character intros
Ron Edwards:
Hi Ethan,
With pre-emptive apologies for laying a reading assignment on you and running, I offer Silent Railroading and the Intersection of Scenario Prep & Player Authorship, for some useful vocabulary. It's about who gets to say what, and apparently the content opened a lot of doors for a lot of people in the five years since I first posted it. I hope it helps.
Best, Ron
contracycle:
Well I shall restrain myself, but Ethan, it annoys me when people assume that playing this way is a result of conditioning rather than choice. From my perspective, the player authorship elements were potentially disruptive, and it was a risky thing to do.
I completely recognise Ron's descriptions of the other games he encountered; I've never really the kind of thing he describes his group doing naturally. Some people are clearly quite happy with characters as little more than ciphers, although I don't go that far. I did find, though, that establishing an idea, an expectation, of something that could be perhaps described as an audience's gaze did lead to more conciousness of and interest in the portrayal of characters - how they looked, how they behaved, how they dressed etc. Which was useful in reinforcing the shared imagination, in bringing out setting and colour and so on, a specifically visual aesthetic. It benefitted the games without actually stepping into the realm of player authorship, and I had no interest (and have none still) in going there.
Ethan K.:
Thanks for the reading, Ron! I've tried to make up for coming late to these forums, but it always helps to have a specific piece given to me.
Contra: You make a good point; I assumed the gaze of the players is conditioned, not chosen. I'll do more reading and thinking before I attempt to disentangle authorship and gaze here.
Kyle Van Pelt:
Oh man, I missed a lot of conversation while I was gone.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on November 10, 2011, 07:41:37 AM
I'm bringing it up because it's one step beyond the "intro" technique being discussed here, and also to ask, Kyle, have you ever seen anything like this in play?
In short, yes, although not to the degree you describe. When I GM Shadowrun, the players will set up their contacts and define their personalities. However, when it comes time to play the NPC interaction, I usually have another player roleplay the NPC. This player doesn't control the NPC forever, but just for that particular scene, and most often when players see how those NPCs are, they'll jump in next time to play that NPC and do their rendition of them. So, while it's a particular player's contact, everyone else gets a chance to roleplay them. It works out well, and usually increases the amount of overall participation in the game.
Also, since the NPC is pre-defined by the player who made him, usually there's no toes stepped on or wildly inaccurate character development. Granted, the group I usually play with is used to this, but I should state that I didn't start this style of NPC interaction in the group, a player did. It just caught on.
Now, comparing this to another group that I used to GM, they didn't do this at all, and were actually caught off guard anytime the narration ball was in their court. They assumed that narration was GM property alone. However, one of my "house rules" is that whenever you score a critical hit (or Over-Deadly Damage, or what-have-you) you can describe what happens. They would play it safe at first, until a new player grabbed hold of the concept and ran with it, even introducing new characters and locations because of critical hit narration. Then everyone got into it, much to my delight, as narrating every single thing is a chore for a DM who really enjoys player participation.
As far as a game that promotes group handling of a character, no, I've really not seen one, and I've never had rules for it formalized in any of my games either. I hope that accurately answers the question, Ron.
As far as the rest of the thread, I'll look at the linked posts later, as it looks pretty interesting, then provide what little feedback I can.
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