Art in mechanical design - has always been an awful idea?
JoyWriter:
What a mechanic does can be different depending on context, and moving a mechanic from one game to another means repurposing it, even if it is something "obvious" like turns.
Quote from: Callan S. on July 12, 2009, 04:01:32 PM
I'm talking about having a design goal of making a group activity. I'm not talking about having that as a design goal and then for some reason repurposing it?
I'm going to answer this in a nitpicky way, to show the difference in language, and hopefully jump right on the misunderstanding: You don't repurpose a design goal, a design goal is the purpose! What you repurpose is the old mechanics your game inherits from another game. In shadowrun and rifts, the turn structure (or initiative passes in the case of srun) is being used to show the characters off, not to insure everyone can contribute (if that is what you want, although I'll get to this later). In fact they are using the "you can't talk; it's someone else's turn" thing as part of the point of the mechanic! The mechanic is in that case totally not doing what you expect it to be doing! The same mechanic is being used to do something else, to fit a different design goal, of structuring contributions (in the case of shadowrun) so that that player can play out a fast character, but has to make them work in a certain way (I won't go into how srun does this for now).
So if it's not doing that thing you want it to be doing, what part of the game is? Well to work out that you'll need to explain what it is you want it to be doing. It's not objective or obvious, it's what effect you expect the game to have, and you feel many of these games are missing:
You've repeated the idea of people "getting the same number of turns", but I would suggest that what you actually want is more fundimental than that. Do you just want equal numbers of turns? Or do you want interactive participation? Or do you want equal spotlight time for different players? Or do you just want to insure that shy people get air time to talk at least every __ minutes? Because giving people turns to do unrelated things, and making those turns contain different amount of actions, and different amount of actual time, well that fulfils the narrow criteria, but probably not everything you want!
So please expand your idea of a group activity, you may know something we don't, or just saying it in a way that's not communicating what you feel is so important.
Finally I'm not saying that any random game will necesseraly have that function, some people mistakenly imagine that just cos they put ___ mechanic in they will be able to import some experience or group dynamic from another game:
Say you like other games with ___ in it, but you don't like the new one. I'm suggesting it's because the other games used ___ to do what you want, and the new game doesn't, it uses it for something else or just as pointless dead weight. This is a big reason that people like us need to encourage people not to just grab mechanics just "cos that's what these games have" but because they do what they want, and are proved in testing to fit to their criteria, "artistic" or otherwise.
otspiii:
Quote from: Danny2050 on July 12, 2009, 09:37:50 PM
Anyway, my point is, the mechanic is aimed at group interaction. There are times during play where individual effort and experience is highlighted, but short lived so 80% of the game is group time, with lots of interaction and negotiating.
And I guess my argument is that group time is multiple individual experiences interacting with each other simultaneously. This is turning into a bit more of a derail than I meant for it to be, my basic point was 'Design for what the players experience, not what a third party auditor would see, because otherwise it's easy to start putting fiction in the mechanics that needlessly brings down the quality of gameplay.' I said 'individual' experience because in my mind that's breaking the issue down to its component level. A group experience isn't some mystical melding of the minds, it's a bunch of individual people interacting with each other. The other players are probably the most engaging tool you have to enhance a person's individual experience, so I'd say it's absolutely important to put a heavy focus on the interactions and negotiations between them.
Callan S.:
Well, in terms of the title, I've refered to the general idea amongst roleplay culture as a whole. Certainly many traditional games seem to include art in the structure of their mechanics, typically the combat rules.
To me, group activity means everyone just gets a turn. For myself I'm okay with some fluctuation - perhaps someone gets 10% more turns overall, in the game.
The thing is, I've refered to the idea of a group activity, roughly how I've described it here, as if it's one that is pursued in roleplay design culture on a general basis. I've sort of made that assumption because...well, roleplay is a group activity? Am I wrong and no one else carries this as a design goal? That would seem...conflicting? Also if it's the case, it means my thread title doesn't make much of a point given that it's pitting something off against a design goal nobody actually shares.
otspiii:
Quote from: Callan S. on July 14, 2009, 02:42:53 PM
Well, in terms of the title, I've refered to the general idea amongst roleplay culture as a whole. Certainly many traditional games seem to include art in the structure of their mechanics, typically the combat rules.
To me, group activity means everyone just gets a turn. For myself I'm okay with some fluctuation - perhaps someone gets 10% more turns overall, in the game.
The thing is, I've refered to the idea of a group activity, roughly how I've described it here, as if it's one that is pursued in roleplay design culture on a general basis. I've sort of made that assumption because...well, roleplay is a group activity? Am I wrong and no one else carries this as a design goal? That would seem...conflicting? Also if it's the case, it means my thread title doesn't make much of a point given that it's pitting something off against a design goal nobody actually shares.
Why would you think it wasn't? On my side, I only nodded to it on my first post, but my last two posts were largely about how it IS an important design goal, it's just one that should flow naturally out of other broader design goals. "Have a method for resolving conflict" isn't one of my primary design goals either, but it's absolutely one of the most important parts of any role playing system. It's just something that naturally gets built in the process of following larger goals.
At this point I'm not really sure what this thread is about. Is it about the dangers of letting some people dominate the play-time by giving them more 'turns'? Is it about the importance of factoring group dynamics into your mechanical system? Is it about the interactions of fiction and mechanics, and the dangers involved? I feel like everyone's on kind of different pages here, and like we need to sort ourselves out and clarify our intentions before we can really interact in any meaningful way.
I'm also not 100% sure we're on the same page when you say 'art', yet. You just mean the fiction, right? Or is it the fiction and some other additional concepts?
Callan S.:
Misha, I think if it's not a 'larger goal' (as you put it), then you don't have it as a design goal (as I'd put it). Your coming to this thread with an entirely different set of priorities than myself (I say as the original poster and guide of what the thread talks about)
Even on art and fiction, we don't seem to match - how you've divorced fiction as a delivery tool rather than being art delivering yet more art, I don't know. But we don't seem to match here, either.
I'll totally grant perhaps I have some alien set of priorities that I've brought here that I've assumed most other people shared. But this thread is much like the premise of the impossible thing before breakfast idea - that base premise being if you have A as a goal and B as a goal, they just don't go together. In terms of this thread, if you don't have A and B as goals/priorities, then the thread doesn't address you, as far as I can see?
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