This enables us to design faster, sleeker, tighter, because we’re designing for real live play rather than hypothetical motives that may not even exist.

Which is what I take most picking players to do after-the-fact, without the design process to back it up. It isn’t that the Forge games aren’t deeply indebted to a picking process, it’s just that they don’t think it can be done terribly well in play, after design.

Which is just to say: I think there are similar motives in both communities, it’s just that the Forge thinks those motives are best addressed in a design process rather than a play process. And I’d be willing to grant certain Forge games exemption from this pick and choose model, esp. the early ones that set the tone for later games.

I think it depends on how you go about executing your game. Personally, I think it’s possible to make a pick-and-choose game that looks pretty much just like (say) Primetime Adventures.

Of course that’s because I don’t think that games designed with a pick-and-choose philosophy of play have to be designed so that they are the only source for picking-and-choosing.

I imagine it might be possible to simply release a book that is ’15 clever pacing mechanics’ or something like that. As it stands, I think that people tend to pick-and-choose, at least in design. Consider how many games have retrofitted Vincent’s Raise-See-Raise mechanic from Dogs in the Vineyard, but not taken the rest of the mechanics. Dogs didn’t have to be an especially big game to be pick-and-choosable.

So, I guess that, ultimately, I don’t see why pick-and-choose games would be any different in terms of size. I see why they might be, but not that they must be.

Thomas

I’m not sure I’m parsing you perfectly, but I think I disagree anwyay :)

Specifically, at some level, Forge-style play is pick-and-choose. It’s just pick-and-choose at the ‘what game should we play?’ level. But if you are playing Dogs in the Vineyard, then the expectation is that you’ll play it as written.

Which isn’t bad. That’s a fine expectation, and Vincent is perfectly right to tell people who don’t play it as-written and then complain about not having fun that it’s their own dang fault.

But, that’s a different beast altogether from an explicit expectation that people aren’t going to be playing games as-written. In Forge circles, we simply don’t expect that you’re going to snag some mechanic from this game and some mechanic from that game and just use them whenever you think of it. There’s an expectation of consistency, but that’s not the only way to play.

Thomas

In a similar vein, a lot of the rationale appears on the Forge itself, again sort of loaded into the design process rather than the product. Not quite an answer, maybe just a furthering of the question.