[D&D] Editions, Metacosmology and Setting
Grimcleaver:
Quote from: contracycle on February 17, 2011, 01:35:30 PM
It is still pretty unclerar what this thread is really about. What sort of feedback are you looking for? As it happens, I'm also interested in cosmologies and how they inform play but I don't have anything much to contribute on this point becuase it as yet unclear what this has to do with the play of any particular game. This is more or less the aim of calling for some sort of AP to contextualise a discussion. Was the cosmology of the game you described a relevant factor?
I'm really not sure what this post is about anymore. See, I'm pretty new here and am still getting the hang of this. Initially I wrote this post with a mind to share a creative endeavor I've been working on--to break the D&D game apart into various editions and divvy up the content so each edition could feel like its own game and give myself and others three (maybe more depending on what else folks consider an "edition") different games to explore. I thought this was a fun idea to work out in a forum like this and would be a good way to get people to understand me, the kind of gamer I am, and what I have to contribute (a suggestion I found reading Ron's sticky on the Development forum).
But it turns out the topic I suggested was a little too abstract for the current nature of the boards, and I was encouraged to concretize it by giving some examples of games I'd played and how it related to my topic. So I tossed out a few, and have since just stepped back from my original topic and have been replying to people who have been responding, pretty much running with their questions and comments.
Grimcleaver:
So that said, on to some of your comments:
Quote from: contracycle on February 17, 2011, 01:35:30 PM
So. Firstly, "telling a story" is dangerous ground for any kind of comprehensible discussion. I for one think the term is virtually useless, in that it can mean so many things, and in addition, if there are people who play primarily for challenge, or primarily for exploration, then "story" can only be a tool itself, not an end. As a result this doesn't serve as an explanation, I still have to guess at roughly what you mean.
Again, new guy here, so I'm not sure the conflicts that arise talking about "story" so I'm not sure if my further response is going to clarify things or just muddy them more--but here goes. My goal as a roleplayer is to create stories, worthy narratives that my friends and I can share. The more closely the system models a credible world the better for me, because it makes the stories told there feel more real. The more it strays from this and produces results that don't hold up as narrative the more I'd consider it "wonky"--you get results that break verisimilitude and for me that's bad, because I'm shooting for a story at the end of the day, the story of the characters I'm running the game for.
Quote from: contracycle on February 17, 2011, 01:35:30 PM
You say that good system energises play, but as Caldis pointed out your account of a succesful game didn't make any mention of any system action. And when you do mention system in the later case you describe them as "wonky" and "uncooperative". All of which suggest that you are really overriding or ignoring the system in large part, and might be better served by something else. Why waste effort fighting it? System isn't a secondary function like special effects, it's more like the camera itself.
The nature of the challenge was to use the system in its hardest to use form, and that it still held together as a story worth retelling I credit to the beauty and richness of the world behind the rules. Its not that the D&D system can't be supurb for telling stories, it was simply that to prove that to my friends I had to forgo that. I guess to answer your question "why fight it" the answer was to prove to my friends that even at it's worst D&D is still an amazing game capable of telling amazing (for lack of a better word) stories. Now on any other day I wouldn't waste my effort fighting the rules, I would retool them to run the kind of game I want. That said, this particular challenge was specifically designed to keep me from doing that.
Quote from: contracycle on February 17, 2011, 01:35:30 PM
Lastly, and as an aside, this "a non-setting ripped from a history book so as to require no creativity," is a sentiment I couldn't agree with less. And not because you'd "solve" this problem by throwing in a bunch of fantastical monsters and magic powers.
I think a lot of that boils down to taste and the groups one finds oneself in. There's been some killer historical games that were just great. I'm not talking about these. I've also run into a lot of games where the DM, having put insufficient effort into his game and unable or unwilling to go to the effort to come up with a reasonably cool sounding name for his country/city/world/whatever just plucks a name out of real world history. In my experience this kind of thing isn't always bad--but if you've never gamed with a guy before, it isn't a great sign. Again we were totally blown away by this game, and really not just because we got to fight some fantastic mosters. In fact "it's France, but with MAGIC and MONSTERS! Roll initiative" is pretty precisely what I was dreading.
Grimcleaver:
Quote from: Erik Weissengruber on February 18, 2011, 09:55:21 AM
...You've laid down a couple. Actual Play reports should focus around the activities of the people at the table, not just recounting of the fiction you created.
It seems we're treading into pretty deep water. Let me take a step back. It's fun talking about the Forgotten Realms experiment we ran, and looking at how the mechanics affected things for good and ill, but I really didn't mention it to showcase how great the 3e rules were. It was a challenge. Our regular 3e games run a lot more smoothly when I can fix some of my problems with the rules. I'm not 100% sure what "activities of the people at the table" means--though I'd be happy to include whatever would help advance the conversation. I'm not sure even where to start with regard to that though. Maybe I should read around a little to get a better handle on how these Actual Play reports work. Like I said earlier, my intent for this post spiraled way off somewhere a while back and for now I've just been providing some examples of my experience with the game and trying to play off of people's feedback. Not really sure at all what I should be including that I'm not or what I shouldn't be getting into. Still finding my legs, I guess.
masqueradeball:
Using Gygax for 2e seems so very very strange to me. 2e is all about Ed Greenwood (and to a lesser extent, the Dragonlance folks) and Forgotten Realms... Drizzt Do'Urden is the poster child for 2e D&D. Look at the vast majority of the printed material. The "default" settings for AD&D was Greyhawk, for 2e the Realms, for 3e Greyhawk again and finally 4e's "Points of Light."
contracycle:
Quote from: Grimcleaver on February 18, 2011, 02:43:28 PM
Again, new guy here, so I'm not sure the conflicts that arise talking about "story" so I'm not sure if my further response is going to clarify things or just muddy them more--but here goes. My goal as a roleplayer is to create stories, worthy narratives that my friends and I can share. The more closely the system models a credible world the better for me, because it makes the stories told there feel more real. The more it strays from this and produces results that don't hold up as narrative the more I'd consider it "wonky"--you get results that break verisimilitude and for me that's bad, because I'm shooting for a story at the end of the day, the story of the characters I'm running the game for.
OK. My thing with story is that, as I said, it can refer to a whole bunch of things. Say your grand-dad one day tells a story of the "What I Did In The War" variety. This is not a story in the dramatic sense, becuase it is not structured. It is just a series of events, whose significance lies in the fact that they are real. Whereas if you watch a movie, you are seeing a story that is structured in particlar ways to be engaging and to draw in an audience and evoke an emotional response.
Now my hostility to the the term is pretty much a personal view, but more broadly there are additional problems. When you say you creat stories, that could mean that you imapose a mandatory vision on how play should go, ensuring certain things must happen to make your story come out, and overruling anything the players might do that detracts from your pre-imagined story. This has a long history in RPG, and is associated with some of the worst cases of GM power abuse.
Or it could something more like, you and the players get together and interact over issues that you find personally meaningful, expressed throught conventions of the game and the systematic structure, and come out of it with a sort of greater insight into the human condition, in the way that the best movies and novels do.
Hence the idea of requesting accounts of what you do in play; armed with that, we could distinguish what you mean by story, what soprt of techniques you are employing. At the moment you have stated a goal, not a method; it's a worthy goal, but a bit motherhood-and-apple-pie. And as you note, you may well find the system is actually interfering, which is potentially something we could discuss in terms of trying to help with, if you want to explore that topic.
As to the history thing, that's was just a random hit on a nerve. Sure it's a matter of taste; seems to me the default assumption is that extravagant costumes, dramatic powers, flamboyant moves and all that stuff are seen as/assumed to be inherently more interesting and entertaining that real historical settings, actual other worlds inhabited by other actual people. I feel totally the reverse; all that fantasy stuff bores to me to tears. I was talking with an old player friend of mine the other day about a book I was reading, which discussed the government of Henry V, and apropos of nothing he said "That's the problem with FRPGs, they miss out all the interesting stuff." This didn't surprise me because I already knew we shared these interests; but it frustrates both of us that a medium like RPG, which could do a far, far better job than any novel or movie of making historical contexts "real" in a mental sense, pretty much ignores the possibility.
But this has nothing to do with your thread at all and is no more than a personal annoyance, so I'll leave it there.
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