You gathered all that from a gamebook written by an author tangentially related to the Forge?  A gamebook that espouses a type of play derided by Mr. Ron Edwards himself?

Comon', man.  Cut the Red Scare stuff.  The Cold War is over.  Video-gamers didn't stop buying The Elder Scrolls because Final Fantasy calls itself an RPG.

I just think the guy should stop promoting it as an rpg or storygame and just rebrand it as an inprov partygame along with bunging all the bits and bobs the game requires into a nice boxset and selling it alongside the partygames you mentioned, above im sure he'd shift a heck of alot more copies and be able to buy all the hookers and blow(or whatever he's into at the time) he could ever want or need from the profits.  Face it if you had created Fiasco wouldnt you rather promote it as any other type of game than an rpg(especially given how its very weakly related to any other rpg out there)? especially considering even the crappiest partygames make more money in a month than most rpg's do in a year.

If I could sell it to Steve Jackson, sure.

But the logistics of getting it into department stores is beyond some people's means, especially if they want to maintain control over their creation.

Quote from: beeber;561262i wouldn't call it either a trad rpg or a board game.

Personally what I meant is that I'd play that kind of game casually "like a board game," that is, like I play stuff like Trivial Pursuit or Pictionary or whatnot (I wasn't making the point that the game itself would be a board game, to be super clear: it's a story game, clearly, a game where you create a story like an author or movie director). It looks like it could be fun, in all honesty. It's just not a role playing game. And let me tell you - this is really a moot point here. It's posted in the right forum, I didn't have to move it, so I have no axe to grind on that score.

All I'm saying is that honestly I could see myself enjoying a one shot of this with some friends, though I don't see it as a role playing game. It's an actual compliment, believe it or not.

Quote from: Broken-Serenity;561221The game usually goes well  so long as you make sure you go in to the sessions knowing its just a boardgame pretending to be something its not(im not entirely sure exactly what it thinks it is but roleplaying game isnt it)

The game never describes itself as a roleplaying game. The terms it seems to prefer are "weird game" and "story gaming".

It doesn't seem to be a board game at all, because there's no board. (You're surely not talking about the cheat sheet playmat as being a "board" are you? Using that logic, my DM screen turns D&D into a board game every time it falls over.)

In short: You appear to have no idea what you're talking about.

Re: Fiasco. I haven't played, but the rulebook didn't particularly impress me. The format of the playbooks as idea seeds is clever, but that's pretty much all the game has going for it. The rest of the mechanics seem to create more of a mess than a direction.

Watching the video: Just once I'd like to watch one of these Tabletop videos and have them not fuck up the rules of the game they're playing.

(They get the tilt wrong by counting the number of dice they have instead of rolling the dice they have.)

Quote from: beeber;561117never seen any of this storygame stuff, but i must say i'm intrigued and can't wait to see how it gets resolved.

part 1 of fiasco (part 2 is either next week or the week after, i'm not sure how often it airs)

Sssh! You'll wake the beast!

I played a demo (about the first half of the game) via skype with Jason Morningstar, Mike Lafferty and Daniel Gallant on Lafferty's podcast a while back. It was fun and I wish we had gotten to finish the game.

I'd play a full game anytime with an interested group of people, especially as a lot of the playsets just seem to be loaded with fun potential.

As far as "roleplaying vs whatever game", I've often said that I really don't care what kind of game it is as long as it's fun. That's pretty much my first criteria for any hobby activity I participate in for some reason.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;561413Sssh! You'll wake the beast!

I'm sure there's a 40k playset. You could even write up an Eldar thing for it - oh, wait, no, that would require actually using some imagination and doing some work yourself. But none of the Eldar background is specifically written for Fiasco, so you couldn't use it as it's for a totally different game.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;561403Watching the video: Just once I'd like to watch one of these Tabletop videos and have them not fuck up the rules of the game they're playing.

The whole thing feels kind of Dr. Horrible-esque to me - nobody's taking it seriously and it seems to exist mostly to pump up name recognition for the people involved.

Quote from: Benoist;561358Personally what I meant is that I'd play that kind of game casually "like a board game," that is, like I play stuff like Trivial Pursuit or Pictionary or whatnot (I wasn't making the point that the game itself would be a board game, to be super clear: it's a story game, clearly, a game where you create a story like an author or movie director). It looks like it could be fun, in all honesty. It's just not a role playing game. And let me tell you - this is really a moot point here. It's posted in the right forum, I didn't have to move it, so I have no axe to grind on that score.

All I'm saying is that honestly I could see myself enjoying a one shot of this with some friends, though I don't see it as a role playing game. It's an actual compliment, believe it or not.

I have one day a month set aside for quirky games or games people in our group want to play. Fiasco is on the list of things to try. I certainly wouldn't want to run my regular rpg campaigns the way they ran fiasco but I can see it being a fun game in its own right.

Whatever folks call them, and personally I don't really care much about the story versus traditional rpg thing, a game like this looks like it would be a different experience from D&D or Vampire (which I assume was their intent when making it). A bit in the way that games like Og or Kobolds at my baby are different. I would certainly make a distinction between this style of game and my standard rpg fair (whether its labeled storygame, party game or indie rpg isn't too big a deal to me----i think the later can lead to confusion but now I think most people intuit indie rpg means something like fiasco rather than just something put out by a small publisher...a bit like indie rock).

Yeah.  Fiasco has a niche, and it fills it nicely -- it's not trying to replace anyone's regular weekly game.

One of my old buddies is offering to run a long-term campaign, but he works a ton of hours, so he's set aside every other week for people who want to run other things.  We're using those nights for one-shots and short-form games like Fiasco, Ghostbusters, or ghost//echo -- it's a nice way to break things up, it gives the DM more time to prep for the regular game, and a lot of those short-form games are super-easy to learn so we're not investing a ton of time into something we're only going to play as a one-off.

Quote from: Peregrin;561614and a lot of those short-form games are super-easy to learn so we're not investing a ton of time into something we're only going to play as a one-off.

This is why I play these types of game at a weekend tournament our group goes to each year; they're great for that environment. The systems tend to be so simple that you can concentrate on playing your character rather than playing the system, which really matters at a tournament, and is the part of this hobby that I enjoy the most.

They do what they're designed to do really well. They don't necessarily do anything else, but that's okay. Other games do those things.

I watched it, I think that it exemplified part of my problem with a lot of Indie style games.

The scenes are not connected. Sure they all tell part of the games ahem "story", but they focus on the conflict and forget that the things around it is what makes the conflict have weight to the characters. The story of the person, unveiled through their day to day routines and the conflicts.

You can tell both types of stories in a movie, but it seems that Fiasco and a few other Indie games I've seen focus on one type of gaming "story", one that is loosely woven, ensemble-type.

Nothing wrong with that for those who enjoy that, but for me it seems to be missing important aspects of flowing the play of the game to generate surprise, mystery, subtlety, and personality.

Silverlion: go dig up some other recordings of actual play.  One of the big problems with a lot of storygames that tightly focus on a specific genre or style is that they require everybody at the table to know that genre and style well and work together to (re)inforce it constantly.

There's also the fact that a story created collaboratively in real time by amateurs is never going to be as good as something that's been massaged by script doctors and run through an editing room a time or two.