For what it’s worth, this is my impression as well!
Claudio, I believe I’ve expressed to you before that trying to draw lines between different cultures might not be a fruitful way to do this (even if it was true), as it can push people into “us vs. them” thinking.
Nicely put, JD! I’ll second that (so anyone can and should feel free to call me out on it as well).
And me, for that matter—as has happened in this thread and its predecessor.
Hi @Froggy,
The way I’m interpreting your position on discussion around design is that it shouldn’t just focus on the theoretical but should first be grounded in an actual play experience and reflect how the design of a given game may have effected the play experience. If one wants to get more theoretical at that point—such as, discussing design alterations that could tailor the play towards a desired style or the like—this would be okay. But the idea would be to try to take those theoretical ideas into praxis, and the fruit of the theoretical discussion would be following up with how these changes effected the real world play experience once implemented. In other words design discussion would be fine but it needs to be grounded in play rather than just hypothetical abstract discussion that never becomes grounded but is simply an intellectual exercise.
If one was not sure where the boundaries were when discussion design would “Just Chat” be an appropriate place to discuss design that is a little on the theoretical side, which may be speculating on how the design would effect a given play experience; rather, than an actual play experience one has had at the table?
Thanks.
Hey, Jeff, welcome! I encourage to post a welcome message in the welcome thread.
I think that you summarized my position on design and making games pretty well.
So, first of all, if you post in the wrong category, I’ll just move it. It’s not that big of a deal.
Just Chat is as you correctly assumed the place for that kind of speculative discussion (and other things). The assumption here is that, as you said, that type of discussion will at some point be attempted to be followed up as practice. If the thread ends up later containing a large amount of actual play, I will move it to Actual Play or split the relevant content there.
The line where I would find it not acceptable even in Just Chat is when it just becomes hypothetical discussion without any grounding or attempt to ground it. At some point I’d say “alrighty, everyone has said their thing, it’s time to go and try it”.
Another type of thread that I don’t want is out-of-context “How do you do/manage X in your games?”, where X is something like “base-building”, “sandbox”, or “investigations”—an incredibly generic thing that can mean anything based on the context and type of game. In this case, the Original Poster is under the assumption that everyone knows what the word means, and/or all RPGs are similar and mechanics are interchangeable—I disagree with these quite strongly. I usually ask the user to contextualize the request. Otherwise, the result is generally each poster taking the opening post as a prompt, and piling on their opinion without much dialogue at all.
You can see an example of what I see as treading the line in this La Locanda discussion (auto-translators are your friends).
La Locanda started as a Dungeon World forum, and there are a lot of Dungeon World players on it trying to hack the system. The above thread regarding “fluid magic systems” struggled to even find what the term means, derailed quite often into baseless speculation and “if you do that, the players will do that” type of talk. All of that said, I allowed it to continue, because (a) several users were attempting to keep it on track beyond my intervention and (b) it seemed to serve a purpose to some people that didn’t conflict with the rest of the forum.
I still consider it quite a failed thread, but not enough to do anything about it. The thread spawned a bunch of experiments, few of which were actually tried, most of which failed.
If it happened now, I would probably put more effort into keeping it on a productive track, but I wouldn’t close it.
@Jeff let me know if this helped clarify my positions.
Thanks for asking! It’s often not clear to me what other people find unclear, so I appreciate the chance to explain myself.
