GNS and Practicality
Ron Edwards:
Hi Norm,
Perhaps it isn't clear what we're saying with "actual play." It's not about your game in design or a vision for such a game. It's about anything you've ever played, or rather, any role-playing experience at all. Ever in your life. Any game system you actually played. Hop onto the Actual Play forum and write about it a little. Say what you think worked or didn't work, and why. Pick any one or two terms from the essays here and see whether you think they apply, or write about how you think they don't.
To repeat: any role-playing experience. Ever. As long as it really happened.
Best, Ron
Ayyavazi:
Thanks Eero and Ron,
I can certainly post my play experience. It hasn't been with many systems (something I'm not very happy about) and my successful forays into rules-modification were cut short due to my move. I'll go ahead and try to think up some things to put there. What I need to know is, should I just post my game experience and reaction to it, at which point we can start getting into the nuts and bolts, or should I post a particular play experience and what I liked or disliked? Maybe both. Whats the best way to start?
Thanks again,
--norm
Eero Tuovinen:
I wouldn't worry about it if I were you, there are many ways of starting a discussion in Actual Play. Just write what comes naturally and let the discussion open up from there. I've read some very interesting threads where people have discussed their lives as gamers from a total viewpoint; the majority of threads, however, focus on some definite game session or campaign. If you have some theoretical point you want to focus on, then perhaps choose several relevant moments that overlap on this one matter.
Read the forums a bit and get a sense for what others have tried. Some things work while others do so less well.
M. J. Young:
I'm coming in a bit late to this, but I wanted to make a couple points I thought would clarify. Some of this is stated better in Theory 101: Creative Agenda, at Places to Go, People to Be, which I think might help.
The sort version, in my understanding, is that a creative agendum is what makes something fun for you, and what you have to do to get that kind of fun.
My game is Multiverser, and I've observed over the years that because the game separates players from each other it allows a creative agendum to develop individually for each of them. I've had players caught up in religious revivals, or building up powerful characters, or engaging in battles, or pulling strings behind the scenes, or exploring fantastic realms--and the creative agendum of the game shifts according to their interests. But it is a feature of Multiverser that the players are independent of each other: they do not have to agree concerning what the "group" is going to do, so the individual play of each is molded by his own interests.
As someone here has mentioned, that's the problem with incoherent games: since they do not define the path to "fun" the players will attempt to define it themselves. If the players are all in agreement concerning what makes a game "fun", then the incoherent rules do not pose much of a problem, because they can all use those rules toward the same objective. If the players have different ideas about what would be fun to do in this game, they will start playing tug-of-war to get there.
I ran an OAD&D game decades ago in which roughly twenty players had just finished a major dungeon crawl and their characters were kicking back and relaxing in borrowed quarters at a local fort. One of them decided it would be fun to play a stupid practical joke on another, and before the session was over about half of the players had their characters involved in this practical joke war--and the other half were getting impatient and annoyed, partly they thought that these were antics in which their characters would not be involved (and so they were excluded from play), but because the did not think this was at all fun. It led to a huge in-character fight that very nearly split the party, and that on the eve of an unanticipated assault on the fort by monsters. On one level, that worked, because it created a very interesting story; on another level, I almost lost some players because this question of "what would be fun" was a point of disagreement between them, and they were fighting for control of that.
That's the problem with creative agenda discord: the players are struggling to control the game, so they can do what they think is fun. The referee might in this case be one of the competing players, trying to guide the game into what he thinks will make for a fun experience, and they are pressing against the goads.
So if you're going to design a game that has that kind of flexibility to it, it is less about plug-in rules and much more about how to manage the social interactions of the player group to get everyone on the same page. Maybe you can do that with the right plug-in rules (Hackmaster does a marvelous job of making all of its participants play like stereotypical old-school gamers), but probably it's more about perceiving and understanding what hooks players into one kind of fun or another.
I hope this helps.
--M. J. Young
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