[Steampunk Crescendo] Out on a limb
David Berg:
I'm curious: do you feel that Stempunk Crescendo reliably produces temptation and desperation in play? I mean, aside from whether it can or whether it's supposed to. In your play experience, does it?
The only reason I didn't emphasize those in the pitch was that I wasn't seeing them in your actual play reports in this thread. Other elements seemed to outshine them. But maybe I biased that impression with the questions I was asking.
dindenver:
For Temptation, Yeah,
I was able to consistently, at least once per session tempt a player into becoming a vampire just by reminding them they could get an extra bonus if they did.
And it happened when other players GMd as well. The trick is that there is such a low cost of entry and you can't pull out as easily. there have even been one or two players who were like, "I am never going to play a vampire or have anything to do with vampire powers that ended the session with 3 or more powers."
For the desperation, that is harder to tell. I will admit as a GM, I am not good at evoking this response. But I did get some desperate complaining from players who thought the BBEG's were to BBE. And a few who were like, I got my goal, but this world isn't any better, is it? But I dunno if I hit the mark on Desperation though...
Eero Tuovinen:
David's question is difficult, I guess I should read the game to be able to answer that - I mean, you could tell me many things that would specifically perk my interest, but I've no idea which ones would be true for this game.
David Berg:
Eero, what I was wondering was a little broader than that. How excited do you get about each of the following promises?
1) This game puts your working class characters into desperate situations where they must try to change the political system!
2) This game inspires you to play desperate working class punk action with political significance!
3) This game is about struggle and gives characters the power to cause lasting change in their environments. It goes very nicely with a punk ethos if you want to play that.
Eero Tuovinen:
I thought at first glance that the first angle would be my favourite, as I tend to prefer strong statements and specific game design over wishy-washy generalities. This is definitely not only about my gaming preference, but also about my history with the cultural landscape of roleplaying: the tradition of vague design has betrayed my personal creative goals as a roleplayer, which makes me wary about it. I tend to react negatively towards phrasings that indicate that the designer is trying to create a broadly-applicable toolkit game without more than a setting and some mechanics bringing the process of play together.
The above makes me dislike promise number three, it sounds like the sort of thing we tend to say about a game that's not truly visionary about where it's going. "You can do this cool thing" is not as strong a statement as "In this game you do this".
However, a second glance through those marketing statements actually makes me realize that number two is my real favourite. The problem with number one is that it smacks of excess narrow formalism in my particular rpg-text reading context: I could talk about Parlor Narration or theatrical recipes or games limiting their potential to curtail creative risks, but the nutshell of it is that I've found over the last five years that I do not care much about Mad Libs games that require little else from the players than filling in color for a dramatic arc that has mostly been predetermined. Promising me (like promise 1 does) that the game will definitely take my working class character and put him into a desperate situation where he must change the political system reads too cut-and-dry to me - I'd more prefer a game where I can decide for myself whether my character's circumstances are cause for revolution! In this regard promise number two strikes a more appealing balance.
If I really went into fine-tuning a statement along these lines, I'd probably say that the game is about this thing. "Inspiring" is sometimes a code-word for "I didn't really write a system to support that, but there's lots of fluff", which is less than ideal. Saying "The game is about desperate, politized punk in a victorian milieu" feels like a more neutral statement in this regard, it doesn't ping my overly prickly nose for trad product. Of course, after making such a bold claim it wouldn't hurt to give a couple sentences about how the game is about this thing: who are the oppressed, how is it working-class, what the action is like, so on.
I want to emphasize that I'm just describing myself as a customer here, not commenting on the game itself, which I still haven't read. The above is just me free-associating about David's marketing statements. And as I discussed earlier, you should think hard about your target audiences. Forge hardcore like myself are a narrow audience and not the most important one for most designers, you have bigger fish to catch out there.
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