The player decides exactly how his character acts and reacts.

This one is one my mind because I'm toying with a design which directly threatens this cow.

-B

*You have to be "smart" and/or "creative" to play them.

Posted By: Matt_SnyderHere's one I think sucks: The most important goal for a publisher is the number of sales of product.

Oh, good one! And there's one on the (traditional) consumer side that's kind of analogous: you're supposed to keep looking for the One Perfect System and play it all the time once you find it.

Posted By: BailywolfThe player decides exactly how his character acts and reacts.

Good one.

Only the character's player gets to decide what that character thinks or feels.

<blockquote>

Only the character's player gets to decide what that character thinks or feels.</blockquote>

Also a good one.

It dovetails with "social mechanics are secondary to 'role playing' "

Posted By: Matthijs
* Role-playing games are important

God, yes.

*Role-playing games need to be strange or different to be fun.

Posted By: AnemoneI see all these assumptions challenged regularly -- and successfully.

I was going to comment on this as well. It's of the reasons I love the indie/story scene so much.

Also, are we talking sacred cows of game design, or the gaming hobby?

Roleplaying games are a worthy way to spend one's time.

Roleplaying games have value. (Overlaps with "Roleplaying games are important")

Roleplaying games are not a pointless exercise in group masturbation.

System matters.

Collaboration = player buy-in.

The supplement treadmill does nothing to enhance play.

There are no sacred cows and anyone who says that there are is trying to strengthen their own ideological dingus.

Role-playing game texts can be written to a universally single set of assumptions held by readers about what a "role-playing game" consists of, based on prior experience, and since this game is simply a special case of "role-playing game," certain things are assumed to be clearly understood by everyone reading, and no person will bring to their reading a bunch of unusual assumptions about "role-playing game" which are not actually a part of the game the author describes. A bit of text at the front of the book (which usually invokes some patronizing reference to childhood activities) can suffice to bring readers who are not adequately experienced in "role-playing game" up to speed.

Role-playing game texts are collections of rules optimized for quick reference, as opposed to teaching texts. Ideally, every so often, material from supplements should be recompiled into a single, easy to use set of rules, regardless of the barriers this will create for new players.

I've always referred to these as assumptions. To me, a sacred cow is a personal artifact in a game, like "Damnit, I don't want to kill my XP system because it is the best evar and it's why I made the game and why I love it love it love it." The difference is that assumptions are either made to be challenged or aren't even seen as things to change -- not put up on a pedestal, but just covered by an illusion of "no, that's how stuff always is."

But I'll play along with an indie one that I see often: You don't need to spend text defining things like what a role-playing game is, common RPG terms like "GM", etc. People already know that, or will learn from someone who does.

I agree, Ryan. Here's one, which can obviously be really cool but often drifts into lazy designer shorthand:

*Set stakes

Posted By: Joe Murphy
Good game books are 11x7 and ~300 pages. Similarly, good game books are quirky shapes and 32 pages long.

Or, heck, even "good games need to be written down somewhere."

You need a sheet to record your character.
You play RPGs around a table.
After playing an RPG, you have told a story.

RPG's need to have clearly stated design goals.

RPG's need to be books.

Some I'm dealing with presently:

Using a d20 in your system means your game will necessarily turn out a lot like Dungeons & Dragons.

Min-maxing must be prevented by the game designer at all costs.

Allowing players the right to narrate certain things will destroy the campaign world.

Here's one I see more in "traditional"-like games: There need to be critical successes & failures.

* Whether someone has all of it, everyone has some of it, or it moves around, Authority is always in there somewhere.

Reward mechanics effect what the players do.

Actual Play threads are of any use when sussing out techniques and patterns of play.

Posted By: Matthijs* It's impossible to play this game wrong.

It's impossible to play this game right.

Posted By: Ryan MacklinA game requires by assumption that there be lasting consequences.

Oh, snap! Take that one to the practical thread.

One player -> one character.

One character -> one player.

The GM's responsibilities are a necessary requirement for roleplaying. Even if there is no GM, these responsibilities need to rotate or be distributed among the players for roleplaying to be possible.

Fanfic and fortuneless play are something fundamentally different from roleplaying.

Roleplaying is better off not addressing real, contemporary issues (which isn't enjoyable), but should focus on fantasy and historical stuff.

The purpose of roleplaying is "having fun."

Roleplaying is a game.

Roleplaying is a valuable, artistic endeavor and needs to be valued as such.

There are a ton of publishing ones, both in the mainstream and indie communities. Like: You are not a real (indie) game designer until you have written and published a game IN PRINT and sold it at GenCon, preferably through one of the post-Forge booths. Designing supplements for existing games is an easier and lesser task. Collaborating with someone else is easier (or harder) than publishing something on your own. Products with more pages are better (or worse) than products with fewer pages. 80-100 pages is the minimum for a "complete" roleplaying game. There are even cows about the dimensions of games, like how most indie games are digest or freaky (square!) sizes while most mainstream games are 8.5x11s. Games that sell more copies are better.

Designing for print (or PDF) is real design work. Designing for free publication or for your home group to play is not real design and can't possibly be as good or as interesting.

The most important part of roleplaying is actual play.

Posted By: Jason Morningstar

Posted By: Ryan MacklinA game requires by assumption that there be lasting consequences.

Oh, snap! Take that one to the practical thread.

Done (though, its own thread by Andy's request in the one you started)

New editions break old editions. Or invalidate. Or fix.

It's about having fun. I don't need to define what fun is. It just is.

The mechanics should reflect the color of the game - eg, poker in a Western.

* The common GM/players set-up is zero-sum. I.e., if you give the players more power, it means that you're taking away power from the GM.

Magic activities require the expenditure of a resource, but physical activities don't.

A new game has to be innovative in some way.

A roleplaying game needs two or more people.

Roleplaying game needs to be a game.
A roleplaying publication needs to have crunch (aka. mechanics).
The end product of a roleplaying event should be a story.
Roleplaying event should involve excitement and should be fast-paced (I was thinking about awesome, but it's such a vague term).
Different kinds of roleplaying mediums (tabletop, larp, MMO, etc) are somehow fundamentally different.
There needs to be abstraction that separates players from the fiction and puts them on even ground (social mechanics, etc).

A lot of the previously mentioned hit close to home here, and I like it.

Posted By: Ryan MacklinHalf of me agrees with you, and half of me needs to point out that it's a game by definition. Clearly the latter is supporting evidence for the former.

I thought about adding semantics, but that would have broken the nice list. But yeah; the game in roleplaying game is something that's been tagging along - it's good for explaining roleplaying as a phenomenon as most of the roleplaying takes a form of game a huge majority of publications do include a game. It's bad if we think that game-elements are essential for roleplaying and because it leads to the endless argument of what a game actually is.

- Roleplaying for Story needs the theme of the story to be addressed through "protagonizing choices" of the PCs

and the related

- Themes for a good story game should be preferably expressable as (moral) dilemmas

The examples Jonathan gives in this post apply so well I was tempted to follow up in that thread.

Paolo, yeah, totally. Story games have tended to focus on Clinton's infamous question "What would you stab someone in the face for?" or its emotional equivalent "What would you break someone's trust / heart for?" (cross-reference: Sorcerer, Dust Devils, MLWM, Dogs, Polaris, Burning Anything, TSOY, Hero's Banner, Mountain Witch, Cold City, etc., etc.). There's clearly a lot of good bloody story meat there. But there are also many other kinds of stories.

Yes, Jonathan, you got exactly to my point. I forgot to specify that I wasn't criticising Clinton's question, protagonizing choiches and so on: they are excellent techniques which give rise to awesome gaming. The point was simply they (as well as the whole "addressing premise thorugh character choices" thing) are not the one and only way to do Story Gaming.

These are cows I don't think should be slaughtered (I'm using the definition of "implicit, unquestioned, universal assumptions" for "sacred cow")

1. RPGs should be a amateur hobby; no one participating in the game should be paid money for their services. Games should not be designed with the understanding that someone will be compensated with cash by the other players.

2. Cash should not be a reward structure in the game - RPGs should not be a form of gambling for money.

"Rulebooks" and "adventures" are separate, interchangable components of a roleplaying game. (Counterexample: The Mountain Witch)

Max: well, in some limited way that cow was maybe born dead, if we formulate it as "getting paid for making roleplaying fun." We regularly pay designers and publishers for play procedures which are supposed to make our roleplaying fun, and we do it since D&D.

Paying some contribution in order to play is relatively common, too. Lots of larps require it, many gaming clubs have an association fee, and so on.
However, that money mostly covers expenses; getting paid in order to give people a good play experience with more direct means than writing manuals seems still quite taboo, with some exceptions, the most notable of which is maybe a small number of "professional larpers" (I met just a couple, both from Scandinavia).

Andy: well, I wanted it to be clear that I actually like the techniques in question.. But maybe it's implicit in my presence on the forum. ^__^

And yes, addressing one's own sacred cows is healthy. So I'll push forward another one, quite close to home for me, which I'm handling by the horns right now and not without much pain:

"RPGs, and Story Games in particular, are the way for creatively sharing stories among friends, and are quite efficient at it."

* RPGs serve some other, vastly more mature and important purpose than just providing us the excuse we think we need to play Let's Pretend.

What I have in mind is something like a game that has a special position that requires some combination of extreme expertise, preparation, time, or drudgery. No ordinary person either would (drudgery) or could (time) voluntarily take on this game-function unless they were paid to do so. If this position however generated so much fun for the other players that they'd be happy to pay then such a design might work.

(and yeah, I am implicitly ignoring game designers, and do think of some LARP organizers as a possible counter-example to the cow.)

Sacred cows exist without reason and must be slaughtered.

Hey, if we're being honest.

Comparing RPGs to stories / games / theatre / dingus is valuable.