Quote from: Justin Alexander;515293More on the distinction between roleplaying games and storytelling games.

This is pretty much everything the Pundit says, minus the vitriol and the shit-flinging.

I rather like it.

Quote from: RPGPundit;515267Or just by people who hate RPGs in general and want to create a new type of game that only steals the term and recognition of "RPG" while in fact being nothing of the sort.
 
RPGPundit

I blame the rules lawyers rather than the storygamers, at least for D&D; looking at say the Gaming Den or such types on rpg.net I think the underlying drive for them is a desire to "win" the game, which they can't do if the GM starts re-writing the rules mid-game. 3E and by extension 4E being designed to enable and encourage rules lawyering seems to have led to an explosion in the numbers of these guys.
 
Thinking on it further apart from the competitive munchkinry there's often also a perception that the GM is out to get you. Skip Williams' grognardia interview is perhaps interesting -where he talks about how he tried to "nail down as many boards as possible" when designing 3E so GMs couldn't "make off the wall rulings" when characters were in peril.
http://grognardia.blogspot.com.au/2009/06/interview-skip-williams.html

Quote from: Justin Alexander;515293They're just confused people who picked up a screwdriver; used it to hammer nails; concluded it wasn't very good at that; and then proceeded to design a hammer... which they then called a screwdriver because they thought that's what screwdrivers were for.

You forgot the part where they assume that everyone really wants to hammer nails and that anyone who claims that they happily use their screwdrivers to turns screws and has no interest in hammering nails is either delusional, brain damaged, or doesn't really understand what they are doing or want.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;515319Thinking on it further apart from the competitive munchkinry there's often also a perception that the GM is out to get you. Skip Williams' grognardia interview is perhaps interesting -where he talks about how he tried to "nail down as many boards as possible" when designing 3E so GMs couldn't "make off the wall rulings" when characters were in peril.
http://grognardia.blogspot.com.au/2009/06/interview-skip-williams.html

The ultimate extreme form of this style of thinking, would be reduce a system down to a set of precise mathematical formulas and/or random tables.

Though this would be difficult to do in practice, if stuff cannot be precisely defined.

Quote from: RPGPundit;515267Or just by people who hate RPGs in general and want to create a new type of game that only steals the term and recognition of "RPG" while in fact being nothing of the sort.

RPGPundit

Holy crap! Stop the presses! The Pundit and I *agree* on something. I better sit down...

Quote from: Justin Alexander;515293More on the distinction between roleplaying games and storytelling games.

Interesting breakdown. Unfortunately I think the term role playing game (and role playing) has been radically redefined in recent years to the point that classic definitions like yours (and mine) are on the defensive. I just participated in one of those 'what is role playing' threads on another forum and my take home was (on that forum at least) my assumptions about the word were becoming fringe (and even viewed with some hostility). Ten or fifteen years ago this wasn't the case.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;515383Interesting breakdown. Unfortunately I think the term role playing game (and role playing) has been radically redefined in recent years to the point that classic definitions like yours (and mine) are on the defensive. I just participated in one of those 'what is role playing' threads on another forum and my take home was (on that forum at least) my assumptions about the word were becoming fringe (and even viewed with some hostility). Ten or fifteen years ago this wasn't the case.

Don't make the mistake that just because that perspective have become "fringe" on some message boards means that it's actually "fringe" in the hobby.  If you assessed the reality of the hobby from many of the message boards out there, you'd believe that games like Spirit of the Century and Dogs in the Vineyard are wildly more popular than D&D, but sales figures tell a very different story, do they not?  Do games that don't follow that classic definition really sell and get played by large numbers of people?

Quote from: John Morrow;515401Don't make the mistake that just because that perspective have become "fringe" on some message boards means that it's actually "fringe" in the hobby.  If you assessed the reality of the hobby from many of the message boards out there, you'd believe that games like Spirit of the Century and Dogs in the Vineyard are wildly more popular than D&D, but sales figures tell a very different story, do they not?  Do games that don't follow that classic definition really sell and get played by large numbers of people?

I was thinking less about the story game versus role playing divide (though that was a part of the conversation) and more about resistance to the notion of role playing versus roll playing. With the exception of a handful of min/maxers I gamed with in the past, this used to be a relatively uncontroversial dichotomy. In the discussion in question (which was on ENworld---which I consider a mainstream forum) this split was met with a lot of resistance, as was any attempt to connect speaking in character and interacting with the game world in the first person to role playing (not role playing in the general sense but in the specific sense of a role playing your character). How wide spread it is beyond forums I can't say. The people I game with are all pretty heavy role players. But I am in my mid thirties. I do have to wonder if younger gamers have a different sense of the term.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;515402But I am in my mid thirties. I do have to wonder if younger gamers have a different sense of the term.

My young daughters have no problem role-playing, both in freeform play (where each one pretends to be a character) or with their dolls and other toys (having them talk to each other in character), but I keep hearing about children who don't know how to engage in such play and need to be taught it because they never learned how.  See this article, for example:

QuoteNow, the reason that the Tools of the Mind curriculum asks kids like Zee and Emmy to fill out paperwork before they pick up the Play-Doh lies in the fact that today's play is very different from the play of past eras.

For most of human history, children played by roaming near or far in packs large and small. Younger children were supervised by older children and engaged in freewheeling imaginative play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and heroes.

[...]

Unfortunately, play has changed dramatically during the past half-century, and according to many psychological researchers, the play that kids engage in today does not help them build executive function skills. Kids spend more time in front of televisions and video games. When they aren't in front of a screen, they often spend their time in leagues and lessons — activities parents invest in because they believe that they will help their children to excel and achieve.

And while it's true that leagues and lessons are helpful to children in many ways, researcher Deborah Leong says they have one unfortunate drawback. Leong is professor emerita of psychology and director of the Tools of the Mind Project at Metropolitan State College of Denver. She says when kids are in leagues and lessons, they are usually being regulated by adults. That means they are not able to practice regulating themselves.

I'm not entirely sold on the theories behind Tools of the Mind (my school district uses it, but my daughters have not yet attended the public schools), but there are a frightening number of articles out there about children who don't really know how to play make-believe games.  What specifically gets blamed for this depends on the political agenda of those discussing the problem, but there seems to be something going on where children just aren't role-playing the same way kids used to, and the old analogy between role-playing games and a game of cops and robbers may not have any real meaning to younger people who never played cops and robbers.

Quote from: John Morrow;515410What specifically gets blamed for this depends on the political agenda of those discussing the problem, but there seems to be something going on where children just aren't role-playing the same way kids used to, and the old analogy between role-playing games and a game of cops and robbers may not have any real meaning to younger people who never played cops and robbers.

That's terrifying.

Quote from: John Morrow;515401Don't make the mistake that just because that perspective have become "fringe" on some message boards means that it's actually "fringe" in the hobby.

Yes. That's exactly what I was going to point out. Careful with the intarwebz echo chambers.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;515293Because:

(1) STGs are about mechanically resolving control over narrative. Characters are elements of the narrative. And, therefore, you can play RPGs as if they were clunky STGs (mechanically resolving control over very small slices of the narrative).

(2) Most of the STG crowd were, in fact, trying to use RPGs to satisfy their interest in narrative control and storytelling.

Contrary to RPGPundit's conspiracy theories, these people aren't actually Machiavellian villains trying to steal RPGs from him. They're just confused people who picked up a screwdriver; used it to hammer nails; concluded it wasn't very good at that; and then proceeded to design a hammer... which they then called a screwdriver because they thought that's what screwdrivers were for.

You can see some similar confusion in the '74 to '75 timeframe where people were trying to understand D&D as a wargame. Fortunately, Gygax and the other early pioneers of the form understood that they had something different; trumpeted that fact in every forum they could; and by no later than April 1976 had coined the term "roleplaying game" to describe the new games.

The difference here is that the early STG proponents generally didn't understand that they were creating something new and different, so they kept referring to their hammer as screwdrivers.

Ultimately, this isn't just a matter of terminology, either: If you think RPGs are just some kind of specialized wargame, you'll keep trying to design them like wargames (which is inefficient and ineffective). Similarly, if you think STGs are RPGs, you'll keep trying to design them like RPGs (which is similarly inefficient and ineffective).

Worse yet is when you get people who think all wargames should look like RPGs (because they think RPGs are the newest and bestest wargames); or that all RPGs should look like STGs. That's when you end up with ultimately destructive philosophies instead of creative ones.

More on the distinction between roleplaying games and storytelling games.

Whether or not the intention was originally innocent (and given the people involved from early on in the storygames swinedom I would suggest not), that wouldn't change the fact that at this point its blatantly clear that RPGs and Storygames are two utterly different hobbies with different purposes, and yet the Story Swine  continue to act in a cowardly way by trying to subvert the name and recognition of RPGs rather than striking out on their own as their own hobby.

They're way past any stage where they could claim innocence or naiveté about it.

RPGPundit

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;515402I was thinking less about the story game versus role playing divide (though that was a part of the conversation) and more about resistance to the notion of role playing versus roll playing.

I actually think this distinction -- that roleplaying is something that happens "outside the mechanics" -- is actually a significant part of why it can be difficult for some people to identify the defining quality of an RPG: Because if the roleplaying in an RPG is entirely non-mechanical, then it must mean that all of these mechanics must be doing something other than roleplaying.

Whereas I've come to believe/realize that the definitional property of an RPG is that the mechanical decisions are roleplaying decisions; that when you use the mechanics of an RPG you are, in fact, roleplaying.

Now, with that being said, I don't think roleplaying in an RPG should be limited to mechanical interactions. I'm just saying that, in an RPG, there isn't a hard line between "mechanics" on one side and "roleplaying" on the other.

IME, most new players follow a fairly predictable bell-curve: They start out with a lot of extra-mechanical roleplaying (because they don't know the rules), then they become "trapped" by the rules to one degree or another (as they learn them), and then they break out the other side and use the mechanics as a springboard for even more roleplaying.

(One of the interesting consequences of dissociated systems like 4E, however, is that it completely lops off the first part of that bell-curve: New players are immediately forced to interact with the mechanics because they're not associated.)

Quote from: RPGPundit;515488Whether or not the intention was originally innocent (and given the people involved from early on in the storygames swinedom I would suggest not), that wouldn't change the fact that at this point its blatantly clear that RPGs and Storygames are two utterly different hobbies with different purposes, and yet the Story Swine  continue to act in a cowardly way by trying to subvert the name and recognition of RPGs rather than striking out on their own as their own hobby.

Probably true. But since this hobby has so often used "YOU'RE NOT REALLY ROLEPLAYING!" (and the roleplayer vs. rollplayer thing is part of that dubious tradition) as a club that they can hit people with who they disagree with, it doesn't surprise me that there's a natural impulse to feel that people saying "that's not a roleplaying game" are just trying to disenfranchise you and belittle you.

Particularly when some people really are trying to simultaneously paint them as nefarious villains.