Are we missing what RPGs are about?

[BubbaBrown]

It isn't an exactly appropriate comparison with Tabletop RPGs and Video Games. The better comparison would be Tabletop RPGs and Video Game Platforms.

The video game platform is a finite system that is designed to provide the means of running vast quantities of content. The video game platform fundamentally hasn't changed in many years. There have been many tweaks on the way, but nothing too earth shattering.

The Tabletop RPG is really the video game platform. Grab a module, create some characters, and have an adventure. A majority of the content is provided by the people playing on the platform. Many RPG's include some built-in content, but it really is up to the players to bring the rest. It's like all the online drama that EVE Online (Sci-fi MMORPG) has. It was NEVER in the game itself... the players brought it and the game facilitated it.

I do think the Tabletop RPG industry is suffering a bit of the same aliment that the Video Game industry is suffering... "Genre Obsession." The Tabletop RPG Industry can't seem to get away from Tolkien fantasy, much as the Video Game industry can't get away from First Person Shooters. Both Tolkien Fantasy and First Person Shooters were the first ones to really attract the big crowds and push the innovation bar, but now they are EXTREMELY commonplace. BUT... they draw in the money from the general public.

The game system has changed but the content is roughly the same. Wizards of the Coast has practically the same DnD content with a different system in place... Much like Nintendo has the same lineup content with a different system in place...

It's going to be up to the independents to bring in something new, since the current companies are too dependent on the money to experiment anymore.

[John Michael Crovis]

[John Stryker]

[Onix]

[bosky]

I think part of it is, for lack of a better term, replayability. I can unpack Traveller from the late 70s and STILL play it. I don't think I'd be as enamored about loading up Pong and playing that. So you don't get the same forward momentum and turnover and growth compared to video games. Only a dedicated fanbase plays Halo 1 or 2 anymore (compared to the more recent iterations) but a lot of people still play D&D 2nd or 3rd/3.5 edition, for example. Some of the mechanics of older RPGs might feel dated, but they still, fundamentally work and achieve what the players want.

[kylesgames]

Tabletop games rely on imagination and thorough thought, which is somewhat the reason for their decline in this encapsulated entertainment culture (evidenced by the decay of difficulty in video games- first there were just tutorials or move lists, but now we see mandatory landholding (Force Unleashed 2, for instance, with its arbitrary "mind trick the stormtrooper" section which served primarily as an annoyance, its incredibly linear level design and its guidance system) that makes the experience just a rather long movie with button mashing and respawning, though there are still games which make the player make decisions, these usually change the presence of a character later on or the end cutscene.

Tabletop games eschew these methods in favor of social interaction and imagination, allowing unlimited freedom in return for the constraints of a social consensus and an increased strain in the form of manual bookkeeping.

EDIT: From phone, sorry for mistakes.

[Onix]

I'm settling on the concept that a RPG system is the console and the story (including the meta story) is the game. There are still Atari and Nintendo (NES) adherents out there. This is an important insight to understanding what an RPG is. Although it doesn't give a stand alone definition, it does give an analogy that makes things understandable.

I think there's something actionable about this insight, I'm just not sure what. I can see different editions of old games being like the NES, Super NES, Game Cube etc. They don't play the old stories but the stories can be updated to work on the new platform.

To continue the metaphor, most RPGs just switch around the buttons, add more buttons or a joystick or two. It looks kind of neat but most games don't even use all those buttons. Then there's things like Amber diceless having a "revolutionary" interface like the Wii and it experiences a large following. Although unlike the Wii, Amber's revolutionary interface seems to only really work for Amber, it doesn't seem to translate to anything else.

So I think that at least I was missing what the parts of an RPG are and what they're about. I'm still undecided about how to use that insight though. I have some nebulous ideas but nothing that's gotten any traction yet.

[Chris Johnstone]

Interesting thread. I'm just going to ramble incoherently. Probably best to ignore me...

As a curious aside, the first roleplaying game run by Gary Gygax was a thing where players who were about to take part in a multi-way tabletop wargame started out by playing spies in a town in order to decide who would have various tactical advantages.

I think I recall this right: the spies game was so much fun that the players refused to go onto the wargame and the spy game took up the rest of the day. Eventually that led to a couple more spy games, and then a go at a fantasy game.

I suppose I'm throwing out there that the first commercial game was substantially different from the first private game. That might be important or not.

Also, I think the prevalence of vanilla fantasy settings has a lot to do with it being a mixed-bag common playground full of easy to recognise things. Steampunk is kind of becoming the same thing (to some extent) and the Star Wars universe would absolutely unfold exponentially into the same thing if (for inexplicable reasons) it was released as creative commons.

I think this is sort of important to realise, because I don't actually think there are many games that run a Tolkienesque setting per se. DnD has elements from Tolkien (mostly just a couple races), but the fantasy tropes owe a lot more to Jack Vance and Robert E Howard. Heck, the spell names like 'Prismatic Spray' and 'Magic Missile' are stolen directly from Dying Earth, along with the system of memorising and forgetting spells. The whole feel of early DnD is much more Vance, much less Tolkien.

If anything, the thing that dominated early DnD and subsequent RPGs is kitchen sink fantasy. Gygax even threw in some SF elements (quite a few more than I'm aware of, I suspect). The most obvious is the Displacer Beast, stolen directly from the Coeurl in The Black Destroyer (A E Van Vogt) (the book 'Alien' was liberally, um, 'borrowed' from).

Successful fantasy settings like Earthdawn are borderline Tolkienesque at best, and Exalted has departed pretty far from Middle-Earth. I'd go as far as to say, so too has 4th ed DnD.

I guess I'm arguing that we're a bit blind to the diversity that runs through fantasy RPGs now because the change has been slow. They've absolutely been evolving, both in terms of setting and system. However, I think all of this is forced to be a slow process, because the nature of the hobby is such that people need at least a bulk of the elements in a game to be recognisable so they can imagine them without having to stop and break the narrative dream while they figure out what something should look/smell/feel/behave like.

It would be possible to work for years and invent a detailed, intricate setting so wonderfully and bizarrely different to any major commercial game (it might resemble some indie efforts after all), and no doubt reviewers would applaud: but would anyone play it? Maybe a few.

People don't grasp completely new fantasy easily. I could be wrong, but I suspect this is also why The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth bombed at the theaters. They were just too damned left field. Years later, once people had a chance to get used to their tropes and imagery, they've become slow-burning classics: but the original reaction was confused befuddlement.

For the same reason in reverse, the original Star Wars was successful. Star Wars pillaged every comic book and Flash Gordon trope available to it, and threw in some Arthurian imagery, Space Nazis and WWII dogfight shots for good measure. The genius of that sort of kitchen-sink culture-pillaging is that everyone *gets* it right away and credits you with being insanely creative for putting it all together.

I'm rambling. I'll stop. Basically, I'm just positing that RPGs have been changing, but it's incremental, and it's likely to remain that way in commercial circles because of the nature of the beast.

Chris

[Onix]

While yes those are the strengths of a fantasy story, it doesn't make sense that it would explain why people stick with their old games and don't stick to new ones. If story were the determining factor then all successful video games would be fantasy (er, fantasy genre) because you would have the same effect. I can see it being an advantage to the GM to have a kitchen sink setting but it makes less sense for the rest of the players because they're interested in exploration and novel situations. The GM does have an inordinate say in what game is played but I have a hard time accepting that this is an issue of story.

Now story familiarity is an issue don't get me wrong. The Star Wars RPG wouldn't be such a big deal if it didn't have three movies (there were THREE I don't wanna hear it!) showing how to play and what things looked like. People grab onto new stories very quickly. They also don't argue in edition wars because of story changes (unless there's a connected mechanic change). Story has been traditionally trumpeted as the end all be all of an RPG, if you could only get those pesky numbers and dice out of the way. But people like their numbers and dice and don't want them to go away.

That's why there isn't a mass diffusion of players into DnD like games that have different rules. If story was the end all be all or even the end most be most then there would be no reason that the people playing DnD wouldn't scatter into the systems of their choosing. The story is the same or at least if could be made the same with a trivial amount of work.

[Chris Johnstone]

Interesting points. I was mostly just throwing around some random thoughts rather than putting together any sort of coherent argument.

My thoughts on systems reflect those already in the thread:
- New systems have a steep learning curve
- One burnt, twice shy: I suspect a lot of groups have a go at a few different systems but getting stung by a system that doesn't seem to work shies groups back to the first system they used that basically works ok (often DnD)
- Most successful systems (more or less) work ok, and can be house-ruled for personal taste

That still doesn't exactly address your underlying question, though it might be part of the answer.

In terms of unraveling the effect of setting on player choice preference, I suspect there's a need to distinguish setting from story. I like the definition of setting given by RSB in her essay here:

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thr ... rntobewyld

If I read the essay right, setting forms structure. The structure provides a shared playground, but the tradeoff is that it eliminates potential stories. In this way, I guess, I setting forms a sort of dimension of potential stories. I suspect that kitchen sink fantasy is popular because groups (often unconsciously) whittle it down to the setting they are comfortable with. Don't like mind-flayers? Think were-badgers are a bit naff? Easy. Just never mention them. The world is then sort of defined by the elements that are included or not included whilst the gigantic kitchen sinkyness of the rule books allows players to feel that there is a vast potential for new things.

I admit I'm a little perplexed that no SF equivalent of DnD has ever seemed to take hold (as it seems to me that a sufficiently in-depth SF setting would have just the same potential as a fantasy one, perhaps more so). Maybe an SF game needs even more verisimilitude than is typically attempted? An 'alien manual' with hundreds of entries. A 'planet portfolio' with hundreds of planets.

Has anyone ever read the old Terran Trade Authority books? Maybe you could set up an approach like that for supplementary material and gain a foothold playership? Is 'playership' a word? I may have just made that up.

TTA Books: http://www.khantazi.org/Rec/TTABooks/TTABooks.html

Heck, if a SpaceWreck Manual was as interestingly written as the namesake in the TTA series, I'd buy it regardless of whether I ever thought I'd be able to play the game.

Damn. Sorry. I meant to give some coherent, quick point-by-point thoughts, but ended up wandering aimlessly instead.

On the topic of solving problems with evidence-based assessment of data, one could always do a statistical analysis of all of the games listed on the Wikipedia to see if there are underlying patterns:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ro ... s_by_genre

It would take an hour or so to put the data in order, and a few minutes to generate statistical models in R (I'd probably opt for binary recursive partitioning / tree-based models).

Response variables could be:
Success (factor w/ 3 levels): moderate / high / very_high (rather subjective)
Editions (number of editions): might be a correlate of success?
Years in print: might be a correlate of success?

Easy(ish) explanatory variables to include:
Setting: fantasy / SF / supers / horror / humor / generic
Year: Year of first publication
License: Is it a licensed product Y/N

Hard(er) variables to include (would require some hours of research):
Races Y/N
Classes Y/N (number of classes as a variable?)
Levels Y/N
Magic Y/N
Psionics Y/N
D4 Y/N; D6 Y/N... D% Y/N

Other things to include?

You could flip things around and make setting the response variable, and then check whether there have been setting trends over time. Would be fun to play with, but putting the dataset together would be a headache.

I, unfortunately, have to get on with other stuff, so couldn't really jump into it.

On that note, I should get moving with things.

Thanks (and apologies for yet another somewhat rambly post)

Chris

EDIT: typo