Educating your group on CA to prevent premature hair-loss
Eric Schwenke:
Hello, I've been an on-again off-again lurker for about a decade now. A few years ago I made a post or two in "First-Thoughts" about my quarter-baked ideas for a Purist-for-System game, but didn't follow p on it. Since then, my mind keeps coming back to ideas for the game that is slowly baking more and more. I'm really excited about some of my ideas and want to talk about them... but Ron says that I should post here first.
OK, so I haven't been able to game for a while now, partly due to the social strangeness that is common to new parents. Unfortunately, I don't think that our new son was the only reason that my wife and I slowly found ourselves not gaming with our group anymore. I think the biggest problem was not so much that our CAs were different from the rest of the group, but because I couldn't quite get them to understand CAs and Stances and to respect our differences. My wife and I are primarily Sim-minded, but the DM (D&D 3.5) is pretty Nar focused. Throughout the few years that I played with him, he would occasionally bring out his "Vogue Point" rules, which was his tacked on meta-game mechanic that would allow the player to break the rules and even take Director Stance. I generally kept my use of them to a minimum using them in-game only to avoid certain death (ie. stabilize at -9 HP, make a failed Save-or-Die) or in a meta-game fashion to exchange them for XP if it meant leveling that session.
When I first started playing with him it seemed to be OK, because it was just him, me and his wife, but eventually the group grew to an unwieldy size due to my wife (an inexperienced gamer) trying to solve the problem of too few players by getting other friends of ours into the group, growing the group from four to seven. Frustration rose, especially as I heard the DM frequently make use of phrases like "speed of plot" and "plot o'clock", and one of the new players (an attention whore that always tried to steer the conversation towards tentacle-rape and other bullshit would gleefully say things like "logic has no place in a fantasy setting", effectively defecating all over my Sim. Towards the end, I was finally able to get the DM to read ["GNS and Other Matters..." but he didn't seem to get it. Even after I tried to talk about it with him, he would pressure me to use Vogue Points in ways I found unacceptable, and with other players backing him up it got really annoying.
So, does anyone have good experiences and tips on getting people to understand and respect CA that might be resistant to reading and thinking on Ron's articles,?
Eero Tuovinen:
Quote from: Eric Schwenke on September 06, 2010, 01:46:36 PM
So, does anyone have good experiences and tips on getting people to understand and respect CA that might be resistant to reading and thinking on Ron's articles,?
Can't be done. That is, of course there are other texts one might push at others and so on, but who ever learned something while being "resistant" to it?
My experience with similar situations is that trying to solve your agenda issues by teaching CA theory to the other people in your group is like trying to solve your interpersonal problems by teaching psychoanalysis - it just might work with the right group of people, but most will consider the very idea of delving into an esoteric pseudoscience to solve straightforward (to their eyes) interpersonal issues laughable at best, or an effort at dodging the issue or brainwashing at worst.
The only successful method of communication I've had in this sort of situation has been building a solid creative basis for my disagreement and then demonstrating in practice how I'd like to do things differently. In other words, I get a different game and play that with the people in question, after which we'll know much more about our mutual preferences. If this doesn't seem viable, then perhaps there is not enough commitment in the group to playing together in the first place; it's entirely possible that this particular game is more important to this group than the people they play with; if this is the case, then there's little to be done except to either play the game the way the GM wants or get out.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Eric,
My take is not much more optimistic than Eero's. It might help to break things out a little bit in terms of people. You have the GM, his wife, you, your wife, and then three more people. I don't know whether the anti-logic, tentacle-rape guy is one of the latter three, but I presume so. It seems a little odd to me ... if that's the case, then he's one of the people invited in by your wife, so it's unclear whether the GM likes his input either. It's not easy to tell whether play is being disrupted primarily by the GM's techniques or by the presence of this other guy; if you dislike both, or may be conflating the one with the other.
What I'm driving at is that you may do well to organize a group of your own, or at least an auxiliary or alternative meeting (then again, you're not meeting with this one any more, so yeah, a group of your own). Perhaps one or more of the others in this group may be interested in what you'd like to play, once out of the somewhat tricky social dynamic of the current game. It may also be worth considering whether your wife is in fact interested in playing the way you'd like to, which may or may not be a private matter. If you do set up a new group, then I suggest keeping it small, four people including yourself at most.
I'm glad you posted this, because it really is quite orienting for me and others when you start posting in First Thoughts. Purist for System design is definitely not easy and would be hard to deal with if people helpfully suggest some equivalent to Vogue Points without knowing that you have no interest in them based on hard experience.
As a minor theoretical point, because it seems like you're generally interested, I'd like to distinguish between genuine Creative Agenda vs. competence regarding particular Techniques.
Leaving aside what sort of Agenda any individual at the table, GM and otherwise, may want to experience in play, it strikes me that as a group, they aren't especially good at the Vogue Points, or at least, not in the presence of that one guy. I'm also a little dubious concerning the "plot" language that you're reporting as well, because that can mean very different things for different people.
Best, Ron
Clay:
If I may make a suggestion, don't talk about Creative Agenda at the table, and don't suggest "educating" the other players. Reading theory articles about games is about as exciting as reading about new dovetailing techniques: a small number of people will be fascinated, and the rest will be eating their own feet out of boredom and frustration before it's done.
Creative Agenda is another way of saying "what do I want to get out of this game?" Answer that question for yourself. Discuss it with the game master outside of game time, if you're determined to stay with that group. Or take Ron's suggestion and start your own group, and be up front and open about what you want out of that game.
This isn't to run down Ron's gaming essays. They've been very helpful for me to focus on the kinds of games I want to play, and to improve the experience at the table for everyone when I'm running the game. But I don't discuss theory at the table with my players. Instead we talk about how we liked what someone did, or how we'd do something different in the future, as a way to reinforce the things we like and discourage the things we don't like.
Baron:
I agree with Clay. I've started a group, from scratch, only after consuming as much CA as I can from the essays. I've dropped CA-speak while in the game as naturally as I might talk about the weather, but to them its moon-man talk. If you were GM-ing, what you might do is say "this is a gamist game" and leave it at that. Or "this is generally a gamist game, but all this effort about time management, that's kind of Sim" and leave it at that. If they're interested, they'll ask you, and you can pick it up later. Only after some time and shared reading will true discussion of CA become possible. If you're not GM-ing, well, I suppose the only way is through completely off-table discussion with the GM. And even then it's kind of personal.
This is a topic for a different post, a separate post, but there's the kernel of it in Eric's and my posts: how do you teach this? The source of the theory, and correct me if I'm wrong, is actively decreasing disfunction. Disfunction occurs when everyone at the table has divergent CA tastes and cannot communicate those desires. The cure for disfunction is better (more aware) design. But is better design via the Forge for the people already experienced, already with 10+ years of RPGs under their belt, already have design credits? I know I have my tastes, but what about the new guy, the guy who's never played before, or who's only played one game over and over? How does he really learn? Is the way, as I've planned, to try one of each and whatever sticks, sticks? Try another until everyone's satisfied? Or add/subtract Sim/Nar/Gam elements from your present game until everyone's satisfied? Or the deadly solution: find a new group? I think, somehow, now that we have the theory, we can design adequate training wheels. Where are the games - rooted in this theory - that teach?
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