[Ophian] A first actual session
Ron Edwards:
Hi Em!
My vain hope is that people who play the game would all have read it before they gathered. At GenCon, I knew at least a couple of the other people there had read it, and my verbal skim of the ophite material was tuned to what I thought was most important. But even that was suboptimal compared to what I'd like to see happen with it. Since none of these three notions have been built with the ordinary expectations of how people get together to play, I haven't tried at all to make them compatible with those expectations.
I agree with you about the manner of speaking involved. I even found I had to put in a fairly lengthy explanation near the beginning, to remind people that at one time, many of us did indeed experience this kind of unconstructed yet often constructive conversation, among a certain group of people. And the fact that the group never does correspond fully to a given external activity, really captured my attention in retrospect. I think that in my life at least, these groups coalesced in part due to overlapping shared activities, but that doesn't explain why any number of people in those activities simply didn't become part of the group, and why any number of other acquaintances, outside of the activity, did.
About the created characters, they are best understood as the few characters that the author of such a comic does make up more-or-less before starting the strip, but it's clear to me that for all the comics I'm talking about, the significant cast undergoes major changes in personnel as the author finds his or her feet. "Mo and Lo" were not special characters in the first, non-story-arc year of Dykes to Watch Out For; Zonker was a throwaway joke character when he appeared in Doonesbury. In rereading the first Bloom County collection last year, I was surprised at how many named characters were introduced, run through a few strips, and then vanished, before the solid working cast was settled upon.
So, yes, a player in the game can bring in one's starting character at the outset, or later, and one can make up any character one wants, often drawing a descriptor from the leftover pile for help, at any time.
I hope the four of you try the game again, after a strong re-read. It really isn't made to be a process that begins with one person waving the pages around, trying to explain it to everyone else.
Best, Ron
Emily Care:
Vincent insisted that we all read it first, and we did. I think that V & I had the longest to look at it, and the strongest take on what it was to play the Ophian. So, next time I'd volunteer to have him or me do so.
Baxil:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on August 09, 2011, 12:41:12 PM
I'm calling it "Ophian" now because I think it sounds cooler, but it's still just a working title. I'm a little bit intrigued by the tendency in the source literature (semi-autobiographical comics) to name them poorly - Hate, Box Office Poison, and Beg the Question are all terrible titles despite being outstanding comics, and Dykes to Watch Out For meant something very different when the strip began than it came to mean later. So I'm waiting for the moment when a totally "wrong" title seems right.
It's likely I'm putting into different words what you already said. But I suspect that this game, in particular, is going to need to be named based on something that crystallizes out of gameplay. It needs its rite of passage.
Our culture has largely lost the idea of a meaningful shared transition between adolescence and adulthood -- and frankly, I think a lot of the naturalist twentysomething* comics you're emulating are flailing about in an effort to manufacture a rite of passage out of the trappings of routine adult life. (They're about finding meaning in banality, more generally -- but what is a rite of passage, except for an effort to acknowledge and address questions of meaning for the first time?)
My own rite of passage was a long-distance hike. Which is neither here nor there, except that the modern distance hiking community has a tradition of "trail names" worth sharing in this context. A trail name is optional, but honored throughout the community, and (like it or not) something of a badge of commitment. The biggest taboo is pre-selecting one: it has to reflect your on-trail experience in some way. (Thus, I became "Redtail" after an incident with red duct tape and insufficiently sturdy pants. And one of the Pacific Crest Trail's pseudocelebrities, Gottago, picked hers up after an awkward encounter during an urgent bathroom break. Examples of moments like you mentioned, when "wrong" becomes right.)
- Bax
--
* It's telling that your Ophite character is textually fixed at just past the age of majority.
Callan S.:
I had an evil idea in terms of holding the cards between games, namely go buy a bible from a second hand bookstore and hollow out the pages to store the cards. If it feels sacrilegious to treat that particular book in this way, that'd be the point. Just pitching the idea, in case its of use.
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