Are the 90s the "lost age" rules-wise ?

Guts · Post by **Guts** » Thu Jul 04, 2019 4:34 pm

70s - the pioneers. Wonky unintuitive rules. Simple - but solid - play structures and premises (the dungeon). DIY because the official rules won't cover everything, or cover but badly.

80s - the engineers. Reaction to pioneers turns into seek for coherent rules turns to obsession with simulation. Also, diversification of play structures and premises (life out of the dungeon).

90s - the storytellers. The Fluff-age. Reaction to engineers mean a focus on flavor, aesthetics, atmosphere and stories. Poor rules and structures paradigms lead to incoherent products rules-wise.

00s - the designers. System matters. Drop of legacy concepts for conscious use of rules as tools to reach thematic/functional goals. Also, first strong genre-emulation.

10s - the refiners. First non-rupture to previous age. Refinement of that paradigm into simplicity and easiness of play - even revisiting and applying it to older ages. Wild diversification of structures and premises.

From all those, I think the 90s were a lost decade rules-wise. Even the 70s and 80s had more though put into rules.

Makes sense?

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 1:27 am

The 2010s are waaaay worse than the '90s, by my reckoning. The '90s games their flaws but they had Shadowrun, Earthdawn and Feng Shui which at least feature some interesting failures.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 1:33 am

What the hell are you talking about? Shadowrun and WoD were in the nineties. With some interpretation, WH40K as we know it only truly got started in the nineties what with its paradigm shift to being a Space Marines-driven wargame.

John Magnum · Post by **John Magnum** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 1:38 am

Why do people keep responding to silva threads? He's even resumed his old habit of filling the board with a billion barely-distinguishable Grand Theory topics. It's just that he's now a bit more circumspect about calling TGD favorites the worst-designed RPGs ever and hailing PBTA as the system that finally properly structured play.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 1:41 am

John Magnum wrote:Why do people keep responding to silva threads? He's even resumed his old habit of filling the board with a billion barely-distinguishable Grand Theory topics. It's just that he's now a bit more circumspect about calling TGD favorites the worst-designed RPGs ever and hailing PBTA as the system that finally properly structured play.

Who else are we going to dunk on?

Guts · Post by **Guts** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 2:55 am

Whipstitch wrote:The 2010s are waaaay worse than the '90s by my reckoning

Wut? If anything, 2010's games at least address their central premises with coherent rules, something most 90s games didn't (most of the time). Look again: Pathfinder, Fiasco, Fate Core, The One Ring, Nights Black Agents, Icons, Smallville, Marvel Heroic, Dungeon World/PbtA, Hillfolk, 13th Age, Mutant Year Zero, Tales from the Loop, Feng Shui 2, Beyond the Wall, Adventurer Conquerer King, The Black Hack, etc.

The average game here is faster, simpler and more coherent than it's 90s counterpart.

Whipstitch wrote:The '90s games their flaws but they had Shadowrun

..with it's unplayable hacking & rigging subsystems and opaque variable target numbers?

Whipstitch wrote:Earthdawn and Feng Shui which at least feature some interesting failures.

Here we agree.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:..WoD was in the nineties

You mean the game that nobody until this day know how is supposed to be played, a fact that made the very authors come out and whine that "nobody plays our game as we intended" ?

Oh, come on.

Libertad · Post by **Libertad** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 3:17 am

Masturbatory fixation on metaplot and wannabe-novelists are some other major defining features of the 90s.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 3:45 am

Guts wrote:70s - the pioneers. Wonky unintuitive rules. Simple - but solid - play structures and premises (the dungeon). DIY because the official rules won't cover everything, or cover but badly.

80s - the engineers. Reaction to pioneers turns into seek for coherent rules turns to obsession with simulation. Also, diversification of play structures and premises (life out of the dungeon).

90s - the storytellers. The Fluff-age. Reaction to engineers mean a focus on flavor, aesthetics, atmosphere and stories. Poor rules and structures paradigms lead to incoherent products rules-wise.

00s - the designers. System matters. Drop of legacy concepts for conscious use of rules as tools to reach thematic/functional goals. Also, first strong genre-emulation.

10s - the refiners. First non-rupture to previous age. Refinement of that paradigm into simplicity and easiness of play - even revisiting and applying it to older ages. Wild diversification of structures and premises.

From all those, I think the 90s were a lost decade rules-wise. Even the 70s and 80s had more though put into rules.

Makes sense?

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 4:13 am

I was gonna reply to this threads premise but then decided no, it is a return to classic Silva thread. Bullshit classifications formed of ignorance and the end goal is likely to lead back to garbage bearworld mentions even though there is literally nothing of value to consider there.

I guess what I can say regarding arbitrary decade groupings of rpgs is that interesting games came out in all the decades. Of this current decade the most interesting thing about them isn’t the games themselves but the shift in how they are produced. If the 90’s were a dark age then the 10’s are prehistory. Rocks and sticks, motherfuckers.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 5:03 am

erik wrote:I was gonna reply to this threads premise but then decided no, it is a return to classic Silva thread. Bullshit classifications formed of ignorance and the end goal is likely to lead back to garbage bearworld mentions even though there is literally nothing of value to consider there.

Pretty much. I'm basically just taking a moment to remind him that no matter how butthurt he gets that proportional damage codes and the magic system alone makes Shadowrun more interesting than pretty much anything he purports to actually like.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 5:23 am

10s - the refiners. First non-rupture to previous age. Refinement of that paradigm into simplicity and easiness of play - even revisiting and applying it to older ages. Wild diversification of structures and premises.

What is this word salad? Give bloody examples of what you mean.

You are just putting words together. There are no definitions or context to what you are saying. What I can gleam from this is that there were various systems, but that existed before the 2010s. Simplicity and ease of play, nope that existed before 2010s as well.

Ignimortis · Post by **Ignimortis** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 5:45 am

Even the 1990s developers, as focused on their pseudo-narrative bullshit as they were, tried to put more thought into rules than the guys from the 2010s. 2010s are all GM wankery and "oh it's not badly designed or non-existent, you're SUPPOSED to ask your GM about that, not the book".

1990s games had bad rules, 2010s games have no fucking rules. With bad rules, you can find something that doesn't work properly and fix it. With no rules, you either have to trust in your GM to be a very good GM (not just a mediocre GM, but a very good one), or write the rules yourself.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 8:56 am

Ignimortis wrote:Even the 1990s developers, as focused on their pseudo-narrative bullshit as they were, tried to put more thought into rules than the guys from the 2010s. 2010s are all GM wankery and "oh it's not badly designed or non-existent, you're SUPPOSED to ask your GM about that, not the book".

1990s games had bad rules, 2010s games have no fucking rules. With bad rules, you can find something that doesn't work properly and fix it. With no rules, you either have to trust in your GM to be a very good GM (not just a mediocre GM, but a very good one), or write the rules yourself.

Just because the rules are fewer doesn't mean that there's no rules. And even in the 1990s the rules never covered every possible scenario and sooner or later you had to ask the DM about something.

Nowadays the designers who do care about lots of rules just went digital. In the 2010s there's plenty of cheap if not free tools to make your own game where the computer takes care of all the boring calculations and rules checking and also a lot more artificial memory to play with.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 1:23 pm

One of the things the 3.x designers were responding to was a proliferation of rules in AD&D that covered a variety of similar things in very different way.

3.x is accused of 'system bloat', but most of that was piles of character options that nobody could really use, not whole new major subsystems for anything new.

In some ways it's fun to characterize a decade in a particular way like saying 'people in the 70s had bad hair'. It doesn't have to be universally true if it was more often true and was significantly more common than the decade that preceded it and the decade that followed, but there are enough exceptions that ultimately you're using the statement for your own convenience.

saithorthepyro · Post by **saithorthepyro** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 5:43 pm

Are those list of 2010 great hits that Guts posted actual RPGs? Because I only recognize maybe a fourth of them, and of the ones I recognize, classifying Pathfinder as what he considers as 2010 design is not correct given its essentially DnD 3.75

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Fri Jul 05, 2019 11:01 pm

I am very confident that Guts is Silva. Others have stated it too and I would bet actual money on it. Guts has posted exclusively about Apocalypse world games since his first post and only mentions D&D/Shadowrun/Pathfinder to offhandedly namecheck them while talking about *world. His punctuation and capitalization patterns are the same and he regularly starts threads with some kind of broad sweeping question or statement about all RPG's ever and then exclusively talks about *world after the first post. He has started multiple threads claiming that the *world games are the future of all gaming and that everything has lead up to them and finally he does the silva thing of multi-quoting someone and starting with an affirmative ("Definitely", "I agree") before finishing the sentence of him just writing whatever he was writing unrelated to what the person before him said.

Basically everything from the content to the style of writing is identical and indicates Silva got bored after a year and a half of just reading and made a sock puppet account to write more about how bearworld is the future of everything.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Jul 06, 2019 12:00 am

I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was restarting a clean slate. He really has been improved. But I reckon it is hard to not revert to one’s old tricks. Why i tended to ignore silvacarnations in the past was the posting style more so than the interest in a niche system that only provides game design lessons as a cautionary tale. Chain threads chain posts chain quotes. They become a gish gallop that gets annoyingly out of hand.

Keep the garbage contained and it becomes more tolerable.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sat Jul 06, 2019 6:39 am

Let's see if there's anything in the concept.

70's is inventing RPGs. You go from the Fantasy suppliment for Chainmail in 1969 to AD&D plus Holmes Basic in 1979. A lot of it is just figuring out how anything can even work at all, and AD&D is basically a couple thousand post-it note concepts stuck together trying to answer that, which is why it's all so inconsistent.

80's is fixing AD&D. Like, everything is "AD&D, but ...". You get self-consistent systems, bell curves, almost dice pools, terminology changes, new Basic D&D editions trying to explain how to play, and also get into crazy system bloat with big books covering relatively minor edge cases in the rules. Then 2nd edition in 1989 and AD&D didn't adapt any of it, at all, and still outsold them massively.

90's is fixing Roleplaying itself. As a hobby, every book said everyone else was doing it wrong. If you weren't there, you can't imagine how fucking oppressive the whole thing was with every fucking little splat book telling you how to feel about orating a hit roll and how the GM should punish you for failing, berk. New systems tended toward forcing you into a new "feel" rather than fixing anything, and generally failed at it.

00's is 3rd edition D&D, and it's d20 system. Your favourite game got converted to d20, and you bought it, and it didn't really work all that well because d20 is just built to do dungeon crawls and not anything else. It totally fixed (low to mid level) D&D, and kinda fucked everything else up.

The reaction to "oh, right, we do actually need mechanics of our own" picked up steam right into 4th edition D&D, which tried that and shat the bed, much like everyone else had, because it turns out making your own mechanics is very hard to do. Instead of all that, Pathfinder just carried on doing 3e in 2009.

10's is surrender. It's basically Cargo Cult game design. You run a playtest and polling like 3e did, but ignore it all and just use push polls. You make a consistent resolution system like 3e did, but don't fill in the results bit because bears attack. Then you slap together a couple thousand post-it notes like AD&D did; and when that doesn't work you tell people they're doing it wrong like 2nd edition did. Message boards are all carefully manicured passive-aggressive nightmares where you may not deny the success of the new edition, but really they weren't even trying.

Remember when Monte said he was no longer going to make rules for assholes? Yeah, that's just him giving up, deciding that rules which work aren't worth making, because the players he's willing to listen to will coddle him with stories of having fixed it themselves.

20's? Cargo cults only go away when the real thing turns up again. Someone needs to make a decent base game for everyone else to copy, or this will just continue. Nothing is on the horizon, to my eye.

That is extremely over-generalised, it is every RPG ever in 500 words after all, but it's consistent enough within my experience.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Jul 06, 2019 8:03 am

There's a lot more to the 80's than riffing on D&D/AD&D. Paranoia, GURPS, Toon, Marvel Superheroes, WH40k, Call of Cthulhu... those are just some that I remember playing in the 80's and early 90's. Lots of branching out. Palladium came out in 80's too, but that one legit falls into your category of trying to fix AD&D. Ditto for Rolemaster. I'd classify the 80's as when things really started branching away from D&D in earnest.

GURPS I think started the trend towards trying to get a universal system for different settings. Palladium later tried to do the same with their bastardized D&D engine. I think the 90's defining feature in roleplaying is when other RPGs finally supplanted D&D/AD&D.

If I had to classify the 00's then it would be the dawn of OGL, and rise of d20/DnD, and the end or serious decline of a lot of competitors. Palladium, White Wolf, FASA.

Cargo cult 10's sounds on point. That, and the ability for lone individuals to produce works above 90's production values. Art, layout, printing, even funding.

Shit. There's wikipedia articles already written on this garbage. Nice to see that my memory wasn't totally off on some of the major games of the periods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o ... ying_games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_ ... ying_games

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Mon Jul 08, 2019 8:24 am

Paranoia's a low-level AD&D hack, pure and simple, everything in it is playing on AD&D tropes.

I mean, the 80's were hating on classes and trying anything but a d20 to hit (ironic), and some of them loved result tables just way too much, but just about everyone was still playing where you rolled up a PC, went into some tunnels, dealt with the problems therein, and recovered the McGuffin. Yeah, your reward in CoC is insanity and death rather than levels, but there's a random disease table and an insanity table in AD&D and if you use them (don't though) then the same basic thing happens.

The 90's told you to feel the angst of your Vampire as you sat around being sad together about how unfair it was to just exist in this plight of not being the adults in the room yet. Not that most people did, but some people did, and the 90's was comparatively full of it. And unlike the OP, they totally also tried a bunch of new rules. Amber Diceless was a revolution all on it's own, and still carries influence in the hobby.

Guts · Post by **Guts** » Mon Jul 08, 2019 11:23 am

Yep, but how popular or influential was Amber to the 90s as a whole? Or Everway and Over the Edge for that matter? I think the fact those games began to pop in the 90s (and they began to pop exactly because the hobby was saturated by the simulatiomist-complexity-madness of the 80s engineers) dont mean they were influential to the design trends of the 90s. On the contrary, I would say it was only in the 00s that the indie-crowd looked back to those games to refine and expand on them.

erik · Post by **erik** » Mon Jul 08, 2019 2:02 pm

Guts wrote: the hobby was saturated by the simulatiomist-complexity-madness of the 80s engineers

No no no! Bad puppy! Not on the carpet! Those aren’t even terms anyone agrees to. Some aren’t even words! The hobby wasn’t saturated by shit. It was still growing. I dispute everything you just wrote in parts and as a whole.

The 80’s saw lots of novel designs and genres and the 90’s continued it. There was lots of room for development and new ideas. I recall hearing about Amber diceless and seeing it in stores but nobody i knew played it and I wasn’t gung ho enough to push it on my friends since “diceless” was a turn-off for me.

As for “indie” just about every TTRPG started as an indie. And to wit all the designers began as amateurs. Modestly successful rpgs often still fail to function as an adequate day job for its creators. Indie is nothing new. What is a more recent development is that there are game design veterans and companies with history now.

Guts · Post by **Guts** » Mon Jul 08, 2019 2:49 pm

erik wrote:
Guts wrote: the hobby was saturated by the simulatiomist-complexity-madness of the 80s engineers
No no no! Bad puppy! Not on the carpet! Those aren’t even terms anyone agrees to. Some aren’t even words!

If you don't know what simulation and complexity is, I don't know what to say.

erik wrote:The hobby wasn’t saturated by shit. It was still growing.

Those are not excludents.

erik wrote:The 80’s saw lots of novel designs and genres and the 90’s continued it.

No one said the contrary. Ghostbusters and Pendragon in the 80s, and Everway and Castle Falkenstein in the 90s, are examples. That doesn't mean they were popular though. AD&D, Traveller, GURPS and WoD were popular.

erik wrote:As for “indie” just about every TTRPG started as an indie.

Sorry, I referred to the specific crowd at The Forge there, which called their products indie-games. But "Forge crowd" would be more accurate, I agree.

WiserOdin032402 · Post by **WiserOdin032402** » Tue Jul 09, 2019 3:23 pm

Honestly it feels like the 10's are going to be the era of lost rules. While more TTRPGs than ever are coming out, very few of them are well put together or well organized. Tussock is right in that it's all cargo cult. But I don't think anything's going to hit it big enough to break it.

Unless I'm completely wrong, which I might be. The only TTRPG that I can think of that would even be in a position to break the cargo cult is the upcoming Cyberpunk RED and that's only because Cyberpunk 2077 is also coming out, which will definitely get it a lot of attention. But then again if that does happen we still aren't moving forward design-wise, we'd be falling back to late 80's early 90's style game design, so it might be a lose-lose situation.

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Are the 90s the "lost age" rules-wise ?

Are the 90s the "lost age" rules-wise ?

Re: Are the 90s the "lost age" rules-wise ?