[Liquid] Well, I just rolled the dice for show
Peter Nordstrand:
Yes, this is the empty spaces I've been yapping about in the While We Were Fighting threads: The importance of procedures for the creation of fictional content through empty spaces in the design where players get to put in imaginary events and other details relating to the shared imagined space.
Callan S.:
Ah, now this is what I'm trying to check about "works perfectly well without investing much in the SIS"
For example, it's possible for me to stick my hand in a blender. But I wouldn't say sticking my hand in a blender works perfectly well.
Vincent, I think you've gotten the wrong handle on me. I disagree I can't possibly decide what dice to put forward. "Fancies his step sister, 1D8". There, done - I decided(I'm the one to tell you when I've decided something, right?). That's within the procedure, isn't it? I'm not breaking the rules and you'd be breaking the rules to stop me. However, I also agree with you. Doing that is like sticking my hand in a blender - it's possible, it 'works', but I wouldn't say it works perfectly well (well to be frank, it's not as unpleasant as sticking my hand in a blender, of course. I could put those dice forward without any pain or disfigurement. But basically it still just doesn't really work to do so - it's uncomfortable and awkward. More like sandpaper undies!)
Peter, by "works perfectly well" do you mean that it's simply possible to follow the games procedures without investing much in the SIS?
By 'empty spaces in the design' I'm making an educated guess what you want is where a group without an investment in an SIS does not know what to roll or follow next, in terms of rules. Perhaps it could be phrased that the rules no longer guide them at that point about what further rules to follow. The only thing that could guide them as what rules to use next is an invested in SIS? Without that invested in SIS, play cannot proceed? Am I way off?
oliof:
IMHO we are discussing two separate things her: a) What it is when the rules move from mandatory to optional and b) what to do when the mechanics are played instead of the game.
Callan: "Fancies his step sister, 1d8" does not yet form the SIS. When you put that d8 forward, your step sister may or may not be part of that particular raise (you might have rolled and put a d4 forward for the action where you earned the d8), and just reading out the traits is better than just putting dice forward, but it does not tell me why the step sister is important here, or why fancying her is important here and now, especially if everybody else is also mechanically using up their traits. This is a case of b), and I've seen it, and I don't fancy it.
But let's return to PtA, which Frank said some people play wrong. My protagonist has screen presence 3, and I have a scene where we play a bit, and then someone says, "let's have a conflict, time for the next scene", we draw the cards, I win or lose, I narrate or the producer does … The rules themselves, if used very bare, don't force you to invest into the story. You already have your 3 Screen Presence, the system tells you how stuff moves forward, but … the game system as engine isn't well oiled and the game creaks and most likely fails to entertain the group. Those people claim PtA didn't work for them.
And they're right.
As a corollary, I made a very similar experience with PtA as he did with Liquid. We played a couple of very tense episodes in a very short time frame, because the majority of players had a very good understanding of how the story could or should move forward. The GM had a hard time coming up with conflicts because we generated the tension by our own, and after a couple of scenes the GM stopped mumbling "we, uuuh, would need a conflict here", and we'd roll the dice and go get cues about how to continue, and to find out when the unevitable would strike (like when the Don would find out one of his Torpedos was a traitor).
Aaah,
I'm rambling. The PtA rule set can also move into the background of the players' focus if the SIS is vivid and informative by itself, which works best if you have a high level of mutual investment. And if you're on that "good old-fashioned role-playing" vibe, you have the rules right where they belong, in a support role to help move the game along, and not in the fore and center where they may become a burden. This of course is a case of a), and my anecdote about the PtA game is used to illustrate that it doesn't always mean we're moving towards illusionism.
gsoylent:
Quote from: Frank Tarcikowski on February 13, 2009, 08:39:08 AM
My experience with WuShu and sometimes PtA has been that narration rights, especially when combined with a “style over substance” mindset, lead to a mode of play where people, for lack of a better word, neglect the Shared Imagined Space. They don’t care for details, they don’t care for consistency (whether based on genre conventions or “realism”), they don’t pay attention to what their fellow players establish.
I’m sure many people play PtA without neglecting the SIS. I hope some people play WuShu without neglecting the SIS. But I suggest that one merit often overlooked about good old-fashioned role-playing, where resolution mechanics strongly build upon already established SIS elements, is that it makes people invest in the SIS. It doesn’t help in making the SIS interesting or meaningful—at that, PtA is much better. But it makes the SIS substantial.
Now, why did I not feel betrayed when I learned that the GM had not even applied the rules most of the time? Were not the rules what made the SIS substantial? Well, no. It was our attention to it, our investment in it, that made it substantial.
So I’m not saying PtA sucks. But I’m saying that one should invest in the SIS, and specifically, in Situation, moment-by-moment. Who’s there, what’s going on, what does it look like, sound like, feel like? In my experience, if you have a game system that works perfectly well without investing much in the SIS, people may tend to rush the story and their imagination of the actual in-game situation gets rather blurry. Such games still sound great in a write-up but to me, they’re leaving a bad taste, like reading a good book way too fast.
I could not agree more. I found that to be a problem with octaNe and Mythic too. I was very excited by the idea of narration rights style mechanics when I first read about it. With simple but firm mechanics on one hand to provide rigour and a degree of challenge and on the other the flexibility and creative freedom to allow players to resolve issues on theory own terms it seemed like the perfect roleplaying system. What cold be better than that?
In practice I noticed the same exact effect, the games felt rushed and there was little investment in the current scenes.
In a traditional game players interact with the current scene as the primary means to get details from the GM's notes into SIS which can be leveraged later to solve or at least advance the plot. That, and the sheer escapist joy of it of course.
My, admittedly limited, experience narration rights style games is that it does tend to undermine the whole interact with the scene to learn stuff. The scene can become just an excuse to see who get's to narrate the next bit and you are even more reliant on players interacting in the scene for the sheer joy of it, which is great but of course if you already have a set of players who are all jazzed up and into their characters anyway, you can have a good game with any system.
lumpley:
I don't know how important the technical details of my Dogs in the Vineyard example are, but it's obvious I didn't make them clear enough. Let me try again:
Callan, you have a bunch of dice, already rolled, in front of you. I say "I raise. 13," and I push forward a 6 and a 7. You have to push forward dice of your own to match my 13, but how many dice you use matters: if you match it with 3 or more of your dice, you take the blow, and you take fallout; if you match it with 2, you block or dodge. (The rules for your rolling additional dice into your standing dice are outside my example.)
Until I say "I hit you in the head with my shovel," or "I dive out the window," or "I say 'she doesn't love you, you know,'" or "I put my arm around your shoulder," you don't know what I'm raising, so you have no way to decide whether to take the blow or block / dodge. Both narratively, and mechanically: taking the blow means accumulating fallout dice, and the size of the fallout dice you accumulate depends on the precise details of my raise. "I hit you in the head with my shovel" gives you d8 fallout, while "I dive out the window" gives you d4 fallout. Until I make clear the specific fictional content of my raise, the game's mechanics can't go forward.
Like I say, I'm not sure how much it matters, but it is an example of game rules where, for the mechanics to proceed, you need to invest in the stuff of the fiction.
-Vincent
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page