The history of RPGs is the history of things you can’t do, and various strategies to veil, deny or accommodate that fact.
Players like to think they can go anywhere and do anything with their characters unless there’s a mechanism in place to solidly prevent them (and make them like it) or trick them (also, to make them like it by preserving the illusion of freedom). The desire for freedom versus its practical impossibility is an enduring tension so it’s easy for RPG designers/thinkers/grognards to score cheap points by railing against restrictions in one game, or designing a solution that is really way of disguising restrictions.
The oldest restriction is the dungeon crawl. Gamers like dungeons because they have pretend physical walls. For some reason, pretend matter trumps other kinds of pretending, and players don’t mind it getting in their way much. Classic dungeons are usually flowcharts that push explorers toward some signature encounter, even if there are some pass/fail encounters, backtracking and general screwing around to deal with in the interim. The only exceptions are random dungeons, and even the old generators enforced some rising tension with the character level to dungeon level equivalence.
(Wilderness encounters in old D&D were interesting in the way they weren’t level dependent, but the need to get from location to location was restriction enough.)
The dungeon’s flaw is that many people eventually get bored of them, or learn to despise increasingly dodgy rationales for hauling ass through a flow chart. These types accused GMs of lacking imagination or defying realism, and complained they wanted to focus on character portrayal and romance and things, but they had to deal with the Maze of Peril of the Week.
Eventually angry players and inventive GMs figured out that you could do without physical walls and simply outline the rough course of play, but they kind of blundered into this with a healthy dose of denial, because nobody could really admit that the whole point of these structures was to remove the freedom to do anything you want.
Unfortunately, without pretend walls, GMs were forced to get honest or desperate. Some asshole would always ignore the signals and wander off. This happened in dungeons, but the jerk couldn’t get far, because he had to walk the flowchart. When the only restriction was linked to story flow, it was harder to develop a pretense to keep everyone on the rails. Designers provided theme and mood and setting tools to help GMs roughly delineate what players could do (plot against the Prince in Vampire, say) and couldn’t (all kinds of stupid shit that Vampire players did anyway).
One of the tricky elements of this scheme was that it required the GM to show his hand as an artist instead of ascribing it to a trick of the dungeon. But people have been educated to be suspicious of art. They believe it’s something social deviants make to subtly mock them, or it was something created by mighty white men in days of yore, such that it would be arrogant to follow in their footsteps with art of your own. Certainly, modern people are not allowed to manipulate signs meaningfully unless it’s for large commercial interests. Some companies tried to convince gamers that they were some form of social deviant and allowed to dress oddly, dye their hair and make art, but this was only semi-successful and generated resentment that would simmer over the next decade and a half or so.
At some point, people playing through these plot and trope-based restrictions started to believe the GM was making all the decisions (which was pretty much bullshit, but these players have been around since the dungeon, when they kept walking the wrong way up the walled flowchart). Interestingly, many of these players were total book bitches. They didn’t want to be told what they couldn’t do, but vaguely understood that they needed to point to some basis of unity, even if it wasn’t the other players. If they were going to do anything, it was what the book told them. If things went bad, it was the book’s fault.
Eventually, this heady mix of misanthropy and ad hoc textual criticism met the Internet and formed a community. Members wrote their own games. Naturally, they (like so many others in previous eras) half-knew that the central problem was keeping people from doing whatever they wanted, but this group was even less likely than the last to explicitly admit this. They did however know what they would obey, which was whatever was in the book. They’d ruined play by picking text over people, so they thought they could probably solve it by tinkering with the text.
Naturally, the games that resulted were more restrictive than all prior games, but this could be ignored if you believed that “playing the game” was equivalent to “obeying the book.” In the dungeon era, you’d throw up physical walls inside a mountain to kick people to a final confrontation with an evil witch, but some bastard might run away and get drunk in a tavern, and the best you could do was ignore him, give him a loaner character or kill him. The new games were designed so that there was no support for ever going to a tavern – that doing anything besides getting up the mountain to face the witch was meaningless, stupid, and possibly a moral violation resulting from abuse or brain damage.
Game designers like feeling like they’re making people they’ve never met play a certain way, so this approach became quite popular. People who’d left the business to do something more profitable wished they’d thought of it, and some folks working in the commercial end of game design realized that it was terribly simple to come up with contrived metrics for design success by using this style. If it didn’t work, the players were obviously doing it wrong.
Unfortunately, these new strictures didn’t sit well with everyone, and newer games were designed to be unplayable if you didn’t accept your inability to wander off to the pub. These malcontents stuck with older games. Some of them went right back to the dungeon, where the old Flowchart Made of Rock would provide some solace. Some of them stuck with plotty games. The community was a house divided, except for the shared belief that if they played some other way, they’d lose their freedom but if they obeyed their school, they could pretend this wasn’t really happening. It was happening, though. To everybody.
What’s the solution? In some special play groups (though more than you might think) participants crossed the watershed and realized two things:
1) Restrictions were necessary.
2) It was natural to fight against them.
And in these special groups, the participants realized that this tension was never a flaw, but a remarkable source of inspiration. This tension created novel solutions. The group needed to develop new mechanics to support leaving the beaten path, but in such a way that the wayward player returned. The GM learned to moderate his vision, or figure out what happens when the group leaves the dungeon half done. They accepted that some disputes were inevitable, even passionate ones, as people are liable to be passionate about their creative efforts. Through forthright talk, compromise and above all compassion for every participant, these groups accepted the problem and turned it into another toy to play with.
Argh. You totally had me until the end. I am more inclined to be equally skeptical of each groups personal understanding of goodness and light, even the special one’s.
-Rob D.
The alternative is to say that everybody sucks. But lost of groups – not just ones who play my cup of tea (whatever it is) don’t suck. They get through it *without definitively solving the problem* because *it can’t really be solved.* That’s a good thing.
Good stuff.
Rob made a good point to me in another space (i.e. his blog) that not all people get the fundamental principles of story. Until they understand that they can’t really get to this point. How do you teach people the fundamental storytelling techniques needed to make them automatically “get” what you’re saying here?
you’ve earned yourself a twitter follower.
The “fundamental principles of story?” What are those? We have formulaic conceptions of story that suit certain cultural aesthetics. For most RPG players this is based on English language literary, cinematic and dramatic traditions, or some crudely drawn compromise. We also have traces of other traditions, such as oral traditions or other cultures, though we often try to shoehorn them into our own. (Epic poetry as RPG inspiration often ends up being treated this way, where we graft motifs onto a more familiar narrative framework to the point where we forget that by our standards, the Iliad is very strangely structured, for instance.)
We also have our personal notions based on our history of interacting with story. I think it’s much more interesting to crash into these authentic personal models and takes on cultural metatexts, then build something from the wreckage, than start on the basis of something that’s synthetic to begin with for the sake of agreement or teaching a particular form.
Sure, but it’s muddier than that. Those two realizations have popped their heads up all over the place, and in most modes of play. They’re good and useful realizations (if sometimes flawed in the subsequent delivery) but it feels like they’re presented as a dividing line here and that rings false. And worse, it feels like it undercuts the validity of the points – I’ll shout about constraints breeding creativity til I’m blue in the face, but that’s usually because I think people don’t realize how important that is, not because they don’t get it at all.
Apologies if it sounds like I’m taking a piss here, btw – that’s really not my intent. This is good stuff, good enough to make me inclined to niggle the details rather than just shrug it off.
-Rob D.
You’re not taking a piss – you’re arguing. That’s different and good. Naturally, you’re going to have various levels of success for play groups overall and in individual sessions – the non-suck situation is not *perfect*. My main argument is that harnessing this tension instead of viewing it as a problem to be solved/ignored is, to my mind, much more creatively rewarding.
I loved the essay, and it’s an interesting way to look at the evolution of the hobby (especially in regards to the two “schools”), however, I’ll have to decide if I buy into the idea that we’re all really deluding ourselves.
I’ve run railroads, and I’ve run sandboxes, with a variety of new and old systems, and with a mindset that I think falls into “new school” (or narrativism, if I use that terminology). I think the inherent limits are similar to those of movie or tv program of the same genre as the RPG. Characters are heroes in a story. Once they’ve chosen to follow a hook, they will follow it until the action is resolved. Does the hero of a film go to the tavern and drink himself into a stupor and miss all the action? If we go by a more episodic tv or comic book model, he might, but that would be part of a character arc the player is “telling”.
The limits are those of the medium. Is it annoying to have players going off the reservation and losing precious play time following red herrings? Yes, but that’s a failure of the GM’s imagination that he can’t change his scenario to get things back on track. And is that railroading? Not if the characters are free to deal with the threat in whatever way they like. But they must deal with the threat! Why? Because they’re playing a game and that is the game’s current objective.
In sandbox campaigns, I’ve done very little planning and let the players do whatever, but it’s been my role to make sure whatever hook they latch onto turns into an adventure (which I might prepare more fully for the next session). And once that’s happened, they are committed to that objective. They have to be.
Not a limit. Just the reason they play the game in the first place.
A “hook” is a limitation, too. You get to whatever location and this triggers a set of limitations. I’ve run sandboxes myself and won’t claim they’re like any other game, but as you said there is an imposed “objective” that gets set off one way or another.
Loved this post!
You left out a critical part of the new school’s way of thinking. Rather than accepting the hidden limits on what one can and cannot do under the old GM Fiat/Flow Chart era, the games create a system where everyone overtly and transparently agrees to those limits. Rather than being subverted in a covert way, the participants of the game go into the game with the explicit interest in exploring what’s contained within the games textual limitations. It’s a direct departure from a game claiming you can do anything then in practice making it impossible to do so.
John
Games almost never claim you can do anything. GURPS claimed you could build pretty much any campaign, but the tools were designed to set strictures of various kinds. Not the same thing.
Really amazing! You completely miss the point!
Rules are the tools the players use to make things happen. You’re restricted by your tools, of course. But if you use the right tools to make something, you’ll make something better.
In the Mountain Witch example you’re giving, there’s actually a scene in the town at the beginning. But it’s exposition. You can’t find out that much interesting stuff in town.
If you wanted to be playing in town, you’d be playing Dogs in the Vineyard with ronin color. And you wouldn’t be the first.
Your prescription here is to use the same tools for everything, because that’s a restriction, and restrictions are good. But that’s like hammering in a screw with the heel of a shoe.
This is the “playing the game is playing the book text” rhetoric I’m talking about. Totalitarianism is not really a solution. As a player, I can decide that my fear of the Mountain Witch combined with things that set me of in the town make the town important. I can do this on impulse, regardless of what I agreed to/what force the text and GM colluded to impose on me. The rules and rhetoric ensure that my *only* option to realize this is to break the game. In another, looser game an accommodation is possible where I don’t get everything I want, but I don’t have to meet your witch the way you and the book have planned for me.
The idea that the right tools make the right game is incomplete and unnecessarily narrow. Of course game systems matter, but they shouldn’t be the ruling force. People are the ruling force; the game adds an interesting element to their relationships in play, setting a bias for certain things. Furthermore, people repurpose tools *all the time* – and not just to change colour. This happens in WoW and its systems are far more difficult to escape. In Second Life, repurposing stuff is pretty much how you do any form of effects-rich roleplaying – a buddy of mine in a Star Trek sim does a lot of fascinating stuff this way (and in his game, the first officer has a modified Sonic the Hedgehog head). In pen and paper games, this should be even *easier*.
The natural tension between individual desire and necessary limits is a fantastic source of group creativity, not a pathology that gets cured with some form of narrative lobotomy. I do see an interesting out in your comments, though. What if I treated Dogs as the “explore town” subsystem instead of making it a different narrative track?
Finally, the best pair of boots I ever owned secured the heel with screws.
I think the problem here is that if you and the people around the table aren’t honest with yourselves about what you want out of a game, and nobody has made sure that everybody is on the same page about what they want out of this specific game – of course the game is going to break. And it has to break because your expectations of it are broken and you haven’t agreed on your desires, so everyone will be pulling in different directions and that will manifest as a desire to break the specific game you’re playing.
Either develop a healthy relationship to fiction, be it RPG or otherwise, or pick up a hobby better suited to your needs.
I agree that honesty is important – but I don’t necessarily know what I want until I encounter a stimulus. Why do I have to agree on all of this ahead of time? Why can’t I follow an impulse? What is there to fear if I feel real warmth for the other people at my table? I think they can take it, and when they dish out something back, I trust the results will be good for me.
Well, think of it this way: the only reason to have rules is to provide focus and surprise the players (otherwise, you’re not playing a game – you’re writing a novel as a group), and a ruleset is an implicit agreement among players about what they want to focus on, and what kinds of surprises they want and don’t want.
You pick the set of surprises you feel comfortable with beforehand. If you go out to see a movie, or you read a book, you come at it with certain expectation of what it will and will not provide.
Games provide focus, but focus doesn’t need to be fixed or limited for all time because we picked a particular game. In fact, doing so eliminates much of what the tabletop RPG form has to offer, sets up an assumption that participants can’t trust each other without artificial aid, and is generally a downer. Analogies from books and film don’t work because RPGs aren’t books or films — they’re immediate works whose creators aren’t hiding behind the medium, but are right in front of you, bringing their relationship with you into the creative act. You can choose to acknowledge the immediate, intimate nature of the medium, or you can hide behind instructions in the text.
The indie community often talks about how Golden-Ruling, multiple agendas, fiat and such are *the* sources of pain. But if you actually observe poorly functioning games in the wild, that’s not what’s going on. Instead, you have people working very hard to *adhere* to procedures in the text (rules-lawyering) and mostly stick to a common agenda, but they have little true empathy for one another. This is what leads to shouting matches in teenage D&D games. When I’ve observed certain indie games in action (though not all of them end up like this) at conventions, the shouting is replaced by stony silence and joyless, perfunctory decision making.
I would argue that there are entire character concepts within popular culture built upon the idea of a character who is “built” to do one thing switching role part-way through the movie/book/gaming session and deciding to do something different.
For a very recent example, the character of Noel in Avatar is an academic with some military training, but his heart is totally into science and the exploration of this new life-filled world. The scenario changes, primarily due to the actions of another character, and he adapts to it, buying more into his military training so that he can roll with the changing scenario.
Also, in Malcolm’s Indigo campaign, my first character was the cultural expert and he ended up sacrificing himself to try and save some of his brothers/sisters-in-arms, which was in character for him, but out of synch with the rest of the party. I don’t feel that it was done in bad faith to the rest of the party, it was done because it felt right to do and my character was the one who felt the consequences of my actions (though they feel the emotional consequences of not backing me up).
This isn’t about characters, it’s about narrative focus. Try playing out the Avatar scenario in a system like Carry, and it’ll work just fine. What it won’t do is let you turn a game that focuses on people and the weird stresses of war into one about how awesome it is to have a big gun and shoot people, because it’s not set up to tell those stories.
To continue with your example – if I’d gone out to see Avatar expecting it to have the narrative quality of, say, The Word For World Is Forest, of course I would have been disappointed. It’s a fucking action flick and a two-hours effects demo, and on that basis it is untouchable. I went in with reasonable expectations and I came out satisfied.
Isn’t this just lowered expectations?
I would argue that narrative focus in an RPG is mostly based on character and, due to the presence of players, the evolution of those characters due to both other players and GM stimuli, be that NPCs or larger game events. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no expert on different systems so I’ll defer to others on that issue. I tend to look for broad systems that can work on multiple levels and try to make them work for the games that I think my players will want to play. To be honest, I was shocked when Malcolm explained to me that many modern RPGs are designed around not just specific genres, but specific scenarios dealing with specific stimuli.
But narrative focus should be driven by the interests of the characters in my opinion and thus having a character decide to do something wacky that could push a carefully constructed story off the rails is just something you have to roll with as a GM. To be sure, the consequences of ignoring what to you as the GM was the major focus of the game should be felt, but if players get hooked into a different aspect of your game world, then kudos for designing or using a game world that is interesting enough to get them into different facets of it, not just the aspect that’s thrown as the players as the “narrative focus”.
To your comment about rulesets, I agree to an extent. You use the ruleset that works best for the forms of games that your group wants to play, but I’d argue that if you’re using a ruleset that is so inflexible that you can’t do something with it to surprise your characters then that’s a shame. And if your group is so petty that if you as the GM “break” the rules to allow for elements of narrative and they get upset because of that, then you need a better group. Hell, 4E D&D codified mook rules (“minions”) in part so that you could have battles against lots of mooks but also so that if the DM wants to dramatically kill off some NPC character, the players can justify it as “Oh, he must have been like a minion”, likely because someone had the same scenario in 2E D&D and their players said “No way! He must have had at least 20 hit points! There’s no way a dagger could have killed him!”. Anyway, now I’m rambling.
I haven’t planned anything. I don’t even know what the Witch is like at the beginning of the game, or indeed, any time before I have to say something out loud about what the Witch is like. That is, in fact, against the rules. Have you ever played the game? Or read it?
My job as GM is to build the situation that the players are bringing into a tense one. I find the stuff that they’re doing, find ways their baggage is incompatible, and highlight it. Or, when I don’t know what they’re doing, I set up situations that will make it clearer to me and the other players what they’re doing by their actions.
When we sit down to play The Mountain Witch, it’s because we want to play The Mountain Witch. It’s more or less a given that some character or is afraid to go up the mountain. Sometimes, you never get to the Witch. Sometimes, the characters have all turned on each other, or abandoned the task, or the Mountain Witch turns out to be a falsehood put in place by one of the characters’ former masters, or whatever. But what the Mountain Witch is all about, that stuff stays. It stays because it’s what we’re all there to do.
I’ll say this very succinctly:
We are there to do something together. We share aesthetic objectives, though our visions necessarily vary in content. We use the rules like our society uses democracy: to make things happen productively and without blood, even when people disagree.
When I designed Shock: it was to make sure that all the players could do amazing, creative stuff that no one else had thought of, and fold it into a science fiction game without disrupting the world. It works well. And that’s because the rules assume that people’s enthusiasm is fruitful and not the exception.
That’s what Dogs is. You explore the town. People in the town want you to do stuff for them. You decide what, if anything, to do.
As a person who likes to make stuff, that interests me. But I’m not sure you read the prepositions in my simile.
1) Sure you have. You planned for me to play through The Mountain Witch. I agreed, but suddenly I want to do something crazy. Instead of exploring that, the response is that I must be participating in bad faith.
2) I say again, selling me the idea that my total submission to the game’s concept is necessary/desirable is just expressing the problem I have with the whole idea. Instead of foisting off a solution on the group, prefer to leave the problem intact, because I trust the process of dealing with it from occasion to occasion will lead to something cool.
3) Actually, what I mean is that here I am playing a samurai in The Mountain Witch framework, and we end up wanting to get into this town, and you whip out Dogs, but the continuity is the same. And if you say “Fuck it, go fight some bakemono who’ve been riled up by an unrelated onmyoji,” you whip out D&D. This idea fascinates me. How would you handle transitions? Lots of potential there.
4) They were nothing special – just Docs with the “paratrooper” soles I bought in 1993. I can’t find another pair like them now, which really irritates me.
From time to time, yeah. And if you throw a screwdriver at a wall, sometimes it sticks, and that’s pretty cool. But that doesn’t make it a good technique for hanging a picture.
The idea is to take that stuff that works, and write it down so other people can do it, too.
This is just what I’m suggesting and people do it all the time. We went through three systems in six weeks in a recent game.
Ultimately, the problem here is that you don’t have enough experience with focused games to write this kind of article meaningfully. You’re reading assclowns on the Internet and you think you know what kind of game they’re playing, and you’re imagining an experience you might have playing one.
Come to a con sometime. Play with Luke or Vincent or me, play in good faith, then ask questions afterward. Then you’ll be able to say what you like and don’t like about it.
I ain’t a screwdriver ninja, but I have a lot of pictures up – and I don’t think I’m the only one.
“Works” for who? The game owner? The players? The “community?” I just read a thread down at the Forge where a dude running Sorcerer is basically saying it wasn’t a very good campaign without reference to whether anybody had any fun, and Ron responding that it’s because his players are damaged goods – so by one standard, fun and meaning have become irrelevant next to grokking Sorcerer’s Logos. But such a game may work without making nice with Sorcerer’s intended method of play. But even even creating this atmosphere is problematic.
That’s pretty cool. Maybe somebody will write that down in a game sometime. It is “stuff that works,” after all. (Honestly, maybe there is a section in a Nar game about how to use it as a D&D capsystem or alt-system. Feel free to point it out!)
Heh. No. I have played narrowly focused games. I’ve enjoyed them. I even have a credit in one. I know that after this your next rhetorical tactic is to interrogate deeply until you can again find an excuse to invalidate my experience, so I’m not really gonna play that with you. I will observe that appealing to a semi-covert play tradition outside of the text pretty much reproduces the original critique of RPGs by the indie community, which is pretty amusing.
1) Sure you have. You planned for me to play through The Mountain Witch. I agreed, but suddenly I want to do something crazy. Instead of exploring that, the response is that I must be participating in bad faith.
Yeah, y’know what? If you and I agree to get together and do a thing, and I’m invested in doing it and excited about doing it, but then you get some impulse and want to do something wildly different, I’m gonna be upset about it.
If you want to be free to follow such impulses, then don’t make those kinds of agreements. The fact that a particular game or set of games implies making such agreements isn’t a problem, it’s just something that you don’t like. Which is okay.
I would, of course, urge you to try it. Are you sure that you don’t like pistachio ice cream?
This just repeats the rhetoric, making the text a tool to apply force in the absence of trust. Again.
Heya,
I think that you may have misinterpreted Joshua’s metaphor. Regardless, it’s not game texts that are totalitarian or tyranical; people are. I game text offers itself to people to play. People can take it or leave it. It doesn’t hide what it intends.
People, however, do- or can anyway. A focussed design takes one part of the “do anything you want game”, highlights it, and improves on it. It doesn’t try to do everything. It just tries to do one thing really well.
You seem to be mistaking a specialist for a generalist. Focussed don’t pretend to be generalists. They promote a spefic type of play that is fun. If it’s not your cup of tea, that’s cool. The game doesn’t make a statement as to what kind of person you are.
Peace,
-Troy
“It’s not the Papal bull, it’s the bishop.” Well, yes. There is however a more than coincidental relationship between the two. If a game encourages strict adherence to a certain way of doing things, it’s in cahoots with the guy at the table who tells you do do things that way. Surely, you wouldn’t argue the opposite with me, because that’s basically saying System Doesn’t Matter, and you’d have to report behind the chemical sheds or something.
Let me make clear that I’m not pillorying focused designs in particular, but I’m not giving them special exemptions, either. I enjoy playing lots of things, and appreciate that games push a particular focus. I would rather have player desires express themselves fully, even in tension with that focus, because I think it adds sincerity and resourcefulness to the proceedings. Right now in Steve’s (magicbox’s) game I’m really enjoying pushing up against D&D4e’s take on my character.
To get out from under the assumed War with Nar (which isn’t the focus) further in WoD games you have semi-codified Morality rules that players often chafe at dealing with. They don’t think the punishments always fit the crimes. This is great! Writers (not me) have designed accommodations that riff on the existing system nicely, meeting on the middle for a better result. Various groups have created cool house rules. I got to write a total inversion of the rationale for Wisdom (Mage Morality) in a supplement where I posited that the rules are demiurgic punishments for being too cool. This is all better than just giving up and playing something else.
It’s funny how the evolution of the hobby echoes how many of us play it. I remember that the first adventure I “ran” (I was REALLY bad at what I was doing) was a custom dungeon, had very detailed maps, had almost no sense of pace, no reason for encounters to happen beyond “there’s got to be a way through this warren of tunnels” and I was totally a book bitch.
Now I don’t doubt that Malcolm sees me as significantly more of a book bitch than he is, but frightenly enough, I’ve relaxed a lot. My old Thief game was run mostly off the cuff, with a significant amount of sandbox play allowed where my job as the DM was to keep the characters motivated to deal with the issues that kept involving them. I was also uncomfortable with D&D 3.5, so making up rules to deal with junk that I didn’t like was much easier than wading through, say, the grappling rules. Now, I’ve read 4E a lot in the last few years and I’m much more strict about the rules in my Sunday game, but mostly I want to give the system a chance. To be honest, I find that too often people skim the ruleset of the game they’re dealing with, then decide to change the rules because of something they’ve read about but not tried.
On Malcolm’s last points, I’d say that these tenets are upheld by GMs having some sense of what they want their players to deal with and pushing plot forward, even if they have multiple plots that could be picked up on and the players only pick one. The inherent resistance to those restrictions is evidenced by player developing their own elements of the plot, hopefully leading to the players feeling that they have more ownership of their characters actions than the GM does. So I’d say that a certain amount of this tension evolves into GM-player conflict, one reason why a number of groups dissolve over some minor incident that was “the last straw”.
Heya Steve. I think you’re definitely a better systems technician GM than I am, and I do owe it to the group for not getting me to chuck Star Wars Saga too soon (I’m still gonna cut some things, like a discrete Swim skill, and of course the Condition Track is dead).
I think creative tension works well at the player level, too – it’s not just a GM management thing. I’ve taken this POV playing Cinnabar (my Warforged ranger in Steve’s 4e game, for those of you who don’t know). His amnesia means I’ve basically got to postulate things about him. Some of them can be wrong, and when they are I have to develop his reaction. If anything I can up with was right, it would be boring. At the same time, I can run off the rails from time to time instead of being mission oriented and you seem to roll with it pretty well (wreck NPC machine!). The result is better than if I thought solely in terms of guessing your intentions, or if you thought only of the best way to make me feel empowered or on-topic.
To be honest, I had a feeling that you would have one of several different reactions to the construct. One of the possible reactions was a total freakout that involves the construct being smashed. That’s why I made it a minion
But the scene worked as intended since it got you thinking more about your character’s possible backgrounds while working effectively to involve the rest of the party (you missed a fun conversation last week). The only bad result would have been if you’d see this little construct and immediately went into kill-destroy mode and didn’t get any info from it.
Glad you didn’t drop the Star Wars campaign Malcolm. One of the things I like about your campaigns is that we can fail, and fail miserably. Too often the well meaning GM won’t let that occur. Now, granted, in our recent epic failure (Indigo) we knew we could come back… sort of. In both your, and Steve’s, games there is a good balance of rules and freedom.
I also believe that its a normal and desirable thing that as players ‘grow up’ as gamers they start to do the unexpected more and more. I can’t imagine gaming the same way as I did when I was 14 now that I’m pushing 40. At 14 I had a much more linear concept of life in general. At the age I am now, while there is still a linear aspect I certainly see a lot more of how my choices shape my world. It only makes sense that as people arrive at that realization in life it is reflected in game.
Well, I wasn’t going to drop the campaign, but wrestling with the system annoyed me. Now I realize that treating the system as kind of a third party in the room, giving it a chance to speak and then coordinating responses makes it work pretty well. the tension from it not being exactly what I want is good for me as a GM.
I don’t consider Indigo a failure at all! The PCs failed at their mission, but it was worthwhile and a positive experience. One of the best sessions I’ve ever run, I think!
Agreed, it was pretty amazing.
OK.
The ultra-restrictive games you are talking about have an underlying design intention that their authors don’t really acknowledge explicitly: they’re designed to be played with people you don’t trust who you met on the Internet in single convention sessions.
In my experience, these games explicitly trade away the benefits of trust-based gaming with familiar partners (like many of the sublime moments of brilliance that arise purely as a reflection of creative individuals riffing off of each other in the pursuit of art) for a rules system that provides a mediocre but functional simulation of familiarity. Because these games do what it says on the tin you can weed out people with unreasonably selfish demands upfront and subsume reasonable demands without having to stop and address each one (because the rules just tell you your demand isn’t met and you move on.)
I, myself, find medium-to-long-term play with friends (i.e. individuals I trust creatively and emotionally) significantly more interesting and therefore find that ultra-restrictive games are less useful than broader games that leave room for riffing.
I think it’s really important that people can get hurt in play, basically. I push thematic material that I know cuts to the heart of actual emotional issues my players have and have been pushed myself through situations where I was uncomfortable and emotionally stretched because it’s worth it to do that. Sealing off potential miscommunications and injuries is overly santizing.
And which is not to say that there’s anything wrong whatsoever with games that are fun to play at a convention with people you don’t know, especially since that can certainly be an excellent way to become friends with someone, but as someone who has GMed for friends and at conventions I am looking to accomplish something very different in each case…
Pingback: Synapse Design Blog » Blog Archive » Cubism
This is the smartest characterization of the soi-disant indie/storygames movement I have ever read. Well done.