Also, you seem to agree with me but you say you do not, which is odd. You say you need to moderate Competition, I agree, and I think it should be done by rules.
Another thing about the primacy of rules is that I’m sick of games who are “Competitive”, like old-skool D&D. The mechanics don’t support competition but it was acted as if it were, which created much hang-ups.

I don’t think Story needs to be creative, but I think it’s a shared goal of anyone to have a good story. For an example of “Competitive” Story look at Capes, but then you have Competitive mechanics which define who can set the Story, yet, you all want a cool story.
Rather incoherent, but that’s where I got thus far.

You forgot Game. It’s not “CSI” but “CSI Game”. Also, to be exact, I never mention “RPGs”, so when someone told me there is no Role-play opportunities in Cranium Rats I accepted and told him I don’t care about it!

Also, I believe primacy of rules everywhere. Interaction and Story also need to be set down in rules. I grow sick and tired of games that rely on Consensus and Sociality for you to do what they should be doing. The game doesn’t do these things, the group does.

Last, I don’t deal with “How” exactly, I post little ideas and thought-teasers. I make you think about Constraints, I make you think about your social contract, I give you small tidbits, but you can’t really “Define” how-to-do Competitive games, since the possibilities are endless.
I merely point out some points they share and why(Gm-less/GM-full, Scene Setting with Flags, etc.)

Hopefully I’ll have some more feedback for this soon.
-Marco

Getting lost in the minutiae of Chamber cost me … a year, maybe two – three? All of that time, I was convinced that I was “working on my game”. In fact, I was avoiding working on the actual game by focusing on what, at the time, looked like the ultimate goal – a sort of ‘mathematical proof of concept’ for the game. As if by reconciling bales of hay and horeshoes, I could prove the larger validity of the game.

It was, and continues to be, a very hard thing to avoid doing – even after I’ve cast off the chains of Chamber. The old habits are the hardest to die.

To whit: designers (including myself) often use minutia as a way of reassuring themselves that they aren’t falling prey to “The Big Empty” ™.

The Big Empty, of course, being the game that’s about something, and yet contains no content.

Mechanics are a big, solid something. Mechanics are a blunt object of content. You can point at mechanics and say “Look, I created content.”

And it’s easy to create bushels of content about minor things. Equipment, stats, derived stats, skills, derived skills, the list goes on and on.

It’s harder to point at big picture stuff and say “That’s content.” Or, rather, it’s hard to convince the vocal online rpg audience that it’s content.

There’s a level where online rpg folk tend to poo-poo anything that isn’t raw math as “fluff”, and dismiss it as the stuff of would be novelists who don’t understand what gamers really want.

So rules that are broad in scope – as high level rules must be – take on the stigma of being The Big Empty, and the minutia, which is often unimportant and superfluous to the point of the game, becomes the justification crutch.

…I think I’ve just gone off on an unrelated tangent. Sorry.

Patrick Y.

That’s Nar, in descriptive terms, which is also why “style of play” may not be a very good way of teaching what the term means.

Substantively, his Nar 101 leaves out the important fact that orthodox Forge theory wouldn’t classify an instance of play as Narrativism if the GM is the one creating theme (addressing Premise) while the players merely play along, passively appreciating the story being presented. Why that is gets you into issues of Coherence and the problematic assignment of certain types of story-oriented play into Simulationism.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html

I don’t think he was complaining about the game’s initial definition but how it is misused by gamers who have a passing knowledge of the Forge and don’t really know what it means.

I adore the Forge and its games but GNS leaves me pretty cold.

Hm. I may just need to write this all out. Seems like there’s a d20 alternate handbook in the making.