TRPG General Chat

12:31 AM

@SevenSidedDie I learned recently that the reason so many orange things are called "red" in English, is because we didn't have a word for orange yet. (Eg, red hair, red-breasted robin, etc)

trogdor

well, the red hair thing,... some of that is either red or mixed red orange

doppelgreener

@trogdor back then though, people called orange stuff red (orange was just a yellowy sort of red)

trogdor

fair enough

Adeptus

12:52 AM

@trogdor Most "red" hair is more like orange. The closer-to-actually-red (natural) coloured hair is usually called auburn. (Then came artificial hairdyes, and fire-engine-red became possible...)

trogdor

oh, Auburn, ok then

and yeah, I was not talking about the really dark/strong red

I meant like, a tinge of red that doesn't have orange in there

Magician

1:05 AM

Here's a topic I've been pondering a bit: why is D&D and the like so much easier to grok than more "modern", narrative systems like DW or Fate? You can give a D&D rulebook to someone who's never experienced an RPG before, or explain the rules to a similar newb, and they'll be able to play. Maybe not well, and there are certainly common pitfalls like adversarial GMing or My Guy Syndrome, but they're unlikely to fundamentally misunderstand the way the game is supposed to work.

Whereas with Fate or PbtA games, that seems to be happening all the time.

A simple answer would be that D&D is "procedural". It only bothers with resolving actions, leaving narrative formation mostly oustide the rules, on the group's shoulders. While narrative games try to shape the story as part of their rules, which is much trickier.

BESW

[citation needed]

Magician

Which part?

BESW

That "traditional" is easier to understand than "modern."

Magician

Pretty anecdotal, I'll admit. But that's the sense I get both from personal experience with both, and from questions I see on the main site.

Remember the Fate gremlin, for instance.

Shalvenay

@Magician no kidding -- I utterly mangled Fate in many ways when I tried to use it

BESW

1:11 AM

I propose it's a sample bias based on accessibility via sunk costs.

Magician

@BESW Explain?

BESW

When I started playing D&D, I sunk $100 and read 900 pages. When I started playing Fate, I sunk $0 and read 300 pages; I could've read 70.

Which group of people do you think are going to be reading more closely and expecting their chosen system to require great effort to master?

Magician

But were those all of those 900 pages to do with running the game? I recall they were mostly individual rules exception bits, monsters, etc

BESW

And 200 pages of Fate Core are about philosophy, not mechanics. I'm making a point about sunk costs, not about content.

Magician

@BESW I read the Fate rulebook twice, closely, knowing it's going to be tricky. I still flopped around for the first few games.

BESW

1:16 AM

Broadly speaking, I'm speculating that one component of many is that greater sunk costs encourage closer reading and discourage assuming it's obvious.

Magician

I'll admit that we were paying more attention and were more willing to dig into the rules when we were younger.

BESW

Another component, I'd speculate, is that "traditional" games have several more decades of collective experience explaining themselves.

Look at Atomic Robo vs Don't Rest Your Head vs Dresden Files to see how just a few years experience can progressively improve the ability of one set of developers to explain narrative-game concepts.

Magician

@BESW This one, I'll agree with. Though that does raise the question on accessibility of older D&D rules, something we can't quite answer.

BESW

Anecdotally, "no such thing as D&D" was even MORE aggressively true back then.

We've had folks in chat talk about how they played D&D by extrapolating and inventing out of a monster manual and a single splat book, because their local stores didn't have any of the core books.

I'm not sure "understanding the way the game is supposed to work" has the same truth value for that paradigm.

Magician

...which is a somewhat different issue, lack of rules text vs lack of clarity in rules text.

BESW

1:21 AM

Right, but it's part of the same "understanding the game" landscape.

Online SRDs and RPG forums have fundamentally changed the community's sense of what "understanding the game" means.

Magician

Aye. And we have those for DW and Fate, too. And still people struggle to grasp how they're meant to work.

From anecdotal experience: I've started DMing with the online preview of D&D 3.0, quickly moving onto the free published adventures for it. They were pretty terrible. So were my games. But they were undoubtedly D&D. I was running them poorly, but not wrong.

BESW

How would a wrong game of Fate look?

Magician

And whenever we'd get a rule or three wrong, that didn't change the nature of the game, just the way the situation turned out.

Shalvenay

@BESW no kidding -- playing 1e now is a totally different beast than I'm sure it was back in the day, even with a fairly freewheeling yet old-school DM

Magician

@BESW Underwhelming compels. Underutilised aspects. "Broken" stunts that dominate a scene.

Shalvenay

1:25 AM

@BESW like my attempts to run it :P (more seriously -- I wound up not understanding how half the system worked so I simply started with the conflict resolution mechanics and never got very far from there -- things like compels and the Fate point economy simply made negative sense to me at that point)

BESW

I mean, I've played Fate with deeply flawed understanding of its broad philosophies and its specific rules (like the DFRPG fiasco where a sidebar said fate points had to move every time on fire influenced the narrative, rather than being an always-on truth). I've played entire campaigns where setting aspects sat neglected and ignored, and I've given out fate points for compels that did absolutely nothing.

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