head games
Alfryd:
Quote from: Paul Czege on March 06, 2011, 01:10:59 PM
Anyway, drama doesn't come from the non obvious and unexpected. It comes from creating expectations about things that are going to happen and managing and releasing tension about how and when the expectations will be satisfied.
Paul, it's entirely possible this is all going straight over my head, but the general impression I've gotten is that putting the PCs in dramatic situations, more or less by definition, creates a certain amount of unpredictable, divergent behaviour on their part. Because you're focusing on the consequences of players' choices, and those have to be real choices, and that means you can't possibly already know which way they're going to choose. This is why you can't combine a railroad plot with playing narrativist. ...At least, that's the impression I get, stop me if I'm wrong.
Now, sure, drama also (to my understanding,) requires a focus on the players' internal motivations (and the potential for conflicts between them,) so if the player is just screwing with the NPC gratuitously, then that's a problem. But if they're doing it as an expression of some underlying ethical stance or realisation or moral epiphany, then, again, I don't see the inherent problem. *shrugs* Again, I don't know the details of exactly what happened during this session, so maybe I'm talking out of my ass. But I find it very difficult to reconcile the concept of story ownership with the idea that PC responses should always conform to the 'obvious' and 'expected'.
Alfryd:
Quote from: Alfryd on March 06, 2011, 02:15:30 PM
Because you're focusing on the consequences of players' choices...
Shoot, I should arguably be saying characters' choices here. But you get the picture.
Ben Lehman:
Hey, Paul.
This is a game in playtest, right?
1) What are the design goals of the game, exactly? Are you trying to replicate "old school" play?
2) How well are the present mechanics answering that design goal?
I know you said it wasn't a mechanical problem, but I'm of the opinion that everything is ultimately a mechanical problem (or a social problem: I'm giving you and Matt and Renee the benefit of the doubt here.) I ask because this is a problem I see a lot in old-school setting rich games, and I think it's a pretty natural response to the disconnect between such systems and their promises.
yrs--
--Ben
Paul Czege:
Hey Ben,
It's a rich setting game with traditional style GMing but non-traditional resolution mechanics. The mechanics are fun.
If the solution is mechanics, then what's the mechanical solution to the disconnect in the old school setting rich game?
Paul
Ben Lehman:
So, traditional GMing means a lot of things, but my experience with it in concert with rich-setting games is that it tends to be the single-step-removed from dungeon crawl thing where various NPCs give players missions and they complete them, with no particular purpose or goals on their own (you take the mission because, you know, that's what we're doing here, just like in a dungeon crawl game refusing to go into the dungeon is refusing to play.)
Is this accurate?
The thing about this sort of setup is that it can't deliver on its promises to everyone. The rich, textured world gives an implicit promise to the players about "go anywhere, do anything" and the ability of their own characters to make meaningful choices within the broad scope of the setting. But, ultimately, their choices are restricted to "take this job, do it," with any meaningful choice being just "how to do the job." There's a mismatch in setting as presented and the players ability to, you know, play in it.
(This is contrasting with a dungeon crawl, where the meaningful choices are on the same scale but the setting is small to match: your choices influence the setting as a whole because it's extent ends at the walls of the dungeon.)
This sort of set-up consistently results in two problematic things: The GM playing with himself while the players watch (this is because, in this sort of set-up, the NPCs are the real agonists of the situation, and thus to advance the story {as such} the GM must act out all parts) and the PCs engaging in random fuckery of NPCs, simply because it is the only way that they are given to play in the setting at all.
Your game has both of these issues, so I'm pretty sure that that's the disconnect that's going on.
There are several historical resolutions to these problems, but ultimately all of them are a shift away from "old-school GMing" or a shift towards even older-school GMing.
yrs--
--Ben
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