thread: 2005-02-03 : Roleplaying Theory Open House
On 2005-03-25, joshua m. neff wrote:
I have a topic, and I've skimmed through all of the previous posts and don't think I saw this particular one yet, so...
In DitV, you have 3 pages devoted to "The Structure of the Game," which you present as "If Dogs in the Vineyard were a board game, this would be the board."
Why don't all RPGs have this in them? Why don't all RPGs explicitly tell everyone playing them game "this is how you play the game, this is what you do"?
It seems that many RPG designers consider this kind of focus a negative aspect—a game is "just a toolkit" and people can play it however they want. Now, there's nothing in Dogs that prevents me from playing it differently, but at the same time I can pick up the game, read those pages and say, "Aha! Now I know exactly what to do when we all sit at the table."
On the other hand, one of the cool things about RPGs is that you can deviate from the intended flight path more easily than you can with, say, Monopoly or Risk.
So...should all RPGs have this kind of focused "here's how to play the game"? Would some really cool games lose something if they were more focused?
