Yes, which is why I said that I wasn't implying such games couldn't be made. Just that it makes far more sense to start with a broad brush and create lots of options for narrowing down the game to fit the group.
The Game-Theory/Forgeite obsession with "microsettings" is deeply disturbing and counter-productive.
Concerning "microsettings"; creating them makes perfect sense given the ideals of leaving the setting to player and GM creativity to fill in, focusing on a set range of issues and themes, and building a "focused" game. The practice fulfills it's intended purpose, but it's intended purpose
is limited to a specific playstyle.
Now grok this: to me, ALL Roleplaying issues are "player issues". You cannot create better roleplaying through system. You can create (sometimes) better or worse emulation of genre through system, you can create easier or harder play through system, but Roleplaying depends on the players and the group, tinkering with system to try to force roleplaying out of it won't get you squat.
Good roleplayers will roleplay well with any system, "Bad" roleplayers will roleplay poorly with any system.
I spent a lot of time thinking on your point here, and have come to a much simpler conclusion than my previous one. In the games and things I've been considering, and used as my first examples (Castle Falkenstein, Heroquest, the Power Attack, and so on), when things are rolling, the rules don't create the roleplaying.
They just don't get in the way.
So how's this:
Rules can
interfere with roleplay. They may not be able to create it, but they can block it. Rules that are good for roleplaying are ones that, first, provide plenty of raw material for that roleplaying, and, second,
get out of the way. Dear god. I didn't like it. Generally the WORST way to encourage "roleplaying" (or "character development") is to try to force character advancement to go along with it. That's the equivalent to roleplaying of what the old "wheelbarrow full of weapons" syndrome in Runequest was to combat ability.
I agreed with the premise, though. Tying XP to killing monsters in D&D was not the brightest thing to do in the bigger context of what they wanted to do with D20 (Im guessing it was a very early part of 3.x's development that then somehow slipped through the cracks, or was allowed to because it fits in with the tactical model, even though in this case its at the cost of diversity). True20 does levelling nicely in my book.
I'll add a couple of personal notes: in my own "Forward... To Adventure!", XP is based on a simple model of "adventures completed": Complete x number of adventures, you go up in level. That's it. I don't really think that it should be based on monster-killing (wherein the loot should be its own reward) or on roleplay (ditto). The DM does have leeway, though, to lengthen or shorten his definition of what completes an "adventure" (as in, it doesn't automatically equal one session of play).
Hm. Well, you liked the premise, so that's progress. Here's the part I think you object to.
Among a large number of theorists (most of them Forge-influenced), the idea is to structure the game so that the "reward cycle", whatever that is in the game, is based on playing the game either the way it was meant to be or in some way that you have set as best for your character. D&D rewards you for killing monsters, and therefore killing monster would be what the game is
all about if it was built by that theory - except, of course, D&D isn't.
This theory looks dead sexy on paper, and may actually be very close to being true. Actual forms of execution range from the really neat to the bizarre to the fairly ham-handed, in my experience; nobody has got it right, yet.
The other thing I do regarding roleplay is that at the end of each session I award a bonus (xp in D20, Conviction/Adventure/sanity points in other games as fits) given to the player the whole group felt did the best roleplaying of the session. Each player has a vote, the DM has two votes, you can't vote for yourself. The discussion that ensues as each player gives his vote and his reasons for why he feels that player deserves it has helped greatly to encourage the group as a whole to work on developing their characters and creating a joint conception of what is considered group play in any given party.
Oddly, this sounds a great deal like what I do in LARP games I run; the last ten minutes of the game, everyone "circles up", and XP is handed out player to player - with everyone watching and generally pretty solid reasons given. It works.
I don't really agree. In many of my games the power rise has been something that has simply reflected the characters growing in experience (who'd figure?) and personal ability/fame as they face greater challenges. In my Star Wars campaign, for example, the lust for power was not a very central theme (except for a few guys who fell to the dark side). Likewise in my Midnight campaign, the growth in power of the characters was more a reflection of their improved ability over time to survive in a truly harsh world where everything was against them.
In my Traveller game the characters already start with a few levels behind their belt due to prior history, and in that game it really makes very little difference whether you're level 4 or level 12; it makes a hell of a lot more difference whether the party as a whole can correctly estimate the resale value of Senator Tanzel's Commemorative Plates on Gantros.
Its been pretty rare that I've had a D&D/D20 game where the POINT of the game is the rise in power itself. The only one in recent memory I can think of is my RC D&D campaign, where the set goal from the beginning was to try to advance the players from 1st to 36th level and complete the immortality quests for each of them.
See my comments on reward cycles. As I said, I think that idea is close to being true.
Actually, given that we're a fair ways in, and that's likely to be an interesting topic, would you like me to state a full position on that one?
And yet, so many in gaming theory have a serious hate-on for pastiche. Any comments on that?
Please understand, this is pure speculation.
As I've said, struggle is at the heart of the kinds of games that many theorist want to play. Maybe not expressed in a way you'd like, but struggle. And, it's important to their vision of struggle that the characters be key figures in their part of the struggle - they don't need to be the biggest kids on the block, but if the other kids are way, way, bigger, better to focus just on their house for now and get to the rest of the block later.
When I said that the kind of play that comes out of theory involves putting specific things foremost in the experiece, I really meant it. If you're focused on the ongoing conflict of these characters, the scenery is ultimately no more than loose bits of background to be played with and bring into the game in ways that serve that conflict, ramp it up, broaden the scope of it, give it color - but the setting serves the situation, and the situation serves the greater conflict.
Now, there are a lot of benefits to recasting things in this way, and actually playing to those strengths all the way. But there are some struggles, some conflicts, that just don't fly.
As an example of this, a character that is coming of age, whose struggle is the attempt to find a place in the world where they can belong, and to find a way to accept that the world is the way it is and he needs to fit to it just as much as mold a corner of it to fit him - it doesn't work right. That particular struggle is one that a player actually
could short-circuit given even a tiny amount of narrative power. And yet that conflict, "finding my place in the world" is the center of so many coming-of-age stories that I can't even begin to count them. And journey-of-wonder and coming-of-age have a lot of ties, though they aren't quite the same deal.
Now, I could easily be wrong; that's just my supposition. Tony Lower-Basch is working on a high-school drama game that flies directly in the face of this idea; I'm watching it to see how it comes out.
Professors of what, though? And where? A lot of so-called academia these days is really pseudo-academia, sadly.
I'd have to look it up. The nature of academia itself is something I'd prefer to generally leave to the side; I'd say that some fields
seem to act oddly from my perspective, but I really don't know enough to debate it with any real fervor.
Yup, and always to the detriment of Theory. They're your very own personal lawncrappers.
God, I hate that term. And yet, point taken.
Care to explain?
Sure. Recently, I've been spending a fairish amount of time hanging around at
http://www.story-games.com, and a lot of them swing by there to "put their feet up", so to speak. Reading the conversations there has revised my opinions of a great many people a long ways upward - which was good, for me, since the number of them that turned out to dissent on the "Brain Damage" thing had given me a pretty severe downturn of opinion.
And yet I fought a months-long battle on the GoO boards against a group of these guys who were hell-bent on Nobilis (or more accurately, Nobilis-derived rules) replacing Amber's own rules for the Amber game. The main argument being that Nobilis is diceless like Amber is, but its more "hip" because the self-styled intelligentsia claim it to be, even though its in reality a steaming pile of dog excrement with an unbearably vile beancounter system.
Personally, my argument is that the very best system for Amber is Amber, which has not only been hugely successful over the years, but actually follows through with all the stuff that other more pretentious games only claim to do, namely have a truly original and brilliantly innovative system.
*Shrug*
To me, Nobilis is very evocative in terms of tone and feel. But it's not an astonishing system.
As to Amber's system, I generally agree. I'd like to see Amber gone over with a fine-tooth comb, and a touch more resource management added in on few the rough spots (hence my suggested 'place to steal'), but the core of it is solid.
Whereas I do; I remember what RPG.net was like before first the WW crowd and later the Forge crowd got control of the moderation there.
That's deliberate subversion.
I'm on the staff there, as you know. I can say that there's
never been any discussion among moderators there that spoke towards favoring WW or the Forge; the closest that was ever seen was discussion on how to stop theory threads from turning into flamewars. I am, of course, biased, and strictly limited from sharing details, so I can't really justify my position.
I mean, I'm writing a game with Tony Lower-Basch and Robert Earley-Clark(both common readers of theory), Stephen Lea Sheppard (who has freelanced for White Wolf), and Dmitri whose-last-name-I-always-spell wrong (who typically thinks theory is a serious waste of time).
Well, he seems to be trying to be helpful in clearing up definitions, while still presuming that people must accept and work within those Forge definitions. I am curious to see how he would respond to the criticism about GNS (namely that the definitions of G, N, and S seem to be completely up to the what the person doing the defining wants them to mean at the time, mixed in with appeals to authority, in some twisted version of medieval church theology only replacing the Vulgate of St.Jerome with the Holy Writings of Ron). I'd be curious to see how you'd defend it, but then I'm not entirely sure you accept GNS theory, and if you (wisely) don't I wouldn't want you to bother trying to take the defence of it.
I don't accept GNS as it stands. I
do accept the outline of the Big Model, but believe that the wording is poor, and the place where that model places Creative Agendas, something much less clean and simple is going on; I'd be happy to show you my version of the model, and defend it, if you like. The glossary thread I started shows the terms I use, for instance.