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When did ~ become a sarcasm indicator? I think it totally works, incidentally. This thread is one of my favorite threads ever. I feel like I am learning things so frequently that I have to take frequent breaks to think. Which might explain why I started this post last week. I will spare you all my anecdotal responses to the "professionals do not game" sidetrack since that is basically dead and buried. Backno posted:In Indianapolis we have a store that does this. They are a smaller store focused on board games and role playing games that has an actual menu and coffee bar. They have a couple of themed rooms you can rent for your gaming group, they keep the place clean, and overall it's a pretty sweet store. Somewhat related: This thread makes me thankful for those few gaming stores I have encountered where the proprietor is clearly not in the business to make fabulous profits but is also a good person who wants everyone to have a good time, rather than ruining everyone's enjoyment or hiring incompetent/horrible buffoons. I took a Gaming Pilgrimage in March where I drove from my home in Delaware to Lake Geneva for the first time to attend GaryCon III, and made a list of all the gaming stores roughly en-route to visit in the process. The Compleat Strategist in Eastern Pennsylvania and Games Plus in Mt. Prospect Illinois were the two nicest stores I encountered on my trip (though Games Plus was about twice the size and really quite amazing), but I encountered a store in Lemoyne, Pennsylvania that was literally tucked into what looked to have been a garage in a back alley at some point, whose windows were boarded up with only tiny circles cut through them, that had a total of like four parking spaces, two of which were probably for the person who lived next door. But I will be damned if the owner Charlie was not one of the nicest and most entertaining people to talk to I met on my entire trip, and you could tell that he and his (probably) few dozen regular customers basically had everything they wanted from a gaming store. I bought a bunch of random dice from him and tried to convince him to go to Gen-Con for the first time, but he said he cannot really afford to close the store for that long. So adorable and sad and admirable all at once. Tao Jones posted:(I don't think ADB is suffering because of poor marketing or poor business structure, I think it's suffering because its games are poo poo. Unfortunately, they control the license to Star Trek games, so "make a better Star Trek wargame/roleplaying game" isn't possible, for reasons external to operations of the marketplace.) The hilarious saga of TORG comes to mind, and while obviously that game is roughly one millionth as popular as Star Trek, the way it was handed around from one person who had no idea how to stay profitable to another is pretty astounding. Now a German company who actually produces successful games has the license, so presumably it is in for a resurgence, but who knows? As far as random thoughts on how to take the basic RPG design in a good new direction, I always thought live-action role-playing was one of the better innovations related to tabletop gaming. It has a bad reputation, which I imagine is almost entirely due to the scope of the games meaning you are guaranteed to play with some people you would never want to play with normally. But I always found that enhanced the enjoyment of the entire endeavor--when my Toreador coterie entered the Ventrue chantry and found it full of horrible people playing characters who were also horrible, it was not the least bit hard to enjoy scheming against them for many sessions. I think if there were a good way to scale live-action gaming down to a normal-sized group, you would really be on to something. I am sure someone is going to tell me that there is already an independent game designed around precisely this premise, but I actually would be excited if you did, since it would be great. An elegantly designed live-action role-playing game would create results virtually indistinguishable to an outside observer from children playing pretend with their toys, which I think is what the gaming world tries to capture generally anyway. Unrelated: Do you United Kingdom people appreciate just how amazing a gaming culture you have there, even if it is for a restricted subgenre? My jaw literally dropped when, in the beginning of my study abroad year in Leicester(!), I was wandering around the city centre and turned the corner and saw a Games Workshop store. I took like six pictures of it and its interior and went home and e-mailed them to my friends, who were all basically astonished that any gaming company could have its own store.
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| # ? Jan 7, 2012 01:03 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 23:58 |
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Quarex posted:When did ~ become a sarcasm indicator? I think it totally works, incidentally. You can thank Japan for that. It's used trailing a word to indicate the closing vowel sound wobbles around whiningly. So the next logical step is to put 'em on both ends of a word or phrase to indicate the whole thing is wobbling around sarcastically.
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| # ? Jan 7, 2012 02:53 |
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Quarex posted:Er ... what is this? You would think this place's name would have come up in one of the eight years I have attended Gen-Con in Indianapolis, since it sounds like a great place to go when the exhibit hall closes if you have no games lined up. In fact, it sounds so much like the BEST place to go that I am increasingly confused. It's called The Arsenal, and as close as it is to the convention center it is surprising to me it's not talked about more at Gencon. Playing a game after hours is exactly what we did there and it was so nice to unwind there.
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| # ? Jan 7, 2012 04:30 |
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Speaking of LARP, I was thinking the other day it might be fun to do Live Action Space Alert. Could work as an add-on for someone doing a LaserTag business or something. Vague ideas: - Build out the interior of a small spaceship; perhaps a bit bigger than a Star Trek shuttlecraft; like a fighter intended for 4 or 5 crew. Have some interesting physical structure (access tunnels, ladders, a small cockpit, engineering bay) that has to be traversed during play. Imagine something like a McDonald's PlayPlace in size. - Make control of the ship mostly manual (for whatever thematic reason you want) and scatter the interface around the ship. Require significant co-ordination between players, and have significant time pressures (multitasking required). For example, one player could open a valve to flow fuel between parts of the ship. They'd have to return to that valve to close it in a certain amount of time or else the receiving system would overload. And if there wasn't enough fuel transferred, another player wouldn't be able to fire thrusters or raise shields or whatever. But while it's transferring, they need to repair a critical system elsewhere. Obviously ramp up challenge slowly, but be able to engage veteran players with truly demanding combination of tasks. - For scenario, the ship would have relatively simple tasks to perform, especially to start - not "choose where to fly, contact alien species" but more like "keep the ship going, raise shields, fire some missiles to get rid of incoming asteroid" type stuff. Again, think Space Alert rather than a space video game. - Physically, you could have a variety of tasks to perform. Modules to be removed, wires to be reconnected with tools, and cylinders to be removed, refilled, and replaced (with rotating locking mechanisms and what not). - There would be significant feedback from the ship - announcements from the ship's computer, voice broadcasts from the captain, little mallets whacking the outside of the ship (like those in a good pinball game), flashing lights, and rushes of air, etc.. The ship would have limited viewscreens/windows (implemented with lcd's, or just with glass and then projectors outside the ship) but these would be important in identifying the ship's situation. - Individual missions would be very short (10 minute-ish), with perhaps a single overall goal and some extra events/threats cropping up during that time. - Controls would be deliberately unwieldy; lots of lit buttons in grids, toggle switches under plastic covers, joysticks, pull chains, spin-hatches, and dials. The idea would be to create a feeling of accomplishment as players learned how to successfully perform certain roles. Not all players on a team would necessarily know how to run all equipment. Anyways, just a dumb thought.. but I will say that I would totally go to a place like that.
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| # ? Jan 7, 2012 04:30 |
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Live Action Space Alert would lose something, though. In Space Alert, because you queue up a bunch of actions and then resolve them all at once when the mission's over, the resolution step makes its own delicious after-action report.
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| # ? Jan 7, 2012 05:02 |
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quote:Live Action Space Alert would lose something, though. Oh, certainly. I mean, to a significant extent Space Alert is already Live Action Space Alert (and that's part of the beauty of it, as is the resolution step you mention). I just kind of brought it up to give an idea of the scenario and the kinds of stuff you'd be doing. It would be great, though, if you could hide information (or whatever) to allow for SA favorites like "I press the fire button and nothing happens. Next, you transfer energy from the empty main reactor. Finally, Bob reloads the main reactor."
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| # ? Jan 7, 2012 05:47 |
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Quarex posted:The Compleat Strategist in Eastern Pennsylvania and Games Plus in Mt. Prospect Illinois were the two nicest stores I encountered on my trip (though Games Plus was about twice the size and really quite amazing) It's funny that you mention Games Plus, because I go there when I'm in the area and looking for RPG stuff. It's always clean, well-lit, and has a friendly atmosphere. When I was younger and asked for PnP supplies around Christmas I'm pretty sure my parents would go there because of how helpful the employees were with people who had no idea what kind of dice/book I wanted. It has an incredibly good location in the city's downtown shopping district; right across the street from a metra stop and a block from the largest traffic artery in the area. That plus the really visible blue storefront mean it's really easy to find and probably draws a lot of attention from unfamiliar shoppers. It also has a very reasonable frequent buyers program to encourage future purchases. And on top of all that, I've never felt uncomfortable there. Basically, it's a great store that does a lot of smart things this thread recommends, and anyone within 50 miles should throw money at them to make sure they survive instead of random neckbeard dens nearby. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at Jan 7, 2012 around 06:39 |
| # ? Jan 7, 2012 06:19 |
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jmzero posted:Anyways, just a dumb thought.. but I will say that I would totally go to a place like that. This exists I have played it, and it is awesome 
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| # ? Jan 7, 2012 07:45 |
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Hey Gau, could I do a guest post on the blog about all the 'dissociated/associated' mechanics crap that's so popular in grog circles these days? (With a theme of 'don't worry about it if you choose to design a game, nobody cares but neckbeards'?)
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| # ? Jan 7, 2012 20:32 |
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Quarex posted:where I drove from my home in Delaware See, now I'm afraid to talk about my experiences with local shops. Especially since I worked at two of the recent ones.
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| # ? Jan 7, 2012 20:33 |
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I just want to say that as someone who's never even thought of running a hobby store I find this thread absolutely fascinating. I've gamed for a good chunk of my life yet I never really thought of the companies or stores behind it all.
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| # ? Jan 8, 2012 09:21 |
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Chaltab posted:Hey Gau, could I do a guest post on the blog about all the 'dissociated/associated' mechanics crap that's so popular in grog circles these days? (With a theme of 'don't worry about it if you choose to design a game, nobody cares but neckbeards'?) This, like a lot of 3.5e grogish stuff, is just 'I prefer simulationist play'.
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| # ? Jan 10, 2012 01:45 |
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Right, but it's also complete nonsense, because basically no mechanic in the history of Dungeons and Dragons has been 'associated' by Alexandrian's definition except Vancian Casting.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 07:31 |
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Chaltab posted:Right, but it's also complete nonsense, because basically no mechanic in the history of Dungeons and Dragons has been 'associated' by Alexandrian's definition except Vancian Casting. This is my issue with it as well. There is so much meaningless babble associated with RPGs. I'm sure a lot of it is that part of the hobby is tinkering and we are all creative people but do we really need to be discussing "Associated mechanics" and whether they are "gamist"?
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 18:06 |
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Dr Nick posted:This is my issue with it as well. There is so much meaningless babble associated with RPGs. I'm sure a lot of it is that part of the hobby is tinkering and we are all creative people but do we really need to be discussing "Associated mechanics" and whether they are "gamist"? The problem isn't jargon - all fields and hobbies have it, and you're never going to stop it from forming anyway since that's how language works. The problem is using jargon with new people, people that aren't familiar with it, to try and bring them into the fold.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 18:09 |
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I don't have anything against jargon. I do have something against meaningless jargon.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 18:25 |
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Dr Nick posted:I don't have anything against jargon. I do have something against meaningless jargon.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 18:37 |
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I think the associated simmersionilitude is a red herring. It's more of a rhetorical bludgeon and a bit of historical revisionism put out by people who had already decided they hated 4e and wanted a pseudointellectual reason to justify it. It's a tangent for a blog about how games are designed and marketed.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 19:13 |
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Halloween Jack posted:simmersionilitude "Your search - simmersionilitude - did not match any documents." I think you are the first person to use that word. What does it mean?
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 19:17 |
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simulation immersion verisimilitude
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 19:18 |
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insanityv2 posted:simulation The holy trinity of grognard game design.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 19:18 |
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It also reminds me of the silmarillion so it's got that going for it too.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 19:49 |
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insanityv2 posted:simulation The battlecry of the grogtard.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 19:53 |
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MadScientistWorking posted:Meaningless jargon technically constitutes all jargon. Take it from a guy who works in the field whose biggest inside joke entails technobabble. Excuse me? Jargon often has meaning, outside of its use as a way to distinguish group membership. See the fact that "jargon" is a technical term in Linguistics. It can also be almost meaningless and just shows that you're in a particular group. Care to explain?
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 19:57 |
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Xiahou Dun posted:
MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at Jan 11, 2012 around 20:09 |
| # ? Jan 11, 2012 20:06 |
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MadScientistWorking posted:I know. Technobabble is a form of jargon. I usually find jargon as a very lazy way of shorthand because of how loaded certain terms can be. Even granting that, that doesn't mean that all jargon is meaningless jargon, that means that one kind of jargon is meaningless. But I wouldn't call technobabble a form of jargon anyway, inside jokes or no.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 20:21 |
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Yeah, the sciences are full of jargon. A lot of it is really useful for making fine, technical distinctions. Half of the reason I hate explaining poo poo to laymen is because I can't use any of the jargon so it takes 10 times as long, even before I have to explain concepts. It so happens that a lot of jargon, and, usually, some jargon in every field, is meaningless, however. Can you flesh this out with a couple of examples?
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 20:26 |
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My perception of jargon is that it's totally needed but it will definitely put off more casual players. I have played competitive fighting games for like five years and when talking to my friends who are similar I drop so much jargon that someone who just started would have no idea what we are talking about. I am very conscious of it with new players or more casual people, however. I eliminate it from my vocab when I'm talking to someone just starting out so that they don't hate the game and feel overwhelmed with stupid nerd talk. Board games have their own amount of jargon that I picked up from reading forum posts, but it's always kind of striking or weird to hear it for the first time in real life. I had played Catan, Magic, and Dominion casually with friends and we never needed to use any of the "board game" jargon. I went to a meetup (posted about this in here before) and aside from a lot of people being huge nerds, the amount of stupid jargon they used to my fiance and me showed the disconnect between people really into a hobby and potential new players. They had no way of knowing that I understood the jargon, so they should have waited to see if I used it etc., my fiance certainly had no idea what any of it meant and it probably contributed to her not having a good time. For instance if you are talking to a new player you probably don't want to say "This card is strong because it gives good card advantage". You need to break it down and explain what that actually means i.e. "This card is good because, in this game, having more cards is basically one of the main things you need to win. Think of it as this game having one main resource: the amount of cards you have. If you are forced to discard cards, you are losing your one resource and getting closer to losing the game. If you use one card to gain three cards, you are getting way more of the resource you need to win. This card gives you more cards, so even though it looks boring, it's way better than it seems". If someone thinks to say this to a new player, the next time that player hears the term "card advantage" they will probably connect the dots and actually understand it. When going through an explanation of this you also want to check the person's face and wait to see if they are following what you are saying and adjust as needed. Saying "This gives card advantage" while you do something else isn't going to help them at all; it's just going to make them think they understand the game even less. For a lot of jargon a new player will just understand it from hearing it so much, but having one person go out of the way and explain things in layman's terms initially goes a huge way to not scaring new people off. This kind of disconnect can leak its way into rulebooks, tutorials, etc. It's always really important when teaching a new concept, explaining a new game, or in any way dealing with someone who is just starting, probably quite overwhelmed, out of their element, and uncomfortable to explain details/rules in the context of how they interact with the whole of the game. Don't say poo poo like "This spell does flame damage, so you definitely want it". Say "Flame damage is really important in this game because a lot of enemies you see later on are resistant to normal attacks and if you don't get some kind of spells that do flame damage you will be stuck later on". systran fucked around with this message at Jan 11, 2012 around 22:16 |
| # ? Jan 11, 2012 22:11 |
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Idran posted:But I wouldn't call technobabble a form of jargon anyway, inside jokes or no.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 22:24 |
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A word is proper jargon if it is a word that has very specific meaning within a field but is not readily understandable to someone outside the field. The problem with gamist/simulationist/whatever is that it has no specific meaning within the field except for "Thing I like" and "Thing I do not like" This is the difference between "Jargon" and "Meaningless Jargon". Edit: "Dice Pool" would be a legitimate example of gaming jargon. Splicer fucked around with this message at Jan 11, 2012 around 23:40 |
| # ? Jan 11, 2012 23:36 |
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Splicer posted:The problem with gamist/simulationist/whatever is that it has no specific meaning within the field except for "Thing I like and two other things I do not like" Really? Because despite the fact that I was never around during the Forge's heyday, or The Gaming Outposts, their definitions seem pretty clear to me. You could argue they're not accurate, but there are plenty of people defending each approach to design on those sites and it's often clear what they mean when they invoke a specific term. Now people outside of those circles (like here, or on RPGnet) incorrectly using the terms is another thing.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 23:43 |
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Frohike999 posted:It's called The Arsenal, and as close as it is to the convention center it is surprising to me it's not talked about more at Gencon. Playing a game after hours is exactly what we did there and it was so nice to unwind there. See I have never understood why they don't go nuts during Gen Con. Hell a store in Oaklandon, IN (like 30-40 min away from the convention center) is the "Official Game Store of Gen Con" and had a couple of coupons in the book. The one time I went to The Arsenal I thought it was an awesome idea. The only reasons I don't go is the 25+ min drive to get there and I am more of a miniature gamer which they don't really do.
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| # ? Jan 11, 2012 23:58 |
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As a technical writer, a huge part of my job is to translate the jargon used by insiders (developers, project managers, designers, architects, etc.) into plain english understandable by the audience. Sometimes it's necessary to totally avoid a jargon term, and sometimes it's better to define it explicitly and then use it in the documentation. A glossary is sometimes useful (generally for larger documents where it makes sense to have a separate glossary). When discussing technical information, defining terms is critical, whether those terms are jargon or if they're just potentially unfamiliar to the audience. You can see this in well-written RPGs. D&D for example has always gone to some length at the beginning of the PHB to define things like "what is a player-character (PC)". This is a key thing that a lot of games fail to do, or fail to do well, that make them difficult for a novice to pick up and get into. Deliberately creating jargon just to be different is also problematic. If everyone understands what a GM is, there's no need - beyond a lazy way to try and create "flavor - to call him the Storyteller. And that's not even that bad; some games seem to take delight in obscuring the game's mechanics in all manner of special words, often randomly capitalized or bolded in the text (which at least does the job of cuing the reader that they're special), apparently because the authors wanted to "be different" and didn't understand, or care, that doing so creates a learning barrier to entry. That said, jargon can be incredibly useful. In Magic, coming up with the word "tap" to mean "turn the card in play sideways to indicate that it has been used" is great; it's not a complicated concept, the word is simple and easy to remember, and it's something that is used a lot in the game (so making a shortened jargon term serves a real purpose of reducing the size of other rule descriptions). Someone totally unfamiliar with Magic who sees something like "tap your lands to produce mana" still needs to find out what that term means, though, so there's a cost to using it. My advice is that if you're writing a new game, pay very close attention to how you create and use jargon. By all means use it, but be deliberate and careful, avoid creating a jargon term where none is needed (especially when you're just substituting a jargon term for a single non-jargon word that would work just as well), and when you do use jargon, carefully define it and maybe also put that definition into a glossary. Be consistent about how you cue readers that you're using a special term (bold, caps, italics, smallcaps, whatever) and do an editing pass of your draft explicitly looking for wherever you forgot to apply that convention. In the context of the current discussion, though: I don't think there's such a thing as "meaningless jargon". If it's meaningless, it's not jargon, and if it's jargon, it has a meaning. That meaning might be poorly defined, or based on a concept you disagree with, or whatever, but that doesn't make it meaningless; just annoying. "Gygaxian naturalism" is meaningful even if it's arguably (or definitely) not a real thing that Gygax (or anyone else) actually did or intended; its original user, at least, had some kind of definition in mind (perhaps a vague and poorly-defined one, but it was there). If you make up a word that truly has no meaning, it's not jargon: it's babble. Technobabble, to me, is like that: words that sound like they're technical and have meaning, but actually have no meaning and are just intended to give a character something sciency-sounding to say. Star trek is the canonical example here, although of course legions of fans (and I guess the writers of gaming-oriented star trek technical manuals?) have undertaken to provide meaning to technobabble terms after the fact. So, for example, if I say "reverse the polarity of the flubulator and then modulate the tachyon beam!" that's technobabble. The words "polarity" and "tachyon" do have real meanings, but plainly they're not being applied in a rigorous sense here, and in combination they make no sense (to anyone, not just to a listener unfamiliar with the jargon). Whereas "I prefer simulationist mechanics" does have meaning, even if you and I both feel that it's a stupid thing to say, and/or that "simulationist" is too vaguely defined to be particularly useful. It's meaning is "complicated game mechanics intended to simulate events in detail." Probably unnecessary detail, perhaps bogging down a game into boring or unimportant ephemera, perhaps overcomplicating something that needn't be complicated, and probably not in any way adding to the story, characterization, plot, or even the setting, and maybe a really bad idea? Sure. But still a word that actually means something.
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| # ? Jan 12, 2012 00:12 |
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Splicer posted:The problem with gamist/simulationist/whatever is that it has no specific meaning within the field except for "Thing I like" and "Thing I do not like" I disagree; the definitions are pretty clear. "Gamism" is preoccupation with being a game foremost (fun, no rules for the sake of rules, that sort of stuff); "simulationism" is preoccupation with simulating things in detail (rules because they're "realistic" i.e. simulate part of the setting); "narrativism" is preoccupation with telling a story above all else (so everything serves the purpose of telling a story). Different people prefer different mixes of these, none of them are necessary bad and it's not like the three are wholly distinct categories and games can fit in any one - but they're still pretty handy to have as broad types.
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| # ? Jan 12, 2012 00:22 |
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Halloween Jack posted:I think the associated simmersionilitude is a red herring. It's more of a rhetorical bludgeon and a bit of historical revisionism put out by people who had already decided they hated 4e and wanted a pseudointellectual reason to justify it. It's a tangent for a blog about how games are designed and marketed. LincolnSmash posted:Really? Because despite the fact that I was never around during the Forge's heyday, or The Gaming Outposts, their definitions seem pretty clear to me. You could argue they're not accurate, but there are plenty of people defending each approach to design on those sites and it's often clear what they mean when they invoke a specific term. In fact, what would happen in the gns debates is that somebody would post a short, reasonable definiton for say, narritivism, often to prove it could be done- but then almost uniformly, somebody else would pull rank, say the definition was innacurate, and link to a bunch of huge, sprawling essays that failed the test of functional definition or theory. This in time led to bizzare situations like nested jargon- Attempts to simplify explanations of 'Gamism' led to the idea that it was was in part about the challenge to 'step on up' which, like gamism, in theory was a pretty simple concept, but in pratice, had another four page essay sitting behind it. While those terms have ended up having a reasonably clear meaning, it was certainly not thanks to the forge alone. The accepted meanings were in fact, the ones people came up with despite the input of force-style essays, not because of them. And remember, before GNS, there was GDS- Gamism, Dramatism, Simulationism- a theory which preceeds the forge and everyone in it, and iirc acted as a more simple jargon for defining ca in broad terms. Catastropost fucked around with this message at Jan 12, 2012 around 00:36 |
| # ? Jan 12, 2012 00:28 |
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Leperflesh posted:As a technical writer, a huge part of my job is to translate the jargon used by insiders (developers, project managers, designers, architects, etc.) into plain english understandable by the audience. Sometimes it's necessary to totally avoid a jargon term, and sometimes it's better to define it explicitly and then use it in the documentation. A glossary is sometimes useful (generally for larger documents where it makes sense to have a separate glossary). I stand corrected. When I say meaningless I guess I mean the vague thing. The definition of "dissociated mechanic" given by it's author, for instance, is so vague that it essentailly means "thing I don't like".
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| # ? Jan 12, 2012 00:29 |
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One problem with the toxic component of the gaming world is that, sometimes, the jargon takes on an inherently negative connotation. This is kind of the polar opposite to describing something as "a beer and pretzels game." When somebody says that, it's fairly obvious to those that don't know the jargon that it's something you play over beer and pretzels and is probably not serious. To gamers, that generally means it's highly random, pretty goofy, and has simple enough rules that you can understand and play the game while drunk. These games are usually played at parties or at 3 a.m. when everybody is delirious. However, the phrase "party game" took on negative connotations. At least, it did among the people I gamed with. Anything labelled "party game" would be outright refused by some of the heavier duty grogs I've known over the years. They'd be perfectly willing to play something I described as a "beer and pretzels" game, but not a "party" game. These were also the people that had a serious anti-fun angle on their attitudes. Anything too "fun" was deemed unworthy, as gaming wasn't about fun. This was a game night, not a goddamned party. Which had me scratching my head, really. I play games for the joy of playing games. They're fun. They're a diversion. They're frequently silly and meant for entertainment. I've encountered many games that were plenty entertaining no matter who won, but I kept running into people that thought that winning was all that mattered. Which, I think, is part of what is plaguing RPGs right now. There is an increasing amount of people that are convinced that RPGs can be "won," which is really not what RPGs are about like, at all.
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| # ? Jan 12, 2012 00:37 |
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Catastropost posted:And remember, before GNS, there was GDS- Gamism, Dramatism, Simulationism- a theory which preceeds the forge and everyone in it, and iirc acted as a more simple jargon for defining ca in broad terms. That's why my post mentioned The Gaming Outpost -- I thought they were involved in a lot of the evolving GDS discussion.
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| # ? Jan 12, 2012 00:40 |
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Usually when I read things featuring terms like "simulationist," I assume it's because the author's argument would be silly or abhorrent if they expressed it in everyday language.
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| # ? Jan 12, 2012 00:46 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 23:58 |
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I'm probably fortunate in that I'm basically working with current, casually tossed-about definitions for those terms without ever having been exposed to the original in-depth arguments about them. I can look at the words and make a pretty reasonable guess as to what they mean (which speaks in favor of their utility), and through the context of how other people use them (in this and a handful of other threads on SA, but not, importantly, the grognard thread which is too huge for me to ever catch up with). So I can happily accept the use of a word like "simulationist" without caring or even knowing much about whatever horrible baggage it might have. If I roll a die to find out what the weather is like every day, that's more simulationist than if we just leave it to the GM to decide, and only in that case when it's actually important. If the weather has a mechanical effect on combat, that's even more simulationist, and if I have to look up a table and it includes multiple factors and maybe more dice rolls, then even more so. And so on and so on. That's pretty intuitive. I'm sure the conversation gets a lot more complicated (and potentially abhorrent) as soon as we start assigning values like "good" and "poo poo" to that kind of mechanic, and expositing at length as to whether and how much they belong in an RPG. Especially an RPG that used to have more such rules in a previous version and now has less. Or arguably more and arguably less, depending on whether a particular edge-case rule is considered simulationist or not. Ad nauseum. I mean, there are always going to be some people who think such a mechanic is "fun" and others who think it is "not fun". What are you going to do, take a vote? Game designers have to move past that kind of argument if they're ever going to actually finish a product, and at some point (perhaps fairly early on in the metaphorical thread) it might be best to just decide how much simulationism you want in your game, try to be consistent about it, and otherwise drop the subject. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at Jan 12, 2012 around 01:08 |
| # ? Jan 12, 2012 01:05 |
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