@BESW that's not how I'd define Gamism, personally, but it may very well be how GNS Theory defines it
@Undreren well, it's got a fair few rules for social encounters and other skill-based challenges, and there is a general sense among its developers that this is an area where it needs improvement
@KRyan Now when I took that guy and put him in a My Life With Master game, he hated it, passionately, from the very start, because in MLWM character creation is nearly impossible to turn into a "winnable" minigame.
@KRyan This is where the GNS system breaks down if it's generalized. MLWM's character creation is aggressively standardized. You have choices, but it's basically impossible to say "this was a better choice than that one."
But MLWM's endgame and 'win condition' is so explicit that it's impossible to achieve any other kind of conclusion. You play until a very specific condition has been met, and that means you won.
your player may not have liked it that he couldn't abuse the system to "win" but I don't see any RPGs, Gamist or otherwise, as encouraging that behavior to begin with
@KRyan From a game developer point of view, PC creation should be balanced. But my player looks at it as a minigame. In games like D&D and WoW, character design IS a minigame of optimization.
@BESW yes, but generally speaking, only imbalance allows optimization to be possible, and imbalance is, I think, seen as a negative from a Gamist perspective
the fact that 3.5 char-op is possible is indicative of its failure to be balanced
@Undreren Yes. GNS's goal (which it doesn't achieve elegantly) is to provide tools to discuss "what we want in a game" rather than make any value judgement about it.
@KRyan I agree. It was a source of eternal frustration for me as a 3.5 GM. But I was also a player, and I remember the joy of treating PC-making as a minigame. I made PCs I never intended to play, just to see what I could achieve.
(I also retired PCs who were so successful at breaking the system that they broke the party's narrative.)
@BESW I think Legend has a good balance, personally, but I'm biased. It's hard to screw up so hard you're useless, and impossible (as far as the devs are aware) to abuse anything so hard that you overshadow everyone, but there's some wiggle room to make optimization worthwhile
you can optimize to be a bit better than someone who doesn't but never so much that they're useless to you
most of the real optimization comes from synergizing different party members anyway
Imbalance is bad for playing a game. But in the case of D&D it creates a minigame that, in the eyes of many, more than pays for the imbalance necessary for its existance.
@Undreren \o/ glad you agree! Of course, I'm stupidly biased; I only speak my opinions candidly here because I figure everyone already knows of my bias in the matter
but then I wouldn't have that bias if Legend hadn't impressed me as much as it had. shrug
@Undreren sure, but how do you say a game is more Gamist because it fails to achieve one of the most fundamental Gamist goals?
I'd love to try more different systems, but I've got players --and I totally understand and support this-- who have invested a lot of time and energy in the system we're using now, and balk at the idea of throwing away that investment.
@Undreren well, you pointed at the char-op minigame as a reason why a player was too Gamist to enjoy a balanced game, but I feel like one cannot claim to enjoy a Gamist system if one does not appreciate balance?
@KRyan We're currently in 4e, up from 3.5, and that transition was difficult enough. Only the fact that the party had been visibly suffering under flaws in 3.5 that 4e mitigated gave us to drive to make the move. 4e's flaws don't chafe this group as much as 3.5's did.
@BESW fair enough, and I have not played nearly enough 4e to make any claims about it with respect to Legend. From my very limited experience, Legend seems to allow greater variety in character abilities, but I'm told that using only the PHB will give one the wrong impression of 4e.
Some groups flit from system to system with relative ease, sampling and evaluating like a butterfly in a flower garden. My group is a dwarf in an armchair with a single piece of quartz and an eyeglass, spending the entire day examining it in minute detail and wringing every ounce of understanding they can from that one chunk of rock.
@KRyan Yeah, 4e really only comes to life with access to the entire ruleset and its errata... which is so massive that my group feels the online subscription with its regularly updated glossary and comprehensive character builder is the only way to go.
@KRyan Fair enough. If I have one major complaint about 4e (aside from that its module developers are on crack) it's the fact that it makes some very privileged assumptions about its demographic.
@KRyan I really want to run the DF RPG, but again with the dwarf in an armchair.
@BESW mm. it's not... precisely the money; I have spending money enough to afford the outlay of a subscription. It's that I don't have enough time/friends interested in 4e to make that amount of money worthwhile to me, not with how much it could cut into my freely-available funds
@Undreren tis relatively expensive
though honestly still cheaper than a lot of video games
4e expects you to not only have the financial wherewithal to buy their books AND their online subscription (and other goodies), but a level of comfort with technology (and access to it) that is really very presumptive.
It's like a teacher requiring his students to turn in typed essays with specific formatting, without considering if they have access to computers and printers and the training to use them.
I can't claim "back in my day," but in the Old Days of D&D you needed a book or two, and paper and pencil. Technically you can do the same with 4e, but the system isn't actually supportive of it.
(I have a lot of Opinions about Assumptions of Privilege.)
@Undreren Heh. You just got the Cliff's Notes version. The larger discussion has a lot to do with my experience in education on a small island and then in the mainland US.
@BESW on some level, a school should have computers, and a student should either have had training as a part of reaching that point in his academic career, or be actively receiving training at the time. Computers are too important to ignore, and specific formatting is reality in a lot of fields
not that I'm ignoring the problems you're discussing
@KRyan Yes, and yet every campus I've ever been to has chronic problems with making working computers available, while the professors blindly chastise students for not using the labs that aren't working.
The only university on my island is largely populated by students with spouses, children, two jobs, and extended families they are expected to care for.
They can barely afford the money or the time it takes to attend classes and do the work.
ok, so this is a different situation than I'm familiar with, obviously; where I am, the computer labs usually do more-or-less work, alternatives are available, and buying a cheap computer would be a small fraction of the overall costs of living and studying
Guam. It's an unincorporated territory of the United States of America. Draw a line between the eastern horn of Australia and Tokyo and you'll find me just above the equator.
a) college students live on campus or have ready access to cars. Instead, many live some distance away and only have public transit available to them, making it harder to get to the computer lab.
b) college students have free time. Even those without families to support are often working multiple jobs to put themselves through school, and computer labs frequently have hours unsympathetic to this situation.
c) kids these days know how computers work and need no aid figuring out how to make the Ghost of Clippy stop auto-formatting their papers in ways that make the professors throw it out without reading it. (Also, college students aren't all kids.)
@KRyan I agree. But neat handwriting instead of typed pages doesn't render homework pointless, unless it's a computer class.
at the same time, though... what do you want? schools cannot afford 24/7 computer labs, computers are too important to ignore, and anyway I have a hard time believing you could hand-write a lengthy paper without wasting way more time than you would if you just bit the bullet and took the commute
it takes me around an hour to get to school, and I know plenty of people with much worse commutes than that
@BESW not true in most academic fields at the university level
A simpler--and even more common--problem has to do with the way English Composition classes are being forced to teach a single type of citation, and then professors in each advanced field complain that the student doesn't know how to use their discipline's citation system.
@BESW while I can imagine this being a problem, I've never encountered it
but again, what do you propose to do about it?
but anyway, I'd argue that most composition classes should be training students to leverage the power of the software to handle things like citations, bibliographies, tables of contents, and so on
modern word processing software has very powerful faculties for those things
almost no one -- the professors included -- know it, or know how to use it
@KRyan There's no band-aid cure. It's a problem with the attitude and traditions of an education system that was designed to take the children of European immigrants and groom them to be factor laborers, and is now expected to simultaneously make a profit and produce creative experts in innovative fields.
He wrote it in 1976, and the basic idea is that if we don't understand what computers are and are not, we will misapply them to tasks that are better left for human minds.
see, it's not that I disagree -- I have no idea whether or not computers will ever be capable of choice, compassion, wisdom, etc. -- it's that it discredits him when he makes the claim
Like the fact that he spends two entire chapters discussing exactly how computers work on the binary level and up, and explicitly bases his arguments on that.
@kyran, regarding: rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/19085/… are there any of your comments that aren't reflected in the answers? I'm about to take out my mod flamethrower.
I'm also fond of Nicholas Carr, but just because I recommend a book doesn't mean I agree with it whole-heartedly; it gets the brain moving in good circles though.
@BrianBallsun-Stanton you might want to talk to Cobalt about comments specifically; he's done that a lot where he asks a ton of follow-up questions in the comments
@BESW then he's limiting his definition of "computer" some, which is probably fair because it may allow him to make statements that otherwise could never be made
anyway, nothing really worth keeping. I felt the need to explain to LitheOhm why I downvoted the answer, because it's really not an answer that deserves to be at -1, there were just aspects of it that I felt that I personally needed to downvote, if that makes sense. But LitheOhm's seen my comment at this point, so whatever
@BESW nothing fundamental about computer architecture has really changed that much that would be relevant here; I'm more referring to the idea of "computers" that use radically different architectures to achieve something more like "strong" AI
although, I say that, and then I remember how impressive neural nets have gotten recently
that took long enough
there is something to be said for sufficient quantity having a quality all its own
the architectures are similar, just more, but so much more that it does change things
