Reduced enjoinment playing RPG
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
One thing I forgot to include in my earlier post was to open the discussion again to everyone. So anyone's who's interested, post away.
To oculusverit, you asked whether my #1, character death, wasn't necessarily a game mechanic. That's a good question, because the answer is "no." Or rather, let me be more specific to be more clear - by game mechanic, I mean any of the following: quantitative threshold, plot/event threshold, or special sequence of spoken terms. Most RPGs, historically, have imitated the most well-known early designs which used a quantitative threshold, i.e. hit points. But many have not. Of those, a few have not used any game mechanic (as used in this post) at all. See Interview with Vincent and me, 3rd page, Marshall's question to me and my answer, for a brief overview.
To Ar Kayon, you're proposing the classic role-playing tautology: if the GM is good, then everyone has fun; and if everyone had fun, then it must be because the GM is good. This is a cycle of beautiful nothing. If you want to state something substantive instead, you must describe what this alleged GM does which is so good, and causally, how that results consistently in others having fun, and if it's supposed to be independent of the system in question, explain that independence. All of which is possible and viable, but you might discover that your definition of "good," or anyone's, is not universal. I suggest this topic belongs in its own Actual Play thread.
Rocco, I appreciate your patience and attention to the conversation. Clearly, #1-4 can certainly be involved in the hypothetical game we're talking about, whether as narrations using the ordinary mechanics or as subordinate mechanics, leaving #5 and #6 to be "the biggies" in rules terms.
So far, looking over your current ideal game (shall we call it Rocco the RPG?) we have Color, Situation, Reward system and strongly-related mechanics. I submit that we are very nearly done actually designing it. The specific setting - far future, otherdimensional, historical, semi-historical, whatever - actually doesn't matter except insofar as you really like it. The characters, character creation, and resolution mechanics should all be recognizable as subsets of the reward mechanic, even if in some details they are divorced from it. So whatever you'd pick for starting features of a character, or whatever you'd like to use as a resolution device, well, it's whatever you might enjoy greatly and the only real design-job is to hook it to the methods for generating relevant situations, immediately or eventually, and for applying the reward mechanics at their harshest and most exciting.
I suggest further that your extremely strong answer to my "three possible aesthetic approaches" has already covered the Creative Agenda question: you are aiming at Narrativist play quite coherently - even urgently. A certain attention to genre or source inspiration is no impediment to this.
Are there existing games which you might turn to? I think there are. FATE isn't one of them; its Aspect system is pretty mild compared to (say) The Riddle of Steel or The Shadow of Yesterday and would be anemic in light of the intensity of what you're describing. Certain applications of Burning Wheel would be quite excellent, as would a hack of HeroQuest, but I think your technical preferences are pointing in a different direction, toward The Pool. If you were thinking in terms of animated TV series, which is consistent with some of your inspirations, then Primetime Adventures, definitely a daughter of The Pool, would do the job.
Let me know if you think this discussion has helped.
Best, Ron
Rocco:
Hi Ron
I think that this discussion has helped me a lot in understanding my own preferences about RPG, because I was able to express this preferences, examine them once they were written and discuss them with other people. Really, really useful.
When I read your post a smile appeared on my face: you suggested "The Pool" and "Prime Time Adventures". During the last week I read the "pool" mechanics and some discussion and Actual Play of Prime Time Adventures and, when I was reading, a thought suddenly stroke my mind: "WOW, that's the way I would like to play! This games seems to help generating the kind of conflict that I would like to see!" and "It's fantastic! I can put my idea in game with this games, and the other players can too, and we can collaborate!"
So, as you see, talking with you and all the other people here at the forge, helped me clear some disillusionment that I had acquired toward RPG and cast some light on what is "good and fun" for me.
Thanks you a lot.
Rocco
P.S: When I will have some Actual Play I will post them and I would really appreciate to discuss them.
Ar Kayon:
Ron,
You've made a strawman argument out of my statement. I said that a good GM can make a play experience fun, not that a good GM will make the play experience fun, as if by some arbitrary force. The audience is not passive - they interact - and the mechanics of the game itself must be taken into consideration. It would be pure absurdity for me to subscribe to the assumption you've made, preach such assumptions, and then go on designing the elaborate game systems that I do.
By good I mean a general consensus. And while it is impossible for every single person to have similar ideas of fun, in the context of gaming there are underlying principles which make a positive consensus more likely. If this were not true, then you would have wasted your time with your articles. To spare myself walls upon walls of clarifying text, I assume that veteran role-players, of all people, can intuit these underlying principles. I see no sane reason for going into autistic mode whenever I have an informal conversation with my fellow gamer.
Rocco,
You've said that you've tried online gaming. Have you tried OpenRPG yet? It has a platform that supports the actual gameplay (chat room with dice rollers, battle grids, miniatures, etc.), and users from all over inhabit the hub, making it very easy to set up gaming groups. Personally, I think it's superior to face to face gaming for several reasons. 1) You don't have to look at or smell your fellow nerds. 2) If you don't like them, you can ditch them and set up another gaming group in the same day. 3) Which means you don't have to feel bad about killing their characters. 4) They've actually played something other than D&D. 5) No painful drama club acting.
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