Quote from: CRKrueger;724928The problem with Forge theory has always been the concept of coherence.

Does System Matter? Sure.  You don't use Phoenix Command to play a Fast-paced Street-Fighter like martial arts game.  You don't use Mage: The Ascension to do Robotech.  At least not without so much tinkering, it's not even recognizable anymore.

GDS was an attempt at game theory that had some uses then and still does now, even though it has been corrupted by Edwards who never understood "Simulationism" at all, and really was only about the "Narrative" aspect, as is every single Forge author.

The real problem came when "System Matters" and GNS were combined with coherence, the idea that a game must focus on one of the GNS letters and because "System Matters", mechanics must be created to facilitate this.

As a result we got everything from pure storygames to RPGs with a high degree of OOC metagame to facilitate player narrative control and drama techniques.

All you really have to do to decide if the Forge was ultimately successful or not is ask yourself - Where are the Gamist and Simulationist games from Forge authors?  The Forge, despite all the discussion, was only ever about pushing forward a narrative agenda at the expense of everything else.  The most successful games from Forge authors themselves aren't coherent, they are RPGs combined with narrative elements, and the more narrative the elements, the less successful the game.

Best Post in the thread.
There definitely are rules that are gamist, or simulationist or narrative and understanding how a good RPG combines these and understanding where your players are coming from and where they want the balance to be is a key to running a sucessful game.
As you say the Forgists only ever some up with games that move in one of these directions and of course they reject the idea that a game needs all 3 components to work together which is what the rest of us have always known from the get go.

I agree with someone above who posted that the original pre-Forge GDS Gamist-Dramatist-Simulation 'Threefold Model' is useful, a generally good model. BTW what Pemerton does as GM looks to me much more like GDS Dramatism than anything from GNS, so I'm not sure he's really a Forgist whatever he says.
If the Forge did something valuable, I think it was in popularising the GDS model, which otherwise would have remained obscure. As also noted previously, when most gamers talk about Forgist GNS, their actual definitions are those of pre-Forge GDS: they use the word Narrativism to mean Dramatism.
So the Forge kinda did something good in spite of itself.

Quote from: Adric;724907Wait, system doesn't matter? Does that mean that all editions of D&D are equal and it doesn't matter which version I use?

Rules design decisions directly impact the types of experience players will have with any given game. Monopoly is a different game to scrabble, and they're both different to chess. Games with a narrower design goal will be absolutely terrible at creating experiences outside of it's design, but it should have a higher rate of success at creating experiences within its design than a generic system.

Any kind of design philosophy can be used to make an offensive game. Design philosophy in terms of rules=behaviours doesn't automatically equate to offensive material, and dismissing one game because the designer agreed with someone who designed an offensive game on some topics is more of an ad homniem attack.

I don't think that narrow-design systems are usually any better at creating experiences within their goals.

I don't, for example, think Vampire: The Masquerade was better at giving the Vampire experience than GURPS was. Likewise, I don't think Recon or The Morrow Project were better at playing Viet Nam or Post-Apocalypse than GURPS.

I do think Toon was better at playing cartoons than GURPS was, and while I've never played Nobilis, I suspect that it's probably better at playing whatever you play in Nobilis than GURPS would have been.

But for a vast array of gaming System Doesn't Matter nearly as much as the people at the table. Games like BRP, Champions, and GURPS demonstrated that for me and my group general systems are superior. I don't need special meta-game mechanics to add flavor or drive address of premise: we do that fine at the human level.

My experience with narrow systems has been the opposite: the games I've played in and run are rarely narrow in scope. Even one-shot games that last a couple of days cross genres, tones, themes, and play experiences. PC's try all kinds of things, and while I'm comfortable with playing the role of referee, anyone who thinks games shouldn't have rules for setting things on fire hasn't played with my group.

In short, I think that the claims the System Does Matter essay makes are simply wrong and backwards for my group. The SDM essay posits Herbie, a hypothetical GM who can "run anything." It describes a "good GM" as someone who handles the "laborious" work of throwing out out aspects of the game that people at the table don't like. That kind of balancing act just doesn't come up at my table -- SDM, as the essay presents it might make sense if you're playing with someone with very fragile, narrow preferences, but it doesn't describe my experience at all.

Cheers,
-E.

I'm not sure that the logic of system matters is that GURPS should always be replaced by systems that are more specific to the genre/setting/theme you are exploring. That's going to depend on what the group wants from the experience. No generic game is generic enough to not have its own flavour and its own set of baggage anyway; GURPS Vampire will be different from d20 Vampire which will be different from Savage Worlds Vampire. And don't even get me started on Other Worlds Vampire! They're all different ways of approaching the same source material. The point is to be conscious of the kind of game you want and choose or make a system that does that effectively, or at the very least gets out of the way of it with a minimum of fuss.

Quote from: pemerton;724494So (i) I wouldn't really call that debating, and (ii) I would see that as a fairly high degree of hostility against someone for having a different opinion.

The Forge is definitely the exception to that rule.  Reactions to it here generally rage from dislike to witch hunt.  Hell, even with my general dismissal of Forge theory in this thread, I've been accused of being an agenda-holding Forgist.

Quote from: soviet;724524I agree with you about models not needing to be true, just useful. Maybe GNS isn't a complete model of the roleplaying universe (for one thing, it only really work if you accept the premise that system matters). But I've found it useful as a tool for my own games design.

Anybody can find something 'useful', but that doesn't mean it's actually helping them produce something better.

Most of the 'useful' bits of the Forge - different people play for different reasons, system actually does matter, games shouldn't contradict their own goals, either predate the Forge or are relatively obvious.

Quote from: soviet;724524I think it's also true to say that GNS isn't a theory of commercial success and that to some extent focusing on one agenda will be detrimental to your bottom line. It's no coincidence that so many GNS-inspired games are indie games with other uncommercial punk/pretentious qualities such as book size, content, distribution method, etc.

GNS says that 'focused' games are better.  Where are the 'focused' games that are at least cult hits, or have rabid fanbases?  Again, I'm not looking for mass commercial success, but there should at least be some games that have fairly rabid fanbases, yes?

Quote from: soviet;724524The way that GNS explains people enjoying Pathfinder and so on is that people just ignore or change ('drift') the rules that don't fit in with what they want.

Which doesn't explain Pathfinder Society at all.

Quote from: soviet;724524These are the lessons I took from GNS and how I use it in my game design:

System matters. Rules are a tool you can use positively to create an effect.

This is self-evident.  "System doesn't matter" has only *ever* been used as an argument *not* to switch systems - which itself implies that system does matter, otherwise why would you argue against switching?

Quote from: soviet;724524Games work best when the players know how they are supposed to play. Is it primarily about killing the orcs, experiencing Middle-earth, or telling a cool story? Or something else?  

And yet for years people have used the same game to do all of the above.

Quote from: soviet;724524The text of the game should therefore clearly explain the intended play approach and the rules should support or reinforce it.

"The game should tell you how to play" is hardly a revolutionary idea.

Quote from: soviet;724524The G, N, and S essays describe three basic styles of play to consider as examples of this (but note that within them there are various divisions and approaches - the agendas are not monolithic).

And the problem is that those essays, and further work, assert by omission that those are the *only* three ways to play, and that any 'creative agenda' (and I do hate that term) is a subset of one of those.

This assumption inherently drives game development in those directions - and also serves to create a new category of games (Narrativist) which just so happen to be the games that Ron wants to play.

Quote from: -E.;724659Games patterned after the most successful game of all time are "heart breakers" with little reason to exist.

I see that one as more being Ron's foot-in-mouth disease than anything.  The games he described in the essay had interesting ideas, but all were strongly patterned on D&D - apparently without thought as to whether that was the best overall structure for the game or not.

This may just be my 'looking for the reasonable' drive, but to me there's a reasonable point there - if you're writing a game, analyze what the best structure is for that game.  If it's a D&D-like structure, great, but don't just use any structure without thinking about it.

Quote from: -E.;724649People will tell you all kinds of things worked for them -- there are people who believe the astrology thing in the newspaper gives them insight into how to live their day.

Indeed - if it's 'useful', again, there should be cases of where it has helped people solve specific issues, and there should certainly be games written using GNS principles that, even if not broad commercial successes, should at *least* be well-known and have rabid fanbases amongst people that are into RPGs and would have been likely to encounter them through word-of-mouth.

Quote from: -E.;724649GNS's agendas are fluid and weird and do not cover most of what people roleplay for: the experience of playing their character. GNS-Sim used to cover that, but the author (Edwards) deprecated and disavowed the Sim essay and re-described GNS-Sim as being about celebration of a specific fiction. That leaves all kinds of play in the "uncategorized" bucket.

This gets to one of my main arguments about GNS - that it sees these three specific things as the central pivot that RPG design hinges upon.

Exploration of premise, especially, seems orthogonal to other concerns.

Quote from: -E.;724649To the extent that GNS predicts anything it predicts that games which allow for a variety of play styles and/or whose flavor text and GM advice aren't in some (undefined) way compatible with the mechanics will result (most likely) in on-going power-struggle.

If players come to the table with different expectations, then there is likely to be some disagreement about what should be going on.  I think that's obvious.

But what that idea misses is the fact that people *interpret* text, and so even when a game system is explicit about what it is doing, the *interpretation* of that text will be colored by the reader's experience, expectations, assumptions, and desires.

Quote from: -E.;724649In other words, it's psychological model of people is that all those horrible adolescent struggles people had when they were fighting with their friends over, and over in the 90's were the game's fault.

In many ways, the primary goal of GNS seems to be "why people don't play Vampire the way Ron Edwards wants them to, and how to force them to do so."

Quote from: soviet;724760It seems to me that there is a very large middle being excluded here. The available options are not limited to 'GNS is shit and I hate Ron Edwards' versus 'Every word in GNS is objectively correct and I love Ron Edwards'. There is also 'I found a lot of useful stuff in GNS and also some offensive or inaccurate stuff which I have ignored. I will take any other writings by Ron Edwards on their own merits'.

I don't think that every word that has ever come out of the Forge is inherently tainted.  I find some of Vince Baker's stuff interesting, like his clouds and boxes articles.  And some of the advice that has come out of the Forge really just seems like a rediscovery of advice that old-school GMs have been doing for thirty years (dressed up with flowery language, to be sure).

But the fact that a flawed theory has interesting or even useful bits in it does not stand as a defense of the theory as a whole.

Quote from: -E.;724765Let's look at what the original essay says -- even ignoring the Brain Damage Reveal that came later:
...

Thanks for summing all of that up better than I ever could have.

Quote from: -E.;724765Creative Agenda

I do just say that I find this to be a great example of the obfuscating language to come out of the Forge.  All it really means is the expectations that the group has of what they'll do.  That's it.  But 'Expectations' didn't sound academic enough.

And, of course, the term 'Creative Agenda' has its own agenda built in - to inherently frame RPGs as a creative activity, which lends legitimacy to Ron's preferred playstyle over others which aren't inherently 'creative'.

Quote from: Bill White;724788GNS "Creative Agenda" apply to groups and sessions: the place where gamers intersect with games.

I think that focusing on what I call "games" - people sitting down at a table and playing - as opposed to systems is vitally important.

Quote from: pemerton;724869That said, I have found them to have useful predictive value in a few cases. They are good predictors for the lines of discussion on the ICE forums as soone as issues like balance in point buy come up - for instance, many people want point buy options in a game like HARP to both be balanced for play, and to reflect ingame causation, which then leads to all sorts of convolution around why it is that (say) a prince of the blood (an expensive points buy option) can't also be strong and wealthy (more expensive options).

That distinction well predates GNS theory, and back into GDS theory at a minimum.  Gary Gygax in the AD&D 1e DMG talks about the schism in the wargames community between "realism" and "game", and firmly plants AD&D on the "game" side.

And it's a useful distinction - do the rules in your game primarily exist to have 'realistic' outcomes, or do they primarily exist to make a fun game?

Quote from: TristramEvans;724871Ive always been torn on "system matters", because it creates the expectation that one system is objectivelly better than another for a purpose, whereas its rarely that simple and there are factors beyond system design, like familiarity, aesthetics, and player motivations. it would be like judging a film based soley on lighting effects. GNS isnt enough, its a tiny piece of a much larger hole that comes across as myopic in its focus.

Indeed.  That's one of my main arguments.  I look at game systems as fulfilling player needs, which can be wide, varied, and even trivial.

Quote from: TristramEvans;724871"System matters but it doesnt really but it kinda does, but matters differently to different people." is my conclusion.

Absolutely.  I look at it as simply as "does the game system in question meet the needs of the game in terms of supporting the things they want to do?"

In a lot of cases, that includes things like familiarity, etc., and to meet those needs/desires, a system may actually be better for that particular group even if it's not better 'on paper' for whatever reason.

Quote from: CRKrueger;724928The real problem came when "System Matters" and GNS were combined with coherence, the idea that a game must focus on one of the GNS letters and because "System Matters", mechanics must be created to facilitate this.

Exactly.  It's not rocket science to say that if your game system is focused on characters being big damn action heroes that plow through bad guys, that a mechanic that gives any enemy, no matter how trivial, an arbitrary one in twenty chance to kill a player character is a bad idea, as it undercuts the purpose of the game.

But that has nothing to do with the letters G, N, or S.

Quote from: CRKrueger;724928All you really have to do to decide if the Forge was ultimately successful or not is ask yourself - Where are the Gamist and Simulationist games from Forge authors?  The Forge, despite all the discussion, was only ever about pushing forward a narrative agenda at the expense of everything else.

GNS really seems to be "why people don't play Vampire the way Ron Edwards wants them to, and how to make them."

What's interesting is that the obvious answer to the question is "well, find a group that wants to play the way you do, and set those expectations."  I don't see baking it into the system as actually helpful - people will de-emphasize the things they don't like anyway.  If you can't have an honest discussion with your fellow players about what the hell it is you want out of your game, then you've got bigger problems than what the rules text of the game says - and using the rules as an appeal to authority will *not* help.

There were plenty of things in V:tM that encouraged non-D&D-in-fangs-and-trenchcoats play.  But that didn't stop people from playing it as D&D-in-fangs-and-trenchcoats.

Quote from: -E.;724989I don't think that narrow-design systems are usually any better at creating experiences within their goals.

I don't, for example, think Vampire: The Masquerade was better at giving the Vampire experience than GURPS was. Likewise, I don't think Recon or The Morrow Project were better at playing Viet Nam or Post-Apocalypse than GURPS.

Agreed.  I personally think that a given system can support a goal/need, or it can oppose a goal/need.  There's not much in GURPS to oppose Vampire, for instance, and there's a reasonable amount of support for it, especially if you use the GURPS: Vampire splat.

Quote from: -E.;724989I do think Toon was better at playing cartoons than GURPS was, and while I've never played Nobilis, I suspect that it's probably better at playing whatever you play in Nobilis than GURPS would have been.

Sure, GURPS' focus on realism doesn't support the goals of Toon.

For me, analyzing applicability of a game system for a particular game boils down to a few things:

1) How well does it support what we're trying to do?  (Which includes things like system familiarity, liking particular dice, or whatever else is appropriate)
2) Does it oppose anything we're trying to do, and make it harder for us to do those things?
3) If there's some things that don't really support what we're trying to do, how many changes do I have to make for it to really work?

At a secondary level, a system that has mechanics that oppose the things it's trying to do (like the previously-described 'instakill the big damn hero' rule) make it hard for that system to support anything well.

Quote from: -E.;724989But for a vast array of gaming System Doesn't Matter nearly as much as the people at the table. Games like BRP, Champions, and GURPS demonstrated that for me and my group general systems are superior. I don't need special meta-game mechanics to add flavor or drive address of premise: we do that fine at the human level.

Sure, and I'd also argue that BRP and GURPS are similar enough in overall tone and feel that they're relatively interchangeable, in that just about any game where I'd consider using one of them as the system, the other would work just as well.

Quote from: -E.;724989My experience with narrow systems has been the opposite: the games I've played in and run are rarely narrow in scope.

In some cases that may be a matter of insufficient buy-in to the tone/genre of the game.  

If you're running a Golden Age comics game, it shouldn't need rules to handle the heroes torturing people for information, or for how to do instakill shots.  If you've bought into Golden Age comics as a genre, you're not doing those things.

But, yeah.  A system being designed around a particular genre/gamestyle doesn't necessarily mean that it supports it any better than a generic system does.  It's probably more *likely* to support it well than an arbitrary generic system, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a generic system which does the job just as well or better.

Um, I'm sure this is accidental, but you've quoted me as saying several things that in fact -E or others said. Please can you check your quote tags again?

Quote from: soviet;725087Um, I'm sure this is accidental, but you've quoted me as saying several things that in fact -E or others said. Please can you check your quote tags again?

Oops, sorry, I'll fix that.

EDIT - I think I got all the bad ones.  Let me know if I didn't.

Quote from: robiswrong;725081That distinction well predates GNS theory, and back into GDS theory at a minimum.  Gary Gygax in the AD&D 1e DMG talks about the schism in the wargames community between "realism" and "game", and firmly plants AD&D on the "game" side.

And it's a useful distinction - do the rules in your game primarily exist to have 'realistic' outcomes, or do they primarily exist to make a fun game?
 .

I think though that Gary was talking about a particular style of realism, one you don't really encounter that much these days when people say they find a particular mechanics isn't realistic. Back when I first started, a lot of people were after a real hardcore type of realism, where they were more than happy to roll on multiple charts for results that matched their sense of physics and logical outcomes. I think now, the realism issue is often just about cause and effect in the game, basic plausibility of things, etc. I see people use this quote a lot, but I feel it is somewhat misleading, because I don't think Gary was suggesting that you jettison all believability and all other considerations entirely for gaminess. My sense was he just felt D&D is a game so there are going to be some concessions to reality for playability. He also talked about stuff like the milieu and populating a believable setting. So my sense is, he didn't have the kind of things in mind that often crop up during discussions around 4E or GNS.

Sorted, thanks

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;725090I think though that Gary was talking about a particular style of realism

He was. These remarks were specific in context. Forge theory, or indeed, theory, had nothing to do with it.

Quote from: Benoist;725092He was. These remarks were specific in context. Forge theory, or indeed, theory, had nothing to do with it.

Yeah, because even when I started some of these folks were still around. I knew immediately who he was talking about when I came across that passage. It really wasn't addressed toward people who dislike come and get it or don't want an entire game centered around the G in GNS.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;725093Yeah, because even when I started some of these folks were still around. I knew immediately who he was talking about when I came across that passage. It really wasn't addressed toward people who dislike come and get it or don't want an entire game centered around the G in GNS.

Yes. When the DMG (1979) came out was a time when D&D was challenged by a number of other fantasy game products whose fans where, in some quarters, clamoring for more realism in role playing games. Games like RuneQuest (1977) with skills and hit locations, Chivalry & Sorcery (1978) with its wealth of medievalist detail, even Rolemaster (1980) with critical hit and miss charts, not to mention letters to The Dragon and so on, come to mind as part of that general zeitgeist. D&D was hugely criticized for not being "realistic enough", and it was an attempt to clarify the thought that went into the game, rather than some weird time-travelling reference to completely artificial ideas like "gamism" and "simulationism" in GNS.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;725093Yeah, because even when I started some of these folks were still around. I knew immediately who he was talking about when I came across that passage. It really wasn't addressed toward people who dislike come and get it or don't want an entire game centered around the G in GNS.

I started playing in the early 80s.  I'm pretty familiar with the debate even during that time, and the games that came out of it on the 'realism' side - many of the ones that Benoist mentions were still very 'current' games at that time.

Quote from: Benoist;725096D&D was hugely criticized for not being "realistic enough", and it was an attempt to clarify the thought that went into the game, rather than some weird time-travelling reference to completely artificial ideas like "gamism" and "simulationism" in GNS.

Not claiming it is.  I think RE took the basic argument and reinterpreted it as something else.

If you'll note the actual conversation, I was saying that the idea that some people are more interested in the 'game' side and some more interested in the 'realism' side may have merit, but that that observation well predates anything RE ever wrote, and so attributing that value to GNS theory is incorrect.

IOW, I'm not saying Gygax wrote things that support GNS theory.  I'm saying that some of the things that people find of value in GNS theory actually predate it by decades.

I'd also argue that their original forms were more useful than how they've been reinterpreted.

Quote from: robiswrong;725102If you'll note the actual conversation, I was saying that the idea that some people are more interested in the 'game' side and some more interested in the 'realism' side may have merit, but that that observation well predates anything RE ever wrote, and so attributing that value to GNS theory is incorrect.

IOW, I'm not saying Gygax wrote things that support GNS theory.  I'm saying that some of the things that people find of value in GNS theory actually predate it by decades.

The thing is, actual GNS doesn't say that. It actually promotes the idea of coherence, and from that standpoint, either you approach a specific game from a gamist OR simulationist standpoint, not "and", and not "more interested in this than that", which is incoherent and causes brain damage. It's an either/or proposition, not and.

If you don't embrace the idea of coherence, then you're not actually supporting what GNS championed, and the actual thing (along with its corollary concepts of an overt social contract, creative agendas, system matters, etc) it brought to the game design table, especially compared to the threefold model.

Quote from: Benoist;725105If you don't embrace the idea of coherence, then you're not actually supporting what GNS championed, and the actual thing (along with its corollary concepts of an overt social contract, creative agendas, system matters, etc) it brought to the game design table, especially compared to the threefold model.

Are you missing the parts where robiswrong is commenting that he doesn't agree with GNS or Forge theory? It really sounds like you are accusing him of defending forge theory when he has stated repeatedly that he doesn't agree with it and that the only thing he is saying is that the parts and interpretations that soviet is throwing out that he "likes" actually predate GNS entirely (and actually might be more accurate to how soviet views them than the actual GNS essay versions).