Walking Eye interviews me
Callan S.:
That party order isse in part 2 reminds me of the 'I hate compromise' thread, specifically there being no 'default' and especially almost a repeat of the 'oh but I was' stuff.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Tony,
A few years ago, a thread here (its leading post by me) in the Adept Press forum resulted in some kind of extreme, silly reaction out there in the inter-space. You probably heard of it or remember it - the Brain Damage thing. One of the reasons I never paid much attention (or invested any emotion) in that reaction is that clearly no one - and I mean fucking no one external to the community here - read the post itself in any meaningful sense of the concept of "reading." The three things that I articulated for Kevin were the leading point in that thread, and everything I said after that was to be taken in that context. I've been repeating those things over and over for years, wondering why after posting them as the lead in what is probably my most notorious externally-read entry in fifteen years, they have not seemed to penetrate one inch into the wider discourse. Especially when as you know, this issue is probably the core of dysfunction in the hobby.
My presumption is that people were directed to that thread in a frenzy of gossip and self-victimized ranting, and instantly scrolled down looking for the "evil" phrase, neither with any intention of actually reading the post as such (or understanding why it came up as a topic in the forum) nor in any state of mind to process it anyway. But enough of that nonsense.
Regarding Traveller, I don't claim that it illustrates the very common early assumption of "RPG within a wargame," that I was talking about. I hope I didn't single it out as doing so in the interview (did I?). I'm pretty sure that I did not claim that every early RPG followed that model. As I realized a few years ago, my textual memory regarding Traveller is poor; I get supplements and editions mixed up. So to ask whether it did or did not conform, I'd turn to Christopher Kubasik who's extremely literate about the game and its history.
Hi Callan,
Definitely. It's also related to the Murk issue in Bangs&Illusionism - in which Ron beats down Confusion, which I followed up on quite a bit as in your original Molasses thread and in Mother-May-I and 20 questions: Games GMs play. You know, when I first published System Does Matter in 1999, I did not have any idea that this degree of practical dysfunction - one might even say "utter cluelessness" - was so widespread. My assumption in writing about what would later be called Creative Agenda was that by and large, people were competent at generating the basic medium of play, and that the open question concerned what we do with it. I'm pretty sure that the participants in the Threefold discussions (preceding and inspiring my essay) were in the same boat as me for that issue. So it turns out with 11 years perspective, pretty much to the day, actually), they and then I were talking about what to do, when the majority of the audience turned out not to know with what.
Best, Ron
Christoph Boeckle:
Hello Ron
Lot's of good things in this podcast!
You talk about S/lay w/me and the intensive playtesting phase it went through in a relatively short span of time (6 months if I recall correctly). What did it look like? How did you go about organizing this phase? How many people helped out? Also, how do you know that a game has been playtested enough (especially since you mention a the year 2005 as a poor year designs-wise)?
We don't get a lot of discussion on how playtesting is managed at the higher level, and it's a topic that is becoming more and more important for my own designs.
Callan S.:
Hi Ron,
There's alof of history packed into that one paragraph.
I don't think there's just cluelessness though - there's a denial and assertion that everythings absolutely working. And the most important part, with no metric for when it actually isn't working fine. For example, if a car coughs and splutters but gets you from A to B, hey, it basically works. And if it breaks down and stops, and you admit it's broken down, cool. But when someone starts say 'Oh no, see this is another kind of journey that's happening here...and see also it's about the group dynamic, with the group dynamic working together as they push together...the car is totally working, when everyones together, pushing it...and that's the car working!' it's just a massive denial to not have any measure by which the can could indeed fail. It's like the car can not have failed.
And then if you try to make a game that doesn't need pushing, ironically people treat it as if it's failed somehow!
Eh, I had a point but I think I've slipped into just preaching to the choir at the end.
The Dragon Master:
Ron: You didn't say that it did, but my understanding is that was about the second thing we'd recognize as an RPG that came out, and I didn't know if there was history behind that game that I was unaware of. Though really this one could well be an exception. It's one of the few games I'm aware of (pre 95) that had an explicit portion of the game being about trade and negotiation. Really that is what drew me to that game in the first place. There have been very few game systems where combat appealed to me. Sorcerer is one of the ones that did (because "combat" could well be me trying to domineer the guy who wants to shoot me). Dogs in the Vinyard is another, though I don't know anyone who has a copy, or whose shown interest in playing. And traveller with it's rules for finding deals, buying and selling, interspacial travel... it felt like it had more to offer than just kill things and take their stuff.
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