non-play
Filip Luszczyk:
I like Fluffy Bunny by Emily Care Boss. Not because it's a good game (it's crap). I like it because it so accurately summarizes certain segment of the hobby, and in such a witty way.
The thing about this segment is that it's composed of people who don't know what they want. They just want to have fun. And they want somebody to serve it to them on a silver platter.
"Fun" usually means that they seek to be entertained and amused in a mildly engaging manner. Sort of like half-watching TV, only in a nice social context, among people who - more or less - share their nerdish interests. Typically, obsession with select aspects of genre fiction. I noticed this sort of specific taste convergence proves somewhat rare in actuality, but with superficial enough communication it's easy enough to assume by default, and as long as nobody stomps on sacred cows any nice company is nice.
Conventions in particular tend to be rife with such clueless young people.
Now, obviously, I can only speak of local Polish conventions I've been to, which were crap. I've heard foreign conventions are different. I've also heard they are not.
Years ago, there was this random convention in Cz?stochowa and at a late hour there wasn't much to do past idle socializing in the sleeping room. Assorted culture trivia for those who don't know: forget hotels, it's poor. Most Polish conventions traditionally take place in relatively cheap to lease school buildings, some classrooms designated as "sleeping rooms" to host guests on cold floor. Most gaming takes place either there or in corridors, though occassionaly some separate gaming space is provided. Why people bother traveling half the country and put up with such conditions is beyond my grasp, even though I used to do that for several years myself. But I digress.
Some dude I didn't know well offered to run D&D and rallied our idly socializing company to the table. Cool, D&D. I used to play it a lot back then, this being the middle of the whole d20 boom and all. Oh, but the guy proceeded to explain he was going to run "storytelling D&D". Uh, oh, that meant freeform. So much for the game as far as I was concerned, but whatever, not much else to do anyway. I decided I might as well try to contribute and - since I had my laptop with me - offered to take care of the soundtrack. Any good storytelling session needs good atmospheric soundtrack, went the popular gaming meme.
So, I loaded my fav playlist and tried dynamically matching songs to the situation at hand. Some local gaming traditions make it the GM's, er, the Storyteller's job. Never seen it working well in practice though, as going DJ usually diverts too much attention from actually running (ruining?) the game. Worked well enough when another person handled the music apparently.
Ok, I managed to have some fun after all. What, we're fighting wolves in a snowstorm? Here, have some Liberi Fatali, this piece never gets old... and here goes a mandatory Final Fantasy discussion. Fifteen minutes later, back to the wolves. And so on.
I had my character, but I actually stopped caring about it all like half an hour into the game. Or perhaps even before it started? So we took our turns narratively fighting monsters, like there was ever any doubt as to how it ends. While the GM, er, Storyteller was busy trying to be scary with all the acting tricks he learned from his gaming magazine, half the party sort of listened trying to respond with some declaration here and there, while those sitting closer to me were mostly engaged in browsing my collection of pirated pdfs. Then a person or two went to sleep, and the activity continued like that for another hour or two, until it fizzled.
A fun game! I played some cool songs and discussed recent supplements a bit.
But the real fun part? Months later I met some of the participants again. It was then that I learned there was a fun session of D&D that night that I was GM-ing. Uh-huh. Sure I was. If you say so.
And I'm pretty sure for some of them, that was all the gaming they knew. Sitting together, randomly switching from engaging in nerd-approved antics to allowing that crazy Master dude to amuse them. When nudged. Perhaps when threatened with an XP penalty. But most importantly, sitting together. With other fans.
I seriously doubt any of them are still in the hobby. Perhaps they didn't need it from the start?
Characters
Type: Clueless
Traits
genre: grimdark fantasy sci-fi anime
shirt: metal geek funny
body: skinny obese
hair: long short
Stats
Happiness: Maximum = 10
Feats
Eat snacks
Talk crap
Role-play
Roll dice
Not care
System
Perform Feat. Increase Happiness level to Maximum.
The End
Actual play highlights:
"Let's do some RP!"
"Cool. What game do you want to play?"
"Something fun."
"Like what?"
"You tell me."
"How was the session?"
"It was fun."
"How so?"
"It was fun."
"So, what do you think about that system we played last time?"
"It was fun."
"Oh? What was so fun about it?"
"The elephant was fun!"
Callan S.:
So, hypothesis time?
I'm reminded of the warhammer quest board game, in terms of a constrasting opposite. The warhammer quest system generates situation, enough to play right through to the end of a game session (one dungeon).
It's occured to me recently how to describe alot of traditional RPG's - they are like describing the ways chess pieces in excruciating detail (oh, the combat sections...), but absolutely nothing on situation/ie, where to set the pieces on a chess board, or even describing a chess board.
One thing I think design comes up against, and maybe this is projection on my part, is that there's this terror of the board game. I think people are used to what happens in the play account and...they start to design around the idea that that is roleplay. You can't interupt that with this board game playing!
In a way, they are right, if a hyper allergic reaction right. A complete board game would hinge not at all on fictional content, like warhammer quest doesn't (well ignore any "I wont help you because I'm an elf and elves hate dwarves" fictional input for now).
However, you can design a system where some resources are set aside by rules and the rules dictate that those resources are gained purely on fictional judgement by someone.
While in traditional design, vast resources are under the call of fictional judgement. The GM sets difficulty rolls to whatever the hell he pleases, the results to whatever the hell he pleases, if you stumble upon a chest or dragon on leaving the tavern, it's whatever the hell the GM pleases - massive amounts of resources on any fiction judgement call. And the traditional responce is the self flattering "Oh, my GM wouldn't just do that lame stuff! He's really objective!". When really, if he were as objective as rules then you could just use rules and get the same result. The reason rules for assigning resources aren't used (apart from the effort of writing them up)? Because the whole thing is an exercise in sycophancy - the phenomina of thinking you face some sort of objective force, and yet the miraculous track record of winning over and over and over? What luck or talent or both, aye!? Further this with a culture who has often had their ego's beaten down by calous interactions in the past, so will they question the source of their own sense of ego and pride over the accomplishments? Are all the players in the account really clueless, or staying in an ego boosting rut, playing "the hero" to make up for school years spoilt by the ego of other children?
So I suspect advancement in design is stiffled, because the suggestion of something else invalidates the many months and years of herodom and personal identification with that.
Certain the subject always gets seen in the binary "Oh, so you mean a board game", rather than a blend of board game with some resources that can be gained, gained purely by fictional judgement call. Like a simplistic example is warhammer quest but say with treasure chests here and there, but only there based on rules which say someone judges the prior fiction. So maybe if you had said you looked behind the tapestries, when the 'The GM determines if you get a treasure chest' card came out of the deck, you might have gotten it IF you had spoken that fiction. And maybe that gold would have been just in time to buy the item that saves you from dying in the next encounter, except you didn't speak the fiction so by consequence, you die. Thus fiction matters! Or maybe by board game skill and lucky dice, you survive the encounter, just. Does this mean fiction doesn't matter? No, it just means it doesn't dominate the outcomes of play, it merely has an influence on them.
Okay, so there's my ra-ra-ra for why such play in the account continues rather than evolves into something else and a suggestion for something to evolve into, as a contrast. I've really no idea if it'll get anyone out of mire and murk, but it's my only real bet so far.
James_Nostack:
Filip, that sounds pretty horrible. I'm sorry you had that experience. If it's any consolation, I've found that gaming with total strangers is frequently (always?) disappointing, sometimes so disappointing that it causes me to painfully introspect about the amount of my life I've spent playing these silly games. None of my experiences have been as bad as yours on the creative agenda front, though.
Although, maybe one time it was that bad! Kat Miller was running a With Great Power... game, I want to say Dreamation 2009 but it might have been 2008. I was (am) a big fan of With Great Power... and had spent years wishing I could make it out to Dreamation to hang with all the Forge / Story Game peeps I knew on-line. Kat's game, however, consisted of me, two pre-teen girls Kat was babysitting for a friend, and a middle school science teacher.
With the exception of me and Kat, none of them cared a lick about super hero comics, none of them gave a shit about With Great Power..., and none of them were there to actually, y'know, play role-playing games. The girls were politely bored. The science teacher guy took every moment to point out to the children that none of this was real science, kept breaking into Monty Python jokes, and just blither about different, impliedly better role-playing games. The bored children I can forgive.
I think I've seen Ron or Vincent or somebody use a metaphor about people needing to agree to get together, with these particular people, to do this particular thing (play volleyball or have dinner). In both of our stories, it sounds like the other players didn't really give a damn about who they were meeting with, and also didn't give a damn about what they were ostensibly there to do. Bad times.
Thanks for pointing me to Fluffy Bunny, too. My happiness is now set at maximum.
Filip Luszczyk:
Quote from: Callan S. on October 26, 2011, 05:35:28 PM
However, you can design a system where some resources are set aside by rules and the rules dictate that those resources are gained purely on fictional judgement by someone.
Callan, but do you honestly think that would work for people representing this particular segment of the hobby?
The current edition of D&D has pretty elaborate rules on resource distribution. Can't say how effective they are after playing just a few sessions, but they are right there in the manual. So what? Many GM's ignore those rules and just make shit up. Many players don't care, because "they just want to have fun".
Like, just this month, some dude offered to run the current edition of D&D for me and my friends. He was new to the hobby apparently, only gaming for half a year or so and only having contact with this one edition. Still, based on conversations we had, he seemed already infected with the "fast & loose" disease. When some of us demanded he runs the game RAW, he got really angry. We could have pulled the Smelly Chamberlain trick on him just to see how it goes, but after wasting enough time creating our characters, we just parted our ways even before the first actual session.
Actually, every earlier edition of D&D had rules for that in some form, though never so elaborate and strict. Many GM's kept ignoring those and just making shit up. Many players never cared, becase "they just wanted to have fun".
Do you think it would be any different if those rules had a stronger connection to the fiction?
And what stops them from ignoring such rules as well in order to "just have fun"?
Note that we're talking people capable of mistaking the soundtrack guy for the GM. In that opening account, I did not contribute to the fiction at all. I contributed to the ambience at best. I mostly contributed socially. But that was enough to fulfill the entertainer role for the evening. For those people the GM was primarily the entertainer. Therefore, since there was some game and I was the entertainer, I must have been the GM, right? They just did not remember the other guy.
So, what fiction?
It seems people like that have no strong sense of the fiction just as they have no strong sense of the game. They mostly have a sense of social meeting. They are like: "we are gamers, so this thing we are doing now is the game" and leave it at that. They "just want to have fun" which translates to "somebody please increase my Happiness to 10 by means of some gaming-associated activity".
You can set aside whatever resources you want and assign them by whatever system you want and it won't do anything for them when they don't recognize those as resources of use.
And they likely won't see the purpose of those resources. That's because they won't read and understand your theory. Even if you hard code it into the ruleset, it still won't do anything. They won't bother to read and understand your manual on their own. Their GM will not take his time to teach them the rules. Or he will, but they won't grant it enough attention to understand. Or perhaps the GM will ignore those rules in the first place and they will "just have fun". Probably spending half their time on Monty Python jokes and unrelated Star Trek discussions or some other diversion.
That a set of pretty well designed rules exists on paper will not matter in the end.
And yet, such people form a certain segment of the hobby. Sometimes, they strongly identify as "gamers" themselves and obsess over all sorts of gaming-related things. After closer scrutiny their interest in the content tends to prove very superficial and their involvement primarily social. I notice most of them drop out of the hobby after just a few years, as they rarely have enough dedication to keep arranging for gaming meetings throughout their adult lives. Often, the breakup of their initial group is enough. Occassionally though, some will linger in the gaming fandom for years, maintaining heavy, time-consuming involvement of some sort even despite no longer gaming at all.
I believe it's a dead end.
Ron Edwards:
Hi,
I'm fully in agreement with Filip on this issue. It's one of the reasons I've always specified that the Big Model is about play, subject to the (usually tacit) Social Contract statement that we are in fact playing at all.
People who seriously study martial arts know all about this. Any martial arts community, across various schools in a given area, has its share of people who simply aren't participating in any real way but are simply, and all too often, "there." I'm not talking about those who are limited in time but are reasonably dedicated, and I'm definitely not talking about differences in personal ability. I'm talking about seriousness - people who attend, but don't bring the fullness of attention and commitment to their or to others' development. Some stay with a given school forever, identifying with it; others become the dreaded wandering green belts who often think of themselves as well-rounded or eclectic. Frankly, they suck. And I'm not talking about for themselves, because that's their business, but for the rest of us. They're lousy partners, poor contributors to the shared energy and learning of a given class session, and worse, they talk and fucking talk, both in and out of class, in a uniquely non-constructive and yet highly-self-inclusive way.
So, my take is that in the case of gamers, we're talking about the social identity of "gamer" without reference to actually playing. Even sitting around a table and rolling dice and "having a character" - it's not play. It's just ... being "there." And in which case, my attention as a practitioner and as a reflector upon the experience, is instantly diverted away. This is emphatically not about styles, modes, goals, or techniques of actual play. It's about playing at all. No play? Off the screen.
Best, Ron
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page