Are we missing what RPGs are about?

[kylesgames]

[Chris Johnstone]

Fair enough point about DnD 3.5 / 4th ed... I haven't actually played either one so I can't comment. The rather amazing success of Pathfinder alone though seems to suggest that the new editions of DnD have lost the plot somehow.

Oh, and, I completely forgot to mention Traveller: very successful SF game in its day. I'm not sure, but I don't think anyone has ever quite captured that success again with an SF game.

I wonder if source books could take the TTA approach: commission concept art of ships / space wrecks / planets and then write the game material around each illustration. Do it backwards from the illustrations first.

Anyway, yes, that'd be more or less the way I'd put the data together, except that it needs to be in long-format rather than tall format if it's to be put into an analysis, and all variables would have to be listed. In an Excel spreadsheet it'd have to look something like:

GAME YEAR SUCCESS SETTING DICELESS D4
DnD 1974 Very.High Fantasy N etc
RuneQuest 1978 High Fantasy N etc
Amber 1991 High Fantasy Y etc

I could set up a shared Google doc, invite anyone who wants to contribute and then do the various statistical analyses down the track once enough data is together. I can't really contribute to the data gathering though... I just don't have the time. Complex analyses on the other hand are relatively easy for me to do (of course we might not actually find anything interesting in the data... it's hard to tell). I spent the last three years of my PhD figuring out how to elegantly analyse insanely difficult ecological datasets full of multiple auto-correlation and statistical interactions. It'd be fun to put that to use with something a but more lighthearted.

Chris

[kylesgames]

You make it, and I'll contribute what I can. Are we looking at every die used or just the primary dice? Also, what about house rules that have a decent following (i.e. SR3 with d8 instead of d6)?

Part of the thing about D&D 4 is that while I didn't mind the setting shift (some people did, because they felt it was an attempt to force Forgotten Realms players to pay more), the gameplay is a lot more simple than even 3.5, which is way streamlined (still with a lot of individual numbers)

[Onix]

While I can't rule it out, I don't imagine a statistical analysis turning up much that we can't already guess at. Mainly because we might not be asking for the right statistics and therefore miss the point.

For example, I know that most of the RPGs we picked up was because of the artwork when we were kids. It didn't hurt to have a nice thick book either. In a way, pictures are a story delivery system but I don't think it mattered much what the story was as long as we liked the main theme (we did mostly sci-fi). Actual play usually ended up with the games that were relatively simple. We just ignored a lot of rules and boiled it down to dice rolls for combat and persuasion.

The core of that means to me, that if the story is easily conveyed, or if the story has already been conveyed in a movie or TV show, that's a big leg up. For example Rifts is easily conveyed as "World is in chaos as dimensions crash together, everything is in ruins and everything is possible". It's a sentence and you have 70% of the concept. The rest is just adding on to that.

Now some stories although good, don't translate well to an RPG. Star Trek is a good example. There are a few editions of Trek RPGs out there but not many people play them. Why? We tried and found that it's really hard to come up with the random stories and tech that most shows revolve around and not break cannon. Maybe some don't care about the cannon part but the games didn't inspire much. I think they failed to capture what the shows were really about in their system.

Which brings me to this story has to start simple and be conveyed in a sentence. System also has to be simple enough to start. Complexity can be brought in later once the players are hungry for more.