anxieties about death at the core of Ophite

<< < (2/2)

Ron Edwards:
Computers suck a lot. A few hours after posting, I said to myself, "I should post again to clarify a thing or two," and then not one but both the household laptops went "queep queep" and stopped working. Leaving the above post to stand naked for days without my second thoughts. So Paul, I apologize for that.

What I wanted to clarify is that I don't want to dismiss your personal account of faith in turmoil, and how real-world experiences relate to that. Such accounts are rare, especially since in my experience people tend to re-write them into personal hero-journeys from mumbling superstition into some kind of teenage-Nietzsche rationalist-romantic transformation. Especially white, male, geeky people.

I'd like to see a game about genuine faith-turmoil come about some day, and some few already do, at least in implication. Dogs in the Vineyard provides all the components, but sometimes I despair, after reading account after account of Call of Chthulhu retread play, that they ever see much use. That's probably unfair to the people out there who are really hitting the game hard and vice versa. All these points apply equally to the heroquest and spiritual-political concerns in Hero Wars and HeroQuest - what I see on-line may well not be what any number of groups are really doing. I wish those latter would post about it.

What I'm seeing for my purposes is advice for eventually writing the game. Which is to say, if it ever becomes a game text, how to write it. Clearly it's going to be interesting to distinguish, for the reader, the personal religious-upbring content vs. one's personal faith issues.

One of the priorities of this game is a light touch, throughout. The rules for talking lightly touch the fiction. The cards' content lightly touch the talking. There is very, very little compulsion anywhere in there, including the standards for ending play. The extent to which any content or rule hits hard is utterly situational, in hopes of enhancing its honesty. My intent is for one's personal religious upbringing to be a similar light-touch component, which may or may not factor hard into how a given character is played, and which as a fictional component may or may not rebound hard for the player.

As I say, a tricky thing to contemplate in terms of instruction.

Best, Ron

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page