Quote from: Koltar;375610Yes I DO have a good argument - don't I?
Whereas yours doesn't match up to reality.

No, you don't. What you said is that peopl trying to explore new venues in roleplaying games were doing so because some bullshit rebellious teenager behaviour. Which is bullshit.

QuotePicasso? No he wasn't. Picasso had a grouding and training in art. Ever seen the movie "The Mystery of Picasso" ? There is a sequence in the middle where PIcasso does a painting on glass - he goes through at least 17 versions of that pieace of art while the cameras are rolling. You see his thought process live in real time. You also see that Picasso could do realistic art and had the background and training for it any time he wanted to. He knew the basics before going off on his own path ...he had respect for what came before him.

Look, I'm from Spain, I've studied Picasso all my life, I've seen his paintings and been into his fucking house, and I can tell you that because of his previous training in realistic art he decided to stop doing realistic shit. According to your previous post, he should be doing that out of some rebellious strain because, why start painting people as geometrical turds when he was able to pain them straight? Or by your previous post, if you can play a good, wholesome, all-American RPG with alpha GM and shit, why should people explore other things?

QuoteNOPE. Tolkien ? Nothing I said  implied that.

Maybe you didn't intend to, but that's a logical conclussion of your post. Sorry if you don't like it.

Tolkien was as qualified to write fantasy as anyone who reads a lot can be. Any indie game designer is as qualified as Mike Mearls or Gary Gygax to design games, because there's o official qualification for Designing Games The Way God Meant To, as Tolkien didn't have a degree in Writing Fantasy Stuff About Bloody Hobbits.

I bet you that many Oxford professors wouldn't be able to write shit to save their lifes, despite their academic degrees, so your argument doesn't hold any water. And you know what? I'm pretty sure that many people like you said Tlkien - or Lewis - that there wasa no reason to try and write such deviant stuff about fantasy, magic and shit.

QuoteNow you tried to compare Edwards and Barker (and their  followers)  to these guys ?  You're kidding about this - right?

The only comparison I made is that, according to your bullshit argument before, anyone who strays even a bit from the well-trodden path (in this case, RPG Orthodoxy), does so out of some teenager shit. So, that makes Picasso, Tolkien, Dali (people who strayed away from the usual paths) or anyone who has innovated a teenager rebel.

Sorry, it's your shitty argument, not mine.

QuoteArtists only really make "Good Art!" after they have been trained in the basics and have done well at the basics of what they do

.

Says you, showing that you're not really versed on that. For example, there are many great musicians who are self-taught, haven't followed formal education, and are fucking geniuses, pulling new things out of their minds. So no, that's not true.

QuoteThe majority of Indie/Forge designers have no respect for what has gone on before and what works. They show no evidence that they could make an RPG that would work on the mass market or even 'medium market'.

The majority of Forge designers know what they want and what they don't from an RPG, and design them accordingly. They did the Orthodox Way of Gaming before, and it was not good enough for them, so they try new things. I say, god for them. I enjoy any kind of RPG, but I definitely support people tryin' to design a game to their liking, even if the premise or execution are IMO exercises in retardation, as Poison'd or Maid or We All Had Names. Even if that upsets some inquisitorial Amish nerd in godforsaken Cincinatti.

Quote from: Hieronymous Rex;375641In fact, adding a GM to a game makes that game into an RPG. If a GM was added to The Game of Life to adjudicate things like taking high risk loans, the game would become an RPG.

I've refereed ancients and naval minis games that were definitely not RPGs. I've refereed PBM Diplomacy games as well and they aren't RPGs. A friend of mine refereed high school and later college football games and they weren't anything like a RPG. Merely adding a referee does not making a game a role-playing game.

QuoteRPGs were originally a variation on the wargame; the difference was that there was a GM.

Referees/Gamemasters have been used in wargames long before there were any RPGs to talk about.

Now that Koltar has had loads of poo flung at him...
I think he is a tiny bit right, some of the people doing the anti-gm/'Forge-ite Rebellion' thing are coming at it from a petulant/adolescent angle. Their bad attitude tempt's some folks (Koltar) to paint the whole fence red.
Some artists arrive at abstract art as a legitimate part of their journey... others set out with it as a destination because it's the 'in thing' and lets their bullshit stand in place of the talent they lack. Usually those poseurs are pretty damn obvious though...

Some 'games' are just talented people fucking around with 'thought experiments' that are not really intended to be played (Powerkill...).
Some of them are the RPG equivilant of a link to 'Tubgirl'.

QuoteThe GM/Ref/ST is the fundamental aspect that makes something an RPG. In fact, adding a GM to a game makes that game into an RPG. If a GM was added to The Game of Life to adjudicate things like taking high risk loans, the game would become an RPG.

I disagree with that. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what the "fundamental aspects" of an RPG are but IMO having a GM certainly isn't one of them. The only "fundamental aspect" I can really think of is that the game somehow encourages you to play a character that's not yourself... that's about it.
I much PREFER games that have GMs... partially because I really enjoy exploration and mystery in games I play, I like unexpected shit to happen... but that stuff isn't necessary for something to be an RPG.

Interesting view. I'm not sure I'd call them juvenile, but I do see where their approach to game design is reactionary/rebellion to the status quo.

Controversy is the refuge of those with limited talent. The leading lights of the Forge court controversy both with word and game to cover up for this deficiency.

If they were Columbus searching for the new world, they would have landed at the Isle of Wight, raped a few locals and called it America.

Quote from: Simlasa;375706Some of them are the RPG equivilant of a link to 'Tubgirl'.

No matter how much I drink, I can't seem to kill the patch of brain cells that holds that memory.  You should be flogged for giving my brain an excuse to haul that up and torment me.

At least I didn't actually link to it... ggaaaahhh!

Learning all kinds of things here.

I haven't delved too deeply in to the whole Forge deal...avoided it like the plague really for years now. I have also only dabbled in a few Indie RPGs, probably for the most part ones that are close enough to mainstream that I mostly find their lack of general detail annoying. Typical Indie RPGs seem to have excellent high-concept moments followed by terrible follow-through. Most of the "mechanics" of these games strike me less as attempts at innovation and more at ways of labeling something a system with the least amount of actual effort put in to it.

@Koltar: Not everyone thinks your postulation is kooky. It can certainly be tested, of course, should someone want to gather the necessary data to see when various indie developers wrote their games, how often the refer to poor gaming experiences in a conventional environment, and other related factors, I imagine.....but such a person would probably need to get a life! It's kind of a moot point, and we should also avoid anything that leads down the badwrongfun path of doom.

@Simlasa: pretty much what you're saying. One doesn't have to be juvenile to want to break out of a perceived mold. Now I myself happen to be very comfortable in some variant of the gygaxian "group of players and one GM" mold myself, thus why I avoid so many indie games...but I know of plenty of perfectly decent, mature (often more mature than me) gamers out there who are obsessively interested in experimentation and deviance from the norm. I am a comfort food kind of guy. I could easily see an argument made for the notion that not deviating is a kind of juvenile effort to cling to the familiar, myself. I would not necessarily refute it...but I will fight anyone who claims that it is mandatory that I experiment, or that it is mandatory that "they" stop pushing the boundaries.

Fascinated by this discussion, since I am definitely Indie, strongly anti-Forge, and apparently still Swine.

For some reason, people seem to disregard that I've played, GM'd, and written for a number of trad RPGs as well as doing my hippie Indie thing, too. (And a good chunk of the Indie community has as well.)

So, yeah.

My two cents: I like playing games of all sorts (card, board, dice, RPG, RPGish, freeform larp, etc.). Learning different rules/methods of play is fun in and of itself.

The real questions are "does game X give a satisfying play experience?" of whatever sort of play experience it's aiming at, and "is this the sort of game I want to play?"

For example, I enjoy Texas Hold 'Em and draw poker, but am not as fond of stud. The former two give me satisfying play experiences and and are the sort of games that I enjoy; the latter is not.

But that doesn't mean I think stud poker is evil, wrong, stupid, dishonest, yadda yadda. It just means I dislike stud poker.

People need to lighten up.

Quote from: chadu;375897People need to lighten up.

Sayre's Law at work.

Quote from: Silverlion;375510Why do so many Forge-Indie derived games, keep trying to change the dynamic of play. How play works on a  fundamental level?

I think that at least part of what's going on (and I heard this point raised about some pre-Forge games that tried to change the dynamic of play by someone who knew their author) is that they don't really like the traditional games all that much and thus seek to change the hobby into something more to their liking.  I think it's not simply a response to "bad play" (of the sort that anyone would consider bad) but that they don't necessarily find what would be considered good play in a traditional game to be very good.  At least some of the role-bending is because some people want to do "GM stuff" as a player and some people want to do "player stuff" as a GM.

I think that's what drives most of the changes, from house rules to new trends, in this hobby.  Someone sees a glimpse of something that they really enjoy, but it's messed up by a lot of things that they don't enjoy, so they try to cut the things that they don't enjoy out, often not realizing that those things that they are cutting out may be the very thing that someone else enjoys most about role-playing.  

And that's been my personal beef against the Forge ideal of narrowly designed games that do one thing very well is that they often do so at the expense of other things that many people enjoy.  It's like opening up a restaurant that serves only one menu item or refuses to serve up many popular dishes.  Yes, a few restaurants can essentially get away with that by being very, very good or by serving a dedicated clientele (e.g., vegetarian restaurants) but such restaurants will always have a limit to their appeal.

I think people misread Koltar's post.

I don't agree with him, but I read him not as saying revolution was necessarily adolescent, but that this specific revolution was adolescent.  In other words, he was making a comment about the indie revolution saying it was adolescent in nature, he wasn't making any more general or extrapolable point.

Now, as I say, by and large I disagree with that.  But I don't think he was extending the point to art, politics or indeed any other sphere.  

On the general point, there's more than one reason for these games.  Some come from a dysfunctional place, Ron Edwards has long since lost it for example (though that came after Sorceror, which as best I can tell is a good game badly written).  Others, I'd pick out Joshua Morningstar say or Gregor Hutton, have ideas they think are cool and want to see in a game.  Your taste may coincide with theirs or not, but there's no revolution there - just folk doing what they want to do.

Personally, Ron et al have cast themselves into irrelevance.  We can ignore them.  Guys like Joshua and Gregor are doing shit we may or may not find cool according to our tastes, you can like it, think it's shit, whatever but it's honest game design (whatever the hell that means).  

The theory, the discussion, that's bollocks.  The Forge is a monument to Ron Edward's ego that fittingly has buried him under its own self-selected insularity, but the games are generally either born of a desire to make a game that someone thinks would be cool or a desire to gain status in the fucked up culture the indie scene's developed where credibility is determined by being published.  The games produced for the credibility vanish swiftly, often never really played, the ones we've actually heard of are generally the decent ones which doesn't mean we'll like them but hey - I don't like AD&D or 4e, that doesn't tell us anything about Gygax or Mearls both of whom did their best with those games and won a lot of fans for each.

The problem the indie gaming scene has is that lots of folk who don't really have a game they want to produce, want to produce a game because it's a route to status in the community.  That's why a lot of the games are bad, they're a means to an end, not an end.  To go back to my example above, guys like Joshua or Gregor have games they want to produce, that's why their games are good and deservedly get some recognition - and more importantly that's why their games get played.

Yeah, I certainly appreciate the people who are really working to make games that they'd like to play... regardless of where they fall in relation to 'trad' games.

Quote from: chadu;375897Fascinated by this discussion, since I am definitely Indie, strongly anti-Forge, and apparently still Swine.

Well, you're certainly different! I *like* your games, Chad, just like Tim's games. You two have written the only two supers games I care for, and neither of you is what I would call traditional, unlike my crap.  

-clash

Quote from: RandallS;375699Referees/Gamemasters have been used in wargames long before there were any RPGs to talk about.

I would have added that "players must control single characters" to the definition (which would have cut out Free Kriegspiel), but I was uncertain of whether this would also remove games where large numbers of henchman/hirelings are present, or the occasional game where each player gets 2-3 characters.

By "referee/gamemaster" I meant one empowered with Rule 0; cases where the ref merely applies and interprets the rules, as with sports, were inteded to be excluded.