[Agon] - So-so'ing our way around the Island of Lycophon
lumpley:
(This thread has been frustrating me, so I've been avoiding it. This morning I love the Forge, though.)
I think that Callan has fundamentally and crucially not nailed it.
It may be that Agon is a bad design match for what Darcy's group wanted it for, no harm there. But Callan's take is "you could have gotten what you wanted from Agon, if only your group had wanted it enough to put in the required extra effort."
Maybe it's true, but it's a view that rejects game analysis and design.
Hold on, and maybe it's not even true. Expecting a group to put in the required extra effort in order to get what it wants, when a game isn't well-designed to provide it - it's unsustainable. In fact it's the old familiar unsustainable thing.
Anyway, analysis and design! I'm interested to hear Darcy's thoughts about systems that actively support richer, and better-shared, in-fiction color.
-Vincent
Darcy Burgess:
Hi,
Just so it's been said, I think that an inclination to enrich the SIS is not a prerequisite to roleplaying, it is the prerequisite. All the other stuff is the tools that you do it with. I don't think that I'm disagreeing with Callan or Ron (maybe with Vincent, but I can't tell, because I'm confused by what he wrote).
Phrased differently, a play in two acts:
Act I
Me: Hi, do you want to enrich the SIS with me?
You: No, I have no interest in such piffle.
Act II
Me: Hey, wanna play D&D?
You: Yes! I will be in the garage changing the oil in my car.
This is, of course, the worst play ever; Act I is identical to Act II.
Cheers,
D
lumpley:
Huh! I can try to be less confusing, but no promises.
Up top you said Quote from: Darcy Burgess on January 02, 2010, 06:25:34 PM
What Agon doesn't have, at all, is an ingrained system that promotes a vivid shared imagined space. ... It's all too easy to fall into the rut of position-hit-damage-position when we play. It's so easy to focus on the nuts and bolts (all of which are great), that it's easy to lose track of the act of creating a vivid verbal stage.
I think that you're right that this is a quality of Agon's design (and not Agon's exclusively). I think that it'll be fruitful and illuminating to approach it as, crucially, a design problem.
I think that Callan's wrong that it's a quality foremost of your group - yes, the design relies on attentiveness and discipline, but since your group's sitting down to play a roleplaying game, not a boardgame, I think we can and should take your intent as given.
That's all!
-Vincent
RPL:
Hi,
So I’ve been reading this thread and being a bit reluctant to participate, mostly because I don’t know for sure if my account is going to be relevant to your point Darcy.
But anyway here it goes.
Some time ago I’ve GMed Agon for a gaming group of mine. This group also has a running D&D 3.5ed campaign and two of them also play in a D&D 4ed game with me. Also I’ve played a whole bunch of successful and story/character powerful games with them, like PTA, DitV, TSoY.
(don’t know if this background is important, but here it stands).
When we play we try to focus on the point of play, so if the game requires colourful/meaningful scene descriptions like PTA or more colourful/meaningful action descriptions like DitV, we all go for it like mad dogs and make a real effort to pull it of.
However when we play games like Agon or D&D that have a very detailed combat mechanic, which can last for a considerable number of rounds when it starts, we tend to not be so colourful in our descriptions, mainly because it’s tiresome, honestly there are only so many ways to describe and attack and when you have something like 15 to 30 attack rolls in one combat it can get pretty exhausting trying to colour all of them, trying will only slow the game down and doesn’t bring all that much juice to the game it self.
Sometimes it does happen, I remember in Agon a combat we had were I created a Labyrinth has the enemy NPC and when they tried to cross it we made it just like a normal combat, the Labyrinth attacked them with falling rocks, shifting walls, pits, etc. Also in D&D 4ed, some use of powers or creatures can stir up very cinematic imagery.
But mostly there aren’t a lot of colourful descriptions during combats, just dice rolling, it’s not that we want to get the fight out of the way, we are just really involved and focused in the mechanics and tactics involved and are having fun with that. That also doesn’t mean we leave the SIS on the side, every player creates and participates in it with their characters moves and tactical options, and we can all imagine when a player uses his sword or spear and chooses to make a disarm or an attack, we just aren’t that colourful about it.
We leave most of the playacting and such to the other moments of play reaching a new island, talking to the NPCs and figuring out what’s going on, deciding a course of action to take or just having the characters kick around during refreshment scenes, and some of them are really cool, like a player I have that always made a musical-instrument-playing-gesture when we was using music for something.
So to sum up, outside of combat the players participate in the SIS with very rich descriptions of their characters actions and showing them of, however when the fighting starts the participation relies mostly in kind of dry descriptions and using their mechanical options and moves to convey what their characters are doing.
I’m not making any judgment about right or wrong styles of play or SIS input, it’s just the way we play. Is this helpful?
All the best,
D.
Filip Luszczyk:
Vincent,
Quote
I think that Callan's wrong that it's a quality foremost of your group - yes, the design relies on attentiveness and discipline, but since your group's sitting down to play a roleplaying game, not a boardgame, I think we can and should take your intent as given.
I'd say you are underestimating the possibility of there being no clear consensus of what a "role-playing game" is, as opposed to a board game or whatever, among the group.
I've been in a number of groups where everyone wanted to play an entirely different game. Some players came to the session to role-play their characters within the story, some wanted more input in the story, others wanted character optimization or tactical roll-playing almost exclusively, often there were some who just wanted to participate in the game without any meaningful input at all, etc. However, they were all coming to the session to play what they individually though was a "role-playing game". Worse yet, in trad gaming especially, the game could go on for weeks or months like that before it crashed, rarely being fully satisfying for everyone involved. That was rarely the case with highly focused games like D&D 3-4 or most Forge-style designs, where heavy focus on non-conventional mechanics often scared incompatible players right away (however, that doesn't work with casual gamers who don't really care, it seems).
Other than a substantial number of gamers seem to suffer from communication problems paired with some weird masochistic tendencies, my conclusion is that there is no given.
Relying on some universal concept of a "role-playing game" is a very slippery common ground, I'd say. Group tradition or the game manual are more solid, but the former might prove incompatible with the latter. It seems to me a gaming group has two options, basically. The group can rely on their common tradition of how one plays a "role-playing game", disregarding or houseruling parts of the design, or perhaps relying on that discipline thing in case of incompatibilities. Otherwise, the group can try to play the game as is, disregarding their "role-playing" preconceptions and trying to adjust their playstyle to the ruleset (and it's either going to be fun for them or not). Outside those two ways, streets tend to be cobbled with disfunction.
Based on the data provided by Darcy, it's hard to assess this particular case.
Darcy,
Consequently, could you provide us with more details about the members of your group and your gaming history?
Also, my question about Beast Hunters stays. If you had a chance to try it out, I'm very curious about how it compares with Agon in terms of both role- and roll-playing experience and expectations.
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