Food for Thought, Basic: Fun?

[Josh]

  Oh my stars and garters, where to start? First of, fun is a product and an experience. There may be, ideally will be, fun in just being with your gaming group - not gaming, just proximity. How do we separate that fun from game-fun?

I don't get the question?  Do you mean how do you figure out payouts?

I've had bad experiences(not-fun), and good experiences(fun) with the same system, the variable factor being the GM.  And yet, some of my worst experiences coincided with other's best. Same system, different results; yet you want to reduce this into a fun/not-fun binary. In your syntax I believe it would mean the Payouts were based off the GM rather than the system.

The entire point is that it is not my argument.  I am arguing against using fun as an argument. 
Payouts come from lots of places
And some peoples payouts are mutually exclusive.

Anticipating your argument I suspect you'll say that a game ought not to be that GM dependant, and I suspect my response would be that any game of sufficient complexity will be that dependant.

the event of gaming is dependent on a number of factors including system and GM.

I don't get the point of this post.

[Josh]

^That's not really speaking anything about the system in that case, I think. In that case the factor that causes or removes the fun is the DM, not the system at all. I'm guessing that Josh is trying to put up cases where the SYSTEM is the cause of the lack of fun, and in your case it seems that the cause was the GM.

I DO see your point in fun not being I/O like that, though. That seems, again, to be a product of one person preferring a different GMing style. If the system is good, and it sounds like it is in your case, then that variable has been eliminated. The variable in your case is the GM, and if you don't have fun with one GM and do have fun with another, then the system is totally irrelevant in that case because you probably wouldn't have fun with the second GM regardless of system. Then again, if the GM ran a game in another system that you really enjoyed... maybe it is the system after all, that set up the possibility of a bad game.

My primary goal is to set aside the argument of "but we had fun" not to tell what fun means the game is good.  That argument will arise differently.

[woodenbandman]

^Does that post actually respond to my post or use it as evidence? because what I was saying in that post is that the "but we had fun" argument is completely useless in that case because it's not being used to defend the system at all.

[Josh]

^Does that post actually respond to my post or use it as evidence? because what I was saying in that post is that the "but we had fun" argument is completely useless in that case because it's not being used to defend the system at all.

Evidence or rather the extension of your statement.

Should have been clearer.  I simplified my first draft, oversimplified as it appears.