Walking Eye interviews me
Ron Edwards:
Hi Tony,
The middle-late 1970s saw at least a dozen role-playing games appear, and that's a very conservative estimate. If we include the weird body of short-lived half-and-half thingies that led up to and surrounded the 1974 debut of D&D at GenCon, then the number leaps up by quite a lot. Traveller was definitely revolutionary along the lines of what you're talking about, and I'd also point to the wide-open DIY character concepts and the life-path technique. However, I don't think it's accurate to say "It was the second RPG." Part of my reasoning concerns the many other games published at the time, notably the early versions of RuneQuest and Tunnels & Trolls but lots more too, and part of it stems from the difficult fact that there really was no first D&D in a practical, cultural sense - the boxed set that came out at GenCon was a very limited print run, and most people encountered the game over the next few years as a scattered set of semi-related secondary publications.
Callan, "yes."
Christoph, establishing a better shared understanding of playtesting has been one of my goals for the site since it was Hephaestus' Forge. You can see it in my earliest posts in Indie Design, in the eventual creation of the Playtesting forum to try to generate community effort there, in my "reviews" (actually just Actual Play posts, many of which were playtesting feedback) ... I don't know. I've done everything I can imagine to try to generate what you're talking about. All I can say is that the internet community hasn't really stepped up to it, although as long as people are asking the questions you're asking, at least that's something.
I don't mean to sound irritated at you, but the topic is indeed a constant source of aggravation. I really think the ease of publication and marketing, as well as a certain high-school level subcultural reinforcement, led to this issue of playtesting getting dropped in 2004-2005. Which is annoying, because excellent and rather severe playtesting characterized the development of Dogs in the Vineyard, Polaris, Primetime Adventures, and The Mountain Witch, all of which inadvertently became the gold standard of "cool game, cool game designer, cool game designer clique" that characterized the poor playtesting of the next wave of games.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Hi Christoph,
I forgot to add the actual answer to you personally: check out the S/Lay w/Me page at the new Adept site. The threads are laid out to help a person follow exactly that point.
Best, Ron
Christoph Boeckle:
Hello Ron
I understand your irritation, and didn't feel it was addressed at me. Just came back from reading the playtest threads, I had indeed missed the first one, which lays out a lot of what I had been asking about. Great stuff!
I think that what I really want now is to get a grasp of the scales at play. Numbers, or at least orders of magnitude. How many external playtesters? How many sessions were played? How many reports did you get back? (All this including your own testing.)
I understand that you have a lot of experience, which can speed up some of the steps. Of course, mileages vary, each project has its own demands, etc. But I'd really like to get a feel about this, number-wise.
One thing I'm trying to get at is the following: is there typically a kind of "plateau" of testing, where one might feel that it is done, but going beyond that will suddenly show stuff to be done yet? (So this goes beyond your experience of S/lay w/Me only.)
Callan S.:
Hi Ron,
I got the time to listen to the first half just now. You've stressed the 'how' in 'how we agree' before. In terms of spoken fiction, do we really need to agree, for the how to become important? I mean, with the 'I hate compromise' thread it describes having a mechanical default if they don't agree on some fiction. Now totally they are agreeing in terms of rules, like one agrees a bishop can move diaganolly in chess. But you seemed to be describing the 'how' in terms of fiction and that we would indeed be agreeing and that makes the 'how' the important part? What if were not agreeing on fiction (though we are hitting the default then taking that on, making fiction, working something out - but in between were not agreeing?). You stressed the 'how' a time back in regards to the smelly chamberlain threads and I'm still squinting, so to speak. I'm wondering if you were stressing the 'how' in regards to fiction back then, because those threads were like (putting it briefly) someone taking the bishop and moving him horizontally, then a kerfuffle then some sort of agreement to someones spoken fiction that went along the lines of "a horizontally moving bishop".
I know 'how we agree' could just as easily cover the pure rules following stuff, like the diagonal bishop, as much as agreeing on fiction, but was it being used that way here?
Ron Edwards:
Hi Callan,
I think one of points I've never been able to articulate effectively is that by "agree," I mean the most uninteresting, functional, unspecific thing possible for that term. Your phrase:
Quote
we are hitting the default then taking that on, making fiction, working something out
... seems very similar to what I mean. I can also say what I don't mean, as follows:
1. Coming to an amazing, emotional, uplifting, 100% consensual social moment among the people
2. Achieving a 100% correspondence regarding what's being imagined for everyone present
My view on "agree" is better described as "good enough for government work." As I see it, it's also synonymous with the term Shared Imagined Space, which has often been unfairly subjected to identification with one or both of the two objectionable concepts above.
My genuine hope with this post is to take the majority of pressure, expectation, and idealization off the poor term "agree," and for you in particular, to consider that it may be an unproblematic and ordinary concept, easily achieved by a group of people.
Best, Ron
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