Quote from: Steerpike;741622Sorry, I'll use smaller words.

Try using the correct ones instead.

Quote from: Steerpike;741622I was trying to figure out what you were getting at with your post.  It seemed to be part of an implied critique with regards to later editions' character creation strategies and combat rules . . .

I can see how you might take it that way, but I think that says a lot more about how you're spoiling for a fight on that topic than it does about anything I wrote.

Quote from: Steerpike;741622I assumed that by making a thread about it you wanted discussion about the topic.

Maybe that assumption was flawed.

I was after a discussion on the topic, and since here we are seven pages later, I'd say mission accomplished.

Quote from: Steerpike;741622Obviously I'm just being dense here.

Obviously.

Quote from: Steerpike;741622I understand what this means, but are you endorsing this little formula, or criticizing it?  I certainly don't think this way; I was trying to figure out whether you did.

The fact that I like something doesn't mean I believe the thing you like sucks. That is a possibility, true, but it can also mean I don't give a shit about the thing you like, which also doesn't mean I think the thing you like sucks - it just means I'm indifferent to it. Or it could also mean that I like what you like, but not as much as I like this other thing that I like more.

I understand that this is the intrewebs, and the dominant meme is one in which every statement of support for something is assumed to be a categorical rejection of everything that is not that something, but here it is anyway: I like what I like, and you like what you like, and sometimes those things we like are the same, and sometimes they're different, and that's okay either way.

Quote from: Steerpike;741622Again, I'm operating under the potentially flawed assumption that you are actually interested in discussion of the topic that you created.

Seven pages later, Steerpike.

As far as 'cryptic little posts' go, if I have a topic I want to explore at length, I blog about it. One of the reasons I created my blog is that I got tired of writing the same things again and again on message boards; my blog is a database normalization tool.

Forums are a great place for asking questions or tossing out ideas and seeing what the community has to say about them. Starting a discussion doesn't require a lengthy essay, it simply requires a topic. In my experience, tossing out an idea gets a more varied and hopefully more interesting discussion going than writing a manifesto.

And that's more than enough of this fucking meta bullshit.

Quote from: Steerpike;741622Perhaps you only wanted discussion if everyone in the thread agreed with your opening assertions?

Fuck you.

Quote from: Necrozius;741621Yeah whenever I hear anecdotes about characters the last thing that I want to know is what fucking elaborate combination of feats/powers they chose. I know that this is some people's cup of tea, but frankly I'm more interested in what sort of cool stuff the character did or what they experienced. My favorite anecdotes tend to be about cleverness, adaptability and/or defying crazy odds.

Amen.

Quote from: Necrozius;741621I found the Dwarvish Lawrence of Arabia story to be pretty cool, actually.

:hatsoff:

Quote from: Black Vulmea;741623Actually, the larger point isn't specific to any iteration of D&D at all.

Like you said, is your character unique because of what's on the character sheet or how you play him? There's a measure of both in every character, but players shade in different directions along that spectrum.

I get why some players want the widgets and builds and such. I'd like for those players to maybe better understand why they're not as important to me.

When viewed as a generic common theme amongst rpgs as a whole, the character sheet (at least the data upon it) will never be any measure of what is unique about a character.

You can tinker and build with all the widgets you want till you tire of it, and still the character is no more unique than one written by hand on a scrap of note paper that says:

 F1, AC 4, HP 5, S:14 I:11 W:9 C:12 D:13 Ch:14


until play begins and the character becomes unique due to actions taken, decisions made, and attitudes are defined.

This is true in any system because the player next to you can build an exact replica of your "unique" character even down to the name if desired. The unique quality of a persona cannot be defined by mechanics, it is developed in actual play.

The AD&D DM's Log had a great example of special snowflake sample characters. The race, class, stats, gear, etc. were all generic enough but there in the DM notes section was written : "Talked back to Odin...and lived!"

Quote from: Black VulmeaI can see how you might take it that way, but I think that says a lot more about how you're spoiling for a fight on that topic than it does about anything I wrote.

That could be true - and if so, apologies.  Your opening post seemed a bit like it might have been throwing down a gauntlet, so to speak.  My mistake.

Quote from: Black VulmeaSeven pages later, Steerpike.

...

As far as 'cryptic little posts' go, if I have a topic I want to explore at length, I blog about it. One of the reasons I created my blog is that I got tired of writing the same things again and again on message boards; my blog is a database normalization tool.

Let me rephrase: I figured this was a discussion you wanted to actually participate in.  You show up 6 pages in to snipe at my use of the word "interrogate" and make snide remarks rather than to actually join in the discussion substantively.

Quote from: Black VulmeaThe fact that I like something doesn't mean I believe the thing you like sucks. That is a possibility, true, but it can also mean I don't give a shit about the thing you like, which also doesn't mean I think the thing you like sucks - it just means I'm indifferent to it. Or it could also mean that I like what you like, but not as much as I like this other thing that I like more.

I understand that this is the intrewebs, and the dominant meme is one in which every statement of support for something is assumed to be a categorical rejection of everything that is not that something, but here it is anyway: I like what I like, and you like what you like, and sometimes those things we like are the same, and sometimes they're different, and that's okay either way.

Thank you for actually responding to the content of my posts, here, rather than confining yourself to belittling comments and unpleasantness.  This is exactly the clarification I was initially seeking and why I was asking about the intent of your opening post.

In essence, I was trying to suss out whether your stated preference for organic character development in OD&D - specifically for fighters - also formed part of a critique of option-heavy character creation strategies and detail-rich combat mechanics, such as those found in 3.5/Pathfinder.  Your (excellent) post on Gimli/Khazm hints at this critique, when you emphasize that "burgeoning rules complexity... leads to a lack of flexibility," and that "the more fiddly bits a character needs, the more difficult it can be to make changes on the fly."  Reading between the lines, here, I felt like I was detecting a criticism of 3.X/Pathfinder - specifically that you were suggesting that organic character development and making a fighter interesting through play works better in a rules-light system such as OD&D and is more difficult in 3.X and its ilk.  I've been trying to offer a counter-point to this argument, because I don't think that baroque rules systems necessarily inhibit organic character development, or that granular combat mechanics make the process of playing an interesting fighter harder.

Quote from: Black VulmeaAnd that's more than enough of this fucking meta bullshit.

I agree.  I'm much more interested in debating the relative merits of detail light vs. detail heavy combat mechanics and character creation than I am in being insulted or having my word choices nitpicked.  I'd like to continue the conversation around these topics, because I actually do think they're pretty interesting.  Can we agree to stop with the unpleasant little digs and actually have a substantive conversation where both sides explain their points of view?

Quote from: Benoist;741428I disagree. I've known GMs, not just me, but many people besides me, who started GMing and ran decent games from the get-go. Your premise is, flat-out, a bullshit biased assertion, to me. It might be that we have different thresholds of what we would call "good" and "bad" GMing, but then again, that just confirms to me that this is a biased assertion to begin with.

(blinks)

Now let me get this straight.  You really believe -- you genuinely believe -- that someone who's never gamed before is going to be a good GM right off the bat?  In a hobby with an intricate rule set and a comprehensive skill set such as this one?  Nonsense.  There are only about a hundred thousand things human beings can do that are significantly easier, and require significantly simpler talents, than GMing, at which they suck until they're trained or gain experience.

Sorry.  I don't buy it, and I've never seen it.  I've known longtime players who've moved to the other side of the dice and done a decent job, but that's another thing altogether: I've never coached hockey, but I've followed the sport for nearly fifty years, and I've been a player, a referee, a columnist and a broadcaster, so I figure I wouldn't completely blow if I went onto the bench.  (Ask me to do the same with cricket, a game for which I've seen a few matches, and it'd be a farce.)

This has nothing to do, as some of you think, with having fun: I completely agree that a bunch of starry-eyed 11 year olds would have a blast, and still suck at it.  Hell, I had a total blast when I first started playing, and I was 19.  Now, in fact, that GM sucked, and in a year or so I started to realize it: he had Mary Sue on the brain, he ran Empire of the Petal Throne like Hollywood medieval England, he was obsessed with having his NPCs nail the PCs of every female player, he made Monty Haul look like a piker, fudging any dice roll he didn't like was routine, and he'd gape at you blankly if you asked to do anything the rules didn't explicitly cover.  (I bet, all my vaunted acting experience aside, that I wasn't any great shakes as a player then either.)  

Still doesn't mean that in the spring of 1979, I didn't have fun.

Quote from: estar;741342You are refereeing OD&D

Player: I want to carve a Z in the guard's chest.

How do you rule?

Given that I was frustrated that OD&D didn't allow for such options -- OG's opinion aside, there's a giant whopping load of DMs and players alike who are staunchly in the If It's Not In The Rules You Can't Do It/If It Is In The Rules You Can't Contradict It camp -- I ditched OD&D for games that did.

Quote from: Benoist;741393I don't see how DM rulings are by their very nature going to be inconsistent from game to game and mechanically unpredictable. It seems to me that inconsistency and unpredictability are predicated on the DM sucking in the first place ...

I completely disagree.

Let's take, for instance, that OD&D example above.  Several people have put forward opinions as to how they'd houserule it.  Likely I could think of a couple ways myself, between "Look, if you kill the dude, you can have done it with a 'Z' in his chest if that floats your boat" to "Make your attack roll by 5" to "Do Y damage and sure."

But I've also been doing this for several decades, and when I counted a few months ago, I've GMed over a thousand sessions.  How in the merry hell am I going to remember some spur-of-the-moment houserule from six sessions ago?  Or six months ago?  Or six years ago?  I might not write them down, and with OD&D it'd slow play up to a crawl if I tried.

So it depends.  Are you catching me on a good day or a bad day?  Have you spent the last three hours pissing me off or am I feeling fine?  I might decide today that, sure, you can carve that 'Z' with no problem, and decide six months from now that there's a heavy penalty.

Quote from: Steerpike;741643That could be true - and if so, apologies.

Accepted, if only because your screen name is from an endlessly fascinating book.

Quote from: Steerpike;741643Let me rephrase: I figured this was a discussion you wanted to actually participate in.

I have a fucking life, Steerpike.

If you want to berate my habits as a poster, please, feel free to continue without me, or just put me on Ignore if that's what you need to do, because as I said, enough of the fucking meta already.

Quote from: Ravenswing;741658(blinks)

Now let me get this straight.  You really believe -- you genuinely believe -- that someone who's never gamed before is going to be a good GM right off the bat?  In a hobby with an intricate rule set and a comprehensive skill set such as this one?  Nonsense.

I don't think it's nonsense because if I list out the things that make a good GM a good one:

1. Effective communication with players
2. Imagination, and conveying the scene to the players
3. Fair and consistent
4. Organization/knowledable


so you see, the things I think make the best GMs aren't those that are specific of the actual game until you get to #4.  So while having experience sure as hell helps (I won't deny that), I don't think it's nonsense to say a first time GM/gamer can be good.

Well, this is now headed straight into bonkers territory.

If everyone's hearing music for the first time in their life, someone who just picked up the violin may be delivering very good music indeed. However, if you have someone who listened to music before, or, gods forbid, was to an orchestra concert, you might see suddenly face wincing.

Though I'm willing to bet, in truly ironic reversal of Forgist mantra, that "If only they read AD&D GMing manual, they'd know how to GM well off the bat" will drop in next 2 pages here.

I've been to quite a few games led by new GMs lately (what with being active in the RPG scene in my city ) and they have ranged from "absolutely terrible, was I less of a pussy/less nice man I'd have walked out in the middle", to "well, that wasn't a complete waste of time." Though in the latter's case, it helped the GMs were nice looking girls.

 

Quote from: Sacrosanct;741661I don't think it's nonsense because if I list out the things that make a good GM a good one:

1. Effective communication with players
2. Imagination, and conveying the scene to the players
3. Fair and consistent
4. Organization/knowledable


so you see, the things I think make the best GMs aren't those that are specific of the actual game until you get to #4.  So while having experience sure as hell helps (I won't deny that), I don't think it's nonsense to say a first time GM/gamer can be good.

Actually, the things specific to the game arise as soon as point 2, because conveying the scene to the players is way different than conveying the scene to the audience. The audience is passive, the players are active, and you must convey the scene in such a way that's giving the players idea how things look, without trying to suggest too much secrets/course of action that can happen in that place.

Yes, thinking that experience alone, without some self - reflection and experience outside one/two steady groups of players (since I think the important distinction when talking about good GMing is "GMing that's going to be mostly passable for most unbroken players out there, for a given value of unbroken) will make a good/great or even decent GM is a folly, but to think otherwise - that suddenly the rules of Every Activity Ever don't apply to RPGs is...just as much of a folly.

Edit: And as for your list, there's a very important 5th point missing (though arguably it could fit into point 4):

5. Know what the game is about.

I'm no man from cult of RAW, but I've seen games being run by GMs who never actually bothered to read the book, and so they played out 7th Sea like the only RPG they knew (Warhammer), or whose knowledge of Warhammer was down to "Well, it's a world full of war. And Chaos."

I don't think that anybody new to the game is going to be an awesome GM right off of the bat.

I do think that certain games will make it easier to be a half-decent GM even for total newbies - B/X, for instance.  Dungeon World would probably be on that list.

Quote from: Black VulmeaI have a fucking life, Steerpike.

If you want to berate my habits as a poster, please, feel free to continue without me, or just put me on Ignore if that's what you need to do, because as I said, enough of the fucking meta already.

Honestly, I didn't really mean to get as carried away with critiquing your participation.  It was more the way you re-entered the conversation that irked me, but maybe (nay: probably) I was just in an irksome mood.  No worries.

Basically, in reference to your original blog post, I'm interested in the question of how a multiplicity of character options interacts with organic character growth.  You suggest in the post that you think rules-light systems encourage the kind of rich in-game character development you enjoy, suggesting that you think "broad archetypes" and "simple rules" are best for this kind of organic accretion of character.

I'd like to question this, to an extent.  I fully agree that complex rules systems can create, as you aptly describe them, "mastery traps," and/or can calcify character creation into a preplanned set of levels, a  build. But, I would argue, there are substantial upsides to such systems with regards to organic character development.  A system with a diversity of classes, prestige classes, feats, abilities, etc encourages customization and personalization of a character, and specifically ongoing customization.  Multi-classing, switching into prestige classes, acquiring intricate little special abilities and powers - the "fiddly bits," as you put it - can, in the hands of the right player or at the right table, complement rather than constrain organic character development i.e. the development of character through gameplay.

In other words, I think the drive to specifity - and to reflecting different aspects of a character and their abilities in the rules, rather than leaving such aspects amorphous - can aid and encourage developing a character through "lived play," so to speak.  A fighter whose player decides to make his character a swashbuckling Zorro type, for example, might find the ability to multiclass into Rogue, take the Duellist prestige class, and take feats like Weapon Expertise, Improved Feint, and Improved Disarm helpful tools in his ongoing, in-universe development of that character, especially since such a character would be better than others at swashbuckly deeds.  In this case a very specific set of mechanized options, rather than a broad archetype, could help facilitate in-play approaches to characterization rather than restricting them.

I've got plenty of players at my table, for example, who multiclass in ways that a strict optimizer would tear out their hair over but which suit their characters perfectly and enabled them to take their characters in new and unusual and often whimsical directions within play: a Bard, for example, who discovered a primitive firearm and became a flintlock-toting gunslinger.

None of this is to try to dissuade anyone from OD&D or to suggest that the "broad archetypes" approach is bad; but what I would like to interrogate () is the idea that baroque character options are usually restrictive, that their chief pleasure/utility is to satisfy the optimization-happy powergamer and reward systems mastery, or that they're inimical or counter-productive to in-play characterization or the development of a character through their deeds.

Quote from: robiswrong;741668I don't think that anybody new to the game is going to be an awesome GM right off of the bat.

I do think that certain games will make it easier to be a half-decent GM even for total newbies - B/X, for instance.  Dungeon World would probably be on that list.

I think this is again a matter of perception - a complete newbie who gets his hands on B/X and has a bunch of old school veterans arriving to his table, while his education in RPG comes from Bioware games, might be a shocking game (for both). Same newbie player, who's say 15 - 16, and accompanied by other 15 - 16 year olds, will have a very different experience.

Quote from: Ravenswing;741658
This has nothing to do, as some of you think, with having fun: I completely agree that a bunch of starry-eyed 11 year olds would have a blast, and still suck at it.  Hell, I had a total blast when I first started playing, and I was 19.  Now, in fact, that GM sucked, and in a year or so I started to realize it: he had Mary Sue on the brain, he ran Empire of the Petal Throne like Hollywood medieval England, he was obsessed with having his NPCs nail the PCs of every female player, he made Monty Haul look like a piker, fudging any dice roll he didn't like was routine, and he'd gape at you blankly if you asked to do anything the rules didn't explicitly cover.  (I bet, all my vaunted acting experience aside, that I wasn't any great shakes as a player then either.)  

Still doesn't mean that in the spring of 1979, I didn't have fun.

The fact that 11 year olds do a crappy job of GMing when doing it for the first time doesn't mean that reasonable mature people can't do it.

I'm also not claiming that anybody new to GMing will do a *super awesome* job at it.  But I do think it's possible for them to do a *reasonable* job, in certain systems (namely, ones that provide more structure for the GM).

Quote from: robiswrong;741673I'm also not claiming that anybody new to GMing will do a *super awesome* job at it.  But I do think it's possible for them to do a *reasonable* job, in certain systems (namely, ones that provide more structure for the GM).

I'll go even further than you and state that it's not necessarily the systems that provide additional structure, but ones that provide a clear mandate.  You can have a very rules light approach that clearly spells out what the GM is supposed to do and have a person run a successful game their very first session.

Quote from: NathanIW;741689I'll go even further than you and state that it's not necessarily the systems that provide additional structure, but ones that provide a clear mandate.  You can have a very rules light approach that clearly spells out what the GM is supposed to do and have a person run a successful game their very first session.

I'd consider both Dungeon World and B/X to be relatively rules-light, by most standards.

It's not the rules light/heaviness that helps - it's the amount of game structure/process that they give the GM.

If a game just gives a bunch of task resolution rules, but no guidance or structure on how to handle a session/campaign, a newbie GM is going to flounder.

So, I think we agree, but it's a good clarification that it's not about rules light/heavy.  Arguably, rules light games would be easier to run since there's less to have to know/less things to screw up.

(IMHO, of course).