Quote from: Emperor Norton;725108Are 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).

I might have given this impression, but my intention isn't to judge robiswrong, one way or the other. If what I'm saying is something he agrees with, then cool, I expect he's going to post just that.

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.

I don't support what GNS has championed.  The point that you've been responding to was actually me being critical of GNS.

Soviet had said he found value in the idea of gamism/etc. and that it predicts discussions like "it's not realistic that a noble can't be as strong as a non-noble".

I responded by pointing out that this is a realism vs. game balance issue, and that that idea has been around for *decades* prior to RE writing a word about it, and so finding value in that general distinction isn't really a very good defense of GNS.

The Gygax quote wasn't to imply that Gygax supports any GNS ideas - it's to date the 'game'/'realism' division, and show by just how *much* it predates anything on the Forge.

I've also been pretty clear in the rest of my response that the idea of 'coherence' is overrated, and that focusing it upon the specific G,N,S categories is overly specific, at best.  

I do believe that some systems can support certain things better than others.  I think that's pretty obvious.  But the idea of coherence (by Forge definitions) says that a game should support one of 'gamism', 'simulationism', and 'narrativism'.  I disagree with that on several levels - first, that those are the most interesting or important things that a game should consider in its design, secondly, that they are an all-encompassing division, and third, that they're inherently mutually exclusive.

I think we're just in violent agreement here.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;725108the 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).

Bingo.  And that because of their age, what he's finding value in isn't anything from GNS, and that GNS hasn't really added much (if anything) of value on top of them.  Even without GNS, "G" and "S" both exist within GDS, which also predates the Forge.

Quote from: Benoist;725109I might have given this impression, but my intention isn't to judge robiswrong, one way or the other.

Cool.  But just to be clear, I'm not defending GNS in any way.  I'll point out this quote, as well:

Quote from: robiswrongBut 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: soviet;725076I'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.

The counterpoint to GNS's System Does Matter Essay isn't "System Doesn't Matter At All" -- no one believes human beings lack personal preferences -- it's "People Matter More" and "The things people I play with care about aren't the things that GNS Essay talks about."

The GNS System Matters essay talks a lot about are GNS modes, which (IME) most people are not too concerned about, at least within broad parameters. It's discussion of resolution systems is better, but really most people are fine with rolling dice and modifiers. Alternative systems (pure drama or karma) are extremely rare for a reason. Most people intuitively understand their preferences.

Or, to say it another way: I'm happy to explain why I prefer GURPS over Hero, but my answers have nothing to do with GNS or Karama-Drama-Fortune. The aspects the essay focuses on are simply miss-aimed.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: -E.;725113Or, to say it another way: I'm happy to explain why I prefer GURPS over Hero, but my answers have nothing to do with GNS or Karama-Drama-Fortune. The aspects the essay focuses on are simply miss-aimed.

For the general case, absolutely.  But I think the real motivation was "why don't people play Vampire the way Ron Edwards wants them to?"  For him, exploration of premise *was* the entire point, and so why people weren't doing that was the central goal.  From there, the natural next step is to figure out what people are doing besides exploring premise.

The problem is that he assumed that just because that was the most important thing to him, it (or the alternatives to exploration of premise) was the most important thing to everyone else.

Really, GNS makes a lot more sense if you view it from the viewpoint of "why don't people play V:tM the way Ron thinks they should, and how do we get them to do so?"

To be fair, Vampire was a game where the writing talked about "personal horror" and "existential supernatural angst" while the system was all like "check out these lists of kewl powerz!". To that extent, one could say the game was "incoherent" in design (Im using that word as per the dictionary, not the GNS definition). However, the faulty assumption there is that its the system's job to enforce the premise on the game through the system, which is a rather modern conceit. One can certainly play Vampire in the way the text intends with the rules as is, its simply that alot of people played it as "Goth Superheroes", because the system supported that as well. To say that Vampire needed to be focused so that the system forced people to play one way is essentially saying everyone playing the other way were having badwrongfun.

Quote from: TristramEvans;725125To be fair, Vampire was a game where the writing talked about "personal horror" and "existential supernatural angst" while the system was all like "check out these lists of kewl powerz!". To that extent, one could say the game was "incoherent" in design (Im using that word as per the dictionary, not the GNS definition).

I'm not even sure I'd agree with that.  There was plenty of mechanical support for the 'personal horror' - I mean the whole Humanity track was there for that, right?  And it seemed like the general 'flow' was that you'd get yourself in crappy situations, use your kewl powahz to get out of them, which would require you to burn copious amounts of blood, and then you'd do horrible things to get the blood back, which would trigger Humanity checks, if getting out of the situation didn't trigger them inherently.

I think there was definitely mechanical support for exploring that area between "I need to be a monster to survive" and "I don't want to be a monster".

But it seems like people just didn't *want* that.  So they ignored the Humanity checks and screamed that they wanted to play Sabbat.

Quote from: TristramEvans;725125However, the faulty assumption there is that its the system's job to enforce the premise on the game through the system, which is a rather modern conceit. One can certainly play Vampire in the way the text intends with the rules as is, its simply that alot of people played it as "Goth Superheroes", because the system supported that as well. To say that Vampire needed to be focused so that the system forced people to play one way is essentially saying everyone playing the other way were having badwrongfun.

Right.  There was plenty of support for playing V:tM as a game of losing your humanity and spiraling down to becoming a monster.  But a lot of people found the idea of playing a monster more appealing.  That's not because of a system flaw.  It's not because someone's brain damaged.  It's just personal preference.

Quote from: robiswrong;725132But a lot of people found the idea of playing a monster more appealing.  [...] It's not because someone's brain damaged.  It's just personal preference.

Leaving the Forge completely out of it, I could argue that people choosing to play Sabbat as defined in oWoD are damn well brain damaged, just not in the same way.

Quote from: robiswrong;725088If 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.

I think the Forge has been somewhat successful in this respect, but not really by the means one would suppose if one believed the theory. The first is that awareness of the games and the ideological discussion are largely transmitted in the same channels, so if you see a Forge game and you find other people who want to play it with you, there's a good chance they share your taste and your expectation of how the game should play. Whereas when I've seen posts about people trying to introduce the games into their existing groups, the results are often unsuccessful. The games themselves aren't doing much to get people on the same page. (This could be called cherry-picking, as an analytical flaw when making generalized claims.)

The other means is that the games often contain mechanics that are deal-breakers for gamers who enjoy "immersion" (in RE's own terms, from "GNS and Other Matters", they require a lot of Author Stance and Director Stance). So this further narrows the pool of people who want to play the games.

Quote from: robiswrong;725081GNS really seems to be "why people don't play Vampire the way Ron Edwards wants them to, and how to make them."

Ok, now that's funny...and true.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;725090I 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.

Hard sim vs soft sim gaming. Not sure where heard that term but it follows through with the shift in ideal for what "sim" should be.

From my brief talks with Gygax way back I got the impression that the D&D rules were simulation to a point and then ease of play after that point. or something like that. We were talking about Gamma World, but same end result.

The threshold of how much book keeping a GM and players were willing to sustain. And at what point reality has to take a back seat to playing a game and having fun.

Quote from: robiswrong;725132I think there was definitely mechanical support for exploring that area between "I need to be a monster to survive" and "I don't want to be a monster".

I think the phrase was "A Beast I am, lest a Beast I become."  

I think there's lots of opportunities for personal horror, there's also katanas & trenchcoats.  

Ron was pissed that the Gamists ruined Vampire, so he started a movement to train those ignorant Gamists how to be Narrativists through pavlovian reward systems.

A ways back, Pemerton wrote that he didn't see GNS theory as containing predictive claims. I thought that was interesting, since I've generally taken that for granted and (as far as I could tell), I've seen such claims made on its behalf by its fans. So I went and had a look at two of the earliest essays, "System Does Matter" and "GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory".

Let me begin by emphasizing and agreeing with a recent line of discussion here: GNS, and Forge theory in general, offered one major innovation relative to the theories and discussion that preceded it, and that is the importance of coherence in game design. If coherence is just a subjective preference, then GNS is a potentially-interesting manifesto in favor of coherent design. But if GNS claims that coherence is an objective and unalloyed good, such that "incoherent" designs are likely to make gaming groups unhappy and frustrated, then a great deal of the intellectual value of GNS hinges on the truth of this claim.

So what do the essays, say? I'll post quotes. Any emphasis is mine, as is text outside the quotes, which is either commentary or summary of portions of the essays.

"System Does Matter"

QuoteHere I suggest that RPG system design cannot meet all three outlooks at once.

This is a prediction, or prescription, with no subjectivity admitted.

QuoteOne of the biggest problems I observe in RPG systems is that they often try to satisfy all three outlooks at once. The result, sadly, is a guarantee that almost any player will be irritated by some aspect of the system during play. GMs' time is then devoted, as in the Herbie example, to throwing out the aspects that don't accord for a particular group. A "good" GM becomes defined as someone who can do this well - but why not eliminate this laborious step and permit a (for example) Gamist GM to use a Gamist game, getting straight to the point? I suggest that building the system specifically to accord with one of these outlooks is the first priority of RPG design.

QuoteNote, therefore, that I might praise a given system because it matches beautifully with one of these outlooks - even if I don't share that outlook and might hate playing that game. This is an important point, because I now have some criteria to judge, instead of just yapping about "what I like."

Note that this is a clear rejection of subjective criteria; coherence is an objective measure of good design.

"GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory"

Quote...the players are making the horrendous mistake of buying, without consideration of any technical issues presented so far, the most widely advertised, best-illustrated RPG available - that is, strictly on the basis of Color.

Personally, I'm indifferent to Vampire and most of the associated genre, but I know better than to call buying VtM, an extremely popular game, a "horrendous mistake." But to Ron Edwards it is, objectively. Or perhaps we're just talking about the three hypothetical players that are introduced as examples, one a "Narrativist", one a "Simulationist", one a "Gamist". Would it be a mistake for them but not necessarily for someone else? No: if these people can't play Vampire together it's because the three of them are simply too far apart in taste, as shown by the fact that they can even be assigned to the categories. (A later statement by RE, quoted above by John Kim, supports the idea that the -ists are relatively extreme, inflexible personality types.) If so, then buying a Narrativist game is just going to drive the other two players away. The mistake these people made wasn't buying Vampire; it was trying to play a game together in the first place, when they're so incompatible.

In the following chapter, "Role-playing Design and Coherence", RE goes on to compare game design to bridge-building, arguing that adherence to GNS principles, at least intuitively, is as necessary to making a good game as an understanding of Newtonian physics (at least intuitively) is to making a bridge that won't fall down.

Later in the chapter, RE describes what will happen when the example players sit down with Vampire:

QuoteConsider the players who were excited about the vampire concept for role-playing. What happens when they try to play Vampire: the Masquerade? Well, they try to Believe the Impossible Thing, and in application, the results are inevitable.

Well, actually, RE provides three options, two of which are functional, but the third of which, "ongoing power struggle," is deemed most likely and given greatest emphasis. (One might bravely argue that the results of the Greek Euro crisis are inevitable: either Europe will find a solution, or disaster will ensue.)

RE seems on the verge of seeing the benefits of broadness and flexibility in design, when he talks about "general" games. He makes a distinction between these and "universal" games, which he sets up as an ideal that no one would seriously claim exists:

QuoteRPG design that satisfies any participant, with no stress, no adjustment of any part, no potential for interpersonal disagreement, and no unnecessary preparation.

According to RE, the universal ideal is impossible, but "general" designs such as Fudge and GURPS are customizable according to guidelines provided by the system. However, "a coherent general game sits as firmly in its GNS orientation as any other." This gives short shrift to the possibility that the broad nature of game-play (in GNS terms) can be profitably left up to group social dynamics rather than being hardwired.

Discussion of this possibility is vague to the point of being invisible. We turn now to the sixth and final chapter:

QuoteRole-playing is carried out through relying upon the real, interpersonal roles of living humans, yes, even of opponents. If people do not share any degree of either Premise focus (either Gamist or Narravist) or an Exploration focus (Simulationist), then their different assumptions, different expectations, and different goals will come into conflict during play. When that happens, the uber-goal of "Fun" is diminished. Perhaps the people continue to play together solely to interact socially, but the actual role-playing is, effectively, gone.

This might be more positively phrased as, "People inevitably begin games with differing focuses and interests; however, in the course of play and the social interaction surrounding play, successful groups will form a synthesis." However, RE focuses on failure. This is really only justified if one takes as a basic premise that people come to games with their preferences fully-formed and inflexible. The result, if the game doesn't fly apart immediately, is long-term misery:

QuoteDrift is the usual method for dealing with this level of discord. It is a fine solution for resolving within-mode differences, if everyone is willing to give a little. However, drift has a dark side, or degeneration, the disruption or subversion of the social contract such that what is happening is not more fun, at least not at the group level.

In conclusion, RE does make predictive claims in the initial GNS essays, where he says that games which don't steer play toward a specific "GNS mode" (itself a debatable concept) are poorly designed and will likely or inevitably cause groups to degenerate into a mode of play where fun is diminished.

This may or may not be true (I think it's false for reasons both theoretical and observed, and I think the bulk of third-party evidence supports me)--but it certainly isn't just an expression of preference.

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.

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.

True, a stated goal doesn't guarantee success in that goal. I'll amend my statement to say "I think that a game that is successful at representing a more narrow focus of genre  is going to better emulate it's subject matter than  game that is successful at being a general system.

I think V:TM still tried to be too many things. "All sorts of Vampires!" is actually a pretty broad genre these days and means lots of different things to different people. By specific, I mean picking a more narrow concept, like "Vampires trying to live everyday lives within mortal society" or "Vampires manipulating mortal governments and organizations over centuries" or "Villagers and a Vampire hunter hunt the all-powerful Vampire that plagues the Town" With those 3 different premises, you would create 3 different games that make your players behave in very different ways, because the characters are aiming for different things, and will be using different skillsets.

Having a great group of experienced players that you gel well with and can improvise with is awesome, but not everybody has that, and some people that will be new to a game will be new to the entire hobby. for them a more focused game that concentrates on the kinds of experience they want, and tells them how to achieve it is going to be a lot more useful that a very thick book of generic rules that won't even apply to the kind of game they want to play.

Quote from: robiswrong;725110I don't support what GNS has championed.(...)

I think we're just in violent agreement here.

Koolio!

Quote from: robiswrong;725117Really, GNS makes a lot more sense if you view it from the viewpoint of "why don't people play V:tM the way Ron thinks they should, and how do we get them to do so?"

Quote from: daniel_ream;725161Leaving the Forge completely out of it, I could argue that people choosing to play Sabbat as defined in oWoD are damn well brain damaged, just not in the same way.