non-play
Filip Luszczyk:
Quote from: James_Nostack on October 26, 2011, 06:21:35 PM
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.
I don't think familiarity or the lack of it is the core of the issue here.
I don't think the activity was dissapointing for other participants.
I can think of another group in Cz?stochowa from that same period. It was an anime "club" of sorts, perhaps up to two dozen fans who used to meet at the plaza every Saturday to hang out together. For about half of them, about half the time, hanging out meant gaming. Unless one gravitated towards the tight group of yaoi fangils, who were a separate world unto themselves, it was largely socially expected that if you are there, you participate in the game. Games with ten or more participants were not unusual.
I've been hanging out with this crowd for some years, sometimes joining their games, though frankly I preferred those yaoi girls. I've run some one shots a few times, always limiting participation. I had my regular gaming group outside that environment and at times I tried to recruit more promising individuals, but nothing ever came out of it.
For all I know, those Saturday meetings constituted most of their gaming at the time.
It typically worked like this. One of their GMs brought the book and rallied players. Then, rarely the same week, they started creating their characters. They rarely finished this in a single meeting - partly due to group size, partly due to their general inefficiency - and it sometimes took a month to kick off the game. Sometimes, they would abandon a game at that point for reasons or no apparent reason, only playing once or twice or not at all, and they would start this endless prep routine again. Occasionally though, to my surprise, they would pick up something they started playing months or years before.
They were mostly playing in public sites. A park when the weather was particularly good, but usually McDonalds. They would order something cheap just so that employees don't boot them out, as the surrounding tables tended to be empty, for obvious reasons. At times, a dozen people would just come to somebody's cramped flat.
Fun times. Games were not what made them fun for myself though.
Like, I recall this game of Legend of the Five Rings where the GM started by asking if we saw Seven Samurai and when it turned out me and someone else had actually seen it, he asked that we refrain from using our knowledge of his adventure's plot to our advantage. The game lasted for a while, but no plot seemed to actually be there and things weren't really moving forward until some fight near the end. Notably, most of the players were sitting silently most of the time, unless somebody cracked a juvenile joke about "Castle 69" (it was right there on the world map) or something.
Or, I was in their game of Vampire: The Masquerade once. Very large group, but only two or three players were genuinely trying to do anything. The GM himself was mostly focused on the single female player, who played for her first time I think and didn't seem to understand much of this crazy gaming thing, but was apparently happy to receive all the attention. The rest was busy with the host's new ASG rifle and seemed largely disconnected from the game, until some fight broke out and their Assamites from frickin' Kabul had a chance to shine. The fight was mostly chaos with people shouting past each other and the visibly frustrated GM making most rules up on the spot, with little to no consistency. The chaos lessened a bit once I pointed the GM to the initiative procedure in the manual, but I wonder how it would turn out if I wasn't there or didn't say anything.
Virtually all their gaming was like that. No direction whatsoever, no creative content of note, no gameplay to speak of.
They were doing it month after month for years.
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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).
Yes, I know Ron Edward's metaphor. The thing is, it's apparently not true out there in the Real World, where a significant segment of the hobby doesn't work like that, but it's still "gaming" for them and some will even claim to love it. And it would seem sometimes cheerleaders are enough for successful volleyball or finery enough for a successfull dinner, once you put away the issue of preference.
I wonder. Does the lack of clear and voiced disagreement count as agreement by default?
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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.
Not really. It wasn't the case in the game described in my account.
Of course those people cared about who they were meeting with. They cared about meeting other enthusiastic young nerds, to the point of traveling to the convention and spending a night or two on cold floor. Not all of them were total strangers to each other too. Socially, they totally cared. About as much as people care who they visit a pub with, but still.
They also did care about what they were there to do. They were there to "just have fun". And so they did, in their own way.
You seem to assume that the game in itself was the point of that activity, where it was just a pretense. When I think about it, seems to me most participants actually understood that on a social level, as most or all of their gaming was more or less like that.
It's like a TV working in the background of a family meeting, some people half watching it and half listening to what others have to say and half caring about both. Occassionally what's on becomes the topic of the conversation and then it moves to different topics.
David Berg:
I wonder if RPGs are more prone to this phenomenon (people who don't want to really do the activity showing up to it anyway) than other social endeavors?
My first thought is "no". I've seen mixed levels of participation in just about every game or sport I've ever played. I haven't noticed "gamer" identities contributing to more of this than "frisbee player" or "person who's a good sport about playing charades at parties" identities. (Or the "well-rounded, eclectic martial artist". Heh. I totally know that guy.)
My second thought is that maybe conventions are a weird special case, where you roleplay with strangers. It's like joining a pick-up team at a soccer tournament; you never know how many awesome, half-assed* or outright interfering people you might get stuck with. It's the risk you sign up for, and it can definitely go badly.
My third thought is that someone is more likely to get kicked out of an activity for interfering if (a) it's clear and obvious what counts as interference, and (b) it's clear and obvious whose call it is. A soccer goalie who gets scored on because they're talking on their cell phone will be run off the field instantly. A martial artist who draws blood in "no contact" sparring will be instantly reported to the person responsible for the class and/or dojo. An RPG can be similarly clear, but it can also be completely unclear. I don't know any convention organizers who come by the table, saying, "You! You paid money for this, but so did these other people, and you're sabotaging their activity. Out!"
As for groups who get together to not really do an activity, but to use that activity as a way to add a small amount of structure to "just hanging out", well, I guess all we can really ask for is truth in advertising, so no one gets fooled into thinking they'll actually be doing the activity. Which, I guess, might be a tall order, as the non-activity folks don't have too much personal incentive to identify and communicate the difference. In my experience, I've generally been able to spot it immediately and bow out if I wasn't into it (which is fine if it was a ten minute walk to get there, and horribly frustrating if it was a 90-minute train ride).
*While I think interfering non-participants must go, I think non-interfering non-participants can be integrated. In high school, Andy's 5 best friends in the world all played in my Pitfighter RPG during the main time that he was free to socialize. So, he joined us, and even though he had little interest in roleplaying, he didn't interfere with us doing it, and he got to see his friends.
David Berg:
Filip,
The last bit of your last post reminds me of my friend John's account of a Shadowrun game he checked out. The GM kept the fiction moving, while everyone else wandered in and out of the game itself and the room the game was played in. When a new person sat down and got interested, another player would summarize to them what they'd missed. I believe the event was billed as "come play Shadowrun" but was understood by everyone as, "come to this party, at which there will be Shadowrun".
Does that sound similar to what you've seen?
I actually think it'd be interesting to design a system that's optimized for this kind of play. I'm working on an attempt called Mead Hall Tales, where there's one Bard telling a tale of various Heroes, and the Heroes have specific, themed ways to interject their accomplishments into the fiction as the players desire. So, people can come, go, watch, or participate, and the GM gets to keep the activity alive, and everyone knows what they're getting into.
Callan S.:
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Callan, but do you honestly think that would work for people representing this particular segment of the hobby?
I don't know - they never seem to make contact with such materials to actually test the theory? Take this, for example:
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When some of us demanded he runs the game RAW, he got really angry.
Doesn't the RAW contain the (dumb ass) golden rule? So technically by chopping and changing, doing whatever the hell, the GM is playing by the RAW? And indeed, as much as I don't want to advocate this, the person pushing to play by RAW is actually pushing not to play the rules as written. To skip the hallowed golden rule. Really you've got TWO people who 'just wanna have fun' in that regard, not one person. Except one of them actually has a rule behind him, even if it's a stupid rule like the golden one.
Tons of materials with this sort of shitty golden loop hole, which, I hypothesize, actively encourages this non serious stuff you and Ron mention. Further, even without the golden rule, D&D (especiall earlier editions) and other trad games have massive procedural gaps, ones which any human with half a brain can manipulate into a golden rule equivalent.
Do you honestly think you feed these people wreckage and your going to see anything other than wreckage?
I mean, I know what your talking about - a friend of mine's previous girlfriend was said to have roleplayed before. Funnily enough though her responce to our roleplay was "Why are you guys so serious about it?" (funnily enough, in regard to this thread) and she wouldn't take part (we were doing 3.5 at that time, which we actually became more cohesive around and got up to level 10 on average). When talking alone with my friend I hypothesized to him that basically her RP involved smoking a bong and laughing while the GM 'did his thing' a certain distance away. He hadn't been her boyfriend at the time, but knowing her he gave it a nod of plausibility.
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That a set of pretty well designed rules exists on paper will not matter in the end.
Maybe. But do we work off simply thinking it the case, or running some sort of scientific test, actually exposing them to such rules and checking the results? I'll play some will just go on smoking their bong. But some of them just keep smoking, because really there isn't anything in the text to read - they've tried and it's full of procedure breaks (which the GM resolves as he sees fit) and golden rule BS. So they bong on. Can you be 'serious' when you've got a joke of a text to work with?
I've snipped a bit I had about a potential second half of this equation, that of "True believers" as it might not apply at all here (hopefully so).
Anyway, given where I've placed my bet, my problem seems to be the lack of cultural connection to latch onto, taking fiction to be a largely cultural thing. Very much indeed "what fiction?" - it's all kept hidden, because the activity is so shit at handling it they sensibly keep their fiction hidden (perhaps a sort of defence against brain damage, eh?). So what fiction do they find electric and hot? Not 'Vampires and/or zombies and/or steampunk' - if you take moving fiction as the cusp of cutural change, where is the movement they currently find hot? Or have they lost track of that and been left to cultural stagnation? Okay, this is all a second topic. Just raising it to give one idea of where else to go.
contracycle:
This thread makes me want to saw off my own arm with a rusty spoon.
So, there are people out there who eat food, but they aren't chefs! There are even people who have the cheek to comment that they parrticularly enjoyed such and such a dish and this or that restaurant, but they've never gutted a fish and sauteed it over a slow flame. Horrors. Now that we're done pointing and laughing, can we move on?
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