Avoiding the Mechanics for Functional Play
Filip Luszczyk:
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My earliest RP experience was actually (to be generous) a home-brew - but the system was entirely derived from GM fiat. Entirely. We had character sheets with HP, MP, levels, spells, all that, but the entire game was like a sort of crystal ball experience: players say what they do, maybe ask questions and things, and the GM decides everything that happens.
Ah, scratch my previous post. A few months before I put my hands on LoTR adventure game, I tried my home-brew based on what I gleaned from a single issue of the rpg magazine and some crpg stuff. I recall it had a board and a few stats rated with adjectives (I used to play Nahlakh a lot at the time). However, it didn't even occur to me I could write some mechanics to process player's decisions and all that stuff into concrete results. Or maybe I was just to lazy to design any? Either way, five minutes into the session, it was pure GM-fiat.
It was pretty fun when my cousin called the power of Greyskull to use his ninja magic. It wasn't really a game, though. We never tried this again, and I figured out I needed a commercial game. Then, I spent the next decade trying commercial product after commercial product hoping the next one would work better :)
Callan S.:
Hi,
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Games that push for players to avoid combat (or other mechanics) is fine, though for it to functionally work, it needs to be clearly stated HOW it works for both the GM and the players. Without an understanding of what your options are and how play is to work, people naturally fall back on the clear procedures- after all, that's how all -other- games work.
I don't think it's so much that people are "against" doing free-form solutions as much as that the expectation of doing free-form/Referee'd solutions is so rarely well communicated, and has led to so much history of snags in play, or, in my case, no play at all.
I've got this chilling sense that rather than you becoming able to overcome a problem in playing (like being killed by rats when the dude fights a dragon on the cover), you've instead simply become able to perpetuate the problem onto the next generation. Because now, as much as the guy who wrote the game where your killed by rats knew how to play that game, now you know how to play the game. And yet because he knew how to play it, you were left in the lurch for a large amount of time. And now you know, how many others will be left in the lurch for lengthy periods of time?
You have to realise the these books were smothered with the impression, the feeling, that it worked for someone. Quoting the hard look at D&D essay, in the cargo cults section
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How did you know it worked? What did you do it for? All of it, from Social Contract right down to Stance, had to be created in the faith that it worked "out there" somewhere, and somehow, some way, it was supposed to work here
What if it like...didn't work? That even the original guy who wrote the book - really hadn't gotten the group activities he organised, to work. Perhaps just had a very strong social control of the group (if I remember a quote of Gygax, it's that he thought 3rd edition onward the GM had become an entertainer, not a master of the game)?
Assuming it works first, and then trying to figure out how - well, that can be a font of creativity. But it can also be a font of madness if the original activity did not actually work at all. You obviously cannot understand how to make something work, which never did work, ever. You can see that if someone really, strongly believes something works first, they could spend years trying to find out the how. Because they never question their base belief.
Blasphemy, I know, to suggest Gygax's activity might not have actually worked. But blasphemy aside, what if that were actually true? And what then of that text on lulu, that wont download for me either, that says it knows how play old D&D?
Or at the very least, what if the text on lulu actually left you no more informed than you were before reading it? And it just transmitted an enthusiasm to you?
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Callan,
That seems like a worthwhile thread on it's own, especially if you have, or have spoken with people whom it never worked. That seems a little beyond the scope what I'm looking for in this thread, though.
I'm really interested in people who have had personal experience with learning from game texts especially with regard to games where not engaging the mechanics is an expected aspect of play.
Chris
jburneko:
So, Chris, when I was 8 years old my mother bought Red Box D&D at Toys 'R' Us. She did this for two reasons. She'd heard all the horrible occult rumors about the game and thought that was just about the dumbest thing she'd ever heard. (This is the woman who used to "summon" fire and water spirits with her nieces and nephews as a kind of make-believe game much to her sister's ire). The second reason was because she had this odd philosophy that you kept an 8 year old boy happy by giving him monsters to play with. We had ZERO connection to the hobby as a wider cultural phenomenon.
I didn't have a lot of friends my age at the time so to play the game she roped all HER friends together. So from about 8 to 12 or so my D&D gaming was with my mother as GM and her 30-year oldish friends as my party members. We went through Blue Box and then on to AD&D and AD&D2e.
Here's the thing: My mother totally got it. I don't know HOW she got it but somehow she figured out that the GM was there to "make up the rules." We didn't really avoid or ignore the rules so much as she altered them to "make sense" for situations the rules didn't explicitly cover. We HAD a lot of just straight up combats. Pretty cool ones too.
Memorable Quirks of Our Game.
My mother LOVED maps. Man, she spent most of her day drawing maps and populating them with stuff. I'm pretty sure she had note books of adventures we never actually got around to playing. Charts as well, she made a lot of her own charts and tables and stuff or random stuff. If there was an Inn she had a unique list of what was sold there. She drew a city map that spanned *5* whole sheets of graph paper and there was an adventure hook in each every individual HOUSE.
A few times near the beginning we'd start adventures with her handing out scripts (no more than about 10 pages) that we'd read. Railroading? Probably but she had enough of a handle on what was fun about our characters that everybody got really into it. We only did that for a little while.
We had a special toast to open the game, she'd say, "To The Game!" And we'd all reply, "To The DEATH!" (Note on the rare occasions I play D&D, I still observe this ritual).
One time she got kind of fed up with not being able to wrangle the group for regular play. So what she did was make a rather large collection of random charts so that she and I could play together just the two of us, both as PCs with no real DM.
I guess my point is two fold. With regard to Callan's point, what we did worked in so much as we engaged in a successful social leisure activity we called D&D. But to the point of the thread my mother somehow figured it out. There must have been ENOUGH in that text for her to work it out because she more or less ran games right in the spirit of the OSR today.
Jesse
jburneko:
It occurred to me that what I posted above may not seem compatible with some of the posts where I give a some what more pain ridden account of my experiences with D&D. Those stories are about what happened when I started trying to read the rules and play the game by myself. I started trying to read the rules when I was 8 but real frustration set in around Jr. High/High School when I started trying to play and run the game for my friends all on my own.
Unlike, my mother, I didn't get it. I was convinced that what my mother was doing was fun and all but there must be a more accurate, correct, and consistent way to play. This was partially in response to me playing with teenagers who were fond of playing "gotcha" games with me as a GM.
Jesse
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