JimBob and J.J.Skach both your posts is exactly the kind of stuff I'm looking for. The thing, these days I've been having more converastions with my admittedly old school players about the kind of games we want to play.

Also I've been looking over some of my older games, and kind of seeing them with new eyes. I see a distinct difference not only in their design, but in the kind of play (IME) they brought out from the group.

Stuff like Jorune, Runequest, MERPs, Top Secret etc. It's not really a good old days thing, I mean I look at my first edition of CoC, and it's a pretty intense games...but rather, I see a difference, in the kind of games we play now, and the way we used to play. Does this make any sense?

Regards,
David R

Quote from: David RAlso I've been looking over some of my older games, and kind of seeing them with new eyes. I see a distinct difference not only in their design, but in the kind of play (IME) they brought out from the group.

[...] I see a difference, in the kind of games we play now, and the way we used to play. Does this make any sense?

It might make sense to my rather muddled head if you gave specific examples. What did you do then that you don't do now, and vice versa? What did you do differently?

For me, the main difference between roleplaying at 11 and roleplaying at 35 is that I roleplay better now, because I'm more mature. I couldn't roleplay a man when I wasn't even close to being one, I couldn't roleplay a woman when I'd never known one apart from my mother. And so on.

That's the main difference, just maturity and experience of life in general.

A second and more minor difference is the type of adventures or stories we have. Up till about 21, I had a great memory for charts and tables, but couldn't manage intricate plots and relationships between heaps of NPCs. Now I've a bad memory for all the numbers, but I can remember all that relationship stuff better. So when I run a game, I'l present more challenges in the form of people, and less in the form of monsters to slay or puzzles to solve.

My gaming has changed because I've changed, not because games have changed. Though of course they have changed. More fluff now.

Am I on the right track with this sort of answer? I think you have to give us more concrete examples of what you mean.

Quote from: JimBobOzIt might make sense to my rather muddled head if you gave specific examples. What did you do then that you don't do now, and vice versa? What did you do differently?

That's the main difference, just maturity and experience of life in general.

I'll try to explain. I don't think it was maturity - at a young age, we were exposed to stuff be it movie, books - life, that made us grow up pretty fast, some good , some bad. I'm sure it had an impact on the way how we gamed. We (my teen group) aways incorporated themes, that most others would not like in our campaigns, whatever the system -but we had fun, with them.

As for experience, sure, I've improved in the way how I run/play games.

I'm thinking, maybe it's the games today. They seem to leave very little up to the players. Yeah, I know, I'm the one, who likes vision and a POV and all that stuff . Take Jorune for instance. Lot's of detail, but it left a lot of stuff up to the players.

I sometimes, get the feeling, that games today, inhibit, the imagination of gamers. I could be wrong, off course. But there seems to be very little mystery left in rpgs, whatever the genre.

Maybe, as you say, there's a lot of fluff. Maybe I'm not expressing myself well enough. :shrug: I do, feel - not that I'm complaining,  - that it's a different hobby.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: David RI'm thinking, maybe it's the games today. They seem to leave very little up to the players. Yeah, I know, I'm the one, who likes vision and a POV and all that stuff . Take Jorune for instance. Lot's of detail, but it left a lot of stuff up to the players.

I sometimes, get the feeling, that games today, inhibit, the imagination f gamers. I could be wrong, off course. But there seems to be very little mystery left in rpgs, whatever the genre.

The question is of where and how narrow or wide to focus your game.

How much or how little to put in is always a difficult part of game design. I learned this the hard way with d4-d4. The basic thing is,

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That's what it all comes down to. So for example, when Steffan O'Sullivan first designed Fudge, he had no fixed skill lists. He said, "make it up yourself!" A lot of people loved that - a lot hated it. Those who hated it, said, "it's not a complete game." He replied as follows.

Quote from: Steffan O'SullivanMy premise when writing Fudge was that this is a necessary evil - no game can cover every possible event that can come up in an RPG because RPGs try to simulate not only all of known reality, but large hunks of unknown and possibly non-realities.

Therefore, Fudge was specifically written as if there were no possible way to cover everything that could come up. Instead, it was written so that you would never have to refer to the rule book during play - an action I find irritating, as it breaks the mood. If you can do this with Fudge - run a game and never have to refer to the rulebook - it is complete in its design goal.

"All right," you might say, "so every game is incomplete because they don't have rules for urination on demand, or a list of deadly things you might be able to find in a 22nd-century dental lab. But Fudge is less complete than other games!"

Insignificantly so, I reply. Since an RPG potentially is simulating not only the known universe, but an infinity of unknown universes, the denominator is too large to show any significant difference in completeness between Fudge and the most detailed game ever written.

It's the last paragraph where he descends into absurdity.

It's true and fair to say that no game can cover everything. But some games cover a lot, and some games cover very little. To say that when compared to infinity everything is zero is absurd.

"When compared to Bill Gates' $50 billion, your new pay of $10 an hour is insignificantly different to your old pay of $12 an hour, so you can't complain about your pay drop!"

"When compared to the size of the planet, my 4'10" of height is not significantly different to your 6'6" of height. Therefore I feel sure you can't beat me up."

... and so on. So his claim that Fudge is just as complete as (say) D&D is obviously stupid. Still, the fact is that no game can cover everything. So you have to choose what you'll cover, and what you'll leave up to people's imaginations.

And the fact is that whatever you cover, someone will say you shouldn't have bothered, or that you should have covered something else instead. For example, RuneQuest III has a "dropped lantern table", but has no rules for characters starving or dehydrating or go without sleep. Apparently they thought characters were more likely to drop lanterns - for example, when needing to free a hand to draw a weapon in a dark place - than they were to starve or dehydrate or go without sleep. So they thought PCs trudging around dungeons was more likely than PCs marching across the wilderness for months on end. Whereas in GURPS, published about the same time, there are rules for doing without food, water and sleep, but no rules for dropping your lantern. Different focuses.

So, in how much detail do you deal with everything? It comes back to that question and answer - "use your imagination!" "If I could do that all the time, why would I buy your books?"

My impression is that the books of the late 1970s and early 1980s chose to focus on rules for resolution of actions, while the books of the 1990s and onwards have chosen to focus on setting. So for example Unknown Armies has no skill list, saying that you should use your imagination; yet they have decided that imagination isn't required elsewhere, giving 25 different kinds of firearms, and 72 different types of ammunition so you can make up more firearms if you like. They gave 67 skill examples, all told, but 97 examples of gun stuff. This clashes somewhat with their repeated assertions that combat and killing are wrong and shouldn't be done very much, but there you go. They spent about 600 words saying that you should make up your own skills, when they could have had 60 skills with nine words each explaining them instead... or a table of 180 more suggested skills, and a note that it wasn't exhaustive.  

To me, that's fluff - when you'd rather explain why you don't have something there, than to actually put it there. For my part, when I wrote d4-d4 those game design notes I put in two places. Firstly, in the introduction, so people could say, "okay, the game is supposed to do X. I don't like X, so I won't buy it, or I like X, so I will buy it." Secondly, with optional rules, to say, "with the rules as written, you get this effect in play; if you use this optional rule, you'll get this other effect." But many rpgs written nowadays have the game design notes scattered everywhere, constantly explaining and justifying themselves. It's like they're writing to other game designers, instead of writing to other gamers.  

You didn't get that in 1985. It was just, "here's the rule," or "here's the setting." You might say they assumed you'd figure out whether it was good for you in play; I think it just didn't occur to them to justify or explain it, any more than it'd occur to some guy writing out the Monopoly rules to explain how it was not like chess.

Anyway, back to the main point - the game design problem of,

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There's the question of where to focus, and also of how wide a focus to have. So for example GURPS Man to Man has a narrow focus - combat - and Dogs in the Vineyard has a narrow focus - moral dilemmas. They both focus on a small area, but different small areas.

Whereas GURPS has a wide focus, and so does World of Darkness; but again, each focuses on different areas, GURPS largely on everyday people, or something close to it; WoD on angst-ridden supernatural beasts. Wide focus, different areas.

Then you have say Chronicles of Ramlar and D&D - narrow focus, same area. And GURPS and d4-d4 - wide focus, same area.

The earlier games tended, I think, to focus on the resolution of stuff, the rules; the more recent games, on the setting.

Hmmm, long and rambling. Oh well, why change now?

I associate it with the idea of the game as a game with rules to be strictly obeyed and challenges to be fairly won or lost depending on luck and player skill.

A lack of "fudging" and players that are able to take the ups with the downs and not become too attached to their characters to roll up a fresh one and keep on  trucking when the time comes.

Fair's fair. Never ventured, nothing gained. The show must go on.

Hi David:

I've been running games since the late seventies, and I was an adult from the beginning, unlike JimBob and most others. I may have a slightly different perspective.

Quote from: JimBobOzThe question is of where and how narrow or wide to focus your game.

How much or how little to put in is always a difficult part of game design. I learned this the hard way with d4-d4. The basic thing is,

"I don't need to put X in, because you have an imagination."
"If I could think of everything myself, then I wouldn't need to buy your book."

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That's what it all comes down to.

Here is one big difference in game design - In the beginning, no matter what game you played, the GM was expected to create the setting. There were certain assumptions - in D&D you had this fantasy medieval default, and in Traveller you had a civilization among the stars, but you created it. Games like Runequest and Jorune came along with included settings, but they were different than settings nowadays. Like the settings added to D&D and Traveller, they were skeletons for you to flesh out.

It wasn't 'til the mid '80s that the designer's setting decisions started trumping the GM's. Heck, I had no idea who the designers were on anything I played or ran back before then. I figured they were just people like me - guys who liked to game and had a knack for creating stuff. In the late '80s, I started seeing an assumption that you were using a default setting - rather than an ssumption that you were creating your own - worked into rulebooks. This blossomed into the metaplot craze of the '90s.

I always made my own setting, and this assumption jarred me. There were things in books and magazines that wouldn't work outside of the very specific society or circumstance they were designed for. I also started noticing more emphasis put on game and setting designers then there used to be. It became awkward to fit anything new into an existing home-designed game setting. I stopped buying stuff. I almost stopped gaming altogether.

When I designed the first StarCluster, I designed it for people like me, who liked to design their own worlds. Other than very basic setting assumptions like classic Traveller or AD&D 1e, there was nothing setting wise. When I re-wrote in into StarCluster 2, I incorporated a lot more stuff, but I tried to emphasize that this was all optional - I detailed a single star system as an example, and put up stat blocks for the rest - and focused more on tools and concepts that were portable. I regularly got raked over the coals for not including a big setting.

Finding the balance point between too much setting (for guys like me who feel cramped in an over-detailed world) and too little (for guys who prefer everything laid out when they opened the book) is devilishly hard. Cold Space and FTL Now have a lot more setting info than StarCluster, but I still have one review saying the setting is too sketchy balanced with the next saying the setting is just right. No one ever accuses me of giving too much setting...

Quote from: JimBobOzTo me, that's fluff - when you'd rather explain why you don't have something there, than to actually put it there. For my part, when I wrote d4-d4 those game design notes I put in two places. Firstly, in the introduction, so people could say, "okay, the game is supposed to do X. I don't like X, so I won't buy it, or I like X, so I will buy it." Secondly, with optional rules, to say, "with the rules as written, you get this effect in play; if you use this optional rule, you'll get this other effect." But many rpgs written nowadays have the game design notes scattered everywhere, constantly explaining and justifying themselves. It's like they're writing to other game designers, instead of writing to other gamers.  

This is a very important point, and perhaps one that JimBob didn't realize he was making. In the early days, there were no Designer's Notes. No designer thought that anyone would care about why they did what they did, and no gamer thought about asking. Including Designer's Notes was one of the changes I made from StarCluster 1 to 2 - on the suggestion of Marco. I thought he was nuts. Who the heck would want to read that? Yet it was warmly received by the reviewers. I still forget to do it for other games. In Harm's Way has a bit in the intro, but it's tiny. I don't think I ever remembered to write one for anything else I've designed. I don't read other designers' Design Notes myself. I just skip it, like I skip game fiction. Bad habits die hard.

-clash

I think Clash's point about setting materials is right on the money.  I see a lot more of the divide between "new" and "old" schools of RPG in this area.  For example, one of my favorite campaign sets, the old World of Greyhawk folio/boxed set, covered a very large expanse of land and included many cultures.  However, the detail was very sketchy; descriptions were more suggestive than they were expansive, encouraging individual DMs to make the world their own.  It was exciting and heady stuff!

I don't think I have any major point to make here ("then why are you posting?!"), but I do think that the amount and kind of attention paid to RPG settings has a lot to do with the new/old school divide.  Or at least, it did at the beginning.