Quote from: Elliot Wilen;459399Okay, you've lost me in fractal wrongness.

From my perspective, Panzerblitz is more like D&D than either is like a story game. ("The Pool", for the sake of having some specificity.) Panzerblitz provides an experience of commanding a battalion (give or take) made up of platoons & companies (not individual tanks), rather than telling a story about a battle. It was imperfect of course, and later designs in the same family situated the player more clearly in the commander role by introducing limited control over units (representing morale, training, and difficulties of communication). Other games introduced hidden units (representing, obviously, limited intelligence). However even at this early date, and actually for pretty much anything that called itself a wargame--the player's resources were limited to concrete capabilities directly analogous to those of the forces in the field: movement rates, defense factors, attack factors, weapon ranges.

You further lose me by assuming prejudice ("bad word", etc.). So you'll have to start over if you're going to regain my attention.

If you're willing to concede the similarity between D&D and PanzerBlitz, then you can also see how they differ: in one you have a single character that serves as your point of contact with the game-world and your point of view within it; in the other you have a set of units as point of contact and a third-person point-of-view -- maybe a commander's eye view, but an idealized omniscient commander's eye view, one with out-of-the-fiction resources like knowing the disposition and composition of the enemy forces with certainty.

The Pool also enables players to engage with a fictional world. It has the character as point of contact with the fiction, like D&D, but it also gives the player out-of-the-fiction resources to work with. Some people will find this disruptive to their enjoyment of the game, just like some people won't play PanzerBlitz without hidden movement and other devices to restore "the fog of war." But other people get along with that just fine, and think they are role-playing.

Quote from: Bill WhiteThe Pool also enables players to engage with a fictional world. It has the character as point of contact with the fiction, like D&D, but it also gives the player out-of-the-fiction resources to work with.

Now, why use such resources? Why would I want that?

I see two potential reasons:
- for the sake of purely game interest
- for the sake of telling a story

The first is I think plainly the primary rationale for "dissociated" resources in 4e D&D. Take the dissociation to an extreme, and the result would be like a "Euro game" board game -- a tight abstract game with a "theme" laid on top superficially.

That really is how a lot of story games seem to me, except that they are just the abstract game naked. The numbers await their clothing in a theme via the process of play.

Go even further afield in terms of how the game is presented, and we come to old familiar card and board games that do not explicitly claim to relate to any "world" at all. Yet I have played many a "storytelling" game with friends by choosing to treat elements of the game as symbols referring to objects in the story.

In the last case, there is no "feedback loop". The underlying game goes on as usual regardless of what we may infer from it for our story. The story does not inform the game.

Bringing this back around, the "out of fiction" resources are significantly out of character. They are not role playing.

The more the game is about not role playing, the more it is about something else.

That something else could be pure game. What concerns us here is the case when that something else is story telling.

Random question, has anybody read Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin's Second Person: Role-playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (MIT Press, 2007)?

People call different things "role playing".

I would say that most of them are aspects of role playing. Most of them are not, however, the essential aspect that distinguished the class of role playing games from other phenomena.

- Mathematical modeling is par for the course, but no substitute for the player's decision making -- unless you want a game without players! Here we find the "roll playing is role playing" camp that disparages player engagement with the imagined environment rather than with an abstraction.

- Saying lines of dialog in character is a nice touch, but without the player's decision making "in those shoes" it is no more than play-acting. The view of this as constituting role-playing itself leads to the "combat or role-playing" dichotomy among some D&Ders.

Both of those aspects put priority on depiction of the persona. There has long been a faction that looks down on any expression of the player's own real intellect and character as contrary to "real role playing".

In respect to the origins of RPGs, that is anachronistic. The pioneers of the 1970s were very mindful that the matter at hand was a game to challenge and delight the players. Real Gary used the mask of made-up Yrag as an interface with the game environment.

Other aspects enrich role-playing, but the fundamental quality is that interaction with the secondary world by way of the persona's modeled capabilities.

True, here's a quote from the Prelude to Courtesans

Quote from: CourtesansCourtesans is a Roleplaying game... no not that sort of Roleplaying game but if that's what you're in to don't let me stop you!

Quote from: Géza Echs;459536Random question, has anybody read Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin's Second Person: Role-playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (MIT Press, 2007)?

I haven't. But I don't really many game theory books personally.

I think most of us agree that there is in practice not a thin line but a continuum between story games and RPGs, as between RPGs and simulation games or wargames.

There are trade offs, though. A world operating on natural laws produces circumstances that a dramatically satisfying story operating on literary laws should winnow out. A character within a world, bound by causality and space and time, is defined by those limits as an author's role above the world shaping a story is not.

Excellent game design calls, I think, for taking a project as a fresh undertaking to be defined on its own terms rather than getting shoved into this or that box of legacy rules because "that's the way genre X is done".

In computer games, Sid Meier (after his flight simulator period) comes to my mind as someone who thought first of subject rather than of genre.

Our little field started with people who had no notion of "role playing games". They made games about swordsmen and sorcerers, and form followed from their consideration of what would be fun to them.

The identification of "role playing" and "story telling" as activities with special appeal is an opportunity to explore ways to enhance the appeal of each by implementation of game forms suited to it.

Quote from: Géza Echs;459536Random question, has anybody read Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin's Second Person: Role-playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (MIT Press, 2007)?

Not to say that it's not an awesome book and extremely relevant to table-top RPGs, but I've found that most modern game theory exists for one reason - computer games are a multi-billion dollar industry and thus there's a whole lot of money being thrown at all aspects of it, including academic research.  As a result, most academic discussions "talk around" tabletop role-playing, either by dealing with it from a social science, or psychological viewpoint not specifically dealing with tabletop games or from a computer rpg viewpoint, again, not specifically dealing with tabletop games.

As a result, while there certainly can be useful elements, the fundamental process of the tabletop rpg isn't included in their discussions.

Quote from: Bill White;459435If you're willing to concede the similarity between D&D and PanzerBlitz

I don't need to concede it, I'll assert it.

The rest of your post has things backwards, though. You say that PB has sets of units as points of contact and a third-person POV...and The Pool also does. But you elide the fact that PB's third-person POV is due to lack of rules that enhance a first-person POV, while The Pool's third-person POV is due to inclusion of rules that deliberately provide a third-person POV.

[Edit: now it would be interesting to revisit Panzerblitz and create a commander's-eye view of things from the ground up, instead of assuming that interacting with maps is the way to go. In practice, historically, this generally wasn't done. I'd guess first because maps and movable unit representations often are present in HQs, second because actual time & space relationships are crucial to generating the data that flows into the commander's eyes and ears. (This reminds me of Burning Wheel's range & cover rules, which eschew maps in favor of an interesting abstraction, but then have to be patched or handwaved to overcome the possibility that A may be at short range relative to B and C, but B and C can be at long range relative to each other.) Anyway, in practice, historically in Kriegsspiel, other military wargames, and eventually in some hobby games, the commander's eye view was generated by having a GM, multiple commanders on a side who had limited communication, and so forth. E.g. see reports about Michael Korns's Modern War in Miniature, but also Farrand Sayre's Map Maneuvers and Tactical Rides.]

QuoteBut other people get along with that just fine, and think they are role-playing.

So what? Again, you can review my posts in this thread. People are free to think whatever they want, what concerns me is repeated denial it makes sense to divide, or scale, between games of one type, and other games. E.g., attributing matters of aesthetic taste & perception to tribalism or mere conservatism.

Quote from: CRKrueger;459568Not to say that it's not an awesome book and extremely relevant to table-top RPGs, but I've found that most modern game theory exists for one reason - computer games are a multi-billion dollar industry and thus there's a whole lot of money being thrown at all aspects of it, including academic research.  As a result, most academic discussions "talk around" tabletop role-playing, either by dealing with it from a social science, or psychological viewpoint not specifically dealing with tabletop games or from a computer rpg viewpoint, again, not specifically dealing with tabletop games.

As a result, while there certainly can be useful elements, the fundamental process of the tabletop rpg isn't included in their discussions.

Every other type of game in existence can be included in the discussion somewhere in books like Rules of Play, and many other theories/texts.  Game design is focused with the process of play, not necessarily with the technology behind it.

Frex, I have a friend who's graduating with a comp sci degree, and he took a game design course, but they used games like Catan as their focus of study, not computer games.

Mostly this is because RPGs, as they are historically described, are systems that can be implemented in a way that makes it game-like, but not truly a game in-and-of-themselves.

Quote from: CRKrueger;459568Not to say that it's not an awesome book and extremely relevant to table-top RPGs, but I've found that most modern game theory exists for one reason - computer games are a multi-billion dollar industry and thus there's a whole lot of money being thrown at all aspects of it, including academic research.  As a result, most academic discussions "talk around" tabletop role-playing, either by dealing with it from a social science, or psychological viewpoint not specifically dealing with tabletop games or from a computer rpg viewpoint, again, not specifically dealing with tabletop games.

As a result, while there certainly can be useful elements, the fundamental process of the tabletop rpg isn't included in their discussions.

I suspect that this one focuses at least in part on RPGs due to how I found it -- I searched the University of South Florida's libraries for references to "Cthulhu" and "Call of Cthulhu" and this came up on the list. Plus although it does note electronic gaming in its subject headings, it also lists RPGs. As a result, this might be worth looking at if you're interested. I haven't actually held it in my hands yet, but if I get to the campus next week I'll check it out (I won't have time to read it but I'll check the chapter headings and skim at least here and there -- though game theory is outside my academic purview).

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;459587I don't need to concede it, I'll assert it.

The rest of your post has things backwards, though. You say that PB has sets of units as points of contact and a third-person POV...and The Pool also does. But you elide the fact that PB's third-person POV is due to lack of rules that enhance a first-person POV, while The Pool's third-person POV is due to inclusion of rules that deliberately provide a third-person POV.

[Edit: now it would be interesting to revisit Panzerblitz and create a commander's-eye view of things from the ground up, instead of assuming that interacting with maps is the way to go. In practice, historically, this generally wasn't done. I'd guess first because maps and movable unit representations often are present in HQs, second because actual time & space relationships are crucial to generating the data that flows into the commander's eyes and ears. (This reminds me of Burning Wheel's range & cover rules, which eschew maps in favor of an interesting abstraction, but then have to be patched or handwaved to overcome the possibility that A may be at short range relative to B and C, but B and C can be at long range relative to each other.) Anyway, in practice, historically in Kriegsspiel, other military wargames, and eventually in some hobby games, the commander's eye view was generated by having a GM, multiple commanders on a side who had limited communication, and so forth. E.g. see reports about Michael Korns's Modern War in Miniature, but also Farrand Sayre's Map Maneuvers and Tactical Rides.]

So what? Again, you can review my posts in this thread. People are free to think whatever they want, what concerns me is repeated denial it makes sense to the divide, or scale, between games of one type, and other games. E.g., attributing matters of aesthetic taste & perception to tribalism or mere conservatism.

No time for a long reply, since I'll be incommunicado over the weekend, but I just wanted to raise the possibility that the text I've emphasized in bold above begs the question, since it seems to assume that the map and counters aren't rule-like. To some degree, your edit acknowledges that. It may not make a difference to the final outcome of this argument, but it undercuts the point you were trying to make.

Quote from: Bill White;459435If you're willing to concede the similarity between D&D and PanzerBlitz, then you can also see how they differ: in one you have a single character that serves as your point of contact with the game-world and your point of view within it; in the other you have a set of units as point of contact and a third-person point-of-view -- maybe a commander's eye view, but an idealized omniscient commander's eye view, one with out-of-the-fiction resources like knowing the disposition and composition of the enemy forces with certainty.

As I mentioned way back in my original post to the thread, wargames are a really interesting case study in this sort of discussion because once you start viewing "general" as a role that you're playing in those games, it becomes very difficult to distinguish them from roleplaying games.

Multiple characters? I haven't played D&D without one of the players running multiple characters in years.

Access to OOC information? This is bog-standard at most tables. (And what if we reverse the situation and start looking at wargames that feature fog-of-war or simulate the delivery of commands to the troops?)

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;459587(This reminds me of Burning Wheel's range & cover rules, which eschew maps in favor of an interesting abstraction, but then have to be patched or handwaved to overcome the possibility that A may be at short range relative to B and C, but B and C can be at long range relative to each other.)

Completely tangentially, these heavily abstracted range systems -- which I've primarily experienced in playing 3:16 -- always seem to both (a) flatten situations and (b) prove to be more work than the non-abstracted alternatives.

I keep meaning to investigate FATE's zones in more detail. They may work better.

Bill,

To a large degree, though, my edit reinforces the naturalness of using maps & counters in a wargame, even if the maps and counters are hidden from the players.

Look, we're dealing on a cognitive level here. It's a fact that military commanders don't have perfect information or perfect, timely control over their troops. But the elements of a wargame--especially the classic kind, less so today's fad of doing card-driven-everything--create a perception of "commanding your troops", "formulating a strategy", and so forth. If you've played a board wargame of the SPI/Avalon Hill variety, you must know what I'm referring to.

This is fundamentally different from a game whose mechanics operate on a high meta-level, drawing attention to the out-of-character decisionmaking going on.

In short I suggest you're fishing, and you ought to acknowledge it. In fact you've already done so. That someone "thinks that they are role-playing" is only significant once you've defined "role-playing", i.e., the subject of the thread. So you're not making any progress there. But you're already talking about "third person point of view", acknowledging that there are "out of the fiction" resources, etc. So exactly how can you simultaneously not only try to blur, but attempt to demolish the categorization* of games along these lines?

* Or for the nit-picky: "scaling".

Quote from: Justin Alexander;459624Completely tangentially, these heavily abstracted range systems -- which I've primarily experienced in playing 3:16 -- always seem to both (a) flatten situations and (b) prove to be more work than the non-abstracted alternatives.

I agree 100%.  Abstracted ranges work well for games where the feel and narration of what's happening are just as if not important then what's actually happening.  WFRP3 is like this.  Get a complicated fight with enemies in different directions and I swear, tossing down a mat is 5x faster.