement would be necessary to close to hand-to-hand range.

Expansive:  Size is unlikely to be an issue regardless of the number of characters.  Movement may require more than one turn (or several) to engage opponents in hand-to-hand combat.

...  more to follow ...

Quote from: RSDancey;426935If we don't want to use specific positioning, range or distance, how do we convey the size of a space?

Qualitative sizes, not quantitative sizes.

Cramped:  4 human-sized characters could squeeze in, but they couldn't do much.

Small:  Up to 8 human-sized characters could occupy the space, but combat would be hand-to-hand if a fight broke out.

Large:  The space could have tens of human-sized characters, and movement would be necessary to close to hand-to-hand range.

Expansive:  Size is unlikely to be an issue regardless of the number of characters.  Movement may require more than one turn (or several) to engage opponents in hand-to-hand combat.

...  more to follow ...

These sound like pretty good rules of thumb to use in case of doubt. But in many situations it seems like it would be easier to just know the actual space than refer to a game construct.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426929A digression: you're misremembering that bit of the GURPS GMing advice. What it basically said was, if you (the GM) don't have a way of resolving things, including a preplanned outcome for an anticipated course of action by the PCs, then roll some dice as a cover for your made-up-on-the-spot improvisation. The text is on p. 181 of my copy of 3e; it's also an italicized item in the table of contents under Ch. 21, Game Mastering. In 4e Campaigns, it's on my p. 497, and in the TOC in Ch. 18.

I always interpreted that as using the dice to produce the improvisation.  Maybe I'm wrong, then.

Quote from: John Morrow;426916... I don't want to know that just asking about something will make it possible if not likely that it will automatically exist.  ...

Exactly.

If you have a "say yes, or roll dice" principle of narrativist bullsh... er, narrative truth, then it detracts from the sense of a pre-existing fleshed out game-world, the sense of the unknown and the element of mystery in the game-world because the players can bring things into existence by asking for them. More fundamentally, if as Dancey suggests the ref's only get-out is "if it will damage the integrity of the game", then (assuming the players know the rules that the ref is playing by) as soon as the ref activates that get-out, the players know that whatever they've asked for would be game-breaking. In the right circumstances that could be really damaging to the game.

For instance, the big bad menacing your village is a vampire who can only be killed with a consecrated stake - but you don't know that. You're in a small village and the only priest was killed by bandits before the vampire arrived (in fact, the resulting lack of holy worship in the village attracted the vampire). The nearest priest is a hermit who can be reached through a murky forest, or you can take a safer route to find one in the nearest city. This will present you with a dilemma - take an extra risk to your lives for a chance to save every possible villager by having the stake ready before nightfall, or take the long route, knowing a few villagers will likely die that night but you will be able to deal with the vampire when you get back. In the meantime you have to figure out that the consecrated stake is needed which provides an opportunity for roleplay with the villagers, investigation of the priest's notes, use of magical divinations or whatever.

Now the ref isn't railroady, and he's prepared for you to abandon the villagers to their fate and explore the murky woods, or to try to devise your own holy ritual to consecrate a stake, which would require you to make promises to an angel, or indeed to confront the vampire ignorant of what's needed to kill it, in which case most of you will probably escape alive when it becomes evident the vampire cannot be killed. But the absence of a consecrated stake is pretty critical if you want to take on the vampire and not knowing about it is fairly critical if you want a meaningful reason to investigate, roleplay etc. around that aspect.

A player whose character maybe has some notion that legends speak of ancient vampires who can only be killed in specific ways, and who thinks that maybe the possiblities might include garlic from the Forest of the Orcs, decapitation with a sword forged of bronze at noon on the summer solstice in the full light of the sun or a consecrated stake, figures the priest might possibly have consecrated a stake and asks the GM for one.

If you apply Dancey's qualified principle of narrativist whatever ("say yes, or roll dice - unless it would damage the integrity of the game"), the ref has 3 choices:-

1. nullify a whole load of stuff he had planned out by just handing over the stake
2. risk nullifying a whole load of stuff he had planned out by giving the players a dice-roll to get the stake
3. refuse to apply the principle of narrativist bullshit, thus revealing that the absence of the consecrated stake is something he considers fundamental to the integrity of the game (even though it's plainly believable that there could possibly be one), meaning that the players can infer that the consecrated stake is in fact what's needed to kill the vampire.

In other words, how to fuck up your game in one easy step.

Quote from: RSDancey;426935If we don't want to use specific positioning, range or distance, how do we convey the size of a space?

Qualitative sizes, not quantitative sizes.

Cramped:  4 human-sized characters could squeeze in, but they couldn't do much.

Small:  Up to 8 human-sized characters could occupy the space, but combat would be hand-to-hand if a fight broke out.

Large:  The space could have tens of human-sized characters, and movement would be necessary to close to hand-to-hand range.

Expansive:  Size is unlikely to be an issue regardless of the number of characters.  Movement may require more than one turn (or several) to engage opponents in hand-to-hand combat.

...  more to follow ...

I often say stuff like "it's big enough that you can all fit in there, but there won't be much room for moving around". I don't think it's helpful to make the players learn terminology such as Cramped, Small, Large or Expansive, but I guess it's a question of taste and I could be wrong on that.

Brian Gleichman writes about this thread on his blog (http://whitehall-paraindustries.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-mighty-have-fallen-r-dancey.html), making some valid points about what we do and don't have data for.

Quote from: John Morrow;427149Brian Gleichman writes about this thread on his blog (http://whitehall-paraindustries.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-mighty-have-fallen-r-dancey.html), making some valid points about what we do and don't have data for.

He's got the right of it.

Quote from: RSDancey;426404This was without question one of the most surprising results of the survey.  It doesn't segment.  And it's not central to the experience.  People talk about it until they're blue in the face, but what actually happened is that when a virtual game experience came along where most people play alone and can't see (and often can't hear) their companions, well, they had no problem whatsoever embracing it.

The physical aspects of gaming are vastly over-rated.  In fact, my pet theory is that they're actually a band-aid on how challenging the hobby is to engage with.  Many people who might have given it up in frustration or disappointment kept playing because they just liked hanging out with their friends.  But when a better format came along, they switched, and found other ways to socialize.  Anyone who thinks that social contact is a unique value proposition of tabletop games has to question why people's actual behavior doesn't seem to back that up.

In fact, the MMO network is actually much more focused on community than the TRPG audience.  TRPG networks rarely extend to more than a dozen people or so (but there are many links to other networks).  MMO networks rarely have less than a hundred.  In EVE, there are multi-thousand person organizations.  This sense of larger community is actually more social and more likely to produce off-line friendships than the tighter knit, smaller TRPG network.  Its extremely attractive to people with poor social skills but who crave social contact.  Plus, it's where the girls are.

BTW:  TRPG theorists are not the only ones to make this mistake.  The Poker community never thought on-line play would ever become significant; there's no way to use body language skills to deduce strategy, its easy to cheat, collusion is rampant, and "people like to see who they're playing with", etc.  Turns out, not so much - on-line play offers people a play-anywhere, play any time, easily trackable, anonymous, "don't have to go to a scary casino full of scary poker pros" experience that was a better fit for many people than live casino games ever were.

Ya know, I've thought about this some more, and I'm going to rephrase Dancey's argument in terms more familiar to non-RPGers.

Once upon a time, before the Big Bad World Wide Web (and long before the days of Emmanuelle in Space), people used to enjoy natural sex. Now, we've identified 8 key components of what they enjoyed:-

* Attractive Individuals and Exciting Events / Strong Characters, Good Story
* Role Playing / Expressions of Affection
* New Positions / Complexity Increases over Time
* Requires Creativity / Strategic Thinking
* Comparisons with Ex-Lovers and Fantasised Lovers / Competitive
* Accessories / New Partners / Add-ons / New Versions available
* Uses imagination
* Emotionally and/or Mentally and/or Physiologically/Physically challenging

All these 8 key components are also now present in Internet Porn including Dodgy Chatrooms and Webcam Cybersex. It turns out that people who enjoy[ed] natural sex segment into five kinds of people:-

* Power Gamers - want to treat their partners like sex objects RIGHT NOW
* Thinkers - want to outplay their partners in the Game of Lurrve
* Character Actors - like to play a role
* Storytellers - like to see their relationship progress, forming a narrative
* generalists (a bit of everything)

Now, it turns out that Power Gamers are obviously far better suited to Internet Porn. How much easier to treat your partner like an object if they are a picture / video that can play at your command?

Character Actors too are better suited to the anonymity of Internet Porn specifically Dodgy Chatsites where they can roleplay without inhibition.

People often talk about how they like the face-to-face human aspect of natural sex, but when we examined it in the study, it didn't cluster!

Despite all their claims to like the face-to-face human aspect of natural sex, it turns out that people flocked to Internet Porn in their billions, underpinning the development of the Internet and modern commerce, all thanks to porn.

It must follow from this that the face-to-face human aspect of natural sex does not actually influence people's behaviour and can be disregarded!

We can also safely say that the only Character Actors and Power Gamers who still indulge in natural sex are dinosaur throwbacks nostalgic for an earlier age, and that if they knew what they really enjoy and understood what Internet Porn now has to offer with its superb graphics which will blow their minds, they would realise that it is far better suited to them, because they are fundamentally wankers!

Natural sex continues to provide the best outlet for Thinkers and Storytellers because:-

for Thinkers, what is the point of figuring out some highly detailed set of sexual and romantic manoeuverings in the context of Internet Porn if some 18 year old from Des Moines Iowa has already done it and posted a full home-video of how to do it?

for Storytellers, as Internet relationships (especially fixations upon pornstars) are currently transient and ephemeral, natural sex continues to provide the best context for a developing relationship.

However I can safely predict that by 2020 all these things will work better via Internet Porn than via natural sex.

=======================================================

Just in case anyone missed it, the non sequitur is in jumping from the observation that people DO like Internet Porn despite the fact that it doesn't offer natural human contact in a face-to-face way, to the conclusion that people's behaviour is NOT actually influenced by liking natural human contact in a face-to-face way during sex.

In exactly the same way, the fact that Dancey's mates were surprised to discover that people who reported liking face-to-face interaction in TTRPGs were in fact happy to play MMOs - that fact does NOT demonstrate that these same people will NOT make an effort to play TTRPGs with actual face-to-face interaction. So, there you have it.

PS just for the record, I am not trying to equate TTRPGs with actual sex here. Clearly, for most adults, sex is a more intimate, more enjoyable act. Just in case you were wondering! And, obviously, I'm willing to play TTRPGs with many, many people who I would never consider having sex with. I'm not sure whether the reverse applies, but I guess it probably does.

Quote from: Omnifray;427268Ya know, I've thought about this some more, and I'm going to rephrase Dancey's argument in terms more familiar to non-RPGers.

:rotfl:

You sir, you win the internets.

:hatsoff:

Quote from: RyanDSay yes, or roll dice.

Quote from: John Morrow;426916But I want the GM to say "no".

In this case, I'm scoping this advice to what the players want to do in the space where the encounter occurs.

The Big Fear players have is that DMs will make it impossible for them to do the clever things they want to do.  So they ask for detailed architectural drawings of the spaces their characters inhabit so as to minimize the potential for being shut down by the DM.

In a D&D with no specific positioning, having such a map doesn't help.  So we would then enter a world where players would be constantly over-cautious, playing repetitive games of 20 questions with DMs as they explore options, and try to understand what the DM will and will not let them do.

So free the game from this constraint.  Let them do anything reasonable.  Allow them to dice for anything even remotely possible.  And only stop them if they've gone off the deep end into irrational territory.

I would extend this advice to include the definition of the space.  Allow them to help create the world their characters inhabit.

In the example used in this thread (a square room with 4 exits, with extensive webbing concealing the ceiling, and a pile of spider-leavings in the center of the room), here are some things that players could just "edit" into the encounter if they wished:

* A handful of dust from the floor
* Unidentifiable bits of cloth, bone, hair, or insect debris

Here are some examples I'd require dice to edit into the encounter:

* A partially burned torch
* A suitable object (old crate, enough pieces of broken masonry to make a pile, etc.) large enough to stand on and allow a character to reach the webbing

Here are some examples of things I'd refuse to allow to be edited in to the encounter by the players:

* A vial of spider anti-venom
* Dwarven runes carved into the rock saying "set the webs on fire"

I want to talk about player editing a lot more but this is not the message to do it in.  I'll close by saying that most of the time, if the players have no fear about their ability to act rationally, they won't obsess about having a precise knowledge of the encounter space.  

The more you force them to care, the more they'll care. So don't make them care.

RyanD

Quote from: Omnifray;427268Ya know, I've thought about this some more, and I'm going to rephrase Dancey's argument in terms more familiar to non-RPGers.

Let me convert this back into reality.

We have a group of people in 1999 who like a thing.  We study that group and find they all like a core part of the thing.  We also find that 4 groups of people within the main group especially like 4 different parts of the thing.

In 2010, another product comes along that offers that group the same core parts.  And it offers 2 of those sub-groups a better experience with the additional parts they like best.

We know that the new thing doesn't do a great job of offering one of the sub-groups the parts that it really likes.  We also know that the new thing is neutral at best (and possibly worse) in the things that another one of the sub-groups likes best.

We see the number of people engaged with the first thing going down over time.  We see the number of people engaged with the new thing going up over time.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect correlation to causation in this case.

RyanD

Quote from: RSDancey;427370The Big Fear players have is that DMs will make it impossible for them to do the clever things they want to do.  So they ask for detailed architectural drawings of the spaces their characters inhabit so as to minimize the potential for being shut down by the DM.

Come play with any of the groups I've had over the years and you will not find this "Big Fear" (nor a desire for detailed maps/descriptions of everything) -- and without any GM authority killing nonsense like "Say Yes or roll the dice". Yes, I realize that some players fear bad GMs because they have had them, but I refuse to hamstring myself to cater to them. Players who can't live with the GM saying "no" or with a GM who regularly uses Rule Zero can find another game to play in.

I understand that from an industry POV, getting rid of Rule Zero and adding "Say Yes or roll the dice" type GM restrictions is probably seen as a good thing as it expands the pool of people willing to purchase the product to all of those who have suffered through bad GMs and think all GMs are bad. However, these type of "rule fixes for bad GMs" are making the hobby not fun for average GMs, let alone for good GMs. While these types of rules may be good for the industry in the short term, they are bad for the hobby. They are probably bad for the industry in the long term as well as they drive out most of the good GMs (who either quit GMing completely or just stop buying and GMing current industry product with its "hamstring the GM" rules).

QuoteIn a D&D with no specific positioning, having such a map doesn't help.  So we would then enter a world where players would be constantly over-cautious, playing repetitive games of 20 questions with DMs as they explore options, and try to understand what the DM will and will not let them do.

I never use specific positioning and that seldom happens in my games. Usually only when a new player has ignored my handout describing how we play and decided to play anyway in the hope of forcing the group to play his way -- which never works as I am not afraid say "no."

QuoteHere are some examples I'd require dice to edit into the encounter:

* A partially burned torch
* A suitable object (old crate, enough pieces of broken masonry to make a pile, etc.) large enough to stand on and allow a character to reach the webbing

This would make some styles of play hard to near-impossible. For example, "puzzles" that require various innocent-looking items to be found and gathered from other places to be able to do something. Yes, many players HATE such things, but some players/player groups love them. The rules for generic games like D&D should not nerf play styles, especially when the game system previously allowed them. Nerfing many "less common in the eyes of the designers/marketers" play styles is one of the reasons 4e splintered the D&D market. (IMHO, this was bad for the hobby even if it really was good for WOTC's profits.)

Quote from: RSDancey;427370The Big Fear players have is that DMs will make it impossible for them to do the clever things they want to do.  

What is this assertion based on? And how much of a problem is it?

My own opinion is that it exists but it not prevalent because of the social nature of RPG groups either lead to the group telling the DM to quit being a dick or vote with their feet.

Another source of the issue is that a player refusing to play by the rules and keeps trying to playing some other game and leave the group bad mouthing the DM for not letting him do what he wants to do.

In short this is an issue that can't be fixed as long there are human beings playing tabletop RPGs. But it not a serious or major issue because of how human beings interact as a group.

Quote from: RSDancey;427370Here are some examples I'd require dice to edit into the encounter:

* A partially burned torch
* A suitable object (old crate, enough pieces of broken masonry to make a pile, etc.) large enough to stand on and allow a character to reach the webbing

I find your explanation is too verbose and frames it in unnecessary terms born of the Forge type theories.

It is quite sufficient to say something like

--------------------------------------

It is good practice for a referee to assume that players can find common items that plausibly would be found in a room even it not described in it's initial description. Uncommon items can be assigned a chance to be found after a search by the players.

The reason for this is that it is rarely possible to describe every last detail of a room. Even when possible it is usually time consuming and slows the pace of the game down.  

If this is not the current practice in your group you may want to explicitly say for a few encounters that players are free to assume that common items can be found along with a chance for uncommon items. This will get the players comfortable with assuming things and by the second and third session will become second nature.

There still could be rooms that doesn't have anything other than what is described. However this should done rarely or the players will quit assuming  and start asking for fuller descriptions and slowing the game down.

The classic example of this effect is the Tomb of Horrors from TSR when a group encounters it for the first time. Invariably after the first hallway the first time group will ask for full descriptions of 10' squares and spend time checking each 10' square. The pace of the game considerably slow down. While for the Tomb of Horrors this effect is intended in other tabletop situation it would be undesirable to spend this much time on description.
-------------------------------------------------------------

No hint of theory, no general "Say yes or roll" rule. A advice that is aimed as a specific aspect of tabletop play. That of keeping the game moving at a nice pace and to minimize the time the referee need to give a description. The referee see why it is given and make a decision to use it or not to best fit his game.

Quote from: estar;427386I find your explanation is too verbose and frames it in unnecessary terms born of the Forge type theories.

It is quite sufficient to say something like...

Yeah that was less robust.  Not.

Virtually nobody outside a small group of insiders has any clue what you mean when you say "Forge type theories", and a big portion of those who do don't have a negative reaction to them.

You're wasting time & energy concerning yourself with such trivia.

RyanD

This has little to do with the ideological camp of the forge or broadly, theoretical concerns at all. But it's not furthering discussion or understanding to dismiss players' preference in playstyles by attributing their disagreement with you to some kind of imaginary party affiliation.

I am curious about the origin of the Big Fear principle. Did the 1999 survey indicated that many players worried that the DM tended to curtail player action by limiting the environment?

I object to player 'editing' of the environment as the solution to the supposed "Big Fear" issue because it's very damaging to my enjoyment of the primary action of play. As a player, if I am in an enviroment, I want to be able to treat that enviroment as if it were a real one, and interact with it through my character. This is largely undone if player choice can edit the enviroment through my insistence or dice rolls (or those of the player of another PC.) To interact with the imaginary environment as if it were real, I need to be able to interact with it through the PC - a part of that world, not being required to manipulate the world as a player at the table in order to accomplish tasks. If the world has to be "edited" by my player decision, I lose the ability to treat it as real and to add insult to injury my choices lose their impact within the game.

I feel this is cheating me of most of the body of play.

Even if the "big fear" really is a problem on the order of what Ryan suggests, and I am skeptical, in my opinion the cure is worse than the disease. This is especially the case since there are simpler, more straightforward, less elaborate solutions - all it takes is for the DM to be reasonable and flexible in making his rulings against the background of the imaginary environment, and for the action of play to be, as it is at the best tables, open-ended and not demanding of a fixed out come. This is actually easier and less work intensive.

There is no reason for the players to have any kind of fear that reasonable action will be curtailed unless some agenda other than play itself is given primacy. Unfortunately (and often in the name of story) published advice in D&D, especially in the 2e era but not at all excised from 3e to 4e suggests the opposite, causing big headaches and contention all around. D&D is a game of cooperation. To what extent problems of the players being curtailed exist, they are artificial ones that are not implicit in traditional D&D play. The solution to locking yourself inside the house isn't to develop a system to work with a home-bound life. It's just to stop locking yourself inside the house.

Quote from: RSDancey;427370The Big Fear players have is that DMs will make it impossible for them to do the clever things they want to do.  So they ask for detailed architectural drawings of the spaces their characters inhabit so as to minimize the potential for being shut down by the DM.

That's not my experience.  My experience is that it's impossible to do anything clever if you don't understand the spaces the character is in.  It's working with your circumstances and resources to solve a problem, not guessing how you could possibly solve the problem and then wishing the resources into existence.  What you are describing is akin to this:

Quote from: The Princess BrideINIGO: Let me explain -- No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Buttercup is marrying Humperdinck in a little less than half an hour, so all we have to do is get in, break up the wedding, steal the Princess, make our escape after I kill Count Rugen.

WESTLEY: That doesn't leave much time for dilly dallying.

FEZZIK: You've just wiggled your finger. That's wonderful.

WESTLEY: I've always been a quick healer. What are our liabilities?

INIGO: There is but one working castle gate.  And it is guarded by sixty men.

WESTLEY: And our assets?

INIGO: Your brains, Fezzik's strength, my steel.

WESTLEY: That's it? Impossible. If I had a month to plan, maybe I could come up with something. But this...

FEZZIK: You just shook your head -- that doesn't make you happy?

WESTLEY: My brains, his steel, and your strength against sixty men, and you think a little head jiggle is supposed to make me happy? I mean, if we only had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.

INIGO: Where did we put that wheelbarrow the Albino had?

FEZZIK: Over the Albino, I think.

WESTLEY: Well, why didn't you list that among our assets in the first place? What I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak.

INIGO: There we cannot help you.

FEZZIK: Will this do?

INIGO: Where did you get that?

FEZZIK: At Miracle Max's. It fit so nice, he said I could keep it.

WESTLEY: All right, all right. Come on, help me up.

(You can watch the scene here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yokQ0_8__ts).)

It's a great movie and a great scene but it's also funny because it's absurd, particularly when Fezzik pulls out the holocaust cloak.  But that's exactly where "Say 'yes' or roll dice" can lead.   Ask for something -- anything -- and it can magically appear without explanation.  In the movie, Fezzik provides an explanation for why a holocaust cloak just happens to be available but who is responsible for explaining that in the game?  The GM?  A player?  How plausible do they have to make the explanation?

This is also now how I think most people approach most situations.  They do what Westley starts the scene doing, taking stock of their liabilities and assets and then figure out a way to use the assets to overcome the liabilities to reach their objective.  That approach requires the GM to lay out the liabilities and assets so that the players can be make choices about how to deal with their liabilities with the assets on hand.  Yes, that can lead to speculative questions but those questions should not have the power to create the possible existence of things that really have no business being there.

If you are paying the game from an omnipotent perspective, it probably isn't all that much of a difference, but if you are playing the game from the character's perspective or even by thinking in character, it's a huge difference and it's a huge difference if verisimilitude matters.  And as I mentioned above, if questions such as wondering if anyone has a holocaust cloaks can magically create, by the wonders of "yes" or a die roll, the existence of a cloak that nobody remembers buying or having, who is responsible for explaining the sudden appearance of that item?

Quote from: RSDancey;427370In a D&D with no specific positioning, having such a map doesn't help.  So we would then enter a world where players would be constantly over-cautious, playing repetitive games of 20 questions with DMs as they explore options, and try to understand what the DM will and will not let them do.

It's not simply what the GM will or will not let them do but what's possible in the situation.  If there are no limits, then anything and everything becomes possible.  And far from making the players be clever about solving problems with what they have at hand, it can quickly become a game of asking about what's there until the GM says yes or the dice come up with that wheelbarrow and holocaust cloak that lets the players solve the problem the way they want.

Quote from: RSDancey;427370So free the game from this constraint.  Let them do anything reasonable.  Allow them to dice for anything even remotely possible.  And only stop them if they've gone off the deep end into irrational territory.

To a large degree, that's reasonable but that's not "Say 'yes' or roll dice".  It also ignores the possibility that the GM may have the situation planned out well enough that they know what all the assets and liabilities are without rolling.  So, again, I think the advice should be (with a change at the end):

If the GM doesn't already know the answer to a question or have a good reason to say "yes" or "no", they should roll dice or just say "yes".

Quote from: RSDancey;427370I would extend this advice to include the definition of the space.  Allow them to help create the world their characters inhabit.

What if the players don't want to do that?  In a previous thread, I stated that, as a player, I do not want narrative control.  I don't want to help create the world my characters inhabit.  I don't create the world around me.  I want to play my character as if they were a real person in that setting.  

Quote from: RSDancey;427370In the example used in this thread (a square room with 4 exits, with extensive webbing concealing the ceiling, and a pile of spider-leavings in the center of the room), here are some things that players could just "edit" into the encounter if they wished:

* A handful of dust from the floor
* Unidentifiable bits of cloth, bone, hair, or insect debris

Normally, that might work but the GM might have good reason to say "no" to either of those things.  For example, perhaps the GM has a small gelatinous cube or slime roaming the dungeon that cleans up the dust and organic debris on the floor and the GM wants the players to notice the absence of such material as a clue.  That's also spoiled by the idea of automatically giving the the players clues without rolls or being asked about them.

Quote from: RSDancey;427370Here are some examples I'd require dice to edit into the encounter:

* A partially burned torch
* A suitable object (old crate, enough pieces of broken masonry to make a pile, etc.) large enough to stand on and allow a character to reach the webbing

Again, this can work but I can also imagine a GM knowing about all of the big stuff in their room when they created the dungeon and, personally, I expect anything big to be a part of the room description and not magically appear because the players start asking questions (see holocaust cloak above).  If an old crate, piles of broken masonry, and other large things were not a part of the initial description, I wouldn't expect it to suddenly appear.  On the flip side, if most rooms of a dungeon are established as having partially burned torches in sockets on the way, it might be reasonable to assume that this room has them, too, but that's easily enough for a GM to answer without a hard rule about it.

Quote from: RSDancey;427370Here are some examples of things I'd refuse to allow to be edited in to the encounter by the players:

* A vial of spider anti-venom
* Dwarven runes carved into the rock saying "set the webs on fire"

Again, I think this all fits better into the way I'm wording it than "Say 'yes' or roll dice", which implies the GM should never just say "no".  And as your examples point out, sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to say "no".  As it does with many things, the story-game advice goes too far.  So craft a rule of thumb that says what you really want and doesn't go too far rather than adopting the story-game idea that does go too far.

Quote from: RSDancey;427370I want to talk about player editing a lot more but this is not the message to do it in.  I'll close by saying that most of the time, if the players have no fear about their ability to act rationally, they won't obsess about having a precise knowledge of the encounter space.

I think that's true, but I don't think that requires player scene editing or something as radical as "Say 'yes' or roll dice."  A big part of it, in my experience, simply involves using and playing the system so that the PCs don't go up against 50/50 odds or dire odds and, instead, have a pretty good chance of success.  D&D, of course, tries to do this.  A lot of GMs, trying to emulate stories, however, don't.  Like the bad writer who tries to create tension by having every bomb not be disarmed until there are less than 5 seconds left and who make every win look like a come-from-behind victory after the protagonist gets their second wind, those GMs put the PCs up against 50/50 or worse odds and then wind up having to fudge the PCs to victory or the PCs get killed.  

Quote from: RSDancey;427370The more you force them to care, the more they'll care. So don't make them care.

But if you take that advice too far, then they won't really care about the entire scene because none of the details really matter.  That, in my opinion, is one of the big dangers of abstraction.

ADDED: One last thing.  One of the "inside jokes" that some of the people I role-played with in college had was the question, "Is there a zoo on this planet?"  That came from a Traveller game where the players were thinking up absurd ways to create a distraction to do something illegal and one player got the idea to let all of the animals out of the zoo to create chaos.  That, in my experience, is pretty normal for anything goes, unconstrained speculative problem solving by players.

Quote from: John Morrow;427402That's not my experience.  My experience is that it's impossible to do anything clever if you don't understand the spaces the character is in.  It's working with your circumstances and resources to solve a problem, not guessing how you could possibly solve the problem and then wishing the resources into existence.  

This is a huge part of my enjoyment of the game and if the environment is 'editable' I feel cheated as a player.

Quote from: John Morrow;427402A big part of it, in my experience, simply involves using and playing the system so that the PCs don't go up against 50/50 odds or dire odds and, instead, have a pretty good chance of success.  D&D, of course, tries to do this.  A lot of GMs, trying to emulate stories, however, don't.  Like the bad writer who tries to create tension by having every bomb not be disarmed until there are less than 5 seconds left and who make every win look like a come-from-behind victory after the protagonist gets their second wind, those GMs put the PCs up against 50/50 or worse odds and then wind up having to fudge the PCs to victory or the PCs get killed.  

This is a big problem, and, I suspect, one that Mr. Dancey's solutions would tend to exacerbate rather than help with. Unfortunately there is a growing legacy of terrible GM advice and misguided conventional wisdom that these structures improve play - one of the real glories of RPGs is their true open-endedness to the character and player. Both 90's story advice and neo-narrative rules concepts both tend to replace that with what is, in my opinion, an illusory open-endedness for the character and only a token one at best for the player.

Also, as you allude to, I don't think you generally get a good story, either - usually a pretty bad one that's not necessarily any better than the emergent story that is a byproduct after the fact of traditional play, which is innately open-ended.

Quote from: John Morrow;427402But if you take that advice too far, then they won't really care about the entire scene because none of the details really matter.  That, in my opinion, is one of the big dangers of abstraction.

Well said. Also, this is very much what experience has shown me.

Quote from: RSDancey;427370...

The Big Fear players have is that DMs will make it impossible for them to do the clever things they want to do.  So they ask for detailed architectural drawings of the spaces their characters inhabit so as to minimize the potential for being shut down by the DM.

...

Let's put this to the test on the Big Purple, if Pundit doesn't mind the link:-

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?p=13270945

11 votes at the time of writing and not ONE person has owned up to this being a Big Fear of theirs though 2 claim a lot of people they know think that way.

Quote from: Omnifray;427411Let's put this to the test on the Big Purple, if Pundit doesn't mind the link:-

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?p=13270945

11 votes at the time of writing and not ONE person has owned up to this being a Big Fear of theirs though 2 claim a lot of people they know think that way.

Interesting, but I have to admit I doubt the poll will show anything resembling a useful sample size. :/

Quote from: Cole;427412Interesting, but I have to admit I doubt the poll will show anything resembling a useful sample size. :/

12 people so far saying it's not a Big Fear of theirs, none saying it is - seems like a reasonable start to me. To be fair to RPG.net if the debate carries on for a long time they might get 50, even 150 votes. Just depends if people get into the thread discussion or not.

If find the discussion on here is often more useful analytically, but RPG.net is good for polls and brainstorming, IMHO YMMV.

Wow, 1 out of 19 voters has now admitted to the Big Fear. Looks like Dancey might be onto something...

Because

a) RPGnet is scientastic and
b) The way you framed the "Big Fear" really makes people comfortable admitting they might have it

Quote from: Peregrin;427416Because
b) The way you framed the "Big Fear" really makes people comfortable admitting they might have it

Also, the question has the soft implication that it's asking what the respondent's biggest concern might be. It's a pretty leading question.

I think the original, capital-letters Big Fear is a bad piece of usage to begin with, also.

Possibly useful to Ryan and relevant to this thread are the entry the taste for gratuitous difficulty on The Mule Abides (http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/the-taste-for-gratuitous-difficulty/) and the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/20/101220fa_fact_paumgarten) article it references.  Also potentially useful is glorious swinginess: results from the dcc rpg/castle zagyg experiment, part 1 (http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/glorious-swinginess-results-from-the-dcc-rpgcastle-zagyg-experiment-part-1/), a review of using the new Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG to play a module and how it differs in feel from D&D 4e.

Might be worth mentioning, by the way, that Clinton Nixon's game Donjon revolves around a more aggressive version of editing in gameworld facts by the players, in a similar dungeon-adventure context.

Quote from: Cole;427434Might be worth mentioning, by the way, that Clinton Nixon's game Donjon revolves around a more aggressive version of editing in gameworld facts by the players, in a similar dungeon-adventure context.

I've been wanting to take that for a spin with one of my groups as an experiment since the rules are available for free, but goddamn, so many d20s.

I guess I could just use d10s...

Quote from: Cole;427434Might be worth mentioning, by the way, that Clinton Nixon's game Donjon revolves around a more aggressive version of editing in gameworld facts by the players, in a similar dungeon-adventure context.

Quote from: Peregrin;427437I've been wanting to take that for a spin with one of my groups as an experiment since the rules are available for free, but goddamn, so many d20s.

I guess I could just use d10s...

It's found here : http://open.crngames.com/src/donjon.html (http://open.crngames.com/src/donjon.html) since the place the free rules themselves are found isn't 100% obvious.

CRN's assessment of the game has this interesting aspect, I note:

Quote from: http://open.crngames.com/src/donjon.htmlLastly, this game is about winning. Don't be fooled by the fact that you're all friends: the GM's job is to take whatever you say and twist it around and screw you with it. Think of the GM as a genie - an evil one. You make wishes, and he tries work them to his advantage. The players' job is to not let the GM do this: think of cool actions she can't thwart, build characters that are engines of fun destruction, and smite down all the enemies she can throw at you.

Why I think this is interesting is that it suggests that, while the game is described as 'collaborative,' it makes the assumption that the relationship between Donjon GM and Donjon player is a contentious one (good-naturedly so), whereas the D&D GM theoretically has a disinterested or even-handed position toward the players. The "Big Fear" would seem to suggest that D&D's DM similarly has an interest in "thwarting" the players' action. I don't think that is the case - maybe it's more that there is an axis between contention between GM and player, and an axis between GM control of "editing" and player control of "Editing", and the two are relatively independent.

I could see how problems might exist where GM authority is total and the GM's goal is actively to thwart all player actions (I do not think D&D as written implies such a game.) I'm not familiar enough with Donjon to have a clear impact on the game if the Donjon GM were to show a more 'helpful hand' to the PC's edits.

Normally I don't have a problem with the GM saying no, provided there is a rational reason for doing so.

But I remember quite distinctly, distinctly because it was when I first started playing and learning to love RPGs, where an RPGA GM just completely shut-down a creative use of one of my spells where I was just trying to add some color to a scene.  Really, it was incidental to the entire adventure, and wouldn't have affected anything in a significant way.  But this dude was intent on shutting down a new player's idea...just...because.  I still don't know why to this day, and it definitely turned me off back then, because I was trying to make a positive role-playing contribution and playing my character the way he would be, and was essentially told, with the tone in the guy's voice "No, your idea is stupid."  I've also experienced this with several other GM's I've played under at LGSs, and it's always boggled my mind because of how different their views are compared to my own personal "home" groups that I've played with over the years.

As for the axis, I think they can intersect at some points (pure incidental scene editing/color vs. thwarting PC action during a legitimate conflict), particularly if a player is "immersed" in the world, comes up with an idea that, by their imagining of the pseudo-reality, should have a good chance at working, and their character has the means, but the GM either assigns a ridiculously difficult check or just shuts it down, and I think that's where it gets even more dangerous, because players can become frustrated and dissatisfied if their character, as an avatar in the imaginary world, is continually denied opportunities to engage with the imagined environment in novel ways.  

I don't think it has to manifest itself as a "fear" per se, but I have seen it manifest itself with disinterest and the eventual departure of players from some groups.  Even if you're playing a completely "trad" game, a player still usually wants to make creative contributions via their character or contribute to the imagined spaced within the game-world, and if that player is continually neglected because the GM has their own vision, or favors other players, then it can become a problem for the player.

Peregrin, it's interesting that you pick out an RPGA game to describe that incident - although you point to a 'color' use as what was dismissed - in that with such play there is a constrained format that is very much at odds with the open ended approach implicit in the traditional D&D model.

Actually I have long felt that study RPGA data has been sort of a two edged sword - highlighting observations and complaints that are exaggerated in frequency and intensity compared to home play due to considerations toward consistency of experience in organized play. On the other hand something like the RPGA has advantages from the publisher side in terms of how well it can be monetized per player.

I consider myself more of a player as a DM, but I have DMed a lot and from behind the screen it is in no way my goal to shut down player ideas, especially to fit a preordained outcome or to keep things in accordance with my own preconceptions - I would rather be surprised, and find out what happens. But I try to present a game world that is treated as real, because that's what I want to explore as a player, and because I have found that compared to other approaches that produces the best results for keeping players engaged and happy.

Quote from: RSDancey;427393Yeah that was less robust.  Not.

Virtually nobody outside a small group of insiders has any clue what you mean when you say "Forge type theories", and a big portion of those who do don't have a negative reaction to them.

You're wasting time & energy concerning yourself with such trivia.

Note that eveything below the dashed line is what I would put into a book. Above is for the audience of this forum who know what forge type theories refer too.

I will make such formatting clearer in the future.

So yes I am not concerning myself with such trivia.

As for the robustness, it was not intended to be a "rule" but a guide. Ultimately it is up to the judgment of the human referee to implement it or not.

Quote from: Cole;427459Peregrin, it's interesting that you pick out an RPGA game to describe that incident - although you point to a 'color' use as what was dismissed - in that with such play there is a constrained format that is very much at odds with the open ended approach implicit in the traditional D&D model.

Actually I have long felt that study RPGA data has been sort of a two edged sword - highlighting observations and complaints that are exaggerated in frequency and intensity compared to home play due to considerations toward consistency of experience in organized play. On the other hand something like the RPGA has advantages from the publisher side in terms of how well it can be monetized per player.

I consider myself more of a player as a DM, but I have DMed a lot and from behind the screen it is in no way my goal to shut down player ideas, especially to fit a preordained outcome or to keep things in accordance with my own preconceptions - I would rather be surprised, and find out what happens. But I try to present a game world that is treated as real, because that's what I want to explore as a player, and because I have found that compared to other approaches that produces the best results for keeping players engaged and happy.

I've actually had similar experiences with the RPGA, most of them during the Living Greyhawk era or with people that really identify with that era. I had one last year at DDXP, in fact- I have a character with a +1 paired katar (a weapon that splits into two). I had some substance that turned it into a silvered weapon, so I was talking about applying that and then splitting the weapon into two weapons and the LG guys not only saw that as taking a huge advantage, they couldn't come up with how it would be different in any way from my normal attacks since I only rolled one dice for my attacks regardless. (ie, two weapon fighting is just a damage bonus).
 
How do you mean "monetized per player"? The RPGA is free. It's been free for a decade.

Here's an experience I had as a playtester for Torg 2. It led me to become almost a fulltime DM.

Our characters are fighting some kind of pulp superhero villain and I have a gadget type hero. After the main bad guy gives us his evil monologue, he climbs into his spaceship and starts it up, and lets free a big ogre guy and a bunch of other villians, all of which are being handled by the other PCs in the party. For some reason, I end up getting attacked by the big ogre guy.  

Torg has a "trick" type power as well as a "maneuver" type thing your character can do, as part of his attack. So I asked if I could do a sort of feint and snap one side of a pair of handcuffs I happened to have-- on the ogre guy. Which we go through the procedure, and the GM says "uhh..ok.."

The rocket is just about to take off (and of course the engine blast is blinding us and doing damage..)

On my next round I snapped the other end of the cuffs to my own grappling gun and fired it at the rocket just before it took off. So if the bad guy is leaving, he's taking the ogre too, dangling at the end of the rocket. Dude, it was straight out of Batman. I might be minus one grappling gun, but i was pretty sure I could get a new one.

The GM says "no". can't do it. Can't what? Can't hit the rocket with the grappling gun? I did in an earlier part of the game.. Can't attach the cuffs to the gun?

No- what I can't do is "ruin" this battle.

So I let it go. But I never let that guy GM for me again.

Quote from: RSDancey;427393You're wasting time & energy concerning yourself with such trivia.

In addition you haven't stated where there assertion comes from. What experience or data led you to conclude that there there is a "Big Fear".

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;427497So I let it go. But I never let that guy GM for me again.

So the question is with your and Peregrin's story is how much of a problem is it?

I had similar experiences as well but I had way more DMs appreciate the things I come up with while roleplaying my character and work it in.  The results are at times are not quite what I expect. But they are generally plausible so I go with it and roleplay off of that.

Quote from: estar;427502So the question is with your and Peregrin's story is how much of a problem is it?

I had similar experiences as well but I had way more DMs appreciate the things I come up with while roleplaying my character and work it in.  The results are at times are not quite what I expect. But they are generally plausible so I go with it and roleplay off of that.

It's hard to say, because while I consider that to be a very bad problem (the negating DM)- I think that in my situation (shared world with a bunch of DMs) it's easy to just make a mental note and move forward to the next game with a new DM. If you have the negating DM as a feature of your group- you are kinda hosed unless you can get the guy to step down.

Unfortunately ... A lot of gaming group drama comes from attempts to get someone to step down or being asked to step down. It's not even an easy job, so that makes it worse, and depending on the situation, may get players to "go along with it" just because nobody else wants the job.


Here's another example: My pal Hudson won't game with a certain group in PA anymore because during one of their gamedays we went down there and he ended up in one of their groups. Right away they had issues with his character when, after extensive going-nowhere RP with a guard, Matt decided to have his character pickpocket the key they wanted from him. Despite having some kind of maxed out roll on a thievery check, the DM decided that the guard noticed and that they would all be attacked. Hudson then teleported away, went invisible.. he had a lot of tricks up his sleeve and they weren't used to magically equipped rogues, so he got away. So the rest of the adventure everywhere the group went just turned into a thing where the entire city was out to get his character for pickpocketing a key.

That's negating and.. unrealistic. Like.. it wasn't even that important of a key.

This is an RPGA group that runs about 180 degrees different from the ones I run back in MD, and that people around here are used to. Which shows to me at least how local differences make a big deal.

Quote from: estar;427501In addition you haven't stated where there assertion comes from. What experience or data led you to conclude that there there is a "Big Fear".

Well, it wasn't my poll thread on the Big Purple, where so far 88 people have voted and (it's a multiple choice voting poll so it's not scientifically perfect, but still) results in so far are:-

1 vote for it's my Big Fear so I get detailed descriptions
1 vote for it's my Big Fear so I use say yes or roll dice
3 votes for it's a big fear of mine so I get detailed descriptions
6 votes for it's a big fear of mine so I use say yes or roll dice
3 votes for it's not a big fear of mine but lots of people think that way
45 votes for it's not a big fear of mine and not many people think that way
34 votes for who on earth would think like that?
and 4, 5 and 4 votes for miscellaneous add-on questions
(the last of them being Special Snowflake)

In other words, more votes for who on earth would think like that? than for all the "it's my big fear" or "it's a big fear" options combined - in fact, nearly 3 times as many. And that's before you consider the votes for "not many people think that way".

A minimum of 74 out of the 88 people who voted did NOT indicate that it was a big fear of theirs at all, and a minimum of 71 out of the 88 did NOT indicate that it was a big fear of theirs NOR that many people they knew thought that way. By contrast the minimum number indicating that it IS a big fear of theirs is I think 6 or more likely 7.

If Dancey doesn't like these results he only has himself to blame for the "big fear" wording but perhaps someone else would care to set up a more neutral poll? Neutral polls are fairly boring IMHO YMMV but I guess they might be a bit more informative...

A couple of classes of objections I'll address as a group:

Objection:  

DM wants to hide/obfuscate some feature of an encounter area.  Player editing of the space could contradict the DMs plan.

Response:

How much of this is metagaming and how much is immersion?  Are you asking your PLAYERS to discover, by trial and error, question & response, the clue that is available, or do you think that the CHARACTERS really wouldn't notice if they were in the space?

If its the former, I'd submit to you that this creates an unnecessary distraction for the Storytellers and the Thinkers.  Neither is really all that interested in having to interrogate the DM to get information - both would prefer to be given critical information that their characters would know or detect so they can get on with their gaming experience.  Don't ask them to metagame and everyone will be happier.

If its the latter, then I see two sub-scenarios:

A: The absence of a thing is meaningful.  In this case, a player editing something into the encounter accidentally negates a part of the DMs setup.  Telling this player they cannot perform the edit reveals the sensitive nature of the edit and "gives away" all or part of a puzzle.

For problems of type A, check your assumption again that the CHARACTERS wouldn't notice the absence.  The example of the gelatinous cube-cleaned encounter area is a pretty good one.  Would the CHARACTERS not notice that instead of the "funk of a thousand years", the room is spotless?  It's totally OK in my opinion to call a do-over. "Players, I forgot to tell you a piece of information your characters would know - this area seems much cleaner than the rest of the dungeon so far.  There's no dirt or debris in this area." (Just don't make it a habit, or your players will go right back to the Socratic Method of roleplaying.)

Second, would refusing the edit convey meaningful information in a positive way?  "You try to scoop up some dust, but are surprised to find that the floor is cleaner than you expected."  To me, this is great gaming - the players have done something rational, the DM has conveyed information that they got from that action, but the players are still expected to figure out what to make of the information.  This is essentially Fallout; the character failed the challenge, but came away with something valuable anyway.

Third, be flexible.  How damaging is the edit, really?  Is it reasonable that the Cube can't get into this space for some reason?  Is it necessary that this particular Cube cleans down to the bare stone?  Could the Cube be easily swapped out for some other creature that doesn't cause areas to be cleaned?  What if the characters never find the Cube anyway - does it really exist in the first place?  It's part of the DMs job to react on the fly to the things the PCs do, within reason.

You've got to have more tools in your toolbox than DM fiat.

B:  The presence of a thing is meaningful.  In this case, a player editing something into the encounter accidentally negates a resource challenge planned by the DM.  Telling this player they cannot perform the edit either causes an anachronism (the edit is reasonable, ergo the refusal is DM fiat), or it gives away a clue (the edit is reasonable, but the refusal reveals that the DM wants the edit to represent a resource challenge), or it represents a magic bullet (the DM is surprised by the edit and the scenario didn't anticipate it, reducing or negating what would otherwise be a meaningful challenge seemingly "on accident").

First, this is a seemingly solved problem in many regards.  If you wish something to be a part of a puzzle or a quest chain, make it unique.  Don't require a generic torch - require a torch that burns 2x as hot as normal and is recognized as such by the characters when they acquire one.  Don't accept just any holy water, require that it be consecrated in a specific place by a specific cleric to do the job.

Second, if the item is mundane and reasonable, suck it up.  So they manage to bypass some portion of your adventure plan by editing in a key item.  If you based that on assuming that they wouldn't have access to something you've made a whole host of other assumptions that are dangerously unlikely too.  Other than some A4-style "you start out naked" framing, PCs are notorious for showing up with all manner of goods & raw materials tucked away "just in case".  Frankly, you should be able to turn this on a dime anyway and just swap out some other mundane thing for the item they've edited into the encounter without doing much harm whatsoever to your plan.

Third, you had better be sure that you're in alignment with your players that this is the kind of game they want.  If you personally enjoy these kinds of scenarios, but your Storyteller and Thinker players find them irritating, you'd be better off trying a different kind of encounter.  If everyone in the group wants these kinds of puzzles, suggest to the group that they refrain from editing items into encounters unless they feel its absolutely necessary (i.e. do a reverse metagame - agree ahead of time that things which are not described are not present).

On the whole, these seem like fairly technical concerns which are really straw-men arguments against a perceived loss of DM control.  I suspect that in practice, few if any of these things would prove to be unfixable either in realtime, or in-between sessions with the DM reworking minor parts of the plan.

Objection:

The players wish to suspend their disbelief and engage with the game as if the game world were real; interacting with it without any editing function whatsoever.

Response:

Character Actors love this kind of experience.  Its like following a script:  You do and say such and such, the other actors do what they're expected to do, and the story emerges as a result.  But those players are on their way out of the hobby; reframing D&D to avoid their particular concerns is a mistake.

This is also really a continuum argument, not a binary argument.  As much as some might like it, the DM is not a virtual world simulator, and isn't able to actually pre-build a world and then allow players to interact with it.  

DMs are CONSTANTLY making up responses to player input.  Is there really such a difference between:

Player:I search around in the debris and find a half burned torch!

and

Player:  I search around in the debris looking for something to light the webs on fire.  Do I find anything?

DM:  (consults notes listing all the things in the debris)  Yes, you find a half burned torch.

or, what is even more likely:

DM:  (pretends to consult some notes, decides that the request is reasonable) Yes, you find a half-burned torch.

This is really a question of AGENCY.  WHO is doing the editing?  The Player, or the DM?  If, in order to enjoy the game, you have to feel totally disempowered, relying on the DM to make each and every decision about the world, you're asking for a game where the Storyteller Players are going to be extremely frustrated and unhappy, and the Thinkers are going to rathole the group regularly as they plumb the depths of what the DM will and will not allow, searching for the limits to the problem domain.

On the other hand, if YOU wish to ask the DM to shoulder that load, but don't require the other players at the table to relinquish their right to edit, you have preserved your own illusion of virtuality without limiting your friends' desires to contribute differently.  This is really an issue of selfish vs. selfless playstyle.

And if you really can't be happy unless you're in a virtualized world where the players have no editing powers whatsoever, well, the current genration of MMOs is really extremely good at that kind of experience....

RyanD

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;427492How do you mean "monetized per player"? The RPGA is free. It's been free for a decade.

I just mean that in the sense that I feel RPGA players would be on the whole more likely to purchase current game materials. I may actually be mistaken - I'd be interested in seeing any data on purchasing patterns among RPGA players if it's out there.

Sorry to be unclear.

Ryan, your logic is a tortured one when you're dismissing other posters' points, claiming their positions as attacking straw men, while at the same time throwing out canards like an attachment to a GM's carefully laid plans, or "maybe you'd be happier playing an MMO - it does what you seem to want much better." The second is especially poor form coming from a man with professional ties to an MMO company who just hasn't been able to resist dropping hints at the mind blowing conceptual leaps the industry has to offer in that field - apparently, a motion render of a rippling satin dress to which, trust me, the video file can't hope to do justice.

It is especially frustrating that you are to so great a degree privileging jargon over practice here - "I clean off the dust" - "There's not really much dust anyway" becomes okay if you convey it as "Fallout," a la DitV? That's nonsense. Games have not unwittingly been developed around storygame design principles to which only recently have we been revealed the names. It's one thing to present a design - another to distort practice such that you present it as  a deliberate, but merely imperfect reaching toward your design.

If the problem is just DM pixel-bitching, the easy solution is just the open-endedness implicit in tradtional D&D - player editing is over-elaborate and has questionable follow-on effects. You've even said that if a player's edit compromises the DM's inflexible bottleneck, the DM can always shift what's needed behind the curtain to maintain the bottleneck - why would you want to do that? The virtue of D&D is its open-endedness and the ability to interact with a fantasy world as if it were real - why close that off, editing or no editing, by making an end-run around the players' lateral thinking? You have an artificial problem, a clumsy solution, and you're selling the clumsy solution by saying "don't worry, though, you can always sneak the artificial problem back in without anyone noticing?"

If under D&D, your platonically worst possible DM can screw the players by dismissing the player's lateral thinking, under "New D&D" the same platonically worst possible DM can screw the players by playing a shell game to dodge the PC's editing authority. It's like the "black knight" problem you alluded to DitV as the fix for - it's not a fix at all, it's just a different model open to the same problems. Does the new problem stand on its own virtues? Matter of taste. I'm interested in hearing more of the actual elements of new D&D - the waste of time is the RPG-theory sales pitch.

Quote from: RSDancey;427537...
How much of this is metagaming and how much is immersion?  Are you asking your PLAYERS to discover, by trial and error, question & response, the clue that is available, or do you think that the CHARACTERS really wouldn't notice if they were in the space?

... for the Storytellers and the Thinkers.  Neither is really all that interested in having to interrogate the DM to get information - both would prefer to be given critical information that their characters would know or detect so they can get on with their gaming experience.  Don't ask them to metagame and everyone will be happier.

Are there really any half-decent GMs out there who don't consider it a good idea to give players the relevant information which their characters would notice?

For instance, the DM who ruled that my orc cleric in 3.5 was going to be arrested for speaking some Black Speech tongue in the tavern when he swore in it. I mean, c'mon. If the use of the Black Speech tongue is actually a crime, and if every peasant knows that, I think my orc cleric (with his average Int and high Wis) will KNOW that. Not telling me then deciding I got arrested without giving me the chance to reconsider - WTF?

But that's an instance of a DM acting like a twat. (The guy's alright actually and his DMing decisions aren't usually THAT bad...) But why would you need to spend time discussing this point? It's bleeding obvious. Sure, there might be the odd REALLY BAD GM out there, but why worry about that one particular isolated problem?

Also, you keep banging on about Storytellers and Thinkers, but it's JUST NOT RELEVANT TO YOUR EXAMPLE. If ANYONE wanted to engage in the socratic method, it would be the Thinkers. Power Gamers want to be able to get on with the action, not spend hours quizzing the GM. Character Actors want to enjoy immersion in their character's viewpoint, not spend hours thinking up stupid questions for the GM.

The way you handle this as a GM is give out the relevant information and give out some red herrings as well. What's the big deal?

QuoteA: The absence of a thing is meaningful.  In this case, a player editing something into the encounter accidentally negates a part of the DMs setup.  Telling this player they cannot perform the edit reveals the sensitive nature of the edit and "gives away" all or part of a puzzle.

For problems of type A, check your assumption again that the CHARACTERS wouldn't notice the absence.  The example of the gelatinous cube-cleaned encounter area is a pretty good one.  Would the CHARACTERS not notice that instead of the "funk of a thousand years", the room is spotless?  
...
Second, would refusing the edit convey meaningful information in a positive way?  ...

Third, be flexible.  ...

You've got to have more tools in your toolbox than DM fiat.

Let's start with the obvious.

Quote... Telling this player they cannot perform the edit reveals the sensitive nature of the edit and "gives away" all or part of a puzzle. ...

THIS IS SIMPLY GOING TO BE A PROBLEM IF YOUR DEFAULT MODE IS ALLOWING PLAYERS TO EDIT THE GAME-WORLD - AND DOES NOT ADMIT OF A CASE-BY-CASE SOLUTION!!! THE PROBLEM STEMS FROM HAVING THE "say yes or roll dice" RULE AT ALL IN THE FIRST PLACE!!! ONCE YOU HAVE IT THERE'S ALWAYS THAT RISK UNLESS YOU HAVE NO SECRETS!!!

Irrelevant that the characters might or might not notice a clean floor - you're relying on a trivial example. The important examples are of cases where there is nothing at all for the characters to notice immediately, but you have to refuse the edit for still secret reasons which the characters could not yet know, but once you refuse the edit, may guess.

Irrelevant that sometimes giving info might add to the game. Sometimes it might ruin the game. That's far more important. I do NOT want to have to slow down my GMing to decide whether something is positive or negative before I am allowed to engage my instinct/fiat.

Yes, be flexible. But irrelevant. You can always be flexible, rule or no rule.

And ultimately, even with your qualified version of say yes or roll dice, it's STILL about GM fiat, just more constrained.

QuoteB:  The presence of a thing is meaningful.  ...

First, this is a seemingly solved problem in many regards.  If you wish something to be a part of a puzzle or a quest chain, make it unique.  ...

Second, if the item is mundane and reasonable, suck it up.  ... PCs are notorious for showing up with all manner of goods & raw materials tucked away "just in case". ...

Third, ... If you personally enjoy these kinds of scenarios, but your Storyteller and Thinker players find them irritating, you'd be better off trying a different kind of encounter.  ...

On the whole, these seem like fairly technical concerns which are really straw-men arguments against a perceived loss of DM control.  ...

First, I do not want to fill my game with innumerable unique items, nor do I want to constrain the way I plan for games by having to include unique items. How artificial.

Second, I don't care if an item seems mundane or reasonable to you, in some situations the absence of mundane reasonable items (e.g. rations) may be a lynchpin of the game.

Third, I dismiss your Third point because you're just harping on about Storyteller and Thinker players, when (1) you've NO proof of your suggestion that Character Actors are leaving the hobby, and (2) it's probably the Thinkers who would enjoy these sorts of puzzle most anyway.

Finally, these are NOT straw-man arguments. I'm trying to get you to understand how complete GM fiat is a fantastic tool for many ends. Gygax, Arneson & co came up with the gaming model we know today for a reason. It's tried and tested and it WORKS. Other models may also be viable, but the single, all-powerful GM is a GREAT model for any kind of roleplaying game where you are NOT aiming for collaborative creative involvement of players in the world-editing process (a kind of storygaming) nor for purely fair wargaming.

QuoteObjection:

The players wish to suspend their disbelief and engage with the game as if the game world were real; interacting with it without any editing function whatsoever.

Until you accept that Character Actors are still a real part of the tabletop RPG hobby - or to put it facetiously that people who are interested in ROLEPLAY are still ROLEPLAYING at the tabletop - your arguments on this point are wholly without merit.

What's more, we all know that players are cleverer than they are given credit for. Illusionism, which you encourage, has its limits in the context of railroading - that much is trite -, and it also has its limits in the context of "say yes, or roll the dice". Not least of which, if it's written in the DMG, some clever player is going to read it and know what you're doing, possibly because he also DMs occasionally (not necessarily a bad thing!).

Another thing. Ryan if your argument were correct that only Storytellers and Thinkers are really left in the hobby, the correct prediction would be Apocalypse Now.

Thinkers want out-and-out challenge and are prepared to manoeuvre the game in intricate and complicated ways to win.

Storytellers want whatever "story" means to the people who produced your survey results, which sounds like "an interesting succession of in-game events" to me. They may be prepared to manoeuvre the game in intricate and complicated ways to get "storytelling" to happen, whatever that means.

These are the two most outright opposed of the four main kinds of gamer you identify. They each come at least very close to having what GNS would call a creative agenda - Thinkers are pushy "gamists", and Storytellers are pushy something else. They are both going to be, on the whole, pushy about their thing.

Character Actors, as long as they get a chance to roleplay, they are happy. Cos you can roleplay anywhere, in any context. As a fight's about to start, you can roleplay yelling or cowering or damning your foe's mother. Story come, story go; combat come, combat go. They can fit with anyone. As long as it isn't CONSTANT hack n slash, of course, with no opportunity for roleplay. But Storytellers and Thinkers probably wouldn't want that either.

Power Gamers, as long as they get a chance to kick butt, they are happy. Their fights can be fitted around "story", or can be set in a strategic context. They, like Character Actors, are easy to please.

You see, the more "Strategic" you are, the more focused you are on long-term control of the direction that the game takes. The more "Tactical" you are, the more focused you are on short-term experiences.

People who want short-term experiences are easy to please because short-term experiences of any kind can slot into anyone's long-term game-plan.

It's when you have two conflicting long-term game-plans that conflict may emerge.

So, Storytellers and Thinkers are the hardest two segments of gamers to square with each other of all.

So, on this (probably more or less correct) logic and your (highly dubious) premise, games now have to be written for not 56%, but 34% of the gaming population of 1999 (plus a few hangers-on). What's more, as on your premise 56% of those gamers are still playing, if this logic is correct (which it may be) and if your premise is correct (which I doubt), NO game is going to be suited to more than 60% even of the current market. It's almost as if we may as well all pack up and go home now.

And I refuse to believe that.

Quote from: Omnifray;427551Another thing. Ryan if your argument were correct that only Storytellers and Thinkers are really left in the hobby, the correct prediction would be Apocalypse Now So, games now have to be written for not 56%, but 34% of the gaming population of 1999 (plus a few hangers-on). What's more, as on your premise 56% of those gamers are still playing, if this logic is correct (which it may be) and if your premise is correct (which I doubt), NO game is going to be suited to more than 60% even of the current market. It's almost as if we may as well all pack up and go home now.

And I refuse to believe that.

I have a real problem with the segmentation study for another reason.

I don't think you can split gamers down into different segments; I think that all players have at least some of the segments described 'within them', it's just that the proportions are different person by person. So I might be 43% Thinker, 17% Power gamer, 30% Character Actor, and 10% Story Teller, for example. This means I'd come across in the segmentation study as a Thinker, but actually the other three things added together are more important to me than 'Thinking' is.

Further, I would say that anyone that indexes over 50% on any one axis will be vanishingly rare. This is bourne up by the fact that each segment ended up with a 22% share, with the remaining 12% being undecided. This would equate with the 'average' score in my version being 22/22/22/22/12 - to get over 50% you'd have to be way out of this average range.

Am I right - I don't know. But the numbers as presented so far support this view just as well as the 'discrete segement' version, and it fits my own experiences of what gamers are like rather better.

There are reasons to be skeptical of the study and of how Ryan is reporting it, but your objection doesn't seem to appreciate what cluster analysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis) is.

Quote from: RSDancey;427537And if you really can't be happy unless you're in a virtualized world where the players have no editing powers whatsoever, well, the current genration of MMOs is really extremely good at that kind of experience....

RyanD

Neverwinter Nights didn't replace 3e eight years ago for me, and EVE still doesn't satisfy my ability to interact with the world in limitless ways.

"Sandbox" as EVE may be, it's still contained within a box, and that box has plenty of limitations.

I mean, I started with video-games well before I ever even knew what D&D was.  I was playing NWN, a faithful adaptation of the 3e rules, an easy-to-use module maker, and live virtual DM client, before I ever sat down at a table  -- I was playing online with live groups of people doing actual role-play in persistent world servers.  If video-games were able to provide a better experience in terms of playing "my guy in a fictional world", why would I have ever put up with all of the "inconveniences" of tabletop?

I'm not against player narrative authority, and in fact I like it.  But I just don't see how, for those interested in playing "their guy" only, a world based on current software limitations could ever live up to anyone's expectations.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;427565There are reasons to be skeptical of the study and of how Ryan is reporting it, but your objection doesn't seem to appreciate what cluster analysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis) is.

Thanks for the article link, Elliot. As I would understand it (re: what glazer said) what's useful to take away from such a study is that if you have a significant grouping of people who enjoy six specific elements, it's likely that if you have people known to enjoy the first five of those elements, you've probably got good grounds that something featuring element six will appeal to that set of people too. Does that make sense?

(For my part I find more to question in how the conclusions of the study make a convincing case for Ryan's design proposals.)

Quote from: Peregrin;427568If video-games were able to provide a better experience in terms of playing "my guy in a fictional world", why would I have ever put up with all of the "inconveniences" of tabletop?

I'm not against player narrative authority, and in fact I like it.  But I just don't see how, for those interested in playing "their guy" only, a world based on current software limitations could ever live up to anyone's expectations.

I'd be interested in hearing about if there was any market data suggesting an above average popularity of MMORPGs in people interested in traditional, non-RPG character activities like stage and film acting.

Quote from: Omnifray;427551Another thing. Ryan if your argument were correct that only Storytellers and Thinkers are really left in the hobby, the correct prediction would be Apocalypse Now.

Quote from: Col Kurtz looks at the hobby from 2005-2010The horror!  The horror!

Quote from: OmnifrayThinkers want ...

Storytellers want ...

Character Actors ...

Power Gamers ...

You are again mistaken in your mis-categorization of the segments.  I'll repeat.

All hobbyist tabletop RPG players desire the following in their game,regardless of their sub-segment:

* Strong Characters and Exciting Story
* Role Playing
* Complexity Increases over Time
* Requires Strategic Thinking
* Competitive
* Add on sets/New versions available
* Uses imagination
* Mentally challenging

You persist, for some reason, in trying to position the segments as exclusionary of these things (or inclusionary only of parts).  This is the fallacy of losing the forest for the trees.  Zoom your perspective out.

Let's look at one aspect:  Role Playing.

Storyteller:  "Role" - means "role in the story".  Am I the young kid becoming a man?  The Fallen Hero searching for redemption?  The pampered princess learning how the Real World works? The servant of a jealous God, bringing the Word of Truth to the unrighteous?  "Playing" - means "how I make this development happen".  I seek opportunities to advance my character's story, and by extension, the narrative of the whole group.

Power Gamer:  "Role" - means "role in the party".  Am I the Tank, the Healer or the Damage Dealer?  "Playing" - means "how I roll the dice to make my character work."

Character Actor:  "Role" - means "virtualizing my character and working to reflect my character through my deeds & words".  "Playing" - means "my decisions in the game are based on what I perceive to by my character's knowledge, motivations, abilities, insights, and desires."

Thinker:  "Role" - means "what I do to help the party succeed".  I solve puzzles and mysteries.  I connect the dots so that the others see how the threads in the story weave together.  I think outsize the box and attempt to solve problems creatively.  "Playing" - means "I do my best to out-think the DM and the scenario, to come up with the best course of action for the circumstances, and to be prepared for the kinds of challenges I expect to face during current & future encounters."

The Storytellers & the Thinkers share a long-term view of play.  The Character Actors and the Power Gamers share a short-term view of play.  In a world where the core TRPG audience consists of Storytellers and Thinkers, the balance of design should shift to reward this long-term perspective, and reduce the need for and impact of short-term perspective.  (Please don't convert that into "get rid of", "reduce" is a long way from "remove".)

Storytellers and Thinkers create good synergy.  Thinkers are constantly feeding raw material into the Storyteller's narrative.  The Storyteller is crafting sense out of the Thinker's rather abstract actions, which enhances the experience for the Thinker - adding relevance post-facto.  Key insights may come from the Storyteller, who has a sense of pacing and flow.  Key insights may also come from the Thinker who has a sense for the way the parts of the narrative fit together.

There was a time when a lot of D&D players engaged in robust long-term play.  Back when they were playing characters who expected to hold land, build structures, and engage in substantial activity outside the adventure.  3E doesn't support much of that, and 3.x never spent much time on it at all.  So this may in fact be more of a call to redress a decade's mistaken imbalance in perspective, rather than (for this one point) a fundamental redesign of the game outright.

RyanD

Quote from: RSDancey;427574Storytellers and Thinkers create good synergy.  Thinkers are constantly feeding raw material into the Storyteller's narrative.  The Storyteller is crafting sense out of the Thinker's rather abstract actions, which enhances the experience for the Thinker - adding relevance post-facto.  Key insights may come from the Storyteller, who has a sense of pacing and flow.  Key insights may also come from the Thinker who has a sense for the way the parts of the narrative fit together.

I would like to note that for both Storyteller and Thinker you present the game situation in terms of the narrative (which I continue to believe exists only post-facto to begin with) - which would seem, from your description of both player personalities to be the storyteller's goal and, and to relegate the thinker's place to that of a facilitator that goal. I wonder, is the player interested in interacting with the game world as a concrete phenomenon actually a "Storyteller," as you describe the thinker as "rather abstract? I would consider address of theme to be the more abstract process.

Quote from: RSDancey;427574There was a time when a lot of D&D players engaged in robust long-term play.  Back when they were playing characters who expected to hold land, build structures, and engage in substantial activity outside the adventure.  3E doesn't support much of that, and 3.x never spent much time on it at all.  So this may in fact be more of a call to redress a decade's mistaken imbalance in perspective, rather than (for this one point) a fundamental redesign of the game outright.

While for the most part I agree, I think it is misleading to characterize various elements as "outside the adventure;" rather than as part of it - this is, I think, a problem exemplified by the 3e/4e "encounter" model, but as much or nearly so in the model of "scenes" as addressed variously by 2e and neo-story models alike - the metagame privileging of artificial frames of interaction with fixed solutions, rather than a holistic interaction of place and character.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;427565There are reasons to be skeptical of the study and of how Ryan is reporting it, but your objection doesn't seem to appreciate what cluster analysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis) is.

Blimey, that's a data dump and no mistake. I'm afraid you'll need to explain in simpler terms why people can only belong to one segment, because I'm not getting it from the link.

Quote from: RSDancey;427574You are again mistaken in your mis-categorization of the segments.  I'll repeat.

All hobbyist tabletop RPG players desire the following in their game,regardless of their sub-segment:

* Strong Characters and Exciting Story
* Role Playing
* Complexity Increases over Time
* Requires Strategic Thinking
* Competitive
* Add on sets/New versions available
* Uses imagination
* Mentally challenging

You persist, for some reason, in trying to position the segments as exclusionary of these things (or inclusionary only of parts).  This is the fallacy of losing the forest for the trees.  Zoom your perspective out.

Let's look at one aspect:  Role Playing.

Storyteller:  "Role" - means "role in the story".  Am I the young kid becoming a man?  The Fallen Hero searching for redemption?  The pampered princess learning how the Real World works? The servant of a jealous God, bringing the Word of Truth to the unrighteous?  "Playing" - means "how I make this development happen".  I seek opportunities to advance my character's story, and by extension, the narrative of the whole group.

Power Gamer:  "Role" - means "role in the party".  Am I the Tank, the Healer or the Damage Dealer?  "Playing" - means "how I roll the dice to make my character work."

Character Actor:  "Role" - means "virtualizing my character and working to reflect my character through my deeds & words".  "Playing" - means "my decisions in the game are based on what I perceive to by my character's knowledge, motivations, abilities, insights, and desires."

Thinker:  "Role" - means "what I do to help the party succeed".  I solve puzzles and mysteries.  I connect the dots so that the others see how the threads in the story weave together.  I think outsize the box and attempt to solve problems creatively.  "Playing" - means "I do my best to out-think the DM and the scenario, to come up with the best course of action for the circumstances, and to be prepared for the kinds of challenges I expect to face during current & future encounters."

The Storytellers & the Thinkers share a long-term view of play.  The Character Actors and the Power Gamers share a short-term view of play.  In a world where the core TRPG audience consists of Storytellers and Thinkers, the balance of design should shift to reward this long-term perspective, and reduce the need for and impact of short-term perspective.  (Please don't convert that into "get rid of", "reduce" is a long way from "remove".)

Storytellers and Thinkers create good synergy.  Thinkers are constantly feeding raw material into the Storyteller's narrative.  The Storyteller is crafting sense out of the Thinker's rather abstract actions, which enhances the experience for the Thinker - adding relevance post-facto.  Key insights may come from the Storyteller, who has a sense of pacing and flow.  Key insights may also come from the Thinker who has a sense for the way the parts of the narrative fit together.

There was a time when a lot of D&D players engaged in robust long-term play.  Back when they were playing characters who expected to hold land, build structures, and engage in substantial activity outside the adventure.  3E doesn't support much of that, and 3.x never spent much time on it at all.  So this may in fact be more of a call to redress a decade's mistaken imbalance in perspective, rather than (for this one point) a fundamental redesign of the game outright.

RyanD

In your arrogance and pedantry Ryan it is YOU who completely miss the point, and the forest for the trees, and accusing me of missing the forest for the trees is frankly hypocritical.

The real meaning of my earlier post does not depend on exclusivity of preferences. I could very easily have phrased it thus, to exactly the same effect:-

If I understand your study correctly,

Thinkers are those gamers who are most likely to prioritise Thinker-type gaming, which means outhinking the GM, other players or whatever.

Storytellers are those who are most likely to prioritise Storyteller-type gaming, which means focusing on interesting in-game events [including the GNS-so-called-narrativist themes/premises you list].

Powergamers are those who are most likely to prioritise kicking butt.

Character Actors are those who are most likely to prioritise actual roleplay.

So, you can see from this summary that there is a natural tension between the things that Thinkers prioritise and the things that Storytellers prioritise for exactly the same reasons I gave in my earlier post. The fact that Thinker also require a baseline minimum of Storytelling and may enjoy more, and that Storytellers also require a baseline minimum of Thinking and may enjoy more, is utterly irrelevant.

Basically you are relying on nothing more than semantics and sophistry to refute my arguments. You objections do not go to their substance.

Except for your artificial and empty rhetoric about Storytellers and Thinkers synergising with each other. But I could make similar rhetoric about any two types in combination. Power Gamers love conflict; conflict is conventionally considered the substance of Story. There you go. Synergy number one.  Character Actors make the elements of Story more vivid and evocative by playing their characters with dedication; Story provides the setting for that. There you go. Synergy number two.

As for the old castle-building etc. theme which I recall quite clearly from BECMI D&D, I don't see why Character Actors wouldn't often want that - to have castles and estates as an extension of their character, if they are playing that kind of character.

Disclaimer:- I have never studied statistics formally. The first I have ever heard of cluster analysis has been this thread, and the first serious look that I have taken at its techniques has been just now in response to reading the Wikipedia link (above).

I considered this document:-

http://www.2dix.com/view/view.php?urllink=http%3A%2F%2Finfo.wlu.ca%2F~wwwpsych%2Fgebotys%2Fcluster.pdf&searchx=cluster%20analysis%20examples

Cluster analysis for clustering "cases" such as individual gamers is most often based on distance measures. Distance measures involve combining differences in multiple variables between individuals - for instance, you could cluster characters by combining differences between them in Str, Int, Wis, Dex, Con and Cha (notice I still use the traditional ability score order - this is because I played real D&D).

This was the key text for me:- the text at the link talks about how you mathematically combine the different numbers (basically it's (X1-X2)^2 + (Y1-Y2)^2 + (Z1-Z2)^2 where X1 is Bill's Str, X2 is Bob's Str, Y1 is Bill's Int, Y2 is Bob's Int, Z1 is Bill's Wis, Z2 is Bob's Wis etc), and then says -

[/B]

It seems to me, though I suppose I could be wrong, that it MUST follow that even if you weight variables in standardised form, each variable's weight is inversely proportional to how many variables you admit to the process. For instance, if you only admit Str, Int and Wis, each of these ability scores will individually make far more difference to your clustering than if you admit all 6 ability scores including Dex, Con and Cha.

It therefore seems to me that the whole clustering process is going to be massively dependent on how many variables you admit to the process and what those variables are.

What's more, the whole hypothesis of the method is that the variables are NOT independent. If you admit lots of variables which correspond statistically to each other in fact, the result must be that the clusters reflect those variables disproportionately. This skewing must become even more pronounced if some of the variables are in fact to some extent reflections of the same underlying data.

For instance, if you ask your system to produce TWO clusters and the variables you admit are:-

Total Wealth, Income, Pension Size, Value of Main Residence, Value of Vehicle

... plainly you are very likely to get clusters of Rich and Poor.

Now, if your survey on roleplayers asks lots of questions about things like:-

- do you like Story in your games?
- do you play Storyteller games?
- do you like to explore themes and premises in play?
- do you like your games to have identifiable plot?
- do you like to see characters develop as the narrative continues?

... then each of these feeds into the Storyteller style, and you are very likely to end up with a Storyteller cluster at some point because people who tick one of these will often tick the others.

So, clustering may be great for clustering cases based on variables which are more or less independent of each other, such as do you like the taste of fair trade coffee, what is your income, are you male or female, what is your attitude to fair trade ethics, etc., BUT where many of the variables are closely connected, in my largely as yet ignorant view the whole premise of clustering may be flawed.

Clustering should NOT reliably and frequently produce a neat, symmetrical set of groups along the 22/22/22/22 lines. I'm not saying it never can.

And the WotC study for all I know may be perfectly valid.

But if you select a range of variables many of which correspond with each other very VERY closely, your clusters are I think bound to end up reflecting those in effect pre-selected groupings.

The analysis of roleplayers is I think in huge danger of falling into that trap because so many of the factors likely to interest researchers are likely to correspond closely with other particular factors also of subjective interest to the researchers. In other words, where things are of subjective interest to the researchers, the researchers may ask many questions which are in essence about those same things, and fewer questions about things which do not hold so much interest for them. The clusters will then inevitably reflect the researchers' subjective interests.

That, at least, is my suspicion.

In other words if the researchers asked lots of questions about butt-kicking (or which were inevitably closely connected to butt-kicking), lots of questions about plot (or which were inevitably closely connected to plot), lots of questions about roleplay (or which were inevitably closely connected to roleplay) and lots of questions about strategy (or which were inevitably closely connected to strategy), even if they asked some questions about other things, those 4 clusters were more or less preordained to emerge.

Now all you have to do is have your researchers rank people in relative rather than absolute terms (e.g. Bill does not have a Strength score on an absolute scale from 3 to 18, but has an average, below average or above average score compared to the group's average Strength) and you are almost guaranteed a symmetry of emergent groupings, depending on how you work out the relative values / averages. Such an analysis would then tell you more about the researchers' subjective interests and methods than about the actual reality on the ground.

And it would have the seductive veneer of science.

I'm not for a moment saying this is what WotC did. I'm sure they have great people on the job. But for me to accept your cluster analysis as giving meaningful information about what drives gamers and makes them tick, I would need to look at the original study and its methods in detail and the questions asked and variables selected. I just don't have the data to accept your conclusions.

Wow. I leave for two days, and that's what I find when I come back? A bunch of story gaming "let the players edit the dungeon" bullshit?

Good Lord. Unbelievable.

Quote from: Benoist;427610Wow. I leave for two days, and that's what I find when I come back? A bunch of story gaming "let the players edit the dungeon" bullshit?

Good Lord. Unbelievable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Icr14tvxdNs

Quote from: Benoist;427610Wow. I leave for two days, and that's what I find when I come back? A bunch of story gaming "let the players edit the dungeon" bullshit?

Good Lord. Unbelievable.

Quote from: Peregrin;427611http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Icr14tvxdNs

I believe you two mutually win the thread.

Quote from: Glazer;427586Blimey, that's a data dump and no mistake. I'm afraid you'll need to explain in simpler terms why people can only belong to one segment, because I'm not getting it from the link.

Assuming we're talking about how the actual data was used, and not some model or theory, then the cluster method would basically amount to creating a scatter diagram in n-dimensional space and then looking for bunches of dots that cluster together. This is hard to imagine visually if n > 3, of course, but it can be done numerically and, furthermore, you may be fortunate enough to identify a small subset of variables that govern the major breakdown of clusters.

The value is largely in identifying the "lumpiness" of the data and developing imputed "groups". If Strategic-Tactical is really a value scale, i.e., measuring your relative interest in Strategic vs. Tactical--and if the same's true of Story vs. Combat--then the data (allegedly) say that there's a cohesive group of people who are into tactical combat, and not so many people who are into tactics but equally interested in combat & story. The same (allegedly) is true for the centers of each of three other quadrants, and then finally a group whose interests are balanced along both axes.

Allegedly, someone might be equally interested in combat & story. But these people tend also to be equally interested in strategic & tactical focus. The "clusters" are imputed identities, basically shorthands for a set of correlations. By definition, you can't be part of more than one cluster, if the clusters were observed as such. Whereas, if there wasn't any pattern to people's interests, there wouldn't be any observable clusters. Or if there was basically a normal distribution of interests on each axis, but no correlation between them, then you'd just have a single cluster in the middle of the graph.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;427497No- what I can't do is "ruin" this battle.

I think such people need to explain how it "ruins" the battle.  If the GM knows how the battle is going to turn out, they can write it up and send me the story while I go find an actual role-playing game to play in.

The people in my group, many of whom also GM, have had great fun playing through what amounted to shooting fish in a barrel, either because a plan worked out or because of luck.  

From the New Yorker article about Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto that I posted a link to earlier (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/20/101220fa_fact_paumgarten):

Quote from: ArticleMiyamoto recognizes that there is pleasure in difficulty but also in ease, in mastery, in performing a familiar act with aplomb, whether that be catching a baseball, dancing a tango, doing Sudoku, or steering Mario through the Mushroom Kingdom, jumping on Goombas and Koopa Troopas. His games strike this magical balance between the excitement that comes from facing new problems and the swagger from facing down old ones. The consequent sensation of confidence is useful, in dealing with a game's more challenging stages, but also a worthy aim in itself. "A lot of the so-called 'action games' are not made that way," Miyamoto told me. "All the time, players are forced to do their utmost. If they are challenged to the limit, is it really fun for them?" In his own games, Miyamoto said, "You are constantly providing the players with a new challenge, but at the same time providing them with some stages or some occasions where they can simply, repeatedly, do something again and again. And that itself can be a joy."

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;427497No- what I can't do is "ruin" this battle.

So I let it go. But I never let that guy GM for me again.

That's what should happen.

Quote from: RSDancey;427537Objection:  

DM wants to hide/obfuscate some feature of an encounter area.  Player editing of the space could contradict the DMs plan.

Response:

How much of this is metagaming and how much is immersion?  Are you asking your PLAYERS to discover, by trial and error, question & response, the clue that is available, or do you think that the CHARACTERS really wouldn't notice if they were in the space?

For me, as player or GM, it's a matter of immersion.  Yes, there are times when the characters wouldn't notice, may not notice, or might not notice without explicitly looking for it.

Going back to your spider in the web example, the characters would almost certainly notice the spider if they took enough time to thoroughly search the room, might notice the spider immediately if they took a good like at the web, and probably wouldn't notice the spider if they didn't bother to keep looking up until it moved.  As such, I'd say "Take-20" for a thorough search (take the good and bad but succeed automatically), roll for a deliberate glance at the web, and say "No, you don't spot the spider until it attacks" if the characters ignore the web.  At some level, if the characters always notice the spider, it will never get a surprise attack on them, which seems pretty silly, doesn't it?

Quote from: RSDancey;427537A: The absence of a thing is meaningful.  In this case, a player editing something into the encounter accidentally negates a part of the DMs setup.  Telling this player they cannot perform the edit reveals the sensitive nature of the edit and "gives away" all or part of a puzzle.

The problem isn't that the edit gives something away.  The problem is that the edit is wrong because of information that the players are not aware of.  In other words, facts of the setting can be established without entering the "narrative".  You seem to be arguing that setting details and facts don't exist until spoken and that's wrong on two levels.  It's wrong on a literal level because the GM (or, heck, even the author if the group is using a published book or adventure) may have established details and facts during the preparation of the game.  But it's also wrong on a conceptual level.  As a player or even GM, I want to feel as if the setting is a real place rather than a malleable pile of clay that can be molded at whim like the dreamscape in Inception.  This is one of the reasons why I don't like recycled NPCs, even if the GM has recycled an NPC with a different group and I find out by talking to someone in the other game.  It damages the illusion for me.  And allowing or even expecting me to edit the setting not only makes the setting less real for me but reminds me of something I don't want to be reminded of.  It's like having to watch the cow go through the stun line, butcher, and meat grinder before I can eat a hamburger.  Sure, that's how hamburgers are made, but it's not something I want to dwell on while I'm eating one.

Back to GM preparation, and I say this as someone whose first games with role-playing rules had no GM, a primary value of the GM or referee is to provide logical cohesiveness to the setting and to manage the mechanations going on in the setting that are outside of the site of the PCs but would exist if the world were a real place.  If you undermine that and let anyone edit the setting without a referee or manager, then you might as well just do away with the GM entirely, but that would mean losing the valuable purpose that they serve in the game.

Quote from: RSDancey;427537For problems of type A, check your assumption again that the CHARACTERS wouldn't notice the absence.

If I think the players aren't noticing something that their characters would notice, I'll tell the players.  But that's not what I'm talking about and that's not always the case.  There are plenty of things people don't notice, particularly if no motion is involved.  It's quite possible to hide in plain site when not moving, which is why rabbits, deer, and other herbivores freeze when they spot a threat.  Yes, it can work and it can work for a giant spider lurking in a web above a dungeon room, too.

Quote from: RSDancey;427537The example of the gelatinous cube-cleaned encounter area is a pretty good one.  Would the CHARACTERS not notice that instead of the "funk of a thousand years", the room is spotless?  It's totally OK in my opinion to call a do-over. "Players, I forgot to tell you a piece of information your characters would know - this area seems much cleaner than the rest of the dungeon so far.  There's no dirt or debris in this area." (Just don't make it a habit, or your players will go right back to the Socratic Method of roleplaying.)

It depends on the detail.  The extremes are easy.  There is a middle ground that's not so easy.  Whether a half-burned torch might be in the room depends a great deal on who was there last, which a GM might know.  And that goes back to the GM knowing things that the players don't, which is pretty much the whole point of differentiating the two going back to the war games where referees handled double-blind movement.

Quote from: RSDancey;427537Second, would refusing the edit convey meaningful information in a positive way?  "You try to scoop up some dust, but are surprised to find that the floor is cleaner than you expected."  To me, this is great gaming - the players have done something rational, the DM has conveyed information that they got from that action, but the players are still expected to figure out what to make of the information.  This is essentially Fallout; the character failed the challenge, but came away with something valuable anyway.

You can do a lot of things.  That's one of the problems with game theory discussions is that people confuse what people can do with what's easiest for them and what they want to do.  Can I come up with some way to say "no" that's not saying "no"?  Of course I can.  But why am I jumping through hoops if I just want to say "no"?  And that's the problem with making it a hard rule and prohibiting the GM from saying "no".  What purpose does it serve other than to constrain the GM and make them jump through hoops?

Quote from: RSDancey;427537Third, be flexible.  How damaging is the edit, really?  Is it reasonable that the Cube can't get into this space for some reason?  Is it necessary that this particular Cube cleans down to the bare stone?  Could the Cube be easily swapped out for some other creature that doesn't cause areas to be cleaned?  What if the characters never find the Cube anyway - does it really exist in the first place?  It's part of the DMs job to react on the fly to the things the PCs do, within reason.

It depends on the situation.  But the point is that the GM already knows the answer to the question.  There is no uncertainty (roll dice) and no reason to say "yes" (the GM knows the answer is "no"), so why is the GM prohibited from giving the answer if the answer is "no"?  The GM may not have even planned out the details beforehand.  They might be able to answer simply because they have a very sharp image of the situation in their mind and are answering from that mental image.  Setting details can exist before they are spoken.

Quote from: RSDancey;427537You've got to have more tools in your toolbox than DM fiat.

The problem is that you are taking all of the hammers out of the toolbox for everyone's protection and I'm left hammering nails with a screwdriver or wrench when all I really need is a hammer.

Quote from: RSDancey;427537B:  The presence of a thing is meaningful.  In this case, a player editing something into the encounter accidentally negates a resource challenge planned by the DM.  Telling this player they cannot perform the edit either causes an anachronism (the edit is reasonable, ergo the refusal is DM fiat), or it gives away a clue (the edit is reasonable, but the refusal reveals that the DM wants the edit to represent a resource challenge), or it represents a magic bullet (the DM is surprised by the edit and the scenario didn't anticipate it, reducing or negating what would otherwise be a meaningful challenge seemingly "on accident").

That's a problem.  It's not the only problem.  The point is that the detail can already be established by the GM (or by a setting or adventure author) even before the players know about it.  What's hurt by letting them change it?  What's hurt by letting everyone in the kitchen cook dinner at the same time?

Quote from: RSDancey;427537On the whole, these seem like fairly technical concerns which are really straw-men arguments against a perceived loss of DM control.  I suspect that in practice, few if any of these things would prove to be unfixable either in realtime, or in-between sessions with the DM reworking minor parts of the plan.

Ryan, I consider myself primarily a player.  I really don't enjoy GMing all that much.  In fact, I consider it a sort of penance so the other GMs in my group can be players in the same games together and get a break.  But whether I'm a player or a GM, I want the setting to feel like a real place and anyone, player or GM, who edits details of the setting for metagame reasons risks collapsing my suspension of disbelief if I notice it.  And mechanics that formalize and even require such metagame consideration of the game guarantee that I notice it.  So I'm not defending the traditional GM because I envision myself in that role and don't want anyone usurping my power.  I'm defending the traditional GM because that's what I want to pay under.  See your next point.

Quote from: RSDancey;427537Objection:

The players wish to suspend their disbelief and engage with the game as if the game world were real; interacting with it without any editing function whatsoever.

Response:

Character Actors love this kind of experience.  Its like following a script:  You do and say such and such, the other actors do what they're expected to do, and the story emerges as a result.  But those players are on their way out of the hobby; reframing D&D to avoid their particular concerns is a mistake.

It's not like following a script at all.  It's like living life.  And I'm not convinced (nor have you proven) that such players are on their way out of the hobby.  Why?  Because MMORPG game words don't act like real places because the objects in them can only do what they are programmed let you do.  Maybe you can pick up the chair in a bar and break it.  And maybe breaking it will give you a chair leg that you can use as a weapon.  And maybe you can burn the chair because it was made of wood.  But can you play stickball with the leg?  Can you you roll the chair leg under the feet of another character to make them trip?  I can go on and on with examples like that.  Even if I grew up wrestling the interfaces of MMORPGs so I didn't find it annoying, the computer is only going to allow me to do a fraction of what a human GM could imagine and that is going to be true until long after we are both dead.  

Quote from: RSDancey;427537This is also really a continuum argument, not a binary argument.  As much as some might like it, the DM is not a virtual world simulator, and isn't able to actually pre-build a world and then allow players to interact with it.  

DMs are CONSTANTLY making up responses to player input.

Correct.  And that's where human beings excel over computers.  To put it in terms you might appreciate, computer games say "no" if they don't know how to handle what you want to do.

Quote from: RSDancey;427537This is really a question of AGENCY.  WHO is doing the editing?  The Player, or the DM?  If, in order to enjoy the game, you have to feel totally disempowered, relying on the DM to make each and every decision about the world, you're asking for a game where the Storyteller Players are going to be extremely frustrated and unhappy, and the Thinkers are going to rathole the group regularly as they plumb the depths of what the DM will and will not allow, searching for the limits to the problem domain.

I used to play with quite a few casual players.  You might even call them passive players.  They were totally in the game for the story unfolding around their characters but had zero interest in making the story happen.  Are those players accounted for in your segments?  Based on what I've seen, quite a few groups seem to have one or two players like that, even if they are the SO or spouse that tags along to play.  Do they want to be asked, "Why did your character fumble?"  I don't think so.  I think casual players are largely ignored by the theory crowd and online message boards but I think they are an important bit of glue in the social element of the hobby because if an SO, spouse, or friends who don't take gaming all that seriously can play, it's more likely that the social group will chose gaming as an activity.  If they feel left out, it's more likely that they'll suck the gamers into doing something else with them that they do enjoy.

Quote from: RSDancey;427537On the other hand, if YOU wish to ask the DM to shoulder that load, but don't require the other players at the table to relinquish their right to edit, you have preserved your own illusion of virtuality without limiting your friends' desires to contribute differently.  This is really an issue of selfish vs. selfless playstyle.

To some degree, I'm fine with that, but it depends on why the other players edit.  If they care about verisimilitude, again, that's fine.  If they start making edits that damage verisimilitude and break my suspension of disbelief, then it's just as much of a problem as a player creating a character named Sir Barney the Purple of Dinosaurus.  

Quote from: RSDancey;427537And if you really can't be happy unless you're in a virtualized world where the players have no editing powers whatsoever, well, the current genration of MMOs is really extremely good at that kind of experience....

Yes, the current MMOs are very good at that but there are things that they aren't good at, which is why I think it may be premature to write off the character actors.  I have no doubt that some of them will find something appealing in MMORPGs just as I'm sure some Storytellers are satisfied by the amusement park games that have a plot that they players play through.  \

Quote from: RSDancey;427574The Storytellers & the Thinkers share a long-term view of play.  The Character Actors and the Power Gamers share a short-term view of play.  In a world where the core TRPG audience consists of Storytellers and Thinkers, the balance of design should shift to reward this long-term perspective, and reduce the need for and impact of short-term perspective.  (Please don't convert that into "get rid of", "reduce" is a long way from "remove".)

And I'm still left wondering why, if you believe this, you'd embrace conflict resolution mechanics like those in Dogs in the Vineyard, which are extremely tactical and fiddly as opposed to focusing on the long range in terms of planning and direction.

Quote from: RSDancey;427574There was a time when a lot of D&D players engaged in robust long-term play.  Back when they were playing characters who expected to hold land, build structures, and engage in substantial activity outside the adventure.  3E doesn't support much of that, and 3.x never spent much time on it at all.  So this may in fact be more of a call to redress a decade's mistaken imbalance in perspective, rather than (for this one point) a fundamental redesign of the game outright.

And you can do it without alienating the existing segments, too.  And this goes back to my point about improving what the long-term players want through planning rather than tactical story-game technique used in play.

Quote from: Benoist;427632That's what should happen.

Well sure, it's what happened when we tired of our old WoD GM forcing us into his little plot-point campaigns by forcing our characters into stupid situations.

The problem is, this seems to be a recurring issue for a lot of GMs I've played under.  I don't know whether to blame White-Wolf or the old Living Greyhawk modules, but I'll be damned if a lot of GM's just don't know how to improvise and go with the flow.

Quote from: Peregrin;427656The problem is, this seems to be a recurring issue for a lot of GMs I've played under.

Sure. When all GMs learn is how to run scripted stories and there is a complete void of relevant advice on how to actually run competent games, GMs who do not know how to deal with creative PCs in other ways but to say "no" and be dicks about it and wrecking the whole fucking game desperately to get the PCs back on track is what you get.

Quote from: John Morrow;427642...
The problem is that you are taking all of the hammers out of the toolbox for everyone's protection and I'm left hammering nails with a screwdriver or wrench when all I really need is a hammer.
...

Perfect analogy!

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;427615Assuming we're talking about how the actual data was used, and not some model or theory, then the cluster method would basically amount to creating a scatter diagram in n-dimensional space and then looking for bunches of dots that cluster together. This is hard to imagine visually if n > 3, of course, but it can be done numerically and, furthermore, you may be fortunate enough to identify a small subset of variables that govern the major breakdown of clusters.

The value is largely in identifying the "lumpiness" of the data and developing imputed "groups". If Strategic-Tactical is really a value scale, i.e., measuring your relative interest in Strategic vs. Tactical--and if the same's true of Story vs. Combat--then the data (allegedly) say that there's a cohesive group of people who are into tactical combat, and not so many people who are into tactics but equally interested in combat & story. The same (allegedly) is true for the centers of each of three other quadrants, and then finally a group whose interests are balanced along both axes.

Allegedly, someone might be equally interested in combat & story. But these people tend also to be equally interested in strategic & tactical focus. The "clusters" are imputed identities, basically shorthands for a set of correlations. By definition, you can't be part of more than one cluster, if the clusters were observed as such. Whereas, if there wasn't any pattern to people's interests, there wouldn't be any observable clusters. Or if there was basically a normal distribution of interests on each axis, but no correlation between them, then you'd just have a single cluster in the middle of the graph.

So, what about this...

IIUC, clustering is basically a matter of grouping like with like and separating dissimilar things. Within a cluster two individuals are more likely to be homogenous and less likely to be heterogenous than across clusters - as measured by your distance measure, which is a linear mathematical number based on incorporating differences in several variables between the individuals.

It seems to me that in a cluster analysis study of individuals based on survey responses particular variables might not be reflected in clustering for a number of reasons including:-

1) no Qs in the survey (e.g. no questions about face-to-face social interaction), or Qs inadequately put so answers do not reflect underlying reality
2) answers are effectively constant across the study population (e.g. "yes" - everyone likes face-to-face social interaction), which is really just a subset of (3) below, with the aspect of variability reduced to 0
3) answers are variable across the study population, but totally unrelated to other variations across the study population, specifically the main points of difference which end up being critical to cluster-formation (e.g. people like face-to-face social interaction to differing degrees, but that is unrelated to anything else in the survey, such as whether they like tactics/strategy or combat/story)

Now, we have Dancey earlier on in this thread suggesting in effect

A) people talk about face-to-face interaction until they're blue in the face, but in the WotC survey, it didn't cluster
B) power gamers and character actors will leave the hobby because (i) MMORPGs can do some things they like mechanically to a level TTRPGs cannot and (ii) their behaviour does not actually reflect a strong preference for face-to-face interaction

It seems to me that (B) can in no sense be said to follow from (A).

The fact that face-to-face social interaction didn't cluster surely only means that the variations in preference for face-to-face social interaction were unrelated to the main points of difference/similarity.

In other words, it means that power gamers, thinkers, storytellers, character actors and general roleplayers were all identified (correctly or incorrectly) as having similar levels of preference for face-to-face social interaction (or - any differences between individuals were the same for each group), or the differences of sociability between groups were not important at the level of cluster-analysis, or the question wasn't asked.

But that preference for face-to-face social interaction could still be the most fundamental reason why all or any of them play TTRPGs.

For instance, the single most fundamental cause of homelessness may be the legal, economic, social and political structures of capitalism. But in a study looking at cluster analysis of homelessness in cities in the USA, capitalism simply won't cluster - because it is a constant factor present in all of them. That doesn't mean that capitalism isn't fundamental to homelessness. It just means you can't differentiate on that basis.

So, face-to-face social interaction could still be fundamental to why people play RPGs. Or to put it another way:-

*People* *Snacks* *Setting* *System*

Personally I don't think you can rigidly heirarchise people's preferences in that way, but anyway.

The point is that face-to-face social interaction may be a very strong pull on people of all 5 types WotC identified. At best, the lack of clustering around that point may tell us that Power Gamers are as likely to like face-to-face social interaction as Storytellers. At worst, it is meaningless.

I would hypothesise:-

1) Storytellers particularly like face-to-face interaction because they like enjoying the Storyteller stuff as a group - seeing people's reactions to the themes of the story, letting people see theirs, etc.
2) Character Actors particularly like face-to-face interaction because facial and vocal cues and feedback can be critical to immersing yourself in your character's perspective
3) Power Gamers particularly like face-to-face interaction so their mates can see them kick butt
4) Thinkers particularly like face-to-face interaction so their mates can see what a bunch of smartarse cleverdicks they are (not to mention munchkins)

What if the preference for face-to-face social interaction DURING GAMING is no greater among TTRPGers than among MMOers and it doesn't cluster in that sense as between TTRPGers and MMOers? Even if that's the case, you've got to consider that preference in comparison with other preferences which will vary between the two groups. MMOers might have very strong preferences for things which can only be satisfied via a computer medium without so much face-to-face social interaction and may make sacrifices to get there. TTRPGers may have weaker preferences in those areas, so that by comparison their preference for face-to-face interaction (which is only the same as MMOers on an absolute scale) has a greater effect on their behaviour.

So, I simply don't accept that you can discount face-to-face social interaction from the MMO v TTRPG equation.

What's more, the notion that Character Actors get more out of MMOs than out of TTRPGs strikes me as utterly fatuous.

Quote from: John Morrow;427630I think such people need to explain how it "ruins" the battle.  If the GM knows how the battle is going to turn out, they can write it up and send me the story while I go find an actual role-playing game to play in.

The people in my group, many of whom also GM, have had great fun playing through what amounted to shooting fish in a barrel, either because a plan worked out or because of luck.  

From the New Yorker article about Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto that I posted a link to earlier (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/20/101220fa_fact_paumgarten):

I read that article and I agree with it.

Here's something I remember that very few people seem to remember quite the same:

In AD&D it wasn't *always* life and death, in fact it was somewhat common to go back and "clean up" dungeon sections with a party that was a bit higher than the level required. In fact once you got past 3rd level or so, you had so many retainers that you were very rarely on the line with your own character*.

Frequently, it wasn't about life or death for your own character. So the supposed old school concerns about being mundane scavengers and scroungers doin' it the hard way in a world where life is always on the line .. really rings false for me. Your life was on the line in the first adventure. And then you took the survivors of the three PCs you and your friends each ran and stacked up the remaining gold and hired as many light footmen as you could and a sergeant to lead them. The first game was gambling, but the second and beyond were about resource management.

* I also don't exactly buy the Tavis suggestion that players do (or should?) care about their hirelings. Maybe the henchmen - those cost more money to recruit and usually even had names, but hirelings were frequently marched directly into danger, sent to probe ahead for traps, committed to suicidal battles as delaying actions.. I think I learned the term "cannon fodder" from the DMG (possibly a Dragon article) and we all thought it was hilarious. I used to have a running gag of the hirelings that desert the PCs after being mistreated showing back up in the employ of a rival adventure and trying to encourage loyal hirelings that the HR benefits were better.

A quick note of thanks to Omifray & Elliot for their explanations of cluster analysis. Very useful (and interesting) stuff. Thanks guys :)

Quote from: Benoist;427660Sure. When all GMs learn is how to run scripted stories and there is a complete void of relevant advice on how to actually run competent games, GMs who do not know how to deal with creative PCs in other ways but to say "no" and be dicks about it and wrecking the whole fucking game desperately to get the PCs back on track is what you get.

Hence my advocating that the industry should be focused on it teaching gamers to be better referees and give them good tools to be good referees beyond the design of the rules themselves.

Trying to relegate all this to rules is a cop out. These issues can't be resolved by rules. They only be resolved by having experienced referee teach folks their techniques.

In addition before doing this experienced referees need to think long and hard about why they do the things they do to avoid the trap of thinking their way is THE way.

As much as I written on Sandbox gaming and my Majestic Wilderlands I don't think they are THE way of gaming. They possibly may be the good way if you are concerned with the same issues as I am. By laying why I do the things I do another referee and say, "Yup that something I can use" or "Nope not applicable to the type of campaigns I run."

The main things that bothers me about Dancey's post is that they don't relate to anything he done in his campaign. Has R. Dancey refereed some games with these techniques? How did they work? What were the circumstances?

I wrote the my "How to make a Fantasy Sandbox" after I analyzed how I wrote nine different setting for Points of Light I, II, and the Wild North.  I am eating my own dogfood by using my Majestic Wilderlands in two S&W campaigns. (a monthly and a weekly) (Majestic Wilderlands was run mostly using GURPS prior to the S&W campaigns).

I would be a lot less critical if I seen people reporting use Say Yes or Roll in a D&D campaign involving dungeon crawls, and other types of adventures.

Quote from: Omnifray;427674So, what about this...

Yes, I think you're right on all points.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;427741Yes, I think you're right on all points.

Thanks for the feedback!

Further to this excellent point:

Quote from: Benoist;427660Sure. When all GMs learn is how to run scripted stories and there is a complete void of relevant advice on how to actually run competent games, GMs who do not know how to deal with creative PCs in other ways but to say "no" and be dicks about it and wrecking the whole fucking game desperately to get the PCs back on track is what you get.

I think it's worth noting that the principle of 'roll the dice or say yes' comes from the 'How To GM' advice section in Dogs in the Vineyard.  Here's the relevant section, along with the paragraph just before it:

Quote"All I'm saying is, the PC's stories aren't yours to write and they aren't yours to plan. If you've GMed many other roleplaying games, this'll be the hardest part of all: let go of "what's going to happen". Play the town. Play the NPCs. Leave "what's going to happen" to what happens.

How, though? Here's how:

Drive Play Toward Conflict

Every moment of play, roll dice or say yes. If nothing's at stake, say yes to the players, whatever they're doing. Just plain go along with them. If they ask for information, give it to them. If they have their characters go somewhere, they're there. If they want it, it's theirs. Sooner or later— sooner, because your town's pregnant with crisis— they'll have their characters do something that someone else won't like. Bang! Something's at stake. Launch the conflict and roll the dice.

Roll dice or say yes. Roll dice or say yes. Roll dice or say yes."

The section continues with lots more of good advice about how to run an open sandbox campaign and avoid rail-roading. Most importantly, and to rather belabour the point, it's not a rule that you have to follow, it's advice about how to be a better GM.

Quote from: Glazer;427968The section continues with lots more of good advice about how to run an open sandbox campaign and avoid rail-roading. Most importantly, and to rather belabour the point, it's not a rule that you have to follow, it's advice about how to be a better GM.

Some of the advice in DitV I agree with, some I don't. It's not as if I'm arguing for some kind of "say NO or roll the dice" principle. I just don't necessarily prefer to address resolution in terms of 'stakes' that are relative to the PC's goals, especially in terms of their dramatic goals. I prefer to view the world as relatively independent, and to try to rule impartially.

Some people, Mr. Dancey seemingly among them, and possibly Mr. Baker (though I think he's more trying to clarify), are very tied to the idea that the traditional DM and traditional D&D rules exist entirely to control PC decisions and keep them moving to a predetermined outcome. That's not the case.

QuotePlay the town. Play the NPCs. Leave "what's going to happen" to
what happens.

is good advice, but it's independent of "Roll dice or say yes." You can go with "Roll dice or say yes" and try to work toward "what is going to happen." (Though I think that's bad advice) or you could go with "roll dice when the results would not be obvious" and let what happens happens.

I'd rather just play the situation and let the stakes be what they turn out to be. Say a PC decides to throw a coin so as to land on a ledge. Seemingly nothing's at stake, but he might not get it there. It might turn out to be important later for unpredictable reasons. In the moment, it just may or may not land where the PC wants it. So I might make it roll. Or if I judge that it's too far to throw, I might say no. It's not about keeping the PCs on the rails, at all. It's just about giving them an independent world to explore.

Quote from: Cole;427971Some people, Mr. Dancey seemingly among them, and possibly Mr. Baker (though I think he's more trying to clarify), are very tied to the idea that the traditional DM and traditional D&D rules exist entirely to control PC decisions and keep them moving to a predetermined outcome. That's not the case.

I agree - if you go riiiiight back to early versions of D&D. However, pretty quickly RPGs became dominated by very linear modules, partly I think because they were easier to write and use, and partly I think because linear modules tend to give an obvious 'story' (story now!). Look at the difference between something like G1-3 and the DL modules, for example. With linear modules comes ideas of plot and storyline, leading to rail-roading and saying 'no' if players do something that doesn't fit with the GMs plan.

It's this style of play that DitV is pushing back against, I'd say. Not good old-fashioned OSR sandbox style play!

Actually, the advice to "drive play toward conflict" is the antithesis of world-centric play, the type of sandbox where the world & events are independent of the PCs.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;427975Actually, the advice to "drive play toward conflict" is the antithesis of world-centric play, the type of sandbox where the world & events are independent of the PCs.

The two are plainly in tension with each other [in exactly the same way that naturalistic roleplay and player choices intended to steer the game in a particular direction are in tension with each other] but I think that as GM you can combine them successfully as GM... run the world according to your subconscious instincts of how things will happen, but nudge yourself in the direction of dramatic events, or of events which paint alluring/exciting imagery such as mystery/horry. You might do that nudging subconsciously too, or you might do it consciously - it doesn't really matter, as long as the game stays exciting, dramatic and/or full of alluring/exciting imagery. As a player the issue is - does my effort of mixing naturalistic immersive roleplay and attempts to steer the game interfere with my immersion? - to which the answer may well be yes. As GM, your immersion is not so much the issue, so the question is merely - does steering the game in exciting/dramatic directions jeopardise the believability of the setting I portray to the players? It may do so by making the world spin in inconsistent ways which you as GM aren't even consciously aware of; but the risk is not as direct and powerful as the risk to a player's immersion from the player doing the corresponding thing.

In practice there's a middle ground, to be sure. But the advice as presented in the rulebook of DitV, and the interpretations you see from fans of the game, indicate that the game's culture is highly drama-centric. (For example, look at Jason M.'s comments in the survey thread.) The idea is to use all the discretion available to you as GM to actively ramp up the tension in the course of the scenario. Across scenarios, you're also supposed to do some armchair psychoanalysis of the players and then design the following towns to push their buttons harder and harder.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;427975Actually, the advice to "drive play toward conflict" is the antithesis of world-centric play, the type of sandbox where the world & events are independent of the PCs.

I'm sorry you feel like that Elliot, and it's not been my experience. I haven't found it hard at all to 'roll the dice or say yes' while still having events independent of the characters take place. The trick is to come up with events that are truly independent of the characters, driven by the world being a real place, rather than making them up on the spur of the moment just to drive the player's back onto the path you have planned for them.

The other thing DitV taught me was to listen to the players, and incorporate their ideas into the world if I possibly can. I am having an absolute blast playing a Barbarians of Lemuria campaign with my 10 year old daughter (she loves the old Marvel Conan comics I have in my collection, god bless her), where we're creating the world background for the campaign jointly, although I'm the GM and she the player. We do the world building between sessions, adding stuff we think will be appropriate and building the world as we go along. The effect has been *more* immersive, for both of us, not less. But that's just how it's worked out for me - YMMV :)

1. What's there to be sorry about?

2. When you use "immersive" like that with no gloss or explanation, I have no idea what you mean. But on the face of it, if the player is participating in world-building, that's problematic for an "in character perspective". It's not fatal--I can even see how it can help if done in-between sessions, since it gives the player more familiarity with the world. On the other hand, the more it has to do with directing the "plot" or "course of play" by means that aren't accessible to the characters, the less compatible it is with an "IC POV".

However, that's not really what I'm talking about here, I didn't mention it in my post, and I don't know why you're bringing it in as it tends to obscure the real issue. I'm talking specifically about "drive play toward conflict", which in the passage you quoted, is portrayed as a sort of adjunct to "say yes or roll the dice". (I've already dealt with my specific problems with "say yes or roll the dice" upthread.) But elsewhere in the rules you'll find: "Escalate, Escalate, Escalate" and "GMing Between Towns". Have you read those sections? Do you follow those guidelines? Or what about Jason M's suggestions for play here (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=427491&postcount=70)? I read them not as presenting the world as a neutral, preexisting reality, but as deliberately adjusting and improvising in the course of play, in an effort to ramp up conflict & drama.

EDIT: I should mention that either I misread something in one of your earlier posts, or the sense changed during an edit. I agree 100% that DitV and other (particularly early) Forge games were a reaction against linear plots. What I would object to, though, is the idea that DitV or other Forge games are restoring the "roots" as found in early dungeoneering-type D&D. In a nutshell I think when it comes to the "GM-led, linear story" paradigm, they reacted mostly to the "linear", somewhat to the "GM-led", but kept the "story".

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;428183But on the face of it, if the player is participating in world-building, that's problematic for an "in character perspective".

I understand the theory of IC POV, but in my experience it's never been an issue. Certainly my ten year old copes perfectly well flip-flopping between co-GM and player.

QuoteHowever, that's not really what I'm talking about here, I didn't mention it in my post, and I don't know why you're bringing it in as it tends to obscure the real issue.

Sorry, it was in response to Omnifrey's post. I should have been clearer.

QuoteBut elsewhere in the rules you'll find: "Escalate, Escalate, Escalate" and "GMing Between Towns". Have you read those sections? Do you follow those guidelines?

I have read those sections, and I'd certainly follow them if I was playing DitV. I think they're good advice in general too - keeping the characters motivations in mind will usually lead to a better game than ignoring them, whatever type of game you are running, don't you think?

Quote from: Glazer;428189I understand the theory of IC POV, but in my experience it's never been an issue. Certainly my ten year old copes perfectly well flip-flopping between co-GM and player.

It's not a problem of flip-flopping between the two. It's a problem of wanting to play and be a character, i.e. play a role playing game, and not play cooperative story telling and be some sort of co-author, i.e. a story game. Besides, being a co-GM in my mind is not the same thing as being able to edit the world as a player. As a co-GM you assist the GM. As a player you edit the world to fit some kind of authorial vision you have for the game and elements that are outside your character's sphere of action. That's not the same thing at all.

Also, just because your ten year old doesn't have a problem with that doesn't mean that other players cannot have an issue with it. It's kind of a lame back-handed slight that doesn't really address any of the issues I or other RPG players might have playing a game where they're basically building a narrative instead of living in a fantastic environment managed by the GM.

Quote from: Glazer;428189I understand the theory of IC POV, but in my experience it's never been an issue. Certainly my ten year old copes perfectly well flip-flopping between co-GM and player.

It depends on what the player's looking for. IC POV isn't absolutely necessary to enjoy a game, and playing as a player (that is, controlling a character) doesn't necessarily mean you have an IC POV.

QuoteI have read those sections, and I'd certainly follow them if I was playing DitV. I think they're good advice in general too - keeping the characters motivations in mind will usually lead to a better game than ignoring them, whatever type of game you are running, don't you think?

Actually, I think those sections are pretty bad. I recognize that they might provide exactly what DitV players are looking for. However, as applied to RPGs in general, if I'm playing and I decide to barricade a church, I wouldn't want the GM to decide on the spot that some NPC had a problem with my action, or to retroactively describe the church's new & shiny construction, which I'd have to mess up, just because it would be more dramatic and conflict-ful. Either the church is new & the NPCs have screwed-up priorities, or not.

EDIT: Saying those sections are about "keeping PC motivations in mind" is an oversimplification. Those sections encourage deliberately and improvisationally concocting challenges to the PCs' values.

Quote from: Glazer;428168... We do the world building between sessions, adding stuff we think will be appropriate and building the world as we go along. The effect has been *more* immersive, for both of us, not less. But that's just how it's worked out for me - YMMV :)

When I've used the word "immersive" I've probably meant "immersive in the character's point of view" or "character-immersive". I guess we could call it chimmersive for short. I'm not talking about "immersive in the story" or "immersive in the game-world" because that's so general that you might as well say "immersive in the game" or in other words "an absorbing game" which is so fundamental as to be trivial, if you see what I mean.

The notion is that chimmersion is better for certain kinds of experiences of play. One thing which your ten-year-old daughter MIGHT be missing out on (not altogether but in part), or might not, depending on how you are GMing within sessions and prepping between sessions, is the sense of the unknown regarding the pre-existing fleshed-out game-world and the related sense of mystery. You can't have optimal mystery and maximal co-authorship involvement. The two are plainly antithetical to each other.

I hate to break it to everyone, but all surveys have bias. You never get perfect data, and therefore are never able to make perfect conclusions based on that data. But until the pixie elves give us the technology for perfectly accurate magic 8-balls, we're stuck with that or nothing.

It's a science. You use whatever tools are available to you in the best way you know how to gather observations and form a conclusion. Trouble with 'soft' data like this though is that you're rarely able to TEST those conclusions in the field, and it's extremely difficult to verify causes and effects even when you can.

So attacking the survey and conclusions is pointless, but speculating on the ramifications of the conclusions and how to address them through design is not. And wanking off to statistics 101 is a complete waste of time.

I concur with most of what RSDancey has said because I have made similar conclusions from observing behavior at games as opposed to a written survey. In fact, his description of the in game 'discovery vs. creation' issue is so close to mine that I'm actually a bit worried he's involved in applying a similar technique to address it.

Quote from: John Morrow;427642Because MMORPG game words don't act like real places because the objects in them can only do what they are programmed let you do.  Maybe you can pick up the chair in a bar and break it.  And maybe breaking it will give you a chair leg that you can use as a weapon.  And maybe you can burn the chair because it was made of wood.  But can you play stickball with the leg?  Can you you roll the chair leg under the feet of another character to make them trip?  I can go on and on with examples like that.

I'm pretty sure most of this can already be done in Vindictus.

Computing physics is a well understood problem, and the only limit for in game physics is raw computing power. I give it three years before that power is in most people's hands and software designed to take advantage of it becomes available.

AI on the other hand will likely take longer because it requires both a change in computer architecture to do effeciently (the von neuman machine is basically nothing more than an assembly line), and a change in the way the majority of programmers think.

That step is mostly held back by the human factor (and perhaps getting pesky nanotubes to go where we want), but considering this same human factor is why people play RPGs in the first place, and that it's not exactly a scarce resource, we can get there more effectively by creating better human interface devices, especially for content creation.