Post by darkling on Aug 21, 2011 12:34:10 GMT -6
Not saying I necessarily could have interpreted the LBB or if I had I would have interpreted them the same way as I did when I was first introduced to them several months ago. But don't think to paint us all with the same broad brush, kay?
Ya know, over the last week or so, lots of people just seem to want to get miffed because they can, and I am about to start ignoring posts of this type.
To keep it on topic, however, The Complete Book of Wargames boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18531/the-complete-book-of-wargames gave the LBBs a rating LOWER than its lowest possible rating for rules presentation (Rock Bottom). That said, they also stated that, despite its enormous deficiencies, it was the best [rpg] game going.
So how about we take these posts for what they are and stop trying to find insults where they don't exist?
Sorry if that came of as miffed, I wasn't offended and it wasn't at all intended to seem that way. What I was trying to say was that the list of things you see as unintuitive and requiring prior explanation:
the idea that a game might exist (a) with or without a board and playing pieces; (b) if it did have a board and playing pieces, that they could have an enormous number of variant forms; (c) the idea that there need be no ultimate goal to the game, i.e. you did not need to checkmate the king or force all the other players to sell their properties and declare bankruptcy or conquer the world; (d) that the game could be focused in a variety of ways, as with simple adventuring or building contacts in the city's underworld or conquering lands and raising armies; (e) the players could play competitively or cooperatively as they chose. None of these things is intuitive to the typical Monopoly or Risk style boardgamer, much of it would have been out of the experience of many miniatures wargamers of the period,
were all concepts that were very intuitive to me and my group of friends at about age ten. In my experience, these ideas are common elements of children's play and that it is the normal Monopoly and Risk type board games that are more of an abstraction and a learned ability. I mean (a)-(e) could all be applied to games we played with dolls or legos or games we played when we pretended to be our favorite fictional characters. The only thing separating those from an RPG was a hit detection system.
I totally agree that the LBB have a horrid rules presentation. I had to spend hours writing quick reference sheets and suchnot for my group the first time we played, and even then there is a lot of confusion. I have absolutely no doubt that Holmes and the more recent clones have cleared a lot of that up and have already stated that I play the LBB more from a sense of stubbornness than any particular merit they have. But I find the idea that people need 'what an RPG is' explained to them by Holmes a weird concept. I've never encountered a person who didn't understand the 'it's like playing cowboys and indians with rules' explanation. You have obviously had a different experience of things, which is all I am trying to say: we shouldn't be generalizing.