Ryan Dancey on Redefining the Hobby (Updated: time elements in a storytelling game)

[Glyfair]

But, there is no denying that D&D still dominates the market in an unbelievably huge way.

And I think that's what Ryan wants to change. He doesn't necessarily want to eliminate D&D's importance, he just wants to create something that's as important.

From Ryan's blog entry that began this series:

People ask me if I have plans to return to the hobby gaming industry. My answer is a qualified “no”.

There is, however, one last mountain that remains. No tabletop roleplaying game has ever consistently outsold Dungeons & Dragons, over more than 30 years of history.

 

[Glyfair]

Two more updates (one came during the ENWorld downtime last night)

Step 4: Redefine the Platform
STep 5: Redefine the Rules

Lots of interesting, controversial ideas.

I believe that the Power Gamer faction of the player demographic is going to shift their play primarily to MMORPGs over time, which will change the overall audience of tabletop gaming. With the Power Gamers absent, their need for complex tactical rules for combat is removed from the equation. In reaction to that change, I believe we need to replace physical combat with dramatic conflict as the core of the game experience. Playing to the strengths of the remaining 3 segments (plus the “Basic Gamers”) means we have to re-think what a tabletop Storytelling Game should emphasize.

Currently, Dungeons & Dragons spends the bulk of its rules-payload on resolving physical conflicts between groups of individuals. It has virtually no support for resolving the actions of large groups en masse, nor does it provide tools for economic or political conflicts. And when used to resolve social conflicts, the game’s resolution level (10 seconds), and emphasis on physical conflict tends to reduce such conflicts to pure roleplaying exercises with very little gameplay. That is a big area where the game platform needs to be restructured and improved.

In addition, Dungeons & Dragons has but one mode of play: first person realtime narrative. In other words, the game has no rules for, and makes no allowance for the concepts of narration outside of the things an individual character can do on its player’s “turn”.

Another major issue to be addressed is the tacit assumption made throughout D&D that unless a game object is explicitly identified in the environment that thing does not exist. This places an immense burden on the GM to attempt to think through very complex physical environments, and greatly limits the player’s range of options and creativity.

 

[RFisher]

That's an interesting idea that the "power gamers" won't hang around on the tabletop too much longer. Not sure whether I agree or not. I think I agree in theory, but I'm not so sure in practice.

The other two quotes represent lines of thinking in the (IMHO) right direction.

Has he not encountered Risus?

If he's not there yet, he's getting close to realizing that this "tacit assumption" is only an assumption of the later editions & a misnomer that some of us read into the original. That the game should be much, much more than just what the rules cover was a key element.

 

[Glyfair]

That's an interesting idea that the "power gamers" won't hang around on the tabletop too much longer. Not sure whether I agree or not. I think I agree in theory, but I'm not so sure in practice.

I'm certain there will be power gamers around (no matter the definition you are using). If nothing else, some are part of a group and will play what the group is playing.

 

[F4NBOY]

The D20 System, especially as expressed in Dungeons & Dragons, has probably reached the end of its useful commercial life.

Yeah right!

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I'd just like to say that I agree with everything MoogleEmpMog has said in this thread. If 4E actually does take a hint from some of the better indie games and gives us a more developed system for resolving conflict and creating story--and the game mechanics to constrain and guide that process--it will probably change my mind about converting. It will merge my favourite game with some of the things that I really love about recent indie games. In other news, I also agree with pretty much everything Ryan Dancey says in Step 5.

 

[Zoatebix]

Speaking as a player of boardgames, they're *not* the route that D&D needs to go down. All the attempts at moving the D&D experience to the more structured form of the boardgame (Talisman, Runebound, Descent, WoW:tbg) are terrible at even coming close to anything resembling a RPG. Not just that their gameplay is inferior, but that it counts out the vital part of the RPG: the imagination.

Boardgames might provide a jumping in point for some aspects of RPGs (mainly the tactical), but no more.

Cheers!

What about something like Arkham Horror? I've been meaning to pick it up for a while, and I'd love to hear your opinion of it.

 

[Zoatebix]

FWIW, most dedicated console RPG fans I've met, myself included, play the classics of the genre many, many times.

Seconded! I've played through the original Seiken Densetsu (the black and white Gameboy game known as Final Fantasy Adventure stateside) and Final Fantasy 4 (originally released as FF2 here) more times than I can remember.

 

[Zoatebix]

"Story Games" has some appeal, and it's already being used, but it has a heck of a lot of baggage. I totally agree with whoever said upthread that stories have a teller and a listener, (or an author and a audience, more generally) and that D&D Players are not an audience. Plus there's the White Wolf baggage. People have gone so far as to call what White Wolf's co-opting of Storytelling Brain Damage, and given a lot of the content of the Will Hindmarch's chapter from MIT Press's Second Person, it looks like some folks at White Wolf has bought into a lot of the stuff that people are objecting to in this thread.

Dragonhelm's reiteration of "Products of your Imagination" keeps growing on me. A lot!

"Adventure Games" is the official name for the hobby gaming industry that GAMA came up with, isn't it? This was much to the confusion of the folks making table top wargames (especially historical ones), but it's a pretty good name for a lot of RPGs. Some horror games aren't really adventures, and Breaking the Ice and such doesn't fit, but "Adventure Games" isn't bad.

So - What's in a name, my fellow hobby redefiners?

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

People have gone so far as to call what White Wolf's co-opting of Storytelling Brain Damage

While I might be sympathetic to the author's thesis, the presentation has got to be the most rambling, unfocused mess of essay I've ever read. What, exactly, I would ask him, are you talking about in this paragraph? Or this one? That's a nice list of things; why is it here? Are you going to connect any of this to your thesis, or am I going to have to wait for the movie to come out?

I practically had to deconstruct (whoops, shouldn't use those nasty postmodern terms) the essay in order to reverse-engineer the thesis out of it, and figure out why the author thought I should agree with him.