AMMF?
John Adams:
I have a feeling I may regret this in the morning, but this idea is stuck in my head so here it goes. Please reply with thoughts and especially AP reports about the following. Is this just me being cynical/satirical or is it perhaps, A Thing?
I have been trying to put my finger on the goals my group had for role-playing lo these many years, and I think this sums up a lot of it:
Adolescent Male Masturbatory Fantasy.
This is a particular Sim aesthetic in which the most important attribute of every player character is BAD-ASSERY, expressed as:
1) He always gets the girl
2) He takes whatever he wants, usually by force
3) Anything that stands in his way gets smacked down, HARD
4) He faces momentary setbacks, but only from cool, BAD ASS opponents, then see #3, #2 and #1
In short, all of these characters are CONAN, as imagined by a 14 year old boy.
Filip Luszczyk:
I think you basically, more or less, nailed down a pretty popular gaming goal. Arguably, such an approach might have been quite common historically, though not well suported by the majority of traditional designs (mostly, things like high mechanical whiff factor or strong GM empowerment tend to get in the way). Either way, seems like a valid and worthwhile reason for role-playing.
I'm not sure whether you provide enough AP material for the purposes of a discussion here (i.e. no specific gaming experiences). I'd give some examples myself, only I don't even know where to start...
Eero Tuovinen:
Are you positing this as a problem, or is it just an observation? I'm asking because while I most commonly see this particular phenomenon judged as a problem, I'm also well aware of people and groups that actively try to get to this sort of thing - replace "adolescent" with "primal" and "masturbatory" with "focused", and you pretty much describe the classical sword & sorcery right there.
To compare, this sort of thing never came naturally to me and my friends when we were adolescents, and that hasn't changed now, either. Our comfortable and assumed mode of play always was about setting and character adherence - I could just wish that we'd had any aesthetic motivations that were as clear and well-communicated as "I get the girl and look cool doing it." I'm reminded of an early, long fantasy campaign we had where all high points of the campaign were really about our ability to weave dramatically satisfying plot arcs with the tools the game provided (illusionistic tools, understand - whatever content we created in the game needed to happen without overt negotiation) - the coolest thing about the game at the time pretty much was having your character involved in significant interaction at all, and the more dramatic and multifaceted it was, the better it was. As I remember it, the high point of the campaign was when it was revealed that one of the player characters was the brother of the most powerful sorceress in the realm; this was cool because it tied the character into the setting in a manner that was not a given, considering the tools and techniques provided by the game itself. (This was with Elhendi, a Finnish fantasy game that might be characterized in general terms as very rules-light Runequest.) This is about as far as possible from the wish-fulfillment aesthetic you describe.
This is not to say that I'm completely unfamiliar with the phenomenon you describe in the real world, I've just encountered players to get to the table with those sorts of expectations very rarely. The two cases I remember were both superhero games, interestingly enough - it seems that superheroes are a comfortable topic for this sort of thing. In both cases one player reacted with outright anger and frustration at complications set against his character - in retrospect it was pretty obvious that he wanted to narrate how his character succeeds, not let that success be threatened by the rules. Having the player's proposed solution to a situation (interrogation of a henchman to find out the mastermind's evil plan, if I remember correctly) blocked by the GM might seem like a completely unnecessary move to that sort of player.
All that aside, are you familiar with BARBAREN? It's this game-in-development by Frank Tarcikowski, and it seems to me that your group might like it - it's all about the barbarian heroes doing their barbarian stuff in a very unabashed manner. I find this a very interesting design goal, and in case you think it's a problem that your group likes this sort of thing - why would it be? (Of course if you don't like it yourself, that might be a problem.)
Ron Edwards:
Hi John,
Good call. There was some discussion about this in the Adept forum: Character conversion and Elric books for Sorcerer & Sword background (help!), but it was tuned to a pretty explicit version of the topic and I think the more general issue was missed.
Here's my question, which might focus Eero's point: how many game systems, and how many years, did (or have) you spent in trying to reach this? Did it work ever? I'm asking because as I see it, there's a built-in contradiction. If the character never encounters actual adversity, the victories are hollow and become unsatisfying with repetition. Yet actual adversity also means that success is not guaranteed: the character will also suffer loss, despair, and defeat, in addition to frequent setbacks. In the mind-set you're describing, even the setbacks are unacceptable, perhaps terrifying - the character must always win or self-esteem suffers in what feels like an irreparable way.
I've seen this most often in terms of superhero role-playing, with a sort of Wolverine syndrome - he senses anything, can't be ambushed, knows everything about anything military or espionage, ignores nearly all damage, recovers from any degree of damage, cuts through anything, is faster than anyone, never loses his cool except in even-more-cool berserk rages, says wise and blunt things in a way that shuts other people up, et cetera, et cetera, all the time. Playing with someone who's into this (and again, due to the contradiction, is doomed to failure) turns into an exercise where everyone else has to keep stroking this image too, and the whole game becomes a service to this one guy's impossible need to see this image fulfilled.
My question concerns game systems because I'm trying to get an idea of how much and how widely you've sought this goal, and also to see whether you've been successful at it. It may be that I'm too pessimistic.
Best, Ron
John Adams:
Well, this is what I'm trying to puzzle out. This certainly seems like a perfectly valid goal. Done well I think this could be really fun and I'm tossing ideas around in my head on how I could design such a game. Thanks Eero, I'll put BARBAREN on my list of games to check out.
But it also seems to me that if this idea was firing on all cylinders it would be nothing less than a pure ego-stroking circle jerk. That isn't to say it would be bad, but let's just call it what it is: pure wish fulfillment. It would have the trappings of Gamism without the teeth, to echo Ron. Although in this case it isn't "oooo! look how EVIL I am" it's "ooooo! look how COOL I am!" As long as Gam isn't the desired agenda, I think that would be OK.
In practice, I insisted as the GM to keep some honest "yes you can fail" challenge in the game, but over time that became mostly talk. What we actually did came fairly close to this sometimes, despite an unsupportive System and the general Illusionist shtick. We went at least a dozen Systems and worked around all of them to try and make this work. Incidentally, it was almost entirely on the GM's shoulders to make this work: not only making sure everyone got to look cool but preserving the Illusion that the players actually earned something when it was all really fiat.
One contrary point: I think setbacks are a critical component of this aesthetic. Die Hard would be what it is if Bruce Willis didn't get his ass handed to him. My players are on board with that, I think. The distinction is that such setback never amount to *failure* in any meaningful way, and they always enhance the cool-ness of the hero, they NEVER make him look weak or incompetent.
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