Structure, Focus, Setting: Classifying Game Types

[The Bloody Nine]

Over at The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms
... now with 35% more arrogance! blog run by Talysman "A Pundit and enthusiast of old-school D&D and a few modern rules-light RPGs" he writes Structure, Focus, Setting: Classifying Game Types and also refers back to Whatchamacallit Games where he refers to this post by Robin D Laws See P. XX: The F20 Era.

It is funny right off the top when Robin wants people to use F20 when you are talking about D&D (undefined though as to which D&D) and the first thing in the comments is a guy saying that he has trademarked F20 for his own game, but doesn't mind it being used.

Then we get into  Talysman in the Whatchamacallit Games post saying 

In the Pen & Paper RPG Bloggers Community on G+, Tim Baker linked to a blogpost by Robin Laws in which he laments that there’s no easy way to talk about D&D and its descendants, in contrast to non-D&D old school RPGs or modern non-fantasy relatives of D&D, like D&D Modern. For legal reasons, we use circumlocutions, such as one he cites: “d20-rolling fantasy games”. And he suggests the term “F20” as a good shorthand for exactly this.

I, of course, object.

He is fine with the F for Fantasy, but thinks referring to the d20 is wrong because he feels it is wrong to put any focus on the dice mechanics.

I’d almost be tempted to suggest calling D&D derivatives “Class and Level Fantasy Adventure Games” or “CLeF Adventure Games”, or even “A-CLeF Games” if you wanted something really short. But then you run into my biggest objection to the Robin Laws suggestion: clever abbreviations are more trouble than they are worth. If you come up with an abbreviation like “F20” or “CLeF”, no one knows what it means until you explain it to them.

Then in his latest post he gets back in on this saying 

Structure, Focus, Setting: Classifying Game Types

I am shocked I never expanded on my game classification system here.

I was reminded of my old definition of CLEF games (Class and Level Exploration Fantasy,) first hinted at in my criticism of Robin Laws in the Whatchamacallit Games post. (I’m sorry CLEF never caught on, but ecstatic that Robin Laws’s “F20” suggestion didn’t, either.)

Apparently, all my later references to CLEF games were buried in comments on forums. But I did expand on a classification built around three broad parts to any RPG:

Structure: How PCs are defined, particularly in terms of how issues are resolved. For example, “Class and Level”.
Focus: What the PCs do, and how they advance. For example, “Exploration”.
Setting: Where the PCs do it. Genre defined as broad types of location. For example, “Fantasy (Worlds)”.

So my question to all of you, does any of this kind of thing serve any useful purpose? I can refer to OD&D, B/X, 1E AD&D, 3E or 5E and everyone knows what I am talking about, I can refer to each clone by name and no confusion.

[Deleted]

No, it does not.

Though Robin Laws may be a very nice person, I think in terms of games he's full of crap. His "Laws of Good Gamemastering" are nothing but leading players around by the nose. It's all closed-system "you are puppets in my story" garbage.

[robertsconley]

Apr 13, 2018 8:55:47 GMT -5 The Bloody Nine said:

So my question to all of you, does any of this kind of thing serve any useful purpose? I can refer to OD&D, B/X, 1E AD&D, 3E or 5E and everyone knows what I am talking about, I can refer to each clone by name and no confusion.

No because the focus on needs to be on what it takes to run a fun and interesting campaign. The rules are only a subset of that and are only important in terms of how well they help the referee adjudicate the actions of the PCs.

How well the rules help depends on several factors among them; personal preference as to the level of detail covered, how well they reflect the setting of the campaign, and how well they reflect how the referee and player think about the setting. The latter is important because given two sets of rules that equally represent a setting, one may work better with how everyone think than the other.

But in the end the whole thing about rules is a matter of personal preference akin to whether one like fantasy versus science fiction, Greyhawk versus Forgotten Relams, Third Imperium over Star Trek or Star Wars. The rules don't need to be anything except reflecting the setting in some way, help with adjudicating the actions, and finally whether folks in the group like them.

The problem with Robin Law, and many other author writing about running RPGs is a hyper focus on the rules. Rules can't fix anything if the referee is a poor adjudicator, the players exhibit poor sportsmanship, or the campaign is boring as hell.

Debating the fine points of classification to me is utterly pointless in terms of running a good campaign. Nor does it help evaluate how well it reflects a given setting. It may help with finding a different system of rules similar to those you had success with. But it seems to me that not a good point to waste a lot of words.

What would be useful is an author explaining why they wrote a set of rules the way they did. Why did they pick 3d6 bell curve as a dice resolution over a 1d20 linear curve. And so forth and so on. That would make it easier for me to decide whether that set of rules would fit the setting I intend to run.

As a side not fitting the setting is not the same as realism. The criteria on which I decide which set of rules work with running a campaign based on Saturday morning cartoons is different from one I want to use for a campaign based around William of Normandy's conquest of England vesus one used to run a campaign where the focus is on exploring multiple level dungeon built by a crazy wizard.

[Hexenritter Verlag]

Nope, we do not need any other funky terms to use to describe our games. If I need to explain what OD&D is, I'll do so as concisely as I can, the same goes for Delving Deeper or any other OSR I might run.

[The Bloody Nine]

 I love it when people agree with me! I fail to see the point of trying to invent boxes to put everything in and I'm happy to see that I am not alone.