[SS], [TSoY] and "safety net"
Paolo D.:
Hi people! :-)
First of all, what do I mean with "safety net"?
I mean a mechanic or a procedure (or more than one of them) of a game, meant to help all the table in staying on the same page during play.
For example, I mean rules like DitV's veto, or like PTA's Fanmail.
So, here's my question:
after reading the Solar System (and playing it), it seems to me that it has no safety net at all. At best, there is the "Gift of Dice" variant rule, but it's... A variant rule, and not a part of the standard core of the game.
However, I found that in TSoY (I read it on this wiki) the Gift of Dice was a core rule.
So, I asked myself: why the SS doesn't have any safety net at all? Is there a particular reason?
Thanks,
Paolo
Paul Czege:
Paolo,
So, by "safety net" you mean a mechanic that enables a group to enforce the game's genre during play? As distinct from mechanics for creating or teaching genre? As distinct from mechanics that don't enforce, but instead reward for genre adherence?
Do Secrets and Keys, by virtue of being player chosen reward mechanics, perhaps define and reward (rather than enforce) a custom genre for each Solar System game?
Paul
Ron Edwards:
Disclosure: Paolo and I have talked about this already. Paolo, I'm going to stop all this introductory dancing and get right to the point.
He's referring to mechanisms of appreciation, especially quantitative/dicey ones, which reinforce the shared attention to what's going on in the fiction.
The Solar System is distinctly less oriented toward those mechanisms than The Shadow of Yesterday. It also privileges GM judgment regarding player-input, giving it a managerial role at some points in the text.
The question is whether the Solar System represents a certain rehabilitation, that is, toward a more traditional construction of approval of players' statements and inclusion into the fiction.
Whether this is good or bad or indifferent, is not so much the point, but my reading of the text tends in that direction, as does Paolo's. These readings and conclusions were independent of one another, so we were each surprised to discover the other's view. Now we're interested in what others think.
Best, Ron
Eero Tuovinen:
That's interesting. My first reaction is that while the Gift Dice are a mechanism of appreciation, they're also not an entirely functional one in practical play. (I made it an "optional" rule in the SS text and shunted it into a side-bar precisely because it's been a dead-letter rule in most of my own play, but I recognize its utility in some minority of possible campaigns.) This is, of course, mostly based on my own experiences in play. I suspect that the overriding reason for why the Gift Dice don't do much for the groups I play in is that TSoY is much more objective and organic about protagonism and audience sympathy than something like Primetime Adventures, which uses a very similar attention-enforcing mechanism in Fan Mail. When we play PTA it usually takes a session or two for new players to grog how to use Fan Mail, but after that it's a self-enforcing cycle largely because it's a priori assumed that the player characters are and will be the audience focus of the game, no matter what happens. With TSoY players might use Gift Dice when prompted, but almost without fail they'll end up ignoring and forgetting the whole idea soon, no matter how much Story Guide attention is lathered over them. Also, much of Gift Dice usage in TSoY ends up being more about "I need to help a party member" than "I appreciate your character as a fellow creator", which poisons the mechanism and encourages wrong thinking habits. My theory about the difference, as I mentioned, is that while PTA considers it a given that a player character will be the focus of admiration and audience interest, in TSoY you very much have to earn this stance from the rest of the group, and unless you do, the Gift Dice are a dead letter - and if you do achieve this, then the Gift Dice are fundamentally unnecessary.
It is not uncommon in my own TSoY/SS groups that 1-2 player characters end up real protagonists, 1-2 end up as comic reliefs, 1-2 become villains and the rest become sidekicks of some sort. There is also always a constant tension in the game between the ideals of independent protagonism, wherein each player character is worked up and appreciated as a hero in his own right, and party-based play, where player characters align themselves around a leading protagonist to maximize the amount of PC-to-PC interaction and character exposure in the campaign. The SS rules text is very non-committal about how the campaign builds up in this regard, as you might have noticed, just like the TSoY text is. In these conditions it's far from given that a given character will ever do anything that is truly deserving of Gift Dice.
The underlying reason for why TSoY is so much more hands-off about audience relationships to player characters is probably in the implicit way the game approaches protagonism: the character creation procedures and the way players introduce their characters to each other are less explicit than PTA or other constructionist drama game, and depend more on the process of play as a tool the group uses to align themselves: the nature of the campaign and the characters is discovered in play rather than set-up in planning the campaign. In this regard the game is very much a traditional design, which I wanted to preserve in writing up the SS rules text.
I find the topic of player input very interesting, and I was very aware of it when writing the SS rules text, as might be expected here at the Forge. I personally view most of the procedural instructions in the SS text as necessary clarifications and explications of how the game described in TSoY has to work (for me, at least), whether Clinton happened to phrase the given point out explicitly or not. Some of those procedures do emphasize the GM role much more strongly than Clinton's text does, which is a good observation from Ron. My own opinion on the matter is that the most spectacular differences are because Clinton wrote his text tendencially, trying to de-emphasize the GM for essentially political reasons, while I wrote mine from a more balanced viewpoint, trying to observe what actually happens in these types of games in play. There are some points in the text, such as the way it distinguishes between character goals and conflict stakes, that I find univerally applicable to a great range of games from Sorcerer onwards that have traditionally been phrased in a less useful manner by pretending that no editorial oversight occurs in between declaring a character's goal and transforming it into an element utilized by play procedure. The GM in Solar System is a very useful being whose powers are clearly defined yet wider than in many other games.
I should also note that it's somewhat easy to read the SS text misleadingly because it uses basically four different types of attribution for the different decisions and authorities it assigns at different points of the text to the different players: sometimes it says clearly that "the player of the character" or "the Story Guide" makes a choice, but then sometimes it says "the character" and sometimes it uses a passive voice, "the decision is made", to signify that it doesn't matter who makes the call as long as it's made according to the precepts laid down in the text. I'm perhaps a tad more careful about my turn of phrase in this regard than the average bear, so it bears consideration to read carefully and see who I attribute the decisions to; if one wanted to see a lot of GM authority in the text, it wouldn't take much to read all passive phrasings as referring to the GM instead of the group as whole. Not that this is a bad read, but the intent is that if your group is OK with less GM authority, then you'll read these parts more inclusively and less authoritatively.
But anyway, I agree with the both of you about the basic observation: SS represents itself more clearly as GM-led than TSoY does, and this shows up in various ways in the text, perhaps including the de-emphasizing of Gift Dice. The reason is ultimately that I'm convinced that this game works better when the player and GM responsibilities are delineated more clearly, as the players have a very limited range of tools for engaging in constructive participation from outside their own character's purview, while they have plentiful tools for working through their characters in defining and developing the campaign. One might well view the SS text as a rehabilitation and reinterpretation of the traditional sources Clinton used in writing the game, as Ron says - TSoY is by nature a hybrid design, and I wanted to emphasize this more than Clinton did when he wrote the original text in a very different atmosphere in 2004.
P.Jeffries:
I noticed the same problems as Eero about Gift Dice and protagonism:
With TSoY players might use Gift Dice when prompted, but almost without fail they'll end up ignoring and forgetting the whole idea soon, no matter how much Story Guide attention is lathered over them. Also, much of Gift Dice usage in TSoY ends up being more about "I need to help a party member" than "I appreciate your character as a fellow creator", which poisons the mechanism and encourages wrong thinking habits.
It is not uncommon in my own TSoY/SS groups that 1-2 player characters end up real protagonists, 1-2 end up as comic reliefs, 1-2 become villains and the rest become sidekicks of some sort.
There is also always a constant tension in the game between the ideals of independent protagonism, wherein each player character is worked up and appreciated as a hero in his own right, and party-based play
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