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RE: [Roleplaying Games] GM-less Play RPGs, A Treatise in One Part
How would you consider board games like yggdrasil https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71671/yggdrasil
, Gloomhaven https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/174430/gloomhaven or Dwarven Dig https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6531/dwarven-dig ? Seems to me these are also "dm-less" games which CAN lead to roleplaying, even if they're not explicit in encouraging it?
A lot of the hard-core RPG indie designers would look sideways at those designs, and the hard-core old-school RPG designers might grudgingly agree that they're games but have nothing to do with role-playing.
I would say that they're games in which you take on a role and thus, by definition, are role-playing games. They are highly structured role-playing games which have a very strong board/card-aspected Oracular design, but they encourage you indirectly to inhabit the role that you choose.
They're a long way from a more free-form, narratively constructive game – but so is My Life with Master and Chris Perrin's Mecha, both of which have very structured and almost ritualized ways for players to interact with both the narrative and each other in mechanical terms. Polaris may have been one of the leaders in that particular style of semi ritualized potential responses.
I was wondering how long before gamist/simulationist/narrativist might come into "play" (pardon the unavoidable pun) here. :)
Thanks again for the pointers - more fodder for my mind to ferment over!
I thought I had escaped the evil clutches of GNS Theory!
I swear, I can't get far enough from people from the Forge to escape the tendrils which clutch.
GNS was an insight for its time, but it also became a sort of cult rallying cry, a hammer for people who it only had soft squishy mallets for most of their lives. There wasn't a problem that wasn't a nail for well on into a decade and for some RPG designers, even today.
Just thinking about it, my eyes and ears are bleeding. This is your fault!
I have tons of references and crazy things lying around. If you have any more questions or even a suggestion for a full post, let me know. If there's one thing I like to do, it's ramble at disturbing length.
Agree re: GNS, especially how it was overdone over too much time. Sadly.
Thoughts of games? Oh, I have plenty of them, unfortunately far too few are organized enough to lead in potentially useful ways...
Hrm. You're already heavily hinting around the edges of character-focus versus story-focus, so there goes that one. You're pretty much avoiding the heavy game mechanic side of things, which I'll take as a personal preference.
Hrmm.... Amber Diceless? Since your eyes are already bleeding, Ron Edwards' Sorceror? If you're into masochism, Project Adon?
(Warned ya, full of oddities myself, just not very well organized...)
Character focus versus story focus is an interesting space, because a lot of narrativists (in the literary sense, not the gaming sense) will tell you that there is no difference between them. Stories emerge from characters and without characters there are no stories.
This is a position that I am inclined to be on board with, interestingly enough. Of course, a character need not be a person – all it must be is an identifiable, repeatable entity which has notable qualities and which independently possesses wants and desires. The USS Enterprise in Star Trek is a character, not just because she possesses a crew with wants and desires but because she represents an entire social pressure and because part of the audience identifies with the symbol.
I am generally not fond of heavy game mechanics because crunch is just not that fun for me – except in very specific and definable spaces. Jovian Chronicles is incredible, even though the design system for equipment is crazy crunchy and really leans heavily on verisimilitude – and it's incredible because of those traits. Mekton for similar reasons.
Most the time, however, I am not the guy for crunchy mechanics because I just don't find that they bring enough to the table. If I want to play a game where exhibiting system mastery is part of the pleasure, online computer games are far more effective at providing that kind of gratification. If I can spend four hours building a Champions character or four hours playing Space Engineers – I'm going to do the latter. I get to show off my mastery of systems and float around in space rather than just stare at page after page of really tightly printed arcana.
I think that is responsible for a lot of the change in the RPG industry and the consumption of product in that industry.
Amber Diceless gives me a headache, not because the system is bad (although it objectively is, with the interaction between bid for traits and trying for verisimilitude with a written setting which pointedly acknowledges his lack of consistency), but because the fan base was so rabid and so painfully stupid back in the day that I can no longer think about it without, as Shakespeare would have it, "my gorge rising at it." In retrospect, the Theatrix RPG design was vastly better at achieving the same aims, it was almost a shame that the writer of it was just such a public dick.
I actually like Sorcerer. I would probably punch Ron Edwards straight in the face on general principles, but the man produced some awesome work. In the post after this one on RPGs where I walk through character design for GM-full traditional games that I like, Sorcerer was almost the third entry and I still might go back into a public character design for the system.
Adon? I'm a sadist not any kind of masochist. I don't hate myself that much.
Ah, Yggdrasil! I was trying to remember what that game was called, I was going to use it as an example of what I felt was GM-less play since it was a co op games using algorithm and probability over time to drive the conflict the players had to face. Though I suppose it's kind of tactical and the story is a bit light...