Warhammer; Chaos! Order! Molasses!
Jasper Flick:
What do you think Matt's overplanning is a symptom of? Does he just love to make up plans? Is he a perfectionist? Is it a defense mechanism against a screw-you GM? What's Daniel's place in this?
I feel your pain! Personally I despise this kind of play. It's boring, based on nothing but second-guessing, and probably totally irrelevant later. Couple this with a GM who instinctually counters any plan the players come up with, and you have a colossal waste of time.
To me, it's not playing, it's making up what-if scenarios. Ok if everyone wants to do that, but if it bores you, perhaps you should say so? Why won't you? So you'll keep sacrificing for them, so they don't need to sacrifice for you? Why not demand an equal share of fun? You're tuning out!
Ok, past that specific issue. Now I'm going to jab hard at what I think is the core issue, to see if I'm anywhere on target. Correct me if I'm talking nonsense.
The main vibe seems to be that your contribution doesn't matter, that it's all between Matt and Daniel. And they just happen to be brothers. They're attuned to each other, while you're the misfit left in the water outside the boat.
Ron Edwards:
What a fascinating thread - so much to think about based on one thorough description of what play is like. I thought I'd provide some background threads which play a big part in how I'm reading this one, which again involves the term "murk."
Bangs&Illusionism - in which Ron beats down Confusion - I don't think the thread itself was particularly successful, but on the second half of the final page, that's where I proposed the term "murk" for a very specific phenomenon of play. - a follow-up murk thread which elaborated upon a particular example. And Spot the sim-clue-ationism was Callan's thread regarding the same group - I found it valuable reading as a foundation for this one. ... And as optionals for people who enjoy the topic, here are Incoherent Play and Bucket Seats (and to some extent its linked parent thread), Bangs and Framing, and [PTA] Players wanting their PCs to fail?, to see how the same issue cropped up a lot.
Best, Ron
JoyWriter:
Don't forget that you could be oscillating; what if Matt got the reward for detailed play in the last game, so stepped up to the detail role, with Dan pulling back because he could see he was annoying you last game?
But that effect would only be a very small amount of the problem. The other problem seems like classic compulsive future proofing, and there are three ways I can think of to deal with it on floor level; time limits as you suggested make the choice more pointed, super GM creativity to make the situation one that his tools cannot solve, whatever they are by listening to his plans and bypassing them all, and actually letting him retcon his prep time, but setting out "how long it took him" before you set off. The latter seems the one that would most suit him, for these reasons;
he is forced to consider the time his character would use to plan at the outset, considering you by proxy,
he is able to work out the perfect solution and have satisfaction in it, (although I would have it so in playing out the prep he should be required to make some irrelevant prep too, for suspension of disbelief purposes and so he still thinks ahead a little)
he is more aware that he is interrupting you by how it interrupts the flow of events.
The question is then how to broach such a subject, as well as dealing with the decision making thing. The social element Jasper mentions may well be true, (me and my brother have done that before now to newer contributors by accident) but these things can break down really quick if you approach them right, especially if you have a solid group going:
I get the impression you're not much into out of character table talk, more out back chatting. In that case, how about having a talk to Dan about the pacing thing, and the causes for your lack of engagement with the fiction (from here it feels like pacing + tension + slight breaks in your personal warhammer suspension of disbelief/genre conventions). If we can hammer out some possible solutions here maybe he would be interested in implementing them, as he is more likely to be in a design frame of mind. You'll probably want to avoid hitting him with a new game text and an ultimatum though :P
Got an idea for two birds/one stone solution, to travel + lack of player involvement in tension, based on rustbelt last night:
One player rolls to "avoid trouble" which is sort of the equivalent of a stealth check, and explains how, imagining what dangers could be there and how to dodge them. The next part uses price pretty heavily, but weirdly, as if they fail we think up piddling little adversities or avoidance challenges they come across in trying to avoid the main threat(s). Anything from crawling into brambles, loosing equipment scagged on bushes, or little challenges where your attempt fails a little but you have a chance to recover. Heavy interaction between GM and player to suggest acceptable price, and in doing so the journey is given character.
Very little idea how it works for multiple journey-ers yet, and would probably require adjustment for WFRP, but I thought I'd add it just in case.
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hey, I once knew a player who liked to plot every detail in advance. The trick was to give him something to work with, because otherwise he would go through all the possibilities and would just refuse to go anywhere until he had it all thought through. That player knew exactly what he was up to and what he liked about role-playing. He would appreciate an easy victory that he had earned through careful planning. Not so much the style of play I enjoy, personally, but at least you knew what to expect of that player.
In your example, Callan, I suspect that one should not read that much purpose into the individual actions. These guys seem to me as if they don't have a clue what they're doing, or why. If I may be so blunt.
- Frank
Callan S.:
Well, to me that raises the question: And you do know what your doing? Isn't that what my group would say as well? With the very same emotional certainty?
In accounts I've read for years, it seems hundreds of groups take a text which is, as I said before, more like a dictionary than a novel. Their texts contains rules, yes, and like in Ron's murk example about fights and yes, we have rules for a fight, but how and when does one start - how does it's results link into anything else?
If I were to just write a hundred rules, with no intent on my behalf for them fitting together in any way at all, I'm sure on exposure to them (perhaps with some nifty fluff text and art) some group somewhere out there would "Know how to do it" with my hundred rules. When there is no fucking way to do it - I specifically just randomly threw rules together! I'm pretty damn sure that would happen - people would see a 'procedure' and 'the right way to do it' when there was none at all.
Further, in terms of murk, there was this TV program called 'How art changed the world'. It looked at cave paintings and how flickering lights (like a flaming torch) could in a partly sensory deprived environment, start causing halucinations. Indeed, there were often squares and odd geometric shapes in the animals they painted in caves. The presenter actually went to a science lab where they stimulated the same geometric visions in him with some goggles.
Eventually they brought images out of the cave and onto stone pillars as stone carvings. Eventually they didn't have to go into the cave for it to happen, they could produce images from memory and produced them because they facinated them (and others)
Perhaps it's a long draw of the bow on my part, but it seems roleplay culture is still in the halucination phase, still crawling down into a dank cave (so to speak) and sitting there for hours (literally?) until it comes. The bad bit isn't halucination - inspirational halucination is great! The bad bit is the absence of recognition that it's a halucination - there's instead this certainty that "That's how it's done!", when it isn't how it's done, it's something they've invented - they are as much the author of their halucination as everyone is the author of our own dreams at night, even though you don't realise while dreaming, that you dream and author it.
I'm not sure it's just about talking with Daniel about designing. It's hard to describe - it's again like Ron's example of the fight rules - as we all see, combat rules are often quite detailed. It's like many designers tried to get designery with them and...still just left it to the halucination as to when a fight starts, what the ongoing ramifications are, if any, etc. There's not much point getting into design, if you then let the halucination run rampant everywhere else. The halucination has to be contained and constrained, with no leak points, otherwise it just pwns any other design element with it's halucinegenic ways. And for that, A: the hard one, you have to recognise its a halucination and the harder one B: you have to want to constrain it. Alot of people just wouldn't call it roleplay "It's a board game!". So there's a philisophical hurdle, then a choice I can't make for them.
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