[They Became Flesh] Ronnies feedback
Ron Edwards:
H'mmm. I smell genuine game design.
Little stuff first. (1) Is 10 dice enough? Seems like the whole process is fun from the beginning, so why limit it that sharply, or rather, why not provide the option to roll at least a couple big ol' handfuls in the course of a longer game? There's a playtesting question for sure.
(2) How about the scope of immediate and specific actions, then? What can my guy do? Can I blast a person to ashes by singing his name? Can I sleep in a spot and wake up in a perfectly-built, gorgeous house? Can I kill nine men in a fight without breaking a sweat? This kind of pure thematic-based pool-play needs a common ground of imagined scope. What are your thoughts about that?
Big stuff. This is what Callan is always on about, and why I keep trying to get him to articulate it more and more accurately and precisely as the years go by. Ultimately, trait-based play is merely "everyone says so" or "Bob says so" unless there is some way to invoke the mechanic first to establish that the fiction obeys. I am not as hardcore as Callan is; if I read him correctly, at least some of his posts flatly decree that the latter invocation should be always and only the means of applying something on one's sheet. Instead, I see a kind of dance between "the circumstances allow it" thinking and "it's on my sheet so I'm using it" thinking. And the actual steps of that dance remain unknown, or at least, only briefly touched upon in the threads here.
In one of those threads, I reflected upon my own designs to discover that I never use such traits in my games. I mean, I play them all the time, and I aver that they are not merely devolved into "Bob says it's OK/not-OK for you touse your Good Aim trait" exercises, but apparently there is some understanding in my own creative self (who I imagine to be very grubby indeed, working most ferociously all the time, and not at all nice to visitors) which says, "don't go that way." One thing that is clear to me is that designing "sheet first," so to speak, is solid ground.
Elizabeth, it looks like you decided to step onto that solid ground. I won't say the alternative is quicksand straight into the "Bob says" territory of play, but it is certainly still not a good place to venture out of habit, because it can go that way.
Best, Ron
Elizabeth:
Here's the next iteration of the PTD - the only major change is the dice mechanic and the way the endgame works. I've been busy moving to California and completely redesigning a Facebook game at work, so I haven't had a lot of time for tabletop stuff. Now I'm making the time, though.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B74mgaLw45BFMjc1Mzk4MDUtNTljNC00NTVhLTg1NmItOWZjMjZlZGJlMDZj&hl=en
Please let me know what you think.
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