The peripheral community that is a f*cking pox on our hobby

[Pseudoephedrine]

Okay, I get where you're coming from. Truthfully, though, most GMs I've met have trouble getting any kind of structure at all into their game.

Yeah, but I think that's part of the same problem. Reading fiction gives you all sorts of ideas for things characters can do and why so that you're not completely surprised when your PCs do something unexpected.

By contrast, if your main experience and idea of how characters act is anime or TV (where characters are notoriously stupid for plot purposes) then you're just less equipped to deal with that sort of thing when it comes up.

Jared Diamond makes a similar point in Guns, Germs and Steel when he points out that the Incan emperor was willing to (foolishly) enter the fortified compound of Pizarro's company with an unarmed retinue of nobles simply because it hadn't occurred to him that Pizarro might ambush him, and the Incas had no literature or history about similar situation to advise him to act differently.

[oktoberguard]

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=408117

The description of this game is just basically a collection of references and allusions to crap, and the various character ideas and description of the setting are just cliches stapled together. And this is just a game I randomly found on rpg.net. While rpg.net is more extreme than most perhaps, I think we can see this in weaker forms throughout most of gaming, both on the design side and on the play side.

thanks for the link. this looks interesting.

[John Morrow]

Yeah, but I think that's part of the same problem. Reading fiction gives you all sorts of ideas for things characters can do and why so that you're not completely surprised when your PCs do something unexpected.

To be honest, I think real life experience combined with non-fiction (history, biographies, psychology, current affairs, etc.) are a better source of inspiration than fiction.  Good fiction is usually someone else's distillation of real life experiences and knowledge of the real world and when a person writes fiction based on what they know primarily from other fiction, they become two (or more) steps removed from reality and produce something derivative rather than something unique and interesting.

[John Morrow]

I think you're right about Hamlet, but the cliches it draws on aren't really ones with the same familiarity or immediacy for a modern audience as say, those of popular television crime dramas. The structure and style has a freshness for a modern reader because of that - it's not really like most of the stuff that they're familiar with from the television and children's books they've probably grown up with.

The problem is that you'll see many of the works of Shakespeare (as well as other famous works of literature) borrowed or even overtly ripped off in everything from movies to cartoons.  Before I ever read Shakespeare, I saw Gilligan's Island do a Hamlet musical.  And people who wouldn't know Joseph Conrad from Robert Conrad know the plot of Heart of Darkness from Apocalypse Now or perhaps Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death or, two steps removed, Eek the Cat's cartoon parody of Apocalypse Now Eekpocalypse Now!.  I recently read an article (couldn't find a link to it) where the author talked about making an allusion to a work of literature and having someone else think he was talking about The Simpsons, which had done a parody of the work of literature.

[Kyle Aaron]

I don't think collectors are destroying the hobby. In some ways I think they prop it up financially.

I think this is probably true. On the other hand, we are all collectors.

I think there needs to be a sort of critical mass of game systems out there and books being published to keep people interested. It's a bit like this thing the tv networks tried with taking a normal season of a series, say 22 episodes, and splitting it into two lots of 11 episodes, separated by a month. Surprise, surprise, rating rise steadily from episodes 1-11, then start up again at half as much on episode 12. So the network cancels the series. Brilliant.

When I go into the game store, I look for new stuff, both stuff entirely new to me, and stuff new in the game lines I already enjoy. If there's nothing new I get bored and next time I think of visiting the game store, don't.

If game books were restricted to those which definitely saw play, there'd be about one-tenth as many, published a lot slower than they are today. Just think about your own rpg collection, how little of it sees regular use. The game store would be very boring and you'd hardly ever visit there. And it'd close. "Oh but we have online shops, and -" yeah, yeah, but a life online is one where you know less people (as amusinlg described by David Wong), so you have less people to game with. Plus being in a game store amongst all those books, all those potential brilliant campaigns in alien worlds, that's just more inspiring than clicking on links.

Consider something else: clothes. Some people recommend that once a year you go through your wardrobe, and anything you haven't worn once in the past 12 months, get rid of it. If we did the same to our game collections we'd all have much smaller collections.

There are not many people who only own the minimum clothes, something like 3 shirts, 2 pants, several undies and pairs of socks, one coat, etc. There are not many gamers who own the minimum of game books - one system and one setting book. Most of us are collectors, in that we own stuff we rarely or never play.

[John Morrow]

The description of this game is just basically a collection of references and allusions to crap, and the various character ideas and description of the setting are just cliches stapled together. And this is just a game I randomly found on rpg.net. While rpg.net is more extreme than most perhaps, I think we can see this in weaker forms throughout most of gaming, both on the design side and on the play side.

The essay A Critical Appreciation of John Milius's Conan the Barbarian goes a bit overboard in it's praise of the movie but down near the bottom in section 5, the author talks about what he calls "recombinant-genre" movies:

   [...]In an article published shortly before Conan was released in 1982, Stephen Schiff refers to the "repeatable experience" that formed the appeal of genre movies--Westerns, films noir, war pictures, screwball comedies--during the heyday of the Hollywood studios and points out that "true genre movies don't exist anymore" because so-called genre movies produced today are more about a genre as defined in retrospect rather than of a genre:  "It's a matter of ontology.  When a being is aware of itself, it becomes a different being.  And even though Body Heat is a very good movie, it's not a true film noir because it's too much about the form--as Double Indemnity and D.O.A. and Out of the Past never were and never could be."

In the 1970s, Schiff says, such directors as Robert Altman and John Milius's film school contemporaries Steven Spielberg and George Lucas "began to use genre as if it were a recombinant nucleic acid--to create new forms."  A "recombinant-genre" movie such as Star Wars

   can give birth to what looks like a new genre . . . but it doesn't act the way genres act . . . .  George Lucas doesn't work within or even on genre.  He plugs in genre, flashing its proven elements at us as though they were special effects . . . .  [R]ecombinant-genre movies delight in the viewer's ignorance.  The audience for Outland doesn't necessarily know from High Noon, and the crowds that flock to Raiders of the Lost Ark may never have heard of Lash LaRue or Tailspin Tommy.  Parts of old genres replace the nuts and bolts of narrative that used to keep movies running.  More and more, genre becomes a secret junkyard.

The secret junkyard of postmodernism, that is (the term was not yet commonplace when Schiff wrote his essay).  Postmodernism is concerned with demographics more than it is drama, with form more than function, with the mechanical more than the natural.  It is cynical, relying for its effects on the automatic identification and instant appeal of known quantities, the "junkyard" of images, icons, motifs, and gimmicks that have developed in the kinetic, commercial, American twentieth century. Postmodernism is the sound bite, the bumper sticker, the high concept:  content removed from its context and now accepted in and of itself, one dimensionally.  Postmodernism does not reinterpret; it merely reiterates.  Purveyors (one hesitates to use the word creators) of postmodern entertainment do not as a rule respectfully borrow from and build upon the work of their artistic forebears or stand upon their shoulders; they simply take.  Postmodern narrative is a series of non sequiturs lined up like so many separate squares on a game board.  Cut to the chase.  Go over the top.  Use stick figures who do not grow or mature but who transform.  Astonish with sudden shocks, or persist in ratcheting up precalibrated shocks; do not enlighten with outcomes of gradual revelation.  Above all, be impatient.

Schiff was prescient.  His essay was written before MTV signed on via cable television, before our summer entertainment became dominated by big-budget, lighter-than-air action-adventure movies at the metroplex, before word-processing authors of popular fiction became corporate profit centers (just as their stories became assembly-line widgets that either enhanced the bottom line or were dropped to make room for more successful, more appealing products), and long before the personal computer revolution, pushed into fast forward by Bill Gates, digitized everything from payroll checks to the Five-Foot Shelf to pin-ups on the Internet.  Schiff saw that Star Wars itself was the source "of a genre that transcends cinema:  the video game"; little could he know that just on the horizon were new and improved, vastly more sophisticated video games as well as Dungeons and Dragons, a product that begat a whole new sensibility in action-fantasy novels, movies, and games that in turn begat such hybrid, more-context-than-content corporate falderal as the syndicated television programs Hercules and Xena, Warrior Princess--recombinant-genre products no doubt designed that way from the first strategy session.

The ease with which images and token concepts are digested and burped back up in our accelerated, manic, postmodern "communications" culture trivializes everything.  As a filmmaker, John Milius is constitutionally incapable of creating such cross-pollinated, live-action cartoons as the Indiana Jones movies or Xena, Warrior Princess.  Conan the Barbarian is indeed a genre movie, albeit of a genre only sporadically represented on the screen until the 1980s and not universally identified as a cinematic genre until then.  It stands on solid storytelling ground and is very different movie from, for example, Return of the Jedi, with which it is more or less contemporaneous but which is little more than a marketing tool posing as a feature film.

[David R]

The description of this game is just basically a collection of references and allusions to crap, and the various character ideas and description of the setting are just cliches stapled together.

You just pissed on my gaming sessions and GMing style. And boy does it sting.

Regards,
David R

[Thanatos02]

Okay, I get where you're coming from. Truthfully, though, most GMs I've met have trouble getting any kind of structure at all into their game.

I think that if you can comment on Hamlet's narrative structure, you probably don't have the same problem as people who think it's a Porky Pig cartoon.

But, since we're on this tangent, I think that reading more books is a good thing. I'm not certain it's objectively better, but I feel I'm a better person for having done it. It's also more cost-effective then buying gaming books, considering how much I can get out of some of my novels. Gaming books have never been as layered, even if their 'fluff' has its place.

Generally speaking, though, I think the collection of gaming books over time is probably less harmful to a good game then someone who only ingests gameline novels and rpg books.

[Jackalope]

How the fuck do you do Hamlet in gaming?  I cannot wrap my head around that.

[Thanatos02]

How the fuck do you do Hamlet in gaming?  I cannot wrap my head around that.

You're not trying to duplicate it, of course. But you might consider bringing layers and themes from it into your game. It's one of the classics of Western lit, so even if you don't copy it, players are still likely apt to recognize its tropes as familiar and act accordingly.

[RPGPundit]

By over-focusing on making comics "not just for kids!" they ended up making comics that weren't for kids... and then were surprised that they had a shrinking market as they had fewer kids getting into comics to replace people who were growing out of them.

The collectors wanted convoluted, confusing story lines and dark, gritty characters.  They didn't want to grow out of superman and batman -- they wanted them to get older and more "mature" with them.  So rather than add comics for adults, they changed the kids stuff to be more grown up.  Great for the adults... not so great for the kids.

It was a short-term success in that the collectors would buy a lot of product compared to a casual consumer (or kids!) -- but it was a bit like killing the goose that laid the golden egg.  It's was a non-sustainable business, and eventually the house of cards started to collapse.

Over time there was a conscious decision to focus more on the mature gamer, and the collector in particular.  This is virtually the same thing that happened with the comics industry -- but about 10 years later.

The RPG industry saw it's peak in the early 80s when TSR put "Ages 10 and up" on the covers of it's books.  In 2000 WotC decided RPGs would be for adults.

And the results look very, very similar to what we say with the comics industry.

This is precisely my position on the issue.

The problem with "collectors" is that a gaming companies knows it will sell a couple of thousand copies easily by making a 900 page full-glossy gold-plated ultra-slick total-colour hardcover with leather binding that's priced at $150 a pop; rather than the "risk" of promoting a $10 or $20 game directed at 14 year olds with limited budget.

Kids don't play RPGs anymore not because they've abandoned the RPG hobby; the RPG hobby abandoned them, as in, any serious and well-thought-out attempt to be directed at them, decades ago.
And now the same people who whine about how the "hobby is dying!" are the ones who bitch and moan if their RPG isn't hardcover and full-colour, and will consider any game priced under $50 to be "low quality", as if that affects how you play the motherfucking game.

RPGPundit

[droog]

How the fuck do you do Hamlet in gaming?  I cannot wrap my head around that.

I set up the situation, and the players responded. In that particular case, 'Haemlid' ran away and went to sea. Later he returned with an army and took his kingdom back.

[Jackalope]

I set up the situation, and the players responded. In that particular case, 'Haemlid' ran away and went to sea. Later he returned with an army and took his kingdom back.

Oh, so Hamlet wasn't one of the players.  I get it now.  The players are Rosencratz and Guilderstein, they're observers who can choose to get involved or not, but the "hamlet plot" doesn't actively involve them, yeah?

[droog]

Oh, so Hamlet wasn't one of the players.  I get it now.  The players are Rosencratz and Guilderstein, they're observers who can choose to get involved or not, but the "hamlet plot" doesn't actively involve them, yeah?

Haemlid actually was a PC on that occasion. One of my friends had dropped into town and I gave him the chr. But I'm sure there are many ways to make use of Hamlet in a game.

[Aos]

I ran a year long solo using elements from Hamlet, (murdered father, occasional ghostly manefestations of the same) Kidnapped (hoodwinked, fucked over and sold into slavery) and Count of Monte Cristo (The PC increased his competence with REVENGE in mind). After the initial fuck over the game pretty much ran itself.
The fuck over is important, because you have to do it in such a way that the player isn't railroaded, which requires a bit of finesse.