Quote from: Balbinus;376532It's unusually plot driven for me, I usually go more for dynamic situations and relationship maps and all that stuff.  This one, there's ancient secrets to be unearthed and the PCs are (presently unwittingly, at character level anyway) on their trail so it's more linear.

That said, if at any point they want to chuck it all and go conquer a minor city state or whatever, that's their choice.  They'd only do that if it were cooler than what I have planned after all.

Having checked...  I like.  I should start tracking the site; I think there's a way to do that on googlegroups.

(The rest of this thread feels slightly like deja vu to me.  I swear, we've had almost exactly this discussion before.  I keep coming back to look for something new, though, so it's not like I'm not in the same groove.)

Quote from: Balbinus;376543I've used relationship maps since the early '90s.

Ironically, I first saw them in Chicago by Night, a supplement for Vampire.  I mentioned that to RE once, he wasn't happy with the comment...

The thing is though, one guy's old hat is another's lightning strike of innovation.  We all have different ideas, back in the day they were just harder to spread because we didn't have the internet so they'd often be isolated.  You used kickers, I'd never had that particular idea.

That makes perfect sense, Balbinus! Ideas spread oddly when they had to go by word of mouth.

-clash

I try to stay out of these discussions, but my tolerance for tolerance only goes so far. DitV is a radical game, like it or not, and any attempt to portray it as "trad" or "mainstream" is a whitewash.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;376570I try to stay out of these discussions, but my tolerance for tolerance only goes so far. DitV is a radical game, like it or not, and any attempt to portray it as "trad" or "mainstream" is a whitewash.

My actual play experience says otherwise.  What's so radical?

On the whole trad/indie innovation thing, Gangbusters from back in 1982doesn't assume a party or even that PCs know each other.  It does assume that much of play may be driven by conflict between PCs with competing goals.

Indie or what?

Quote from: Balbinus;376581On the whole trad/indie innovation thing, Gangbusters from back in 1982doesn't assume a party or even that PCs know each other.  It does assume that much of play may be driven by conflict between PCs with competing goals.

Indie or what?

Forgie trash! Who wrote it? TSR? Who's TSR? Some damn swinish hippie freaks, that's who! WotC would never have released this crap!

-clash

About DitV...

I've played the game as well. Now, anyone's actual play experience of any game may or may not differ enormously from other games, but we are talking about games as artifacts here, yes? I mean, the actual printed product. In that case, without prejudicing the issue, one of us must be wrong.

Now in the case of DitV there are a bunch of things I've mentioned in the past, so I'm not going to go in depth with page references. Briefly, though:

• To begin with, DitV comes from a design/theory school which is strongly about playing games as written, and also about treating all the "GM advice" not as optional, but as mandatory. In DitV this is actually reinforced by the fact that the GM & play advice is sprinkled through the rules and constantly presented as the way that a given rule is to be applied. For both reasons I think it's fair to look at DitV's mechanics as being of a piece with the GMing advice, unlike say GURPS which (in 3e) has fairly standard mechanics, with a separate GMing section whose (often illusionistic) advice is tacked on and easily ignored. (That sort of advice is often written in a rule-of-thumb, "here's how I do it" fashion, anyway.)

The above point isn't what's radical about DitV; it's presented in advance, though, against claims that you can freely ignore the text and still judge the game fairly. Now for the actual radical elements, in no particular order.

• Say yes or roll the dice, presented dogmatically.

• Despite claims to the contrary, the town is not a "dungeon". The "dungeon" in the classic sense is created by the GM and then administered neutrally. The town in DitV is administered actively with "escalate, escalate, escalate".

• Neither is the creation of the town and "dungeon" equivalent. No, I'm not talking about the process of defining the town's problem through the progress of sin. That is simply a genre conceit equivalent to "orcs have been raiding nearby villages" or "you're adventurers, that's why you're looking for gold in a hole in the ground". The point of departure is that subsequent towns are meant to be designed player-character-centrically, radically so. If a player makes a given judgment, the GM is supposed to generate a new town that challenges that judgment more intensely, and so on.

• The game states that whatever the Dogs decide, is right. There's some ambiguity as to whether this applies only to matters of belief, or if it also applies to causality. (E.g. of the latter, the Dogs decide "All is well in this town now, let's move on." The GM might feel otherwise, that there are a bunch of unresolved issues.) Either way, with belief, what ought to be a central issue is defined by the game as being no more than a maguffin. Other games might not write out their setting's Talmud or Canon Law, but they present such elements as being setting-defined, leaving it up to the group to naturally interpret and extrapolate. With respect to causality, if the more radical approach is the one intended, then the game is further moved in the direction of player-level storytelling, with the setting-level "problems" as mere opportunities for players to make some sort of statement.

• Unambiguously, the game states that players decide the fallout for their own characters, which in many cases can be positive or negative. E.g., you can change the number or size of dice--it's up to you whether you want to make this a bonus. IIRC you can also choose to take a new trait. In short the player has far more control over the effect of events on the character, than is normally seen.

Quote from: Balbinus;376581On the whole trad/indie innovation thing, Gangbusters from back in 1982doesn't assume a party or even that PCs know each other.  It does assume that much of play may be driven by conflict between PCs with competing goals.

Indie or what?

Does it have lots of author/director stance for players built directly into the rules?

In any case, Gangbusters wasn't indie for many reasons, presenting it as such is ahistorical, and ignores other factors (such as: does it have a chip on its shoulder, built into the rules themselves, viz., caricaturing a "traditional" mode of play that it then sets itself up against?).

Furthermore, as I've pointed out in the "new school" thread, there are many non-mainstream games from the past. Some are quite good, most are probably crap. Very few managed to contribute to the gene pool of subsequent games. Today's "indie-Forge" games are their own thing for good or bad.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;376595(such as: does it have a chip on its shoulder, built into the rules themselves, viz., caricaturing a "traditional" mode of play that it then sets itself up against?).

Oh, like they did with D&D 4e?