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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Several questions arise from this! Here are some nontraditional models I can think of from games, most of which I haven't played: In Polaris (it's been a decade, I think this is the game?) each player is assigned an adversary player based on where they are sitting at the table, each player GMs for one other player, generally scenes include only one PC as the PCs aren't generally working towards the same goals, so if another PC appears in your scene they are an incidental NPC. This is, I guess, symmetrical? Aldante Fax, pointed out Microscope, where the general mode of play is conflictless and the active player has total control to construct the environment. In Belonging outside Belonging there are threat aspects which each have a GM sheet, and when a player faces a certain type of threat another player takes that GM role temporarily, and the roles can switch around the table during play. In Ironsworn, IIRC, environmental decisions are mostly consensus based. It's designed as a solo game, so it's pretty easy to get consensus with yourself. In final bid, the active player starts out with environmental control of the scene, and then the latter half of the scene is adjudicated by the player that wins the auction (which is determined by a vote). In Flash Gordon, player's are divided up between two teams and take turns doing simple scenes based on specific guidance in an environment book. In Hungry Ghosts, one player plays a lost human and the other one a murderous ghost and they take turns going through their books which adjudicates results. This is a much easier question to answer if you are less concerned about "What is an ttrpg?". I think you could have systems that combined consensus building/scene setting rotation with oracles, and/or an environmental/setting guidance book. The fundamental issue is that the 'environment' in a PvE game has to exist, so some person or group of people must create it at some point.
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Apr 20, 2021 16:26
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aldantefax posted:Part of the beef with some modern tabletop RPGs are that there were too many concessions to operationalize them into closed systems. The backlash as a result of that were that the nature of the game changed because you didn't play to find out what happened there, you already know what's going to happen because of the surrounding structure of the game. Other tabletop RPGs were created in response to the much more closed systems that the western industry was driving towards which highlighted the open ended nature. As I recall it, the reason storygames (eg the forum, back when it started) was called storygames was because people were tired of the "but does this count as an rpg or not!?" debate. (In that vein, I have a certain soft spot for Clyde whatshisfaces joking term "TTWD" ("That Thing We Do"). By your definition I would call something like Fiasco is a closed system but if I sit down for an evening of That Thing We Do and we play Fiasco, I would feel like I got what I wanted. Your mileage may vary.)
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Apr 20, 2021 18:08
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DalaranJ posted:Here are some nontraditional models I can think of from games, most of which I haven't played: Don't forget Winterhorn (environment is contextual and provided by pre-provided cards) and Capes (fully troupe play where a player can play any character each scene, including the villain)
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Apr 20, 2021 18:44
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aldantefax posted:Conversely, all tabletop RPGs are open systems. I wonder about this. Perhaps it's in my personality to be reflexively suspicious of absolute statements; so let me lead in by saying, this seems like a reasonable categorical statement for the purpose of defining "what we mean by tabletop RPG today, for the sake of discussion" but I also think that a different definition is possible. Specifically: if me and my buddies are playing some Gloomhaven, and we decide to "act out" our characters, have in-character conversations, and make in-game decisions based on "what would my character do" - but in all other respects we adhere to the game rules, never modify them or invent new ones, and drive inexorably toward the fixed set of possible outcomes the game provides - are we or are we not "playing a tabletop role-playing game"? That is a semantic question for which there is no absolute answer, as I led into: we may or may not choose to allow that case into our definitional bucket, and there is no value judgement attached to that decision - we ought to make it as a strategic decision, to bound the discussion in a way that is useful. So I'll ask this: why do we exclude this gameplay mode - or any game that formally runs this way - from "tabletop RPGs"? It might be that exactly this kind of structure would fit your distributed game idea, for example, or Elector_Nerdlingen's suggestion of a no-GM game... basically, a boxed game with rules everyone can be expected to learn and grasp, which tells players to roleplay, perhaps explicitly with prompts, but is bounded by a rules engine that drives to a conclusion fully anticipated by the designer. (In a game of chess, while there is always a winner/loser or occasionally a draw, no-one has ever calculated out every possible board end-state, since the number of possible states is enormous. Similarly, a constrained RPG boardgame need not anticipate every possible end-state in order to have a bounded result like "you defeated the enemy y/n" or "you did or did not accumulate 100 Fun Points" or whatever.)
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Apr 20, 2021 20:12
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Leperflesh posted:I wonder about this. I think there are two reasonable answers to whether or not your Gloomhaven example is a closed or open system (which is maybe a less nebulous question than 'is it a rpg'). You could say that it's a closed system still, because your roleplaying didn't actually affect the outcome of the game--at most it affected your choices made, but those choices were always within a closed set of system-provided options. You either won or lost the fight you just had, you either gained or lost whatever resources the encounter specified, you got whatever box text telling you that you won the campaign that you would have gotten in any other situation. You could also say that you're breaking it into an open system, because your roleplaying absolutely does change the outcome of the game. Your character's confidence is shaken after a near-death experience. They've proven their character by deciding to become injured to save an NPC. The life you imagine that they go on to live after the campaign ends is different based on the roleplaying you did mid-game. Your roleplaying didn't affect the system-given choices you made or the system-given results, but it did affect your perception of what those results signify. I think it's still just a semantic decision which of those lenses you use, but I think both are useful in different design and analysis situations.
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Apr 20, 2021 21:22
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Why does a game need to be open ended to be an RPG? Even in D&D you can run a published adventure with a definite beginning, a definite end and defined encounters along the way. If the adventure is run “by the book” does that mean it’s no longer an RPG?
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Apr 20, 2021 21:50
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I'm also wondering about that definition. For example, in my heart I know that Scum & Villainy is an RPG, but it has a specific trigger for Endgame (you reach however many rep with a particular faction), and Endgame is a defined sequence (briefly, you do three more jobs, the setting is altered in a major way, the game ends). I guess you could faff around to the extent that you never reached that state, but that feels like both players and GM would have to be engaging in bad faith - that is, you're supposed to try to succeed at jobs, and jobs are supposed to effect faction rep, so inevitably you'll end up at Endgame unless you all die before that.
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Apr 20, 2021 23:35
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I don't think a roleplaying game needs to be open-ended in the sense that it doesn't have a (rules-defined) ending. I do think it, definitionally, is open-ended in that you can't model the game fully with a finite state machine. Traditional boardgames are defined by rules that essentially define not just what can be, but everything that may ever be. There is a board, and everything that ever happens happens on the board, and we don't entertain the idea that anything exists outside that board. Roleplaying games typically call upon the referee to handle what happens when the players decide they want to, to be prosaic about it, walk off the board.
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Apr 21, 2021 00:17
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LatwPIAT posted:I don't think a roleplaying game needs to be open-ended in the sense that it doesn't have a (rules-defined) ending. I do think it, definitionally, is open-ended in that you can't model the game fully with a finite state machine. Traditional boardgames are defined by rules that essentially define not just what can be, but everything that may ever be. There is a board, and everything that ever happens happens on the board, and we don't entertain the idea that anything exists outside that board. Roleplaying games typically call upon the referee to handle what happens when the players decide they want to, to be prosaic about it, walk off the board. Yeah--I think that you could even have a RPG with a sort of closed system core where you have a set ending with results determined by a series of finite possible moves you can make along the way, but then have an open ended narrative system sort of growing around that. Like, Fiasco does that, but even though it has a closed system at its core, the point of the game is very much the narrative (in a way that's significantly different in degree than, say, Gloomhaven, which does have some narrative prompts come out of events but which cares much more about the mechanical choices made along the way than the narrative you may or may not be coming up with alongside it).
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Apr 21, 2021 01:25
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So, disclaimer: I am intentionally taking the piss here and making an absolute statement in the hopes there was further discussion regarding this, but from a categorical perspective, if there are open ended choices and not ones that are closed choices that would stress the fabric of the rules engine which the game is dependent upon, regardless of the end state of the game, it would be a tabletop RPG in this categorization. Gloomhaven doesn't have open ended choices, and to be clear, open ended here means specifically "no boundaries". You use cards or decisions on cards to dictate your actions, and your avatar in that game cannot attempt to demand surrender of a group of Cultists, or reason with the Bandit Leader at the end of the first set of crypt maps. There is nothing in the rules framework which permits it or even implies that it is possible, and if you do attempt to follow through with that, the game engine will begin to unravel. That said, with some tweaks that permitted for the game to veer off in that direction, Gloomhaven could be turned into a tabletop RPG. Making decisions in a closed system based on arbitrary feel like "this is what my character would do" will still generate a very specific set of results as granted by the rules engine. For other examples, having a closed end state where it is predetermined, like in Microscope or Fiasco, does not mean the journey there is in a closed system. You still figure out what the details are in the in between with open ended scenarios and outcomes. For the D&D example specifically or running any published material: unless you're playing something like Adventurer's League, there are some projected outcomes but they are non-comprehensive and set in sweeping strokes at the end of an adventure. The encounters and ending may be defined, but the approaches and outcomes are left open to interpretation. Part of what GMs struggle with is attempting to leverage published adventures and the players go "off the rails" and do something completely unexpected - both a blessing and a curse, but the rules engine does not unravel if players decide to reject the adventure entirely, or hyper-focus on one specific part of the adventure which isn't fleshed out, or come up with a novel solution to short-circuit the published adventure in some way. I think the general application of open vs. closed systems and the decision making process holds water but as with anything you can pick apart at it until you're blue in the face. For the original ask surrounding "headless tabletop RPGs", though, it is useful to discuss the semantical difference because maybe you are designing a boardgame instead of a tabletop RPG and that's okay. A matrix game can be argued to have open ended outcomes and scenarios but have a referee or moderator, so technically it wouldn't qualify, but it would still fit the parent categorization of tabletop RPG even though game turns and objectives may be very clear-cut, but the outcomes are not.
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Apr 21, 2021 02:21
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LatwPIAT posted:I don't think a roleplaying game needs to be open-ended in the sense that it doesn't have a (rules-defined) ending. I do think it, definitionally, is open-ended in that you can't model the game fully with a finite state machine. Traditional boardgames are defined by rules that essentially define not just what can be, but everything that may ever be. There is a board, and everything that ever happens happens on the board, and we don't entertain the idea that anything exists outside that board. Roleplaying games typically call upon the referee to handle what happens when the players decide they want to, to be prosaic about it, walk off the board. I think the opposite is more true. All roleplaying games have an ending, in that eventually the rules system will run out of room for progression and ability to challenge the characters. No tabletop RPG is structured to run indefinitely with the same characters.
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Apr 21, 2021 04:22
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Liquid Communism posted:I think the opposite is more true. All roleplaying games have an ending, in that eventually the rules system will run out of room for progression and ability to challenge the characters. No tabletop RPG is structured to run indefinitely with the same characters. I guess that depends on the type of progression. You can certainly keep a story progressing indefinitely even if the characters never gain more abilities or power. Is characters increasing in power an essential component of an RPG?
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Apr 21, 2021 04:52
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nelson posted:I guess that depends on the type of progression. You can certainly keep a story progressing indefinitely even if the characters never gain more abilities or power. Is characters increasing in power an essential component of an RPG? Not really, in my opinion, but some RPGs that have progression systems imply that power will increase linearly as they gain more experience. However, characters may hit an upper limit either artificially by the rules engine (max level, or referee-specified max level) or they gain power laterally. You saw this specific phenomena in MMORPGs with item levels to take place of regular character levels, but also characters can gain abilities and other special features through narrative/procedural play - finding a cool sword or other artifact, or gaining a landed title, or levying a troop of mercenaries. The character individually does not become more powerful (and in some systems is reminded of how close they are to their mortality) in one aspect, but they do have some kind of progression. Games that are self contained scenarios do not require character advancement and assume a high level of power and competency right out the gate. Some storygames are like this, as well as crunchier games like Legends of the Wulin, Feng Shui, LANCER, and even modern D&D editions, as well as superhero-type or larger than life games (Delta Green, Black Ops, etc.) You could theoretically cause a tabletop RPG to run indefinitely with the same characters by making modifications, but there is an assumption that while characters enter and exit play, the decision to do that is not determined by the system, usually, nor the actual method they exit play, which is again open ended in resolution. A character may go out with a blaze of glory or turn into a powerful political figure, or die unceremoniously or fade into the background. Roleplaying games, however, are not required to have an ending. Theoretically, a game like Microscope can be played infinitely, as can a game where linear progress is artificially halted, like D&D. In games where progression systems are absent, players can play their characters as long as they like essentially until they get bored, which could be a few sessions to never. There is no hard limit to ending that game, even if it has some kind of "end of the campaign" maneuver cooked into the rules engine.
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Apr 21, 2021 05:08
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Leperflesh posted:I wonder about this. Oh! No, there is an absolute answer, and it's pretty simple. It's going to result in a state of affairs where some games that call themselves RPGs don't meet the criteria, but that's always a caution when you're dealing with voluntary self-labeling. Forgive the wall, this is a copy-paste from somewhere else. Here's famous and successful game designer Sid Meier, defining what it is that is a game: "a game is a series of interesting choices". That's a video of a talk he gave at the 2012 Game Developers' Conference, but the idea is much older than that. What makes a choice interesting? Well, what makes a choice trivial is when there's an obvious right answer, and trivial choices aren't interesting. An interesting choice is a choice with a complicating factor to it, which can take many forms. The choice's options could have different situational benefits, such that you also need to understand the overall situation in order to make it. The choice could need to be made under too much time pressure for you to fully understand the available options, so you make your best guess and deal with it. The choice's consequences could be unknown, either because they're actually hidden from you and only hinted as to their overall quality, or because the consequences are fully laid out but the framework in which they operate is too complicated for you to fully understand. But an interesting choice always has a complicating factor to it. Remember that for later. And here's more nichely famous and successful game designer D. Vincent Baker on how rules operate in games. He gots a bunch more readings on that site, but here's your takeaway: aside from the player or players, a game can have up to two other classes of elements: the props, which are the objects used in gameplay, and the plot, which is the fiction of the game as held in the minds of the players. Both require a certain amount of consensus to be reached between the players in order to operate properly - if you're using plastic figures on a gridded map (a prop), it should be clear which figure is in which square. Contrarily, if everyone, even GM Dave, forgets that Dave said there were orc raiders in the Black Forest (a plot element), the plot will proceed as if there were no orc raiders in the Black Forest. Props are the things all the players are expected to agree upon as absolutes, even if they have no physical presence at the table; Dave may be privately tracking the hit points of the orc raiders during a combat but everyone agrees that hit points exist and that they're moving up or down by the same number and you die when they hit 0. Plot is the things all the players are expected to agree upon only in the moment, even if there are physical reminders; there may be a publicly visible map with "The Black Forest" marked on it and Dave may have put some orc raider minis there, but exactly what it means for there to be orc raiders in the Black Forest is left to Dave's determination and is not up to the players to freely interrogate. Since players mediate all interactions, it's useful for many purposes, such as this explanation, to think of rules as though the players weren't there, as in this series of diagrams. We can think of rules as prompting prop/prop interactions or plot/plot interactions, or in the more immediately useful case, as prompting prop -> plot interactions or plot -> prop interactions. Here's a worked example, about The Quiet Year, a collaborative map-drawing game that involves drawing from a deck of prompt cards. Chapter Three: The Rules - The Week/Drawing Cards posted:The active player draws a card, reads the relevant text aloud, and resolves it. Picking a question from a card to answer is a prop -> plot interaction. The card and its text are physical objects. Choosing which question is more interesting or fitting to answer, and coming up with an answer to the question, both take place in the realm of the plot - in picking the question and giving its answer, you create a new story. Drawing your answer on the map is a plot -> prop interaction, because your answer becomes a common reference point that any other player can use and you're creating a common physical reference for that point. But one of these interactions represents a more interesting choice than the other one. I was not anticipating the exact text of the rules when I went fishing for the direct quote, but it's easy to spot the answer here since it's the one that actually involves the word "interesting". Coming up with an answer to the question is more interesting than drawing the answer on the map. Why? The reason you draw the answer on the map is to remind people of the answer you already gave, and you get immediate feedback from people about whether or not your drawing actually reminds them of your answer. If it doesn't work you can erase and draw again. If you're stumped, you can ask the other players what would remind them and they can tell you. But when you're answering the question you're coming up with the answer on your own, and changing the plot for everyone. (A tip for playing The Quiet Year: if one of the options on the card has an answer that seems so obvious to everyone that drawing it on the map will be the more interesting part, consider taking the other option.) In much the manner of a college textbook, now that I have worked a single example I will assume you understand the concept completely and move on to more advanced applications. Specifically, let's consider the four categories created by the presence or absence of interesting choices in prop -> plot ("to plot") and plot -> prop ("to prop") interactions. Spoiler: it's a role-playing game if it's got interesting choices going both ways. NONE TO PLOT, NONE TO PROP: The Monopoly Gambit Declined "But wait," says Not That Younger Me. "If I play Monopoly and take the doggy and I pretend that I'm a doggy, aren't I role-playing? Doesn't that make Monopoly a role-playing game?" No, Not That Younger Me. You are not as clever as you think. The reason is because that choice has no teeth, in the rules. It presents no new hooks to the props - the choices available to someone pretending they're a doggy are exactly the same as the choices available to someone playing Monopoly at the next table over wondering why you spend so much time sniffing things. And it presents no hooks to your plot - nothing changes because you're pretending you're a doggy. You don't get to ride the railroads for free because doggies don't pay and you don't get to flick someone's houses off Marvin Gardens because a doggy pooped there and ruined the property values. Or to simplify, you can pretend you're a doggy while playing Monopoly, but Monopoly doesn't care. TO PLOT, NONE TO PROP: The Inevitable Let's talk some more about the prompt deck in The Quiet Year. A lot of GM-less games have some kind of randomized prompting mechanism like this. But, in a lot of GM-less games, the randomized prompting mechanism has certain parameters you can't change. The first thing somebody does on their turn is draw one card. There's nothing in any plot you can create that can excuse them from drawing one, or that can allow them to draw more. Only the prompt deck can allow you to manipulate the prompt deck in any way. And similarly, if one of the choices on the prompt deck is "lose an Abundance" - a resource you've noted as important to your settlement that you have a lot of - you can't take that choice and then just say that the plot you've agreed on says that all your Abundances are too well-guarded to ever lose any. The prompt is real. It's up to you to work out how it happens, but it must happen. This particular prop can affect the plot, but the plot can't really affect it in return. There are no interesting choices the plot will let you make. TO PROP, NONE TO PLOT: The Shadow-Play Consider the Reputation system from Shadowrun Fifth Edition. A runner has three reputation ratings: Street Cred, Notoriety, and Public Awareness. They increase and decrease as you prove yourself a good/terrible person for other runners to interact with, as you destroy and damage lives and property/scrub your record, and as you get caught on camera and make the ten o'clock news/spread misinformation, respectively. So based on events in the plot, you manipulate these ratings, which are props. And you can make interesting decisions about what to do based on how you want those ratings to go. Getting points of Street Cred increases your Social Limit with regard to the runner crowd - you'll be able to count more successes you make on social rolls. Getting points of Notoriety and Public Awareness... has absolutely no mechanical effect. A GM might say "oh, your Notoriety's going up" or "oh, your Public Awareness is increasing" but any consequences of either of these attributes exist completely in the mind of the GM, cannot be affected by you, and do not even relate to other numbers you might be concerned with, like any particular skills possessed by NPCs or ratings possessed by, say, corporate security. Notoriety and Public Awareness are examples of mechanics which only present interesting choices going to the props. I... have to admit I have trouble thinking of mechanics that work this way that I don't consider somehow broken. Maybe someone else will be able to provide an example? TO PROP AND TO PLOT: Role-Playing Game Mechanics So Brianna and her comrades-in-arms are raiding a goblin camp and there's a rickety watch/archer tower in the middle of it. Goblins are up there shouting out combat advice and raining down arrows. This does not sit well with Brianna, who being of exceptional musculature decides to take hold of the tower and topple it. After a mighty effort, the tower tumbles to the ground in a crash of splinters, and the goblins are wounded in the carnage - as, unfortunately, is Rath, who was in the way of the tower as it collapsed and couldn't dodge clear in time. That's the plot. Given your roleplaying game of choice you could pretty easily work out what the props are and how they operate. And there's plenty of interplay there, too. But where are the interesting decisions, that I can honestly say this goes both ways? Well, let's assume for one impossible second that Brianna is not being played by Brian van Hoose, who in one breathless sentence after declaring intention to knock the tower over goes on to detail the WTN (Wreck Target Number) and SQ (Splintrification Quotient) of the only tree in these woods that Rossolin's Black Goblins have a sufficient TQC (Tool Quality (Carpentry)) to build structures out of. The general sort of question flowing to the plot is "what happens?" and the question flowing to the props is "how does it happen?" Let's say we're working within a task-resolution system, which operates largely by setting pass-or-fail difficulties for PC tasks. Pretty much any edition of Dungeons and Dragons will work like this. In this situation, "what happens" is probably an interesting choice for Brianna to make; that is, that she has multiple options available to her and after some consideration pushing the tower over jumps out at her. And, at the very least the GM has interesting decisions to make on the how-does-it-happen front. They have to come up with a task framework for Brianna to try and push the tower over in, or at least pass judgment on one that may or may not be done in the rules text. They may even do this before the game proper, if, say, Brianna picked up the Wrecking Machine feat last level and they were thinking about it when they keyed the battle map. They're making sure that what seemed like a sensible thing for Brianna to do actually works out in the game's resolution framework to be worthwhile. In the cut and thrust of play that follows, assuming the task framework meshes with other task frameworks such as "the combat round", many other interesting decisions may well flow out of Brianna's decision to push the tower over. The GM may decide how the goblins respond. Rath may decide to risk chasing the goblin shaman into the collapse zone. Brianna may decide to consume various resources in order to increase her odds. But again, at the very least, Brianna's choice of action and the GM's choice of how to adjudicate that action were interesting. Or we could be working within a story-resolution system, which operates by exposing various story elements to players and letting them roll for resolution quality. The decisions can reverse in this case. In, say, Dungeon World, Brianna has a move on her sheet called "Bend Bars, Lift Gates" that opens "when you destroy an obstacle with pure strength" and she can aim to engage that move; the move spells out varying degrees of consequence that Brianna can lessen, but not quite avoid, as she rolls higher. The decision of "how it happens" can be made in this case largely by Brianna. But based on the consequences the move lays out, the GM makes the interesting decision of "what happens next". Which can include the tower collapsing on Rath. Again, more can go on here. The GM can agree Brianna has a clear shot to make the move, or they can say she has to deal with the goblin arrows somehow, or maybe that someone needs to clear the way (maybe someone with a daredevil attack pigeon, eh, Brand? Eh? Eh?) and they can move the spotlight around at will so they can break focus on Brianna as she's resolving the move and do a loop around the table to see what everybody else is doing, to get inspiration for how to narrate the fallout from Brianna's action. Or we could be working in a kind of hybrid system, like Fate or Burning Wheel, where the GM has some responsibility both for setting the mechanical bits of the task and coming up with plot consequences for a failure, over and above the simple state of task failure. And Brianna has interactions to do on both sides as well. But in every one of these cases, it isn't Brianna alone who's solely responsible for making the interesting choices. In a role-playing game, the complicating factor (from before!) is the interesting choices previously made by other people, though it's possible that those "other people" aren't making choices right along side you. Maybe they're the game designers - in the case of The Quiet Year and other GMless games, the predefined prompting elements aim to provide you with interesting choices to make even if you can't interact with them.
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Apr 21, 2021 05:58
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Glazius posted:Oh! No, there is an absolute answer, and it's pretty simple. It's going to result in a state of affairs where some games that call themselves RPGs don't meet the criteria, but that's always a caution when you're dealing with voluntary self-labeling. Forgive the wall, this is a copy-paste from somewhere else. To summarize, is the absolute answer you're proposing that a RPG is a game where there's both prop (mechanics) and plot (narrative) and they both have interesting choices both within and between each other? I think that mostly tracks I disagree with the idea that it's absolute, but that's mostly because I think the very idea of an absolute theory of what a [thing] is ends up being actively against the point of what theories are good for. Theories are useful primarily because they're wrong--you take a shot at explaining things that's pretty close to reality, but reality is too complex to ever really be summed up without loss, so the way you actually get to see how things work is by looking at all the ways the theory falls short. These are all just lenses, making it easier to see some facts and harder to see others.
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Apr 21, 2021 09:49
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OtspIII posted:To summarize, is the absolute answer you're proposing that a RPG is a game where there's both prop (mechanics) and plot (narrative) and they both have interesting choices both within and between each other? I think that mostly tracks Just between each other. Prop-to-prop interactions are often just bookkeeping and don't have to be that interesting; plot-to-plot interactions are usually more interesting, but they're also usually more initiated by the players than mandated by the game.
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Apr 21, 2021 15:47
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OtspIII posted:To summarize, is the absolute answer you're proposing that a RPG is a game where there's both prop (mechanics) and plot (narrative) and they both have interesting choices both within and between each other? I think that mostly tracks Substitute "theory" for "model" and I'm with you here. We are discussing stuff, we are using models to help define what we're discussing, models are never 100% accurate but instead just need to be "good enough" to provide useful pictures/outputs/predictions/reference so that a discussion or analysis can proceed. The classic example of this is a map: no map can ever be 100% accurate (it would be as large and as dynamic as the actual thing it's mapping), but any map that is reasonably accurate, for some value of reasonable, allows people to navigate, understand, predict what will be found at some location, etc. as a useful tool. A map is a model of a place. By your terms, it's a "theory" of a place. All that said: the model Glazius detailed works for me. An RPG is a game in which there are plot-to-prop and/or plot-to-plot interactions: player(s) have agency to alter the gamestate beyond what the props dictate. Yes?
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Apr 21, 2021 19:27
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So, I read Jon Peterson's new book The Elusive Shift and I wanted to discuss a part of it, and I think this is the place. Fortunately, I can constrain the discussion pretty well, thanks to Jon Peterson's blog. Just read this. https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2021/01/player-typologies-from-wargames-to-role.html Now you know everything from the book needed for the discussion.  Pictured above we have the model that Blacow proposed. Players have different desires when it comes to play, and different RPGs could be designed to meet different areas of desire. (When the model was designed Blacow was pretty much mainly talking about D&D, back in the days of Basic and AD&D.) If this rhetoric sounds familiar, well, you can point on the graph which direction is Gamist (up), Simulationist (right, it's literally labeled), and narrativist (both down and left). Now a proper interpretation of this model to me would involve describing an individual player's range of interest, here's an example:  What do you think about this model? Are narrative interests really in opposition to gaming and simulation?
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Apr 21, 2021 20:36
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You've hit on why I've always disliked that model: each of the axes imply exclusivity or opposition. I don't accept that personal and campaign goals are opposed, nor that "simulation" is in opposition to fantasy or roleplaying.
A few posts ago, I mentioned when quoting Aldantefax that I'm reflexively wary of absolute statements; I'm also reflexively wary of axial plots. I've seen some really good ones, but, I've also seen a lot of bullshit, and some of that bullshit causes immense real-world harm (meyers-briggs, for example). So I don't want to say that it's impossible to plot roleplaying games onto axial diagrams, but, I haven't seen one I liked yet...
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Apr 21, 2021 21:30
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Leperflesh posted:Substitute "theory" for "model" and I'm with you here. I blame myself for using two similar words in the example. Let's call props "dice" and plot "clouds", which is what Vincent Baker uses in the information flow diagrams that accompany some of that source stuff. It's an RPG when there are interesting decisions to make in both the cloud-to-dice and dice-to-cloud directions, or "can I topple the goblin watchtower?" and "the goblin watchtower falls! what now?" respectively.
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Apr 21, 2021 22:11
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Leperflesh posted:I wonder about this. There's to me a very simple division between tabletop RPGs and games like Gloomhaven and that's freedom to act as your character. If in Gloomhaven a group of bandits have kidnapped the town's children you're likely to be presented with option A: Kick in the door to rescue the kids or option B: Do something specific else. And then work entirely off predetermined options for how you handle rescuing the kids. Meanwhile in a tabletop RPG the GM might (or might not) present you those two choices - but even if the GM presents you them you are not constrained by them. You can try anything that's physically plausible, whether scouting, paying a ransom for the kids, a stealth mission trying to go in through the roof and rescue the kids without fighting. RPGs give you that sort of freedom. But I can't agree that tabletop RPGs are necessarily open games as to objectives - which is equivalent to saying that I think Story Games are a subset of RPGs. In My Life With Master the Evil Overlord (played by the GM) abuses their minions (played by the players) until one of them inevitably snaps and tries to kill the Overlord. Then there are abstract mechanics to work out whether the minion succeeds in killing their master or whether they die in the attempt. And then it's game over. Pretty clearly this game is not open with respect to the finish point. (People hit the roof saying that this was not an RPG because it wasn't an open system and the people who liked MLWM were more interested in games than in definitional flamewars so proposed the name Story Games for games like this that are either a subset of RPGs or are RPG-adjacent depending on your definition). Fiasco is, of course, another game on the edge of what tabletop RPGs are but I don't consider Gloomhaven to be however many in character conversations you have.
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Apr 21, 2021 23:21
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Well OK, Gloomhaven is on rails (and I think we've maybe found a better definition anyway, and aren't talking about the endstate as being the only way in which a game may be "open) but how about Terraforming Mars? My company card is my character sheet, I have lots of choices to make, I can totally choose to make terraforming decisions that I think are "in character" for me, and I could totally berate my fellow players with my monologues as I enact them. But, per our new operating defintion: nothing about my characterizations lets me change the rules for what I can do on the board, my choices remain exactly the same, so there's no Plot-to-Prop interaction really. Yes, I can decide that my "character" prefers planting greenery hexes rather than making cities, and maybe even sacrifice my chances at winning the game to just go ham on greenery tiles, but my decision doesn't change the rules about when and how I am allowed to place them, or what other players are allowed to do. Hence: not an RPG. If we accept this model of "what is an RPG" as Glazius has laid it out, and I think I'm leaning hard toward that being a pretty good model, and one that also sounds basically compatible with what Aldantefax was arguing for.
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Apr 21, 2021 23:32
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Leperflesh posted:You've hit on why I've always disliked that model: each of the axes imply exclusivity or opposition. I don't accept that personal and campaign goals are opposed, nor that "simulation" is in opposition to fantasy or roleplaying. This. Simulation and roleplay are absolutely not opposed, and most of the apparent conflict between them is that the game being discussed is either simulating the wrong things for the roleplay that people want to do (or that the game says it's supposed to support), or often that it's just bad simulation that gives silly results. Personal vs campaign goals sounds like it might have some merit in context - the chart implies that what's really meant by personal goals is "powergaming" ("playing to win at the game mechanics", I think?) and what's meant by campaign goals is "storytelling", and those might tend to diverge a fair bit in AD&D as it was played at the time. But one of my criteria for a good RPG is that winning at the mechanics will also produce a good story (and obviously from that: that an RPG where winning at the mechanics tends to produce a bad story is a bad RPG).
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Apr 21, 2021 23:39
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:This. Simulation and roleplay are absolutely not opposed, and most of the apparent conflict between them is that the game being discussed is either simulating the wrong things for the roleplay that people want to do (or that the game says it's supposed to support), or often that it's just bad simulation that gives silly results. I'd honestly consider simulation as used there to be essentially a third axis, which scales based on personal and group tolerance for crunchy mechanics. Also, I agree, powergaming and pursuit of personal goals are not remotely the same. Personal goals may very well be trying to accomplish a certain narrative point which has absolutely nothing to do with 'winning' the mechanics.
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Apr 22, 2021 02:19
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Leperflesh posted:Well OK, Gloomhaven is on rails (and I think we've maybe found a better definition anyway, and aren't talking about the endstate as being the only way in which a game may be "open) but how about Terraforming Mars? My company card is my character sheet, I have lots of choices to make, I can totally choose to make terraforming decisions that I think are "in character" for me, and I could totally berate my fellow players with my monologues as I enact them. A better example of a borderline case would be the boardgame Diplomacy, played with your soon to be ex-friends. It's at some levels a game where there's no plot to prop interaction - but at other levels the player to player interaction is everything. You can't change the rules, but the rules are at a very very macro scale. You can however change the outcomes because the whole thing is interactive and is about how you play your empire and there are so few rules that that's all it's about. And playing in character is both entirely in line with the game and your choices change things for everything. I'd personally say it's not an RPG, but I think it's where the borders are fuzzy.
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Apr 22, 2021 02:26
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neonchameleon posted:A better example of a borderline case would be the boardgame Diplomacy, played with your soon to be ex-friends. It's at some levels a game where there's no plot to prop interaction - but at other levels the player to player interaction is everything. You can't change the rules, but the rules are at a very very macro scale. You can however change the outcomes because the whole thing is interactive and is about how you play your empire and there are so few rules that that's all it's about. And playing in character is both entirely in line with the game and your choices change things for everything. I'd personally say it's not an RPG, but I think it's where the borders are fuzzy. I think Diplomacy has the potential to be a fun blurring point. You can easily play Diplomacy with effectively no Plot, all Prop--there's a lot of player to player interaction, but it's all meta, where the players are talking to the players about the game they're playing (the conversations they're' having are related to the game, and will affect choices made within the game, but are ultimately outside of the game). That feels like pretty unambiguously not a RPG. You could also imagine a game of Diplomacy where each player decides to embody their favorite WWI-era European politician, and where they justify their alliances and in-game actions based on the characters they're pretending to be and the in-game narrative they're building through gameplay. At this point you've got both prop and plot, and they're both feeding interestingly into each other--you've basically got a RPG going that uses Diplomacy as a core mechanic. Is choosing to betray your current ally and throw in with Russia because they offered you a (non-mechanical) position of power within their upcoming empire once they win (and you know you have no hope of winning at this point anyway) a roleplaying moment? On one level, it doesn't affect the game's end-state (Russia won, you lost), but on another level it does (your perception of your loss is very different than it would have been without this deal). The prop is the same, the plot is different In my experience, Diplomacy tends to run somewhere in between those two poles. I wouldn't call it a RPG, but it definitely has some RPGness to it (and can have more or less depending on how the players use it--ultimately a game is the system and actions the players use at the table, not what's written in the rulebook)
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Apr 22, 2021 04:31
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DalaranJ posted:So, I read Jon Peterson's new book The Elusive Shift and I wanted to discuss a part of it, and I think this is the place. Fortunately, I can constrain the discussion pretty well, thanks to Jon Peterson's blog. I think that ultimately this is one of the few times where a polar area diagram might actually comes in useful? Actually contrasting these things and suggesting one limits the other isn't necessarily borne out in reality; people are large, they contain multitudes, so it's best to just say something like "John is +7 Winning, +2 The Experience, -3 Novelty, +4 Realism; Elhven Tahcticks is 3 Winning 5 Experience 0 Realism 7 Novelty; John won't like Elhven Tahcticks much". Leperflesh posted:Well OK, Gloomhaven is on rails (and I think we've maybe found a better definition anyway, and aren't talking about the endstate as being the only way in which a game may be "open) but how about Terraforming Mars? My company card is my character sheet, I have lots of choices to make, I can totally choose to make terraforming decisions that I think are "in character" for me, and I could totally berate my fellow players with my monologues as I enact them. neonchameleon posted:A better example of a borderline case would be the boardgame Diplomacy, played with your soon to be ex-friends. It's at some levels a game where there's no plot to prop interaction - but at other levels the player to player interaction is everything. You can't change the rules, but the rules are at a very very macro scale. You can however change the outcomes because the whole thing is interactive and is about how you play your empire and there are so few rules that that's all it's about. And playing in character is both entirely in line with the game and your choices change things for everything. I'd personally say it's not an RPG, but I think it's where the borders are fuzzy. Both ways, remember. Props also to plot. Nothing about Terraforming Mars or Diplomacy is set up to in any way engage with or challenge your roleplaying, and the way that you can tell this is, if you took advantage of a board state in Diplomacy or a drawn card in Terraforming Mars that completely contradicted the character you'd set up but got you closer to winning the game, would anybody else actually accept it as a dramatic internal struggle that scarred your character, the way they'd accept a similar sort of element in an RPG? No, they'd all just think that you flaked on the character idea you had so you could win.
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Apr 22, 2021 06:04
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Glazius posted:Both ways, remember. Props also to plot. Nothing about Terraforming Mars or Diplomacy is set up to in any way engage with or challenge your roleplaying, and the way that you can tell this is, if you took advantage of a board state in Diplomacy or a drawn card in Terraforming Mars that completely contradicted the character you'd set up but got you closer to winning the game, would anybody else actually accept it as a dramatic internal struggle that scarred your character, the way they'd accept a similar sort of element in an RPG? No, they'd all just think that you flaked on the character idea you had so you could win. This is kinda interesting to think about. Many - maybe all - of the cards you draw in Terraforming Mars (which is mostly a game about drawing cards and then using them, and resources drawn from both the board state and your cards, to alter the board state and your cards) have flavor text which could act as roleplaying game type prompts. I could see an argument for prop->plot interaction. It's the other direction that I think is the blocker; no matter how you decide to roleplay it, the options the game mechanics present to you remain the same. You can opt to play the game differently based on your character or whatever, but you're still selecting from a limited menu of choices for each action, and unless you actually change the game's rules, that menu is always whatever the props say it is. So it'd maybe not be too hard to modify Terraforming Mars to be an RPG: add a GM, give the GM the power to adjudicate player choices, maybe the power to alter the board state or the deck of cards or even a player's tableu at will, etc. and now it's totally an RPG. Or hell, give the players the power to do that without a GM, perhaps by adding a rule about voting for a consensus, perhaps with different votes per player depending on their relative corporate influence or what have you. The same thing goes for Diplomacy, really. Sure, when I make a deal with Russia that we won't attack one another for three turns, that alters both of our potential game choices: but the game very explicitly still permits us to make the same choices, including betraying one another... the whole point of the rules is that nothing enforces alliances, so you stab your friends in the back viciously. No plot -> prop interaction. I'm thinking right now that a key thing Fax mentioned about RPGs is that we're typically given permission by the rules to ignore or change the rules; effectively, Rule 0 builds in a mega plot -> prop interaction from the beginning. Are there any board games that do the same? It also occurs to me that there are board games, with fixed rules and no plot->prompt interaction, that nonetheless build a sort of role-playing right into the game. For example, Mysterium requires one player to say nothing out loud, but attempt to communicate clues to the players by choosing a subset of cards, all of which have only artwork and no words on them. Players try to discern patterns out of what the silent player is giving them, she listens to their deliberations and may alter her choices based on what they're saying, and importantly, there are no rules about how cards should be interpreted. Players collaboratively invent "rules" - conventions, ideas, approaches - for interpreting the cards shown to try to match them to suspects, murder weapons, etc. In this sense, there is a plot -> prop interaction in play... which props the silent player chooses is affected by improvised collaborative ideas and rules invented at the table on the fly. And, the table's ideas about what rules to invent are affected by the improvised set of choices the silent player makes. Yet, all of this takes place within a limited set of possibilities (the cards drawn from the deck, the possible suspects and rooms and so on, are all fixed by what cards you have in your game, you have a set number of turns to try to win as a group, etc.) so in that sense, the prop->plot and plot-> prop interactions are sort of illusory?
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Apr 22, 2021 06:25
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Leperflesh posted:For example, Mysterium requires one player to say nothing out loud, but attempt to communicate clues to the players by choosing a subset of cards, all of which have only artwork and no words on them. Players try to discern patterns out of what the silent player is giving them, she listens to their deliberations and may alter her choices based on what they're saying, and importantly, there are no rules about how cards should be interpreted. Players collaboratively invent "rules" - conventions, ideas, approaches - for interpreting the cards shown to try to match them to suspects, murder weapons, etc. I have played a little bit of Mysterium and I never managed to think of it that way, but you're right about players inventing rules. I have played a lot of Dixit and there's a similar emergent framework for interpreting cards that happens after a group plays together for a while, and it can get so strong that the game becomes almost incomprehensible to an outsider. I think this is related to how many TTRPG groups end up with a set of what to any outsider would be "house rules", but to the group is just how the game is played - they haven't necessarily thought about "making house rules", often haven't discussed them, and they rarely write them down. Then a new player will join and go "huh?" or they'll post about a rule on the internet using their group's interpretation (or fabrication) and get in an argument. Is there an existing word for these emergent rules/frameworks?
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Apr 22, 2021 08:02
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So if I can summarize, would this be correct? Board game: The rules define what actions a player can take. If there’s not a rule, you can’t do it. TTRPG: The rules place boundaries on what actions a player can take. If there’s not a rule, one or more of the other players decide whether or not you can do it.
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Apr 22, 2021 14:37
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Leperflesh posted:This is kinda interesting to think about. Many - maybe all - of the cards you draw in Terraforming Mars (which is mostly a game about drawing cards and then using them, and resources drawn from both the board state and your cards, to alter the board state and your cards) have flavor text which could act as roleplaying game type prompts. This is not germane to your broader point, but the flavor text in Terraforming Mars is so boring and perfunctory, I would be genuinely impressed if someone managed to use it as a roleplaying prompt.
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Apr 22, 2021 21:56
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Leperflesh posted:It also occurs to me that there are board games, with fixed rules and no plot->prompt interaction, that nonetheless build a sort of role-playing right into the game. For example, Mysterium requires one player to say nothing out loud, but attempt to communicate clues to the players by choosing a subset of cards, all of which have only artwork and no words on them. Players try to discern patterns out of what the silent player is giving them, she listens to their deliberations and may alter her choices based on what they're saying, and importantly, there are no rules about how cards should be interpreted. Players collaboratively invent "rules" - conventions, ideas, approaches - for interpreting the cards shown to try to match them to suspects, murder weapons, etc. In this sense, there is a plot -> prop interaction in play... which props the silent player chooses is affected by improvised collaborative ideas and rules invented at the table on the fly. And, the table's ideas about what rules to invent are affected by the improvised set of choices the silent player makes. Yet, all of this takes place within a limited set of possibilities (the cards drawn from the deck, the possible suspects and rooms and so on, are all fixed by what cards you have in your game, you have a set number of turns to try to win as a group, etc.) so in that sense, the prop->plot and plot-> prop interactions are sort of illusory? No, they're not rules. They're better-understood as... locally-favored strategies, I guess? If you repeatedly played wargames in the same friendly local gamestore on a handful of prebuilt dioramas with the same people, the same thing would happen, patterns in play would arise, but it wouldn't be "a rule" that you try to occupy the central valley first. You're also confusing secret information for plot, which is understandable. Portions of the plot may be kept secret, but it's all meant to be shared when it becomes relevant, as opposed to Mysterium, where the entire game is about overcoming an artificial communication barrier. In Mysterium, you're trying to understand what another person is saying, in the game's own very restrictive "language". In an RPG, while the GM may withhold information about the world until you take certain relevant actions, there's no challenge to communicating that information clearly when the time comes.
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Apr 22, 2021 22:53
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I'm talking about ad-hoc "rules" that evolve at the table. For example, "Hmm, this card has a lot of yellow... maybe she means, the weapon with the yellow background" vs. "Hmm, look, there's light sources. Maybe she means the candlestick?" As two very obvious criteria, the designers may have anticipated those two factors when choosing artwork for cards. But the interpretations definitely extend beyond factors the game designer could have anticipated. When my wife is the silent player, I might choose a card she offered and make an association based on something I know about her, which the designers couldn't possibly have known. And tell the other players. And now this is a "rule" or maybe a better word is "rubric" we're using in the game. In this sense, something from outside the game is now affecting the operation of the game. But: I agree that this is tenuous and may not qualify as a plot->prop interaction.
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Apr 22, 2021 23:00
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:This. Simulation and roleplay are absolutely not opposed, and most of the apparent conflict between them is that the game being discussed is either simulating the wrong things for the roleplay that people want to do (or that the game says it's supposed to support), or often that it's just bad simulation that gives silly results. I concur. Although the more I think about it the more I think that what Blacow meant by 'Simulation' 40 years ago might not be the same thing you or I mean when we write it now. Perhaps he meant more, 'how things happen at large scales', as opposed to personal character story. If that's the case it seems like an aspect of early ttrpgs that we've pretty much abandoned as fewer and fewer players came from wargaming backgrounds. Glazius posted:I think that ultimately this is one of the few times where a polar area diagram might actually comes in useful? Actually contrasting these things and suggesting one limits the other isn't necessarily borne out in reality; people are large, they contain multitudes, so it's best to just say something like "John is +7 Winning, +2 The Experience, -3 Novelty, +4 Realism; Elhven Tahcticks is 3 Winning 5 Experience 0 Realism 7 Novelty; John won't like Elhven Tahcticks much". If you could determine what reasonable dimensions for the diagram. For now the best tool I know of is just Chris Chinn's same page tool. To be honest I'd sort of rather have this for board games than ttrpgs.
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Apr 23, 2021 02:40
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DalaranJ posted:I concur. Although the more I think about it the more I think that what Blacow meant by 'Simulation' 40 years ago might not be the same thing you or I mean when we write it now. Perhaps he meant more, 'how things happen at large scales', as opposed to personal character story. If that's the case it seems like an aspect of early ttrpgs that we've pretty much abandoned as fewer and fewer players came from wargaming backgrounds. Going by this reproduction of his presentation of the model, Blacow doesn't really use that term. If we tie it to wargaming like in the diagram, we get: "WARGAMING Here one might say that the emphasis is almost the reverse of the role-playing oriented game. The most important facets of this type of game are the tactical abilities of the players and GM, and the mechanics of play. There is a strong tendency towards a relatively low level of magic here, both in quantity and quality, since it is upsetting the GM to have a tactically brilliant setup destroyed when a character pulls out a gadget. Wargaming FRP is a competition between the players (as a group) and the GM in which they match wits and skills. He sets up tactical problems which they have to solve for their experience and treasure. Knowhow is all-important, and detailed knowledge of rules a vast help. Since there is a fine edge of danger in the game, developing a character's personality may result in it doing things dysfunctional to survival. Hence the role-playing aspect of the "pure" wargaming approach is often minimal. It should be obvious that in a game dominated by this way of thinkng, soft-keying is an extremely dubious practice. The ethic demands that the players survive by their wits, with bad play being rewarded by death. For the GM to arbitrarily reduce the opposition in order to save the party would be as much cheating as adding monsters to raise the death rate would. Unlike role-playing based games, killing player characters is an integral and logical part of the game; in fact, many Gms of this school set themselves a desired kill ratio and try to meet it. While this fosters a competitive approach between the GM and players, it usually tends to reduce inter-character fighting. The world is foe enough..."
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Apr 23, 2021 02:51
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The diagram I provided had dw_11 appended to the name, so it may have been from the later article by Jeffrey Johnson. e: So judging by the wording you provided Blacow's 'wargaming' would be what we might call the 'challenge' aesthetic. I don't think we view those two aesthetics as opposed any more, although certainly you can't tell a story about your character when they're dead which is a problem that is still quite present in D&D. DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Apr 23, 2021 |
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Apr 23, 2021 03:06
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DalaranJ posted:The diagram I provided had dw_11 appended to the name, so it may have been from the later article by Jeffrey Johnson. To quote Peterson's blog, "In these early discussions, we can see the roots of much of the RPG theorizing that would follow, like the classic fourfold Blacow model, shown in a later visualization above." (bolding mine) quote:e: So judging by the wording you provided Blacow's 'wargaming' would be what we might call the 'challenge' aesthetic. I don't think we view those two aesthetics as opposed any more, although certainly you can't tell a story about your character when they're dead which is a problem that is still quite present in D&D. Well, you can tell stories about their past, or about a new character. You can also decide that personal character death isn't at stake, which is actually easier in a quasi-wargaming scenario where your character is in charge of a bigger unit, and unlikely to be in personal danger.
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Apr 23, 2021 03:47
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Leperflesh posted:I'm talking about ad-hoc "rules" that evolve at the table. For example, "Hmm, this card has a lot of yellow... maybe she means, the weapon with the yellow background" vs. "Hmm, look, there's light sources. Maybe she means the candlestick?" As two very obvious criteria, the designers may have anticipated those two factors when choosing artwork for cards. But the interpretations definitely extend beyond factors the game designer could have anticipated. When my wife is the silent player, I might choose a card she offered and make an association based on something I know about her, which the designers couldn't possibly have known. And tell the other players. And now this is a "rule" or maybe a better word is "rubric" we're using in the game. I think it does. "This ghost communicates like this" (eg, uses color-matching, or numbers-matching) emerging during a game surely qualifies as plot > prop even if it's not intentional on the part of the players or designer. e: On the "deciding that games exist on exactly two axes, and then categorising games based on that" discussion, I have little to contribute other than it's such an extremely D&D thing to do that I can't help but wonder if some of the categories have been made up just to fill in the grid, as it were. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Apr 23, 2021 |
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Apr 23, 2021 06:28
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So, given the in-depth discussion going on in this thread, I'm not sure if this is the right place to broach this topic: After running The Invisible Sun for 2 years now for my friends, I am taking it upon myself to streamline much of the system and build a new setting off the back of that work. Much of this work is bringing the system in line with contemporary quality of life improvements (a single experience track, explicit rules for mixed success/failure states, simplifying character creation, consolidated rule sections, etc.) I really enjoy some of the existing mechanics (Venture and Challenge, Joy and Despair experience, the Sooth Deck), but I'm kind of vexed by just how much of the original IS setting informs the clunkier mechanics (i.e. secrets being a major avenue for improving characters, thoughts as currency, Ephemera Items, etc.). Am I doing myself and potential players a disservice by building a new setting and stripping out the clunkier mechanics? When we change that much of the game's DNA, does it make more sense to start from scratch?
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Apr 24, 2021 19:43
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Gray Ghost posted:When we change that much of the game's DNA, does it make more sense to start from scratch? Nothing is truly from scratch, so do whatever. The important thing is the final result is fun and has its own flavor.
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Apr 24, 2021 20:44
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