Funny...
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@Taskerland Yep. The "theatre kids" (among which I was numbered ... in 1977!) have decisively lost the tabletop RPG war. Despite the myriad of drama/improv-focused games being published, putting all of them together and then under a x10 magnifying glass still makes them a tiny piece of the D&D-and-workalikes pie.
@ZDL It's an implementation thing too... I remember back in the days of the FORGE thinking that their conceptions of narratives and gamism resulted in very similar games with subtly different ethoi because they were both games you experienced rules-first. To this day there are people who play PbtA games like D20, sitting and waiting for the opportunity to deploy their niche-protected feats.
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Funny... Someone was getting indirectly dragged for saying that the theatre kids had destroyed the #ttrpg hobby and blah blah blah
Y'know... As someone who was part of the 1990s White Wolf cohort, my impression of the hobby is that, after the collapse of TSR, the combat nerds got exactly what they wanted and have continued to get exactly what they wanted for each successive decade since that to the point where the hobby is in the process of being re-absorbed by board and wargaming.
@Taskerland Oh heck yeah. Speaking as someone who used to _worry_ that the theater kids would cause more harm among the RPGs than good ... That did not come to pass in any meaningful way, and it seems to me that they're even rarer, now, than my folk are.
Honestly, on this side of the years, I kind of miss having them around. They made it much easier to find an Ars Magica run!
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Funny... Someone was getting indirectly dragged for saying that the theatre kids had destroyed the #ttrpg hobby and blah blah blah
Y'know... As someone who was part of the 1990s White Wolf cohort, my impression of the hobby is that, after the collapse of TSR, the combat nerds got exactly what they wanted and have continued to get exactly what they wanted for each successive decade since that to the point where the hobby is in the process of being re-absorbed by board and wargaming.
@Taskerland Metastasized by board gaming...
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@Taskerland Oh heck yeah. Speaking as someone who used to _worry_ that the theater kids would cause more harm among the RPGs than good ... That did not come to pass in any meaningful way, and it seems to me that they're even rarer, now, than my folk are.
Honestly, on this side of the years, I kind of miss having them around. They made it much easier to find an Ars Magica run!
@SJohnRoss I suspect that 'theatre kids' is quite often just code for 'queer' or 'femme' or 'not a human armpit'.
Either way, I think it takes a special kind of delusion to look at the recent history of RPGs and conclude that theatrical, RP-focused types have somehow been in the driving seat.
Even during the WW years, those types generally wound up getting routed into LARPs.
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@ZDL It's an implementation thing too... I remember back in the days of the FORGE thinking that their conceptions of narratives and gamism resulted in very similar games with subtly different ethoi because they were both games you experienced rules-first. To this day there are people who play PbtA games like D20, sitting and waiting for the opportunity to deploy their niche-protected feats.
@Taskerland I always took the stance, after they started showing up on market (my first exposure was Maelstrom Storytelling) that "story games" were simulation games just as much as were the advanced tactical simulators like AD&D. They just simulated something different: the narrative beats and genre tropes of stories instead of the minutiae of physical motion and contact.
So yes, they are rules-first. But still focused in different directions.
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@Taskerland I always took the stance, after they started showing up on market (my first exposure was Maelstrom Storytelling) that "story games" were simulation games just as much as were the advanced tactical simulators like AD&D. They just simulated something different: the narrative beats and genre tropes of stories instead of the minutiae of physical motion and contact.
So yes, they are rules-first. But still focused in different directions.
@Taskerland I'm not sure what a **game** that wasn't rules-facing would even look like. Unless I'm just missing something. Can you think of any?
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@Taskerland I always took the stance, after they started showing up on market (my first exposure was Maelstrom Storytelling) that "story games" were simulation games just as much as were the advanced tactical simulators like AD&D. They just simulated something different: the narrative beats and genre tropes of stories instead of the minutiae of physical motion and contact.
So yes, they are rules-first. But still focused in different directions.
@ZDL My view is that a lot of them are gamist but they're non-competitive, non-adversarial, and engagement with the rules is mediated through engagement with the themes that are then encoded into the rules.
So in practice you might talk about the game being all about mental illness but in practice you're rolling 'depression dice'
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@Taskerland I'm not sure what a **game** that wasn't rules-facing would even look like. Unless I'm just missing something. Can you think of any?
@ZDL I'm showing my roots here but my native 'culture of play' was all about setting, atmosphere, and character. The rules tended to be quite minimal and transparent.
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@ZDL I'm showing my roots here but my native 'culture of play' was all about setting, atmosphere, and character. The rules tended to be quite minimal and transparent.
@Taskerland Mine too. I came at D&D in '77 from the drama flakes side of the fence, not the wargamers' side. I **made** the rules transparent by basically letting other people tell me when I had to roll dice and what to roll. Then they'd interpret the results and I'd use it as the prompt for improv.
I still do it that way. It's just that the rules are now focused on supplying improv prompts instead of supplying them on accident.
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@Taskerland Mine too. I came at D&D in '77 from the drama flakes side of the fence, not the wargamers' side. I **made** the rules transparent by basically letting other people tell me when I had to roll dice and what to roll. Then they'd interpret the results and I'd use it as the prompt for improv.
I still do it that way. It's just that the rules are now focused on supplying improv prompts instead of supplying them on accident.
@ZDL That is how I tend to play too
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@SJohnRoss I suspect that 'theatre kids' is quite often just code for 'queer' or 'femme' or 'not a human armpit'.
Either way, I think it takes a special kind of delusion to look at the recent history of RPGs and conclude that theatrical, RP-focused types have somehow been in the driving seat.
Even during the WW years, those types generally wound up getting routed into LARPs.
@Taskerland When I was still worrying about them, I meant actual literal theater kids ... because I sometimes danced on stage, sang on stage, acted on stage, and wrote for the stage, I'd seen what they'd already done to make literal theater more difficult to work near.
