[FreeMarket] Trouble with something
Ron Edwards:
Hi John,
I can't speak for Peter or anyone else for certain. I've tried to articulate what he was most concerned with during the discussion, which (I think) might be summed up as, you can't really be good at anything. You can manage your various currencies (Flow, things you can burn, et cetera), sure, but card-counting is card-counting, and once you get it, the system has nothing more in it to use and nowhere to go in terms of simply winning conflicts. If it's gone poorly for you, you can only Call to cut your losses as quickly as you can. As a related note, he is absolutely correct that a bad draw at the outset really screws you. But that is as far as I'll go in trying to channel someone else's views. I may have misrepresented them already without knowing it, and it is not fair for anyone to provide rebuttals to him through the possibly flawed interface I'm providing.
This may go hand-in-hand with something I'm still sussing out as Superuser, which is that, in ome of the text, I find there to be a tension between driving hard at the player-characters yet somehow being sure that it all works out well for them. It may be simply poor reading on my part, but such an approach seems to involve two (for me) undesirable possbilities fo rmy role: either a friendly face masking a passive-aggressive threat, or a play-fight provocativeness masking a benign presence. Now, since I care for neither of these, and since I'm pretty juiced about lots of stuff in the setting and system, I need to find a way to work with the text so that those aren't the only two things I see. I'd like my role as Superuser to be absolutely consistent with the light-hearted, colorful, and intellectually stimulating material, such as captured so nicely by the crowd scene on the cover (especially the primary character), the frontispiece illustration of the little kid with the dog, and that wonderful illustration of Tier 1 Status in the MRCZ chapter. I'm pretty sure that I can do that with another shot at play.
Best, Ron
meganjank:
Hi everyone -
Firstly, I would never engage in any sort of sexual act with Rush Limbaugh regardless of the other choice presented to me. Ew.
As Ron has related in his summary of the game, I was a spectator at the table due to a rehearsal I had to run earlier that evening. I think I may have missed one of the more enjoyable parts of the game, which was the character/world creation part of the session. It seemed like there were a lot of really interesting elements that came out of that process - especially the creation of memories within the group. I would be curious to see how a session runs from top to bottom, rather than halfway through.
Also, to qualify my "excrutiating" comment - from my perspective, there was a lot of frustration at the table and that was translating into unhappy players. It seemed like after a while people were trying to get through the actions in scenes not so much to move the story forward or resolve a conflict, but just to finish it up quickly so they could get it over with. It didn't look or sound like fun to me. Again - I wasn't there the whole time, and maybe if I had been, I'd feel differently about the session I observed.
Megan
Ron Edwards:
Hi Megan! Welcome to the Forge, too.
Your observations were and are right on the money, I think. Our final challenge concerned Peter's character trying to repair the robot, and it seemed to me that we were forced to jump through kind of a grinding series of hoops without much payback. Only our good will toward one another as people kept us from being frustrated with each other.
My thinking is that, by that point, we'd lost most of the excitement about the material that might have made generating details in increments a lot of fun. That's what I can't really know - whether the frustrating feature were an artifact or intrinsic to the system, and if the latter, whether a different prep or viewpoint would make all the difference.
Best, Ron
Courage75:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on October 28, 2010, 06:44:24 PM
I even made up a pretty interesting diagram to help me get my head straight about the game (apologies; it's a Word file; I'll put a PDF of it up later); any comments or questions about it are welcome
Hi Ron,
I had a look at the document you created and was intrigued. How did you come up with it and how did it help you prepare for the game? Also, could you explain how it should be interpreted?
I am looking at different ways of preparing for games and I am very interested in the associations between preparation, memory and running games. When I prepare, I often write quite detailed notes but usually don't make much use of them during the game - there simply isn't enough time to read through my notes while running the game. However, the fact that I have gone to the trouble of making notes usually helps me run a game with confidence, as I know that I have turned my mind to the ideas I want to throw into the game and developed them. Usually, half of what happens in a game I cannot plan for, but I like to maximise on the stuff that I can plan for.
However, I am interested in making this process more efficient. Any tips in that regard?
Ron Edwards:
Hi George,
Like a lot of us here, I am pretty deeply embedded in science fiction, fantasy, and comics, both experientially and historically. When looking over something like FreeMarket, which is very derived to the point of almost being pastiche, I seek a bit of grounding in the older works which I think have directly or indirectly influenced it, or are consistent with it to the point of being historically important to its origins. This is often productive if not immediately obvious to do with Jared's work because he is such a weird filter for pop culture at its most superficial and fragmented - it's like he absorbs all this incredibly stupid and derivative shit, goes "whiirr, h'mmmm, beep!" and spits back a gorgeous, honed, nuanced, and scarily insightful item that could fit nicely among the best of the genuine and powerful seminal works of that topic - without ever having seen them.
So especially for FreeMarket and especially for Jared, I toss my mind and memory out like a net to find things to help orient me regarding what he produced. It's an idiosyncratic thing, certainly; I don't claim that it's especially helpful for anyone else although in the past, I've found that it has been. And it's very helpful to those who are playing with me, because they can see where and how the text spoke to me, and either refine that or use it as a way to orient themselves.
First, I guess I should clarify the diagram. There are three basic units, Grimjack, Those Annoying Post Bros, and Snow Crash. They all overlap one another one-on-one, and all together as well. I realize it's a little hard to tell where each unit's borders are. I'll have to mess with it to make that more clear - each unit is sized at about the dimensions of a comic book cover. So Snow Crash includes the white box with the picture as well as all three blue boxes.
So to break out Grimjack conceptually, its terms are Noir, Introspection, Butchery, Family, Dimensions, Cynicism, Human Contact, Memory, Satire, Flair, Urban, and Genre Mash-up. In the diagram, it shares the top two blue boxes with Snow Crash (Human Contact, Memory; Satire, Flair, Urban, Genre Mash-up) and the middle blue one and white one to the immediate left of that with Those Annoying Post Bros (Satire, Flair, Urban, Genre Mash-up, Butchery, Family, Dimensions, Cynicism).
OK, that said, and I hope it helps someone read it better, I am saying that FreeMarket, to me, draws upon or is consistent with these sources in a very piecemeal but productive way. If I were to say "like Grimjack, sort of," I might cause more trouble than I helped, because Grimjack includes, for instance, introspection in a fashion that could not possibly work with FreeMarket. But with the diagram, I am naming things that I think any reader of Grimjack would go "Oh!" and recognize and be able to consider individually. It also helps me break out the unique combination of features which characterizes the game and is not fully consistent with any one of the three sources that were most useful to me in thinking about the game, i.e., the blue boxes.
Let me know if that helps or makes sense. I tend to work better with specific questions or points rather than a generalized "tell me about it" request.
As a technical aside, the more historically relevant and vastly better source that should occupy the Snow Crash box is Don't Bite the Sun, by Tanith Lee, which would have rearranged the terms to a significant degree, especially concerning reversible death, and further highlighting the glaring absence of sex in FreeMarket.
Best, Ron
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