[The War of the Sheaves] Ronnies feedback
Abkajud:
Hey Ron,
I wasn't worried at all that you were ignoring this thread, but I appreciate the clarification regardless. Mah skin's thicker than it used t' be! :)
Additionally, I can see exactly what you mean about the "Main Event" being ahead, not behind. I stayed up until an absurd hour last night (as the time stamp on my post will attest, most likely) because ideas were swarming. I went back and read some of the Infamous Five, I read Vincent's latest stuff, and something clicked. Not just about the social layer, either - my brain said, "Hey, there's got to be a way for this stuff to be more integrated". Very cool, indeed.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Zac,
It's a little tricky conducting dialogue with someone as deeply in the throes of creation as you seem to be at the moment. By the time I post, you'll probably have moved past what I've read and replied to. I'll try to restrict myself to clarifications of stuff I've posted already and also to direct inquiries, and not get into forward-moving design itself, which at this point, is best left to your own processing.
My only major suggestion
Look again at your title. What war is undeniably and urgently happening? Who is it against, and about what?
Politics
Without any implication regarding your actual mind, your text about this issue continues to be cognitively dissonant. Examine this:
Quote
I really like (and prefer) female protagonists in media, especially when they pass the Bechdel test (two women have a conversation for at least a minute of screen time without mentioning any men), hence my inspiration here. But I'd feel like an ass if I went in the direction of wagging my finger at the bad old matriarchy, if I chose to position the society as a Bad Thing - I suppose I'd have to talk more about the White City, or at least patriarchy generally, to at least complicate the discussion and not be some kind of reactionary pedant.
The first sentence makes perfectly good sense and is not problematic. We play women. Got it.* However, the second sentence is framed with "But" so as to be an oppositional or countervailing concept to the first ... and it's not. It has nothing to do with the first sentence. Whether we play women (which we do) does not match to whether the matriarchy is or is not being problematized.
It also rings an alarm bell for me, which is that you apparently equate any problematizing of a matriarchal society with male chauvinist backlash. This is nonsense. Nothing is wrong with raising issues which you think may be inherent to such a society. For what it's worth, I also suggest that all attention toward the White City, and most especially demonizing it for cred so one's view toward Durum will somehow be perceived as "balanced," is badly misplaced. Let it be off in the distance.
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do you consider this game to have some in-your-face political content?
I would love it if it did. What I'm seeing is a kind of desperate dancing to raise issues without offending imagined ardent second-wave feminist advocates. It could use a healthy dose of in-your-face.
Perhaps it's worth considering, in-your-face towards whom?
And also, I don't see any contradiction between fantastical and confrontational. My interest in fantasy is anti-escapist; to me, fantasy is at its most powerful when it distorts existing issues productively, i.e., provocatively.
Minor points about rules and stuff
I think that Banner conflict is crucial and powerful, and that you seem to be talking about dropping them for some reason, for a given character. I consider that to be something of a red herring. Work on how they function before tailspinning into talking about getting rid of them.
Regarding implements, I really don't see why you have all this stuff about exhausting them, aside from fanboy excitement about Polaris. Why not just treat them as ordinary abilities in the sense of HeroQuest and leave it at that?
Best, Ron
* Also, non-problematic for me. I believe I am the first RPG author to mandate female characters for the entirety of a game.
Abkajud:
Ah, good points and good questions. Thanks!
So - what I meant by "talking more about the White City" was talking about how it, too, is fucked up.
And yet, I am moving hard in the direction of leaving it a complete mystery - play must be first and foremost about the fault lines that develop in this hermit-society when the Stranger arrives.
What I'm shooting for is this: the Stranger should be the equivalent of a goddamn Martian crash-landing on a world that thought it had seen the last of interplanetary contact.
For one thing, it would make sense that the Stranger, very explicitly, be a male soldier or warrior. If he has some sort of livery that proves he's from the White City, so much the better, but the point in all that would be to make his arrival a credible threat that people have reason to be worked up about.
As far as the title is concerned, I'm thinking it'd make a bit more sense to call it something like "Banners over Durum". The original title is an artifact, at this point - it sounded snappy when I was first drafting that initial spiel about the origin of Durumian matriarchy. At this point, I can dump it.
With regard to the Bechdel test, etc., I am stressing out over imaginary political ghosts. I have no particular reason to worry, and I really don't give a shit what the women's separatists of the world might think - upon reflection, the matriarchy is a Shock, anyway. The point is to explore this idyllic, if somewhat fucked up (yes, both. Elements that are awesome, and elements that are pretty bad, side by side) society, and decide what direction you want to take it in, assess the stakes involved (will I hunt down my former kin, even my blood-sisters, if it means I can get the society I've always wanted?), and act.
Mechanically, I have no intention of getting rid of Banner conflict. What I was trying to say before was that I had come up with something that was very new and weird to me, and I needed to spend a lot of time thinking about how play would look. I have a clearer vision of that now, much more so, and I'm very excited about it.
WRT exhausting traits, I think I'm still under the yoke of some rampant fanboy-ism. I'm not trying to do a Polaris hack, not at all, really, but I've been stuck in this mind-set that key phrases were necessary (they may or may not be; I might like them, but they're proving troublesome), and I took that thinking a step further in assuming that key phrases mandates using Themes, also. Not true at all. If HeroQuest can seamlessly incorporate groups and followers into conflict rules that prioritize tracking individual efforts, then I can figure this out.
I want Banners to have a momentum of their own - whether you're in command of them or not, they still have their own interests and goals. They aren't terribly dynamic, on their own (we're interested in how the players handle things, after all), but I'm trying to make it so that if you take a Banner in an interesting direction, you can't just take it back somewhere else without effort. That's kind of what I mean by momentum - if your clan follows you to civil war, and you suddenly get a case of nerves, they've still gambled on fighting, and on winning. If you leave them behind, they're going to still be vulnerable to opposing forces, and on a martial level.
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