Quote from: Jeffrey Straszheim;330863Sadly, they wouldn't listen.

BTW, having played with Marco both as a player and as a GM, I know this is his style too, Jeffrey.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;330866BTW, having played with Marco both as a player and as a GM, I know this is his style too, Jeffrey.

Much of his disagreement with the Forge crowd has been that he gets the same "good stuff" in his game while keeping the trad. structure.  Having experienced both, I think he is mostly correct, with one exception:  a JAGS game does tend to develop more slowly than the Forgie games.  Long combats, for instance, can get tedious when I'd rather just get on with the plot.  However, I find the trad. structure supports strong immersion and character identity way better than the Forgie games, and I can deal w/ the slow development.

In fact, when I really like my character, the last thing I want is for things to happen quickly.  I want to be there in character as long as possible.

YMMV and all that.

Quote from: Imperator;330833Don't let reality get in the war. For some, it's still the 90's.

If that were true, there would be a glut of good music to listen to on the radio, instead of the crap we get now....

I find a lot of Hollywood movies follow the great characters + conflict precept, but they fail in ways that I find very similar to the operation of a heavy-handed GM or an excessively "thespy" player endowed with shared narrative authority. Dumb, inexplicable motivations, illogical plot twists, hammered theme.

Although a lot of movies also do unidimensional characters.

Quote from: flyingmice;330845Maybe great characters + good conflict = good story? That would be a kicker! Tell it to Hollywood!

Very true. The thespy indie film scene have been doing it for years !

But going back to game design for a moment, would you say that your design philosophy reflects your GMing style ? I know your games are playable no matter the playstyle but does yours creep in there a little ?

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Jeffrey Straszheim;330889Much of his disagreement with the Forge crowd has been that he gets the same "good stuff" in his game while keeping the trad. structure.  Having experienced both, I think he is mostly correct, with one exception:  a JAGS game does tend to develop more slowly than the Forgie games.  Long combats, for instance, can get tedious when I'd rather just get on with the plot.  However, I find the trad. structure supports strong immersion and character identity way better than the Forgie games, and I can deal w/ the slow development.

In fact, when I really like my character, the last thing I want is for things to happen quickly.  I want to be there in character as long as possible.

YMMV and all that.

Where Marco and I differ as designers is in the compromises we are willing to make in abstracting combat for speed rather than verisimilitude. JAGS is slower in combat than my games, but in return he gets better verisimilitude, because that's the path he chose. I understand that choice as he understands mine, and we both like each other's games. Otherwise, we're pretty synoptic.

-clash

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;330896I find a lot of Hollywood movies follow the great characters + conflict precept, but they fail in ways that I find very similar to the operation of a heavy-handed GM or an excessively "thespy" player endowed with shared narrative authority. Dumb, inexplicable motivations, illogical plot twists, hammered theme.

Although a lot of movies also do unidimensional characters.

If the characters have dumb, inexplicable motivations, that's not great characters there, Elliot. Great characters have clear, understandable motivations.

-clash

Quote from: David R;330905Very true. The thespy indie film scene have been doing it for years !

But going back to game design for a moment, would you say that your design philosophy reflects your GMing style ? I know your games are playable no matter the playstyle but does yours creep in there a little ?

Regards,
David R

Oh, yes, David! My first responsibility is to make game *I* enjoy running. If I don't enjoy it, how can anyone else? My second responsibility is to make games anyone can run.

See the NPC section in any of my games - goals, motivations, personalities, and resources.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;330911See the NPC section in any of my games - goals, motivations, personalities, and resources.

-clash

I know. It's the reason I asked. Reading you blog post about NPC motivations and very little prep, I kinda of figured you would incorporate this into your work. My players were amazed at how quickly I came up with stuff for our IHW games.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: flyingmice;330909If the characters have dumb, inexplicable motivations, that's not great characters there, Elliot. Great characters have clear, understandable motivations.

-clash

True, it's a tautology. The thing is though that characters can start out great only to be betrayed by the exigencies of plot and stereotyped expectations. Whether that means they were never really great, or that they didn't have any greatness until fully revealed in the course of the story is perhaps a philosophical question when it comes to static fictions that can be revised before release. With RPGs, character has to precede plot IMO.

Quote from: Nazgul;330895If that were true, there would be a glut of good music to listen to on the radio, instead of the crap we get now....

Surely you mean the 80s...

Or the 70s...

Or the 60s...?

Typically depends on when you're born.

See, I like music from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Thing is, after 98 or so, I've heard less than a dozen new bands that were any good played on the radio, so now I don't listen to it anymore.

Yea I know there are better bands out there than what the radio plays, but when you've forgotten your cds/mp3player/stuck in someone else's car, it tends to suck.



As to rpg and story, I go with "story is what happens during the course of the game, but the GM should take care that future events have the past in mind"

Or put another way, once you look back over the 'story' of the first few adventures and see the game developing a certain way (cause that's what the players want) make sure what you have planed next ties back into what when on before. Even as it introduces new things.

Quote from: jadrax;330171It never ceases to amaze me how differently people can partake of the same hobby. So do you think discussion of those sort of GM discussions out of genuine disinterest or some sort of feeling that it should not be done?

The latter.  It's not exactly kosher; asking a GM how he develops the campaign while it's in progress.  It's a little bit like heckling a magician and asking him to explain how he's doing his tricks while he's on stage.

:shrug:

Quote from: David R;330410Of course people like Edwards and Rein Hagen attempted to make story the goal or at least the center piece with mixed results. Hagen for instance claimed he wrote a storyteller game which was in play just an angsty regular role playing game. He should have just said he was creating an angsty regular roleplaying game. Edwards on the other hand was more successful in that he managed to split the community by making these gimmicky "story" mechanics and collaborative story creation the focus of the game. He didn't really create anything new because as almost anyone who has not drunk the koolaid will tell you, funky mechanics aside, Forge games play more or less like regular games.

I was just catching up to make my reply, and it's a good thing I did, because this is it right here.  There's no such thing as a story-game, and it'd be great if the pretentious would-be foisters of that term quit trying to coin it already just to describe a game that has an attitude or a mechanic or two that they don't like.  There's roleplaying games... and then there's other roleplaying games with slight variations.  All this arguing about story comes across as pretty pedantic to me, because we're really only talking about a handful of superficial mechanical gee-whiz gadgets that go on top of a roleplaying session that's pretty much the same as roleplaying game sessions always have been.

Rein*Hagen, or whatever character you're supposed to insert there, made a lot of hay with nothing more than a pretentious attitude, but to claim that White Wolf, or even Forge games for that matter, fundamentally created a new kind of game that demands an entirely new term is a case of a tiny, tiny tail wagging a big ole honkin' dog.

Quote from: aramis;330499Not even then... a sandbox, with sufficient prep, is still likely to be improvisational story. RPG mechanics constrain story. Sandbox play is less constrained than module play, but still more constrained than non-game Improv theater.

Wow, some of you folks fetishize the "pure" sandbox the way Libertarians fetishize "pure" capitalism.  Like the economic principle, in reality a "pure" version doesn't exist, probably can't exist, and even if it could, it'd be a sucky thing to actually experience.

We already had a perfectly fine term here; railroading, that was the theoretical opposite of a sandbox, where the theoretical endpoint is little more than the GM reading his book to the players.  But the point is that both of those: pure railroad and pure sandbox, are merely theoretical endpoints.  All games that I've ever witnessed, or that I can even imagine, fall somewhere on the spectrum in between.  

Personally, I'm a fan of the so-called "narrow-wide-narrow" approach, where you purposefully "railroad" a bit at the beginning of the campaign to get it off the ground, and once it's running on its own steam, you back off and let the PCs have their head.  Then, at the end, you have to force a few strings to tie themselves off and come to a head; otherwise the game just lingers indefinately.