"The term 'GNS' is moronic and annoying" – well this should be an interesting interview

[AbdulAlhazred]

I honestly think you've missed the thrust of the argument here, which was more around creative vision and impulses, and less about say beta testing. Most of the indie game sector at most has a small amount of testing done to ensure mechanics aren't horribly broken, but the creative thrust is not being pulse checked off some sort of market or user. We've gotten genre defining games from that sort of single developer / vision first process, that have upended the industry and won awards.

OK, sure, but lets look at the poster child, Apocalypse World. Having read many things Baker et al have written about the genesis of that game, I think we can see that it was not even slightly spun out in his brain and just dropped on paper. It was a produce of LONG experience, a distillation of that experience into a form which could be communicated to others, along with some genuine innovation in the moment. Still, I bet every element arose somewhere in actual play before it ever got incorporated into AW, and the actual writing of the game itself was at heart more of a compilation of practice and process of identifying the key elements and eliminating the extraneous. So, I am relatively sure it was a pretty social process and the stage of putting the ideas on paper in final form was not where "the rubber met the road" so to speak.

Now, I could never prove that every other substantive RPG has something analogous, if not a full blown public process, at its root, but I think even fairly idiosyncratic developers like Siembieda still didn't just sit down and scratch out his first game "The Mechanoid Invasion" from nowhere. Again, I don't know as a fact, but I bet you dollars to donuts that it arose out of a process of hacking and playing and collaborating with other people from which the thing emerged. And honestly, I'd say Palladium is almost the poster child for weird, half-broken, obviously not-really-tested stuff!

 

[Emberashh]

I was attempting to use the phrase in the way I think Emberash is using it. I regret doing so because I don’t think video games or their design have anything at all to do with RPG’s.

Buy yeah I agree with all your points.

I would rethink that. Game design is game design, and design principles don't suddenly become incompatible or irrelevant just because we swap mediums, and where things wouldn't apply or would have to be addressed differently, we can speak to specifically.

There's no need to sweep a much more robust and varied pool of viewpoints under the rug just because they, understandably, have to focus more of their time and efforts on engineering problems.

Plus, something to consider, one of the best techniques professionals use in the video game industry is paper prototyping. They make what are effectively tabletop games in order to test out the specific game design they're going for.

The idea that the two don't have anything to do with each other is just, not true. Game design is game design.

 

[pemerton]

[Wanted to note I found most of this post well put together and on-point, since I'm going to take some issue with this part.]

I think, as with most such ad-hoc GM decisions for things, its more accurate to say "there's nothing automatically less realistic" here. "A long time" is very vague by nature, and can range from "about right" to "way off". When it comes to adjudicating such things, people's judgments can vary considerably in quality. There's no assurance that a set of rules has it right either, but it at least A) has the benefit that you can pretty much count on everybody participating being on the same page and B) if it matters to you (and to make it clear, it may not much) it can be addressed systematically which is pretty hard to do with one-off decisions.

I think you haven't quite responded to my post.

Now, saying the preceding is going to generate some frustration, so I'm going to try and carefully explain what I said, and what I mean. I think the point I am making has significance for understanding one form of the "pull to purist-for-system simulationism" beyond just our interaction in this thread.

So, I posted that

There is nothing less realistic, as far as fighting and injury are concerned, about the fiction we create in Prince Valiant than the fiction we create in Rolemaster - eg, when a PC knight was run through the shoulder by a skeleton lord's magic two-handed sword, his recovery took a long time. And it doesn't create long periods of uninteresting calculation and technical reasoning at the table. But it is all done by GM stipulation, not "organically/emergently".

So I referred to actual fiction that is actually created, with an example.

But your reply is about possible fiction that might be created using the rules and procedure in question - your "automatically" is an adverb that characterises that possible fiction.

The fact that a procedure permits arbitrary or unrealistic decision-making is, for some RPGers, a reason to avoid it. This is in my view one of the big pulls to purist for system approaches. Doubly so when those possible outcomes are envisaged as being among what is possible in the fiction - because the decision-procedure is taken to be a model (in some loose sense at least) of the in-fiction causal process.

For me, a big part of learning how to achieve more compelling fiction in my RPGing was cultivating the ability to distinguish between the method that is used at the table to generate an outcome and the process in the fiction that generates that outcome. 4e D&D, for instance, relies heavily on this distinction; so does any system that doesn't use "objective" difficulties (say, MHRP, or Apocalypse World); and so does any system that uses "intent and task" or similar "fail forward" consequence determination (Burning Wheel and Torchbearer are two examples; and this is generally how I run Prince Valiant also, although its rules are a bit less clear on the matter).

Anyway, for me that was the main thing I thought of in response to your post. The secondary thing I thought of is that, if anyone is not on the same page about how long it might take to recover from some injury in the context of the events of game play (eg "Now we've arrived at Constantinople, has my shoulder recovered?") then we can discuss and resolve. My personal, practical experience is that - in the context of a pretty non-gamist approach to play - this is not a high-stakes, conflict-prone discussion.

 

[Emberashh]

An apropos vid that popped into my music feed for some reason, but even so.

Someone like Brennan and his players are all well-studied at improv, and the all too common refrain that we can't expect people to be at that level just highlights exactly why I think it's vital to actually teach improv as part of the game and to be explicit about it.

You don't need to be Brennan or Matt Mercer to still be able to follow Yes,And.

And as one commenter put it, something that gets overlooked when people become frustrated when people won't play anything other than 5e, is that whatever other game isn't just competing with 5e, but also with freeform roleplaying.

Some, as a result, we're never into 5e much, so they can easily slip into an OSR game like Shadowdark as the 5e stuff collapses into a simpler protoform.

Others aren't there much for the roleplay, or just want something other than the rote trappings of DND. Here comes Pathfinder or Lancer or GURPs or whatever.

And others still don't like either one. They seem to end up with the narrativist games.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I just wrapped up watching a GDC Indie talk by Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb games - he notes that for his entire game making career he's ignored his forums/steam pages/feedback, made the games he wants to make that fit within his capabilities, and if those stop selling he'll retire and go sell shoes.

I guess you could say that for him "my lazy game didn't sell well, so I put a lot more effort into my next 2" is listening to an audience if you want to get that general.

If you literally don't care if anyone will get use out of your game, obviously my statement was not true. I suspect the number of designers that applies to is tiny.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think you haven't quite responded to my post.

I think I did, but I may have responded to it more narrowly than you wanted, or is useful from your POV. Basically, barring the person making the decision of things like healing time being particularly expert in either the real-world issues of this or the genre expectations for same, I sort of do think on the whole an ad-hoc decision here is very likely less realistic than one baked into the mechanics (while acknowledging the mechanics can be misdesigned here, but that's at the least not any more likely than a purely judgment based one at a GMs end. Its not that they "can" be wrong here that's the thing, its that I think they pretty likely will be unless they've taken the time to analyze the matter in advance or at least when they had to make a decision)

So I was disagreeing with your premise in that particular sentence.

 

[pemerton]

Basically, barring the person making the decision of things like healing time being particularly expert in either the real-world issues of this or the genre expectations for same, I sort of do think on the whole an ad-hoc decision here is very likely less realistic than one baked into the mechanics (while acknowledging the mechanics can be misdesigned here, but that's at the least not any more likely than a purely judgment based one at a GMs end. Its not that they "can" be wrong here that's the thing, its that I think they pretty likely will be unless they've taken the time to analyze the matter in advance or at least when they had to make a decision)

So I was disagreeing with your premise in that particular sentence.

Well, my premise was about an actual event of play. And given that we don't have a MRI on the PC knight's shoulder wound, I don't think we can say it was unrealistic provided it's in the ballpark of actual lived experience of recovery from soft-tissue injury (which is something I have a bit of).

As for the proposition that baked-in mechanics are more likely to be realistic - I don't think there's actually much evidence of that, is there? I mean they're also just numbers made up based on general categorisations of injuries, by people who are typically not occupational therapists and who don't have any sort of statistical evidence ready-to-hand.

The pull to purist-for-system is, in my view, not that the numbers generated by (say) the RM recovery table are more realistic, but that they are generated otherwise than by stipulation at the moment the question arises. To use Baker's language from Apocalypse World, they "disclaim decision-making".

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, my premise was about an actual event of play. And given that we don't have a MRI on the PC knight's shoulder wound, I don't think we can say it was unrealistic provided it's in the ballpark of actual lived experience of recovery from soft-tissue injury (which is something I have a bit of).

As for the proposition that baked-in mechanics are more likely to be realistic - I don't think there's actually much evidence of that, is there? I mean they're also just numbers made up based on general categorisations of injuries, by people who are typically not occupational therapists and who don't have any sort of statistical evidence ready-to-hand.

The pull to purist-for-system is, in my view, not that the numbers generated by (say) the RM recovery table are more realistic, but that they are generated otherwise than by stipulation at the moment the question arises. To use Baker's language from Apocalypse World, they "disclaim decision-making".

But that's just a question of how much research you as a designer want to put in to make your simulation the best it can be. More effort, better sim. Moderate as necessary for practical play and personal taste. Assuming the numbers are just "made up" and no better than what any given DM can improv as needed is unfair.

 

[niklinna]

Well, my premise was about an actual event of play. And given that we don't have a MRI on the PC knight's shoulder wound, I don't think we can say it was unrealistic provided it's in the ballpark of actual lived experience of recovery from soft-tissue injury (which is something I have a bit of).

"Realistic" is just one factor in "acceptable to the table". And it isn't even mandatory.

As for the proposition that baked-in mechanics are more likely to be realistic - I don't think there's actually much evidence of that, is there? I mean they're also just numbers made up based on general categorisations of injuries, by people who are typically not occupational therapists and who don't have any sort of statistical evidence ready-to-hand.

See Murphy's Rules by Steve Jackson Games for some amusing absurd results of supposedly realistic and detailed sim rules.

The pull to purist-for-system is, in my view, not that the numbers generated by (say) the RM recovery table are more realistic, but that they are generated otherwise than by stipulation at the moment the question arises. To use Baker's language from Apocalypse World, they "disclaim decision-making".

That's a high page count for disclaiming a bit of decision-making.

 

[pemerton]

But that's just a question of how much research you as a designer want to put in to make your simulation the best it can be. More effort, better sim. Moderate as necessary for practical play and personal taste. Assuming the numbers are just "made up" and no better than what any given DM can improv as needed is unfair.

Unfair to whom? Like, which rule system are you defending here?

I referenced one that I have extensive experience of - namely, Rolemaster. Which one do you have in mind?