[The Pool] Ghosts & guns & bodies
Ron Edwards:
Addendum to my reply to Callan.
Assuming that you are implying that the text of RPGs are divorced from the procedures and activities of play, such that in this case the painting as an activity and the materials of painting are in fact divergent ... (and as I see it, in such a way that for real painting, they are not) ...
Then I emphatically agree with you when it comes to the majority of published RPGs and the majority of the ways in which I have participated in and observed people playing them, especially starting around 1985 to the present. But not regarding The Pool.
Best, Ron
Callan S.:
Ron,
I think it's unfair to raise thematics or narrative in terms of looking clinically at the games physical properties. These things aren't a property of the game. They aren't even really a property of what was created. They are your own cognitive reactions upon being audience to what was created. If the comparison between a group who uses it and one who doesn't isn't physically much, that can be left up to others to judge what that means, if anything. Some might see a subtle yet signficant difference. Others might not. And they might all discuss that with each other, which they couldn't if the only evaluation on offer was someones reaction. I think both the clinical evaluation and your reactions should be on offer to discuss, not just one or the other.
Quote
Assuming that you are implying that the text of RPGs are divorced from the procedures and activities of play, such that in this case the painting as an activity and the materials of painting are in fact divergent ... (and as I see it, in such a way that for real painting, they are not) ...
Then I emphatically agree with you when it comes to the majority of published RPGs and the majority of the ways in which I have participated in and observed people playing them, especially starting around 1985 to the present. But not regarding The Pool.
Probably the first thing to say is that I don't consider a brush and canvas as a game. The second is that I see nothing in the mechanics that requires dice to be touched at all. In the same way a brush doesn't require you to pick it up, ever.
I'm trying to anticipate alot of reactions to this from many folk, usually along the lines of "Of course we would!", but there are too many permutations for me to really respond in advance.
So I'd just suggest this to illustrate what I mean better than talking - make a pool hack where after X number of minutes, a randomly determined player has to roll on a trait (randomly roll up three traits, he has to pick one within a minute).
It might seem rude and crude (I didn't try to make something that asserts itself and is beutiful). The point is, as much as you might say you would and want to roll, when your forced to either roll or quit playing, it's subtle yet powerfully different. There's a qualitive difference as much as you say thematically and narratively it was an qualative difference for the Brickmilton death change. For your experience, I believe you. For my suggestion, I think it's worth trying in some way.
Writing this with the frame of mind of a long, long process of design. If your writing about the pool as if it's cut and dried and to be talked about as a done project, I guess my TL;DR version is that I don't agree. But that doesn't matter - if it's being treated as done here, then I've found I'm off topic even as I write this so I'll wrap up in that case.
greyorm:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on September 06, 2010, 08:45:10 PM
Well, Everway was right: Color-first really works best with pictures. If I'd taken my own advice, I would have provided something like this or this. I was thinking in terms of the ghosts really driven to do something with their "lives," yes, but in very Hollywood terms - sleek action, glamorous or at least photogenically proactive characters, flash and bang.
This is the most interesting part of all this to me, but (correct me if I'm wrong) it mostly seems to have been ignored in discussion so far. I mean, I read your write-up and thought immediately "oo, oh, ooo ooo, yeah" and then read the characters and thought "oh, er, oh, uhhhh" (no offense to the players). I am pretty sure I get what you were shooting for (*ahem*) given our generally parallel cultural touchpoints, and the characters came off as coming from somewhere else completely different than that. So, yeah, total disconnection conceptually, though not literally.
It reminds me of a series of internet memes that read: "What I Made" "What the GM Saw" "What I Played" and show a different, though related, picture for each. For example.
And it certainly parallels problems I've run into in running games before. I'll describe a setting and an idea to folks, and they'll come back with something that conceptually just doesn't mesh, at least to me. I've had this happen in a Sorcerer Middle-Ages Cthulhu game--which helped kill the game before it went anywhere--and in one of my longer-running D&D games as well. In that case, I ended up stumbling around in the dark for a long time trying to get my bearings on what exactly to do with the characters, and indeed the game itself.
In fact, I think this ties back to one of the "big problems" in gaming for me: DMs not giving you enough information to make appropriate characters, or failing to use the characters you do make when they say "just do whatever, I'll fit it in." Those games always feel hokey and unfulfilling to me in play. And then there's this issue: trying, but just not being on the same page.
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hey Raven, absolutely, that was what I was trying to address in the first paragraph of my first post. I've found it very productive to have someone (usually but not necessarily the GM) rush ahead with an idea and provide something for the others to hold on to. And sometimes it's better to tear everything down and start from scratch if it's not geling. Sounds like in Ron's example the group managed to work with what they had, but I've seen more than one game failing on that account.
- Frank
greyorm:
Ooops, you're right, Frank. I'd forgotten you'd posted about that earlier.
Here's a thing: It's great when everyone's on board. I ran a short-lived but awesome Donjon game where we used the Dark Sun setting as our touchpoint. Since we were all long-time fans of the setting, we all started off on the same page regarding what characters would "look like" in play and what the whole experience should "feel" like.
So your mention of setting creation by the group--not full-blown, perhaps, but everyone's involved in deciding what makes it all go--that gets everyone on the same page, and you can do that by group-creation, or by having a shared, common understanding of what it is it is all about. I can see how that works well.
My interest, I guess, lies in the other direction: what about when the group isn't involved, at least no further than developing their characters from whatever the GM has provided? I've been in a lot of groups where the players don't want to do heavy lifting like that, or don't believe it is their place, or it just doesn't happen for whatever reason (they trust the GM to do his thing), but you still run into this situation in those groups. Like in Ron's example above.
Obviously, they recovered from it in play, but what solid, proven methods are there for those situations so that the envisioned game doesn't have to be refitted into something else post-character creation? Are there? We're talking about communication and clarity here, obviously. I'm just curious what folks have found to work.
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