anyway.

Sometimes it takes two to make a great game. Tweet/Laws in OtE, Tweet/Rein*Hagen in ArM, Petersen/Stafford/Willis in Ghostbusters, etc. I have a strong suspicion that game designer teams composed of one visionary and one mechanics person work especially well - one person to do most of the dreaming, another to make it accessible to the world.

You see this in music some times. From Lennon/McCartney (one a misfit visionary rocker, the other a smooth melody maker) to the Throwing Muses' Hersh/Donelly (one a manic depressive, the other a pop queen), some of the best bands manage to make different sensibilities interact as a whole.

That's why I think some of the most visionary designers have the most unreliable output. They need a producer, a co-designer of equal skill, but different sensibility, to really shine.

What's interesting about John's list is that most of the innovative breakout ideas basically are one-time things.  The larger "name" games tend to stick close to what has gone on before.  And much of the things that the general public touts as "innovative" are usually mash ups of previous innovations (Exalted = Storyteller + Feng Shui, D&D 3.0 = R. Tal games + Storyteller's Power lists).

List aside, probably the biggest innovations in my opinion:

- Unified resolution mechanics (who did this first? anyone know?)
- Point build character creation, ability/spell creation, etc. (Build your own)
- Personality mechanics (I believe CoC started this)
- Dramatic modifiers to resolution
- Mechanics for social resolution
- Rock, Paper, Scissors style strategies applied towards mechanics
- Dials (modular rules, as a core concept, not as houserules)
- Directed Rewards (for something other than killing monsters or showing up)
- Instant Rewards (not end of session/campaign)
- Scene Framing
- Author/Director Stance as a part of mechanics
- Open table discussion (everyone can make suggestions) as part of rules text
- Player right to establish/introduce conflict

Um, basically, you can see most of the innovations revolve around Reward, GM/Player power, and Resolution.  About half of these make regular appearances in mainstream games, though usually not all together.

Matthijs and Chris,

The things you bring up are part of the reason why in the post I did at Yudhishthira's Dice on this topic I mentioned paradigmatic thought, and its strengths. By this I mean that when you have a group that is working on a similar field in a variety of ways you will get usually get better results when looked at over the long term than when you try to leap from individual genius to individual genius.

The individual genius model is one that we often fall back on (one person will make a great game, then a greater game, then the greatest game!) but that is often not the way that a lot of fields work in reality. How many scientists win more than 1 Nobel Prize? The reasons you bring up are things that are important to look at in the way RPGs have developed historically. Often it has not been one individual genius ??? though they have brought about innovations it is other people working with those innovations to make them tighter, better, faster, stronger that has resulted in some of the great points of RPGs. When someone took the great idea that was the insanity mechanic in CoC and turned it into something else, which turned into something else, which turned into the madness meter in UA or the Personality Traits in HeroQuest, you get real craft.

At the same time I don???t want to punch down the idea of the individuals ability to achieve either. Someone like Ron or Vincent, for example, may have a journeman game out and be working towards a masterwork game of their own. I think that is a noble goal, because the counter balance to group-thought is that without the occasional shining star the group can flounder and get mired in ???the way it is??? philosophies. (Look at the decade by decade inbreeding that has happened in RPG history.) So someone like Vincent always striving to push forward is a good thing.

And when he makes his masterwork game, the rest of us must fall upon it, strip it for parts, and carry it???s holy relic corpse out into the gaming world to mill and churn out something even better.

Brand, I like your comparison to the field of science. For some reason we'd love to say "X is the genius that invented Y!", while in reality, X may just be the person who got an article/game published in the right place at the right time, building on the work of many others.

Hi Brand,

Most definitely, probably one of the best reads for me personally was Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine which addressed the concept of ideas evolving and building on each other.  That's why I'm pointing to concepts as opposed to specific games, and in some cases I recognize that some of the ideas may have been independently developed.

I think a major portion of craft is the ability to look at your own work as well as those of others and know which parts to cannibalize and how to fit those pieces together.  Consider Luke's modifications to Burning Wheel Revised, which took a rather solid game and added some stuff he saw work well for other games and ideas, and made it even stronger.  The craft of the work wasn't just taking other ideas and welding them on, but making them a solid part of the whole.

If we make this journal thing fly, one of the specs I really want in place is a way to track the evolution of ideas.

Chris wrote: Basically, you can see most of the innovations revolve around Reward, GM/Player power, and Resolution. About half of these make regular appearances in mainstream games, though usually not all together.

Well, I suspect that's more because those are the only things you're looking at. There have been a lot of innovations in terms of how to design and present backgrounds, character design (classes, niche protection, choices), adventure models, and so forth.

- Unified resolution mechanics (who did this first? anyone know?)
Well, depends where you draw the line.  Traveller (1977) put everything into 2d6 rolls against a target number, but it was explained differently. The landmark game was RuneQuest (1978), which made combat and skill use both into rolls under a percentile skill.  But it had special rules for specials and criticals in combat.  After that, I think the landmark was James Bond 007 (1983), which had a true universal mechanic that used level of success in both combat and other activities.

- Point build character creation, ability/spell creation, etc. (Build your own)
Melee (1977), though Champions (1981) certainly deserves mention as fully realizing the concept.

- Personality mechanics (I believe CoC started this)
I'd say Bushido (1980) deserves mention for its honor system, but that was followed quickly by Call of Cthulhu (1981).

- Dramatic modifiers to resolution
Champions (1981) included bonuses for "surprise maneuver" which was a cool move as described by the player.  But as for explicit modifiers for drama per se, I'd say Paranoia or Toon (both 1984).

- Mechanics for social resolution
I'm not sure.  Certainly James Bond 007 (1983) was the first to really handle this integratedly.  There were prior implementations, but I can't think of them as much.

- Rock, Paper, Scissors style strategies applied towards mechanics
Hard to say on this one.

- Dials (modular rules, as a core concept, not as houserules)
Probably Worlds of Wonder (1982) as the first universal system in the sense of core rules + varying genre-specific add-ons.

- Directed Rewards (for something other than killing monsters or showing up)
Hard to say.  There are rewards for skill use and/or training in Traveller and RuneQuest. Rolemaster (1980) greatly expanded what XP were given for.  But perhaps Marvel Superheroes' Karma (1984) for good deeds is more what you're talking about.

- Instant Rewards (not end of session/campaign)
James Bond 007 (1983) has immediate rewards for hero points although not for experience points.  As for all rewards being instant, I'm not sure.

- Scene Framing
Hard to say.  I think Torg (1990) was among the first games to have explicit mechanics based on "scene".  Probably Theatrix (1993) after that for making them more central.

- Author/Director Stance as a part of mechanics
Ars Magica (1987) through Whimsy Cards and troupe style play, then somewhat more explicitly Prince Valiant (1989) through storyteller cards, and more fully in Theatrix's plot points (1993).

- Open table discussion (everyone can make suggestions) as part of rules text
Well, if we're not counting Whimsy cards since only the card-holder can suggest, then this would probably be Theatrix's Improvisations (1993).

- Player right to establish/introduce conflict
I'd put this first as Champions (1981) for allowing the players to define their own Hunted and frequency of Hunted which show up on an objective scale rather than GM choice. But after that, Ars Magica, Prince Valiant, and Theatrix as above.

Hi John,

Thanks for the historical info... as far as the nature of the innovations- I did say "in my opinion".

I'd be very interested to hear what general concepts you considered worthy innovations, care to share?

Chris

Well, it's kind of a long topic.  I'd like to talk about it, but maybe as a post in my blog.  But for example,

Model for adventure is a big one.  The original model for adventure was a dungeon map.  In Traveller, this was similar: a spaceship or space station map where the PCs had a designated goal.  I'd say the first major innovation past that was Champions.  Instead of detailed locations, Champions instead had detailed character sheets for the villains.  There were maps to fight in, but they often had no key or details (i.e. the street map).  Later, plotted act-by-act or even scene-by-scene adventures came to the fore.

The development of character categories bear mention as well.  I have a discussion of classes and templates on my system design page.  I'd add to this "splats" which are usually a more personalized form of loose classes.

But I'll have to work on the longer list.

Matthijs Holter wrote:
Brand, I like your comparison to the field of science. For some reason we'd love to say "X is the genius that invented Y!", while in reality, X may just be the person who got an article/game published in the right place at the right time, building on the work of many others.

This reminds me of auteurism in the film industry: "Director X is the genius who created movie Y," when in reality there's a literal army of other folks who played vital roles in bringing it to the screen.