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September 26, 2004
Keep Your Friends Close, Your Gaming Friends Closer
A fellow named Timothy Kleinert has an RPG in development right now called The Mountain Witch. The game is about samurai storming an evil Witch King’s castle, though it was also inspired by, and could be used to run, “honor among thieves” crime stories in the Reservoir Dogs vein. The key mechanic is trust: after each scene, the players are asked to rank how much their character trusts each of the other characters. The characters to whom “trust points” are given can use those points in later scenes to aid or to betray the player who trusted them. The game features various reasons to betray your fellows, but ultimately the only way to advance and kill the Witch King is to give and receive trust. It’s a neat mechanic, and I look forward to the finished game, but I’m actually not posting to talk about that.
[Edit: The Mountain Witch link above seems to be working again. Check it out.]
What actually triggered this post was a thread about playtesting The Mountain Witch that started like this:
Last night we played The Mountain Witch at the campus club meeting. I GM'd with four players. First news? Massive positive response; afterwards, one person pointed out that we'd actually all become better friends, to whatever small extent, simply by playing this game.
That business of becoming better friends—through just one session of play, mind you—sounded familiar to me. Remember when we talked here about the Moose In The City thread over at the Forge? That thread started out with:
I hope it is not going to be embarrassing to my fellow players to say that I consider all of you potential life-long friends because of our experience with Primetime Adventures. I would literally bring a major life/crisis problem of mine to you for counsel, and if you did the same, I'd do anything I could to help.
And all the players in that game chimed in to agree with that assessment, one of them saying:
I had a blast with this game; definitely one of the more pivotal emotional moments of the convention. ... I'm fairly convinced the game ... has been one of the biggest contributions to my spiritual growth in quite a while.
Heavy stuff. And probably a little “you had to be there.” But interesting. Our earlier discussion of the Moose In The City game had to do with whether it was “revolutionary.” But what I wanted to talk about, leaving the specific Moose and Mountain Witch games aside except as a springboard, is this business of rapid bonding, becoming better friends, even finding some kind of personal/spiritual growth through an intense gaming session.
I’m very curious how widespread, or not, that kind of experience is. I trust we’ve all made friends through gaming, or become better friends with people we’ve gamed with over the years. I should hope so, anyway! But that’s usually a gradual process: time spent, the accretion of shared activity and memories and in jokes, the socializing around the game and all the rest. This intense bonding after one session of a game, though. Has anyone else around here had this experience, or something like it? Have any of you ever had a single game session that made you and your fellow gamers better friends? And if you did, did that new bond last or quickly fade away? Finally, is this a worthwhile goal to strive for, or waaaaay too much pressure to put on a simple night of gaming? I have my own anecdotes, but I wanted to throw the question open for discussion first.
P.S. Yes, the first guy quoted above is Ron Edwards, which may be relevant to the topic as Ron is a strong advocate of addressing real-world social dynamics among gamers. But I know he’s also a polarizing figure, and that is so not the discussion I want to have here right now. I would consider any discussion, denigration, or defense of Ron, the Forge, GNS and related theory, etc. to be off topic for comments to this post. I want to hear about your games.
P.P.S. I feel bad cannibalizing the Forge all the time for my posts, so I went searching on RPG.net (the things I do for you!) to see what if anything people had said on this sort of topic. I searched for several variations on “closer friends,” “better friends,” “became closer,” etc., and pretty much all I could find was this cheery little post:
My old group included some of my best friends, and some truly wonderful people. But GMing them was like being sodomised with a chainsaw, while they laughed. The best times we had was when we stopped gaming and just cracked jokes. One day, I woke up and realised we were much better friends without the roleplaying. Now we see films, get pizza, watch TV and play board games, and we're much better friends as a result. Keep the friends, and remove the gaming. That's the key.
Hmm. I shouldn’t make generalizations from two or three posts, but you've got to admit the contrast between that post and the ones I quoted above is pretty stark.
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Comments
I'd say it's possible to have a defining or clarifying 'friendship moment', much like it's possible to fall in love at first sight. Has it happened to me while gaming? Sure. Why not? It should be at least as likely to happen while gaming as it would in any hobby. To a certain extent, isn't that what hobbies are for?
It doesn't hurt that gaming tends to be something of a social laboratory; a safe space where we test out relationships and personalities and theories about why we behave the way we do. So it's possible to find out a lot about what your fellow gamers think and feel through the metaphor of the game.
Should we be trying to engineer games that go for that as a result? It's an interesting idea; however, while it's easy to fall in love, it's not so easy to stay in love. Real relationships require time and work that are really beyond the scope of just gaming.
Posted by: peaseblossom at Sep 27, 2004 5:12:02 AM
I'm going to break out the "gaming is like sex" metaphor and let people chew on it. Sometimes it's great and life-changing. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's really terrible.
I've made some really good, close friends at the gaming table. I even met my husband there. But I also have very good friends whose style of gaming simply doesn't mesh with mine. When they do stuff I like, I play; when they do stuff I don't like, I stay home; and vice versa. When they're doing stuff I don't like, I get annoyed, and that's not conducive to me loving them dearly or building deep trust.
Posted by: Ginger Stampley at Sep 27, 2004 9:55:01 AM
Gaming is like any other social networkng. You need to do it lots with lots of different people to find configurations that work just right but take work (al relationships do) and change over time.
So sure, you can have one of those oh wo gaming experiences with fresh faces. Just as you can have great one-night stand sex or connect with a group of people at the bar. Its probably as substantial too.
Posted by: Jere at Sep 27, 2004 10:58:45 AM
Yep. It's a social activity, like many others. I... actually wouldn't want the pressure of feeling like I had to have transformative experiences every time I sat down at the table. I don't do close friendships easily and I'm a pretty reserved person and I think that's perfectly OK.
That said, yeah, one of my Boston social circles is made up of people I met gaming, who I consider to be pretty good friends. (Key benchmark: would I call these people if I were in jail and needed to be bailed out?) But that builds over time.
Posted by: Bryant at Sep 27, 2004 11:05:36 AM
Bryant: You can always call on me if you're in jail and need to be bailed out. Unless I'm at the track. Then I'm all business!
Everyone: Yes. You are all wise, and I agree with all that's been said. But I was hoping for a bit more "Actual Play." Does anyone have any actual stories or anecdotes of this happening, or not happening, that they want to tell? Or are people not going to tell stories if I don't share first?
Posted by: Rob at Sep 27, 2004 11:48:44 AM
Okay, so one time I was playing Castle Falkenstein and this guy in the game was playing the society matron and I was playing a young up-and-coming type and we were at this dinner party and, you know, I forget exactly what happened, but someone (one of the other pcs, of course) was being a boor and I looked at him and he looked at me and we communicated totally non-verbally what to do about the situation and I had never experienced that kind of rapport with a guy before (with women, definitely, but men, no), let alone that guy, and it was definitely a flash of closeness, of being on the same wavelength, that was really illuminating about the possibilities of our friendship.
Posted by: peaseblossom at Sep 27, 2004 12:40:20 PM
I think actual play items would make great entries, actually. I'll think about it and put it on my to-blog list.
Posted by: Ginger Stampley at Sep 27, 2004 1:16:32 PM
I have a story.
I went to my first Ambercon US in 1996, and there I met a woman in a game. I don't think the game made us click - I think we just clicked. We played and we talked through downtime about our lives. Next thing I know I'm telling her how I met my husband - she's telling me about her ex husband and kids. In four hours, she could have been my best friend in the world. We were talking about what we'd do to improve the convention (there had been some problems with timeliness issues). Two years later, Erick is agreeing we can run the 10th ACUS.
Met her in a game. We don't get to see each other much anymore, but I miss her.
Posted by: LizT at Sep 27, 2004 9:52:10 PM
I don't think roleplaying is just like any other social networking. I think the potential for human contact in roleplaying is, like, crazy high, and artificially restrained by the procedures we usually play with. It's quite as though conventional RPG rules are there to buffer the players, to protect them from contact.
My actual play writeup's there for everybody to read. I'd stop roleplaying if that sort of honest, deepening, heart-to-heart contact between me and my fellow players weren't common.
I should say about Moose in the City: before it, Ron and I were friends, but I doubt I'd had a single whole conversation with Gordon, Alexander or Calder. I'm not sure I knew Calder's name, even. No - we're friends because of the trust and openness we established in that game. Whether we'll go on to become better friends, who knows, but we have as strong a foundation for it as you could want.
With my regular group, if we go three sessions without really touching one another, I get cranky and dissatisfied. When I start a new game, my overwhelming early agenda is to establish trust and openness, and I'll ditch out of a game where it's blocked.
...Furthermore, I think that it's my job as a game designer to foster trust and openness between the players of my games, insofar as the games contribute to the collaboration at the table. Here's a kill puppies for satan actual play thread: we killed puppies for satan. (The first ever actual play of puppies, in fact, and I wasn't even there.) Here are a couple good lines from it:
"In the past, I've felt uncomfortable broaching certain subjects or doing certain things to their characters in game. By the time we finished kill puppies for satan, I didn't see any barriers left - it pretty much forced us into being more honest with each other than ever before." - Clinton
"I don't know why, but I feel like a better person for playing this game." - Yasha
This isn't foolin' around. Sharing creativity and meaning with people is potent magic and we sell it short.
Posted by: Vincent at Sep 28, 2004 10:34:39 AM
Thanks for that comment, Vincent. (Thanks to everyone, of course--but I was especially hoping Vincent would post.)
I think my own inclinations are somewhere between your desire to really drive for those powerful moments, and Bryant's not wanting to have that pressure on him at every game. I enjoy junk food and I enjoy gourmet food, and I crave each at different times.
It's quite as though conventional RPG rules are there to buffer the players, to protect them from contact.
I'd love to hear some examples or expansion of this, and also any techniques you use to establish openness and trust in a game, but I don't want to make you do all the lifting in this thread. So again, I open the question to anyone.
Posted by: Rob at Sep 28, 2004 12:27:54 PM
Rob wrote: "It's quite as though conventional RPG rules are there to buffer the players, to protect them from contact."
I think that's very insightful. The apparatus of RPGs make it safer for people to take part in an activity that can become extremely raw -- one part mutual hypnosis a la Charles Tart, one part group-therapy session, with a high potential for psychic and social disaster (insert your worst roleplaying experience here). Character sheets and rulebooks are useful tools for maintaining and re-establishing distance when things get too close to the bone; using dice to create objectivity helps prevent the shared imaginative space from being a tug-of-war between opposing wills.
Junk and gourmet food is a little too value-laden a metaphor for my taste, but I think it's very true that conventionally "buffered" games and more unmediated "raw" games serve different purposes, enjoyed by different types of people and by the same people at different times.
Posted by: Tav_Behemoth at Sep 30, 2004 8:25:59 AM
Thanks, Tav. I think the point about RPG rules buffering players is insightful, too, but it wasn't me that said it - I was quoting Vincent, above.
Your point about the potential for social disaster is a good one. We can probably all think of painful, awkward game experiences, where real life issues and game issues erupt into one another in messy ways. (Probably if *that* was the original topic of this thread, we'd have gotten a whole bunch more stories.) I have tended in the past to blame those bad experiences on the social skills and hang-ups of the people playing (including myself as an adolescent) but hadn't thought much about how the activity of roleplaying might open the door for those. This would seem to be the flip side of the potential for positive intensity that Vincent is talking about.
Posted by: Rob at Sep 30, 2004 10:04:00 AM
Mmm... it's not entirely clear to me that I've seen more game-related social disasters than, say, party-related social disasters. Although in the latter case, alcohol is a very common trigger, so there'd still be an enabling factor. Hm.
Posted by: Bryant at Sep 30, 2004 10:19:17 AM
Rob, my pleasure.
"I think my own inclinations are somewhere between your desire to really drive for those powerful moments, and Bryant's not wanting to have that pressure on him at every game."
I keep trying to write "pressure? What pressure?" but it's not working out. I want games that provoke and challenge me. I want to play them with people who do the same, then hold me to high standards. That does mean pressure, after all.
"I'd love to hear some examples or expansion of this [conventional RPGs are a buffer], and also any techniques you use to establish openness and trust in a game..."
Well, expansion's easy: "The GM should be an impartial, dispassionate rules-arbiter." "The GM can manipulate things behind the scenes to drive the game toward his planned climax." "The GM should punish players who don't play their characters to type" (eg Alignment, most personality mechanics). "You should play your character strictly by in-character knowledge, ignoring out-of-character concerns." Keep adding to the list until you run out of conventional wisdom. What you've got at the end is a recipe for closed, withdrawn, emotionally conservative play.
Imagine collaborating with someone on a novel, following RPG conventional wisdom: "Rewrite backstory to undermine the significance of the other writer's contributions." "Write frustration upon characters whom the other writer's developing beyond their type." "Write only what the characters know, ignoring your own insights, and be sure to keep your thoughts and plans from the other writer." Not only will the novel suck - if you even manage to finish it - you'll never develop a functional working relationship with your fellow coauthor.
Now imagine that you know a writer who really does try to work with other writers, but following those collaboration-destructive guidelines. What would you think of that person? You wouldn't think it's an accident. You'd think that for some reason he doesn't actually want to collaborate. He's protecting himself, his ego, his security - something. He's threatened by real shared creativity and he's using those rotten strategies to make sure it doesn't happen.
Now, I don't think that everyone who plays those games is that guy. What I think is: even if you throw out the bad ideal of the dispassionate GM and the self-protective player, if you play by rules that promote 'em and depend on 'em, you'll get 'em anyway.
As to what techniques and strategies I use - well, I've written a couple-three games made of techniques and strategies, and there are a couple-three-four-five more floating around that others have written. Universalis and Primetime Adventures are two I'd recommend to anybody.
Posted by: Vincent at Sep 30, 2004 11:33:32 AM
Bryant wrote: "Mmm... it's not entirely clear to me that I've seen more game-related social disasters than, say, party-related social disasters."
Over yakitori after nerdNYC's excellent local con, Recess, last weekend I had the pleasure of starting a conversatuion with Luke Crane about the Duel of Wits social interaction mechanic he's developing for Burning Wheel. One of the things I remember him was saying is that it levels the playing field, keeping the loudest/most aggressive personalities from bullying the flow of the game and making sure that the spotlight is shared equally.
It struck me that this isn't the way normal social interaction takes place. As we had this conversation, the most charismatic and/or pushy people *did* hog the spotlight. Not everyone at the table had a chance to act in each round; some folks weren't heard from, regardless of the merits of their views.
My point is that gaming is, among other things, an idealized social sphere. Even the most "buffered" roleplaying system promotes a cooperative, fun-directed framework for socialization, and one of the strengths of this framework is that it can and does include people who experience rejection in most other kinds of social interaction. Raise your hand if you've ever had a good time at the gaming table with someone you wouldn't want to spend time with at a party...
For some people, buffering may be a necessary component for them to share themselves & their creativity at all. That isn't to say that those of us who are ready to delve deeper shouldn't, but I think it's good and necessary for our community to have systems that are enjoyable by people who aren't yet ready to take that step.
Posted by: Tav_Behemoth at Sep 30, 2004 1:31:36 PM
"The GM should be an impartial, dispassionate rules-arbiter."
Actually, I believe in this one, and precisely because I think it's one of the key tools for increasing the intensity of play. One way of characterizing the way how I play has changed over the last few years is that I've been trying to increase the amount of transparency in how I run games.
So first, I've stopped hiding any relevant mechanical information about the PCs' antagonists from the players -- they know the skill levels and stats of the NPCs they come up against. Then, I've stopped running systems that require me to roll any dice because this ensures that the players know that I can't possibly be fudging -- they are actually doing all the game-mechanics in play. This increases the perception of "fairness". Lately I've stopped hiding the background information.
The reason for this transition is that I want to turn up the pressure on the characters as high as possible, because strong conflicts produce strong stories. But in order to keep the players from feeling unfairly put upon (after all, part of roleplaying is identification with your character) I want to what I'm doing as GM transparent, so that they can verify the fairness of my GMing.
I think the next step for me is to shift the responsibility for playing the antagonists to the players. That way I can eliminate the "conflict of interest" between the GM-binding-arbitrator role and the playing-the-antagonist role, and the intensity of the game can be bumped up another notch.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Sep 30, 2004 1:51:10 PM
Neel: I dig. I see the exact same conflict of interest.
My solution has been to make the rules' application open and transparent, same as you, but so that then following the rules becomes the responsibility of the whole group. Not unlike any other game, really; nobody needs to "arbitrate" Chess or Poker or Pit. Anyhow that leaves the GM free to really play up the antagonism - hence passionate, not dispassionate.
You have to find rules that don't need a sole impartial arbiter, of course. Have you played Universalis?
Posted by: Vincent at Sep 30, 2004 2:44:45 PM
Tav:
"For some people, buffering may be a necessary component for them to share themselves & their creativity at all. That isn't to say that those of us who are ready to delve deeper shouldn't, but I think it's good and necessary for our community to have systems that are enjoyable by people who aren't yet ready to take that step."
Maybe so. I don't trust it. And either way, our community isn't exactly well served by being dominated by those systems.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that I feel this way. If I were satisfied with games just as they are, I wouldn't design new ones, would I?
Posted by: Vincent at Sep 30, 2004 2:55:34 PM
Yes, I've had a number of "Wow!" experiences playing just one session of a game and these experiences have led to lasting friendships. All of these experiences were with the so-called "traditional" RPGs (mostly D&D) at gaming conventions.
The difference is that all of them were with provided characters in a well written event. That's also what I seek to create every time I write an event for a convention.
I read all these kinds of posts and threads and articles on The Forge and I keep coming to the conclusion that the best way to achieve this affect is with character-provided events, not with radically different systems. (See our website for more details.)
Of course, people still want to play games where they write their own characters. I enjoy that too but accept that creating your own character, in any system, is limiting because you will only stray so far outside your comfort zone (even if others look at your character concept and think it is WAY outside of THEIR comfort zone). Picking up and playing a character someone else wrote is far more challenging (assume the event and the characters are well written).
Scott from RP-Artisans.Org
Posted by: Scott at Oct 1, 2004 3:51:39 PM
I agree with Scott, I've definitely had life-changing experiences in "traditional" games. I think it's a matter of focus. It seems like if it's an ongoing character that you created, one tends to focus on that character's survival, more than their personality.
The best experiences that I've had are ones where the players had no care as to whether their PC lived or died; except in terms of how it might affect their fellows and the story.
Another piece of this is that I've noticed that people want their PCs to be useful in any given situation. The more focus there is on combat, skill checks, etc., the more the character sheet, rather than the player's role-playing ability determines how useful they can be. (Agreed, some systems by their nature emphasize this more than others).
The flip side is that one bad player can really spoil the flow of ideas and feelings between other players. Our organization has a goal of reaching out to people, so we run a lot of games at conventions.
One problem we run into is the player who has been coming to cons for 15 years, and is still a jerk, and spoils every table he sits at. This is different from the young player that needs guidance, or just a difference in styles.
Any thoughts on how we can prevent these people from spoiling the experiences of our other players?
Thanks,
Tim
Posted by: Tim White at Oct 1, 2004 5:23:25 PM
It occurs to me that online MUSH RP often sees the kind of emotionally unbuffered roleplay we're talking about here; more often in the rules-light MUSHes like AmberMUSH and PernMUSH. Not so often in highly rules-oriented environments like most WoD MUSHes or the scattering of D20 MUSHes out there. People form friendships very quickly, scenes are arbitrated by player consensus, etc.
Sometimes it's great. Sometimes, frankly, it's really incredibly emotionally unhealthy. Sometimes the friendships are real. Sometimes not.
I think it's a good goal. I also think that I (and everyone) has the right to make an informed choice. There are a lot of aspects to gaming; one of them is creativity. But that's not the only reason I game.
And further, there's more than one way to advance creativity. I've said this many times: I like being surprised. I really do. I find that being surprised enhances my creativity. That's why I like GMs who keep secrets, and it's why, as a GM, I like Storycards and other mechanisms that put some control in the hands of the players. So what Vincent sees as creativity-destructors are things that can, for my style of gaming, be creativity-enhancers.
Posted by: Bryant at Oct 3, 2004 10:44:09 AM
I've thought of consent-based MUSHes as environments that can support high quality "unbuffered" play only if the players are all already fairly close.
That's because, in improv terms, "consent" means that any player can block any offer, and that's going to really throttle the rate of dramatic action unless the players make a specific effort not to block. And that's something that's unlikely unless the players already trust one another to some extent (and probably why players in MUSHes tend to form strong cliques).
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Oct 3, 2004 2:22:14 PM
Bryant: Surprise is crucial for me too. I don't really get why you think it's not.
I don't need to be surprised right when my character's surprised, but I need to be surprised sometime. Preferably, regularly and often, same as you.
"That's why I like GMs who keep secrets, and it's why, as a GM, I like Storycards and other mechanisms that put some control in the hands of the players."
Me too.
If you can point to where I seemed to say that I'm against surprise, or the GM keeping secrets, maybe I can explain what I really meant.
Posted by: Vincent at Oct 3, 2004 3:26:41 PM
Vincent: I took "The GM can manipulate things behind the scenes to drive the game toward his planned climax." as being a statement against secrets. If a GM is making decisions behind the scenes -- that a player can't see -- what's he doing other than keeping secrets?
Also note Neel's comments re: public mechanical information and your agreement with that strategy.
Neel: sorta yes. What I saw in playing AmberMUSH for several years is the following pattern: people would roleplay together in non-conflict situations, which created trust very quickly. Following the trust creation, the same players might (or might not) move into conflict situations between the same or a different pair of characters.
Posted by: Bryant at Oct 3, 2004 4:12:37 PM
Bryant: Ah! Nope, it's a statement against underhandedly marginalizing the other players' contributions and against pre-planned outcomes. I'm against those whether they come about by a surprise or a non-surprise.
And then also, surprising your fellow players so doesn't depend on covert resolution. I'm continually surprised - and delighted - by what my fellow players do, before during and after mechanical resolution.
I'll say again: there are rulesets that make this possible, and rulesets where it just wouldn't work. That Moose in the City game, for instance: it was surprise after surprise, and every surprise was exactly right. If we'd been playing Shadowrun we wouldn't've gotten it.
Posted by: Vincent at Oct 3, 2004 8:20:04 PM
Vincent made a point a while back that strikes me as worth following up on in a tangential and self-indulgent sort of way. Imagine collaborating with someone on a novel, following RPG conventional wisdom: "Rewrite backstory to undermine the significance of the other writer's contributions." "Write frustration upon characters whom the other writer's developing beyond their type." "Write only what the characters know, ignoring your own insights, and be sure to keep your thoughts and plans from the other writer." Not only will the novel suck - if you even manage to finish it - you'll never develop a functional working relationship with your fellow coauthor.
This comment puts me in the mind of Jere's Age of Paranoia game, and my character in it. I'm constantly making an effort (sometimes it works, sometimes not) to communicate to the other players what Mitch is thinking, what he's planning, and why he's planning it. Where his priorities are, and what he's likely to do given X stimulus. I do this because I view collaboration as one of the fundaments of the game, and I want everyone to be clear on where my end of things is headed. Also because it makes Mitch nominally more like Richard III.
Posted by: Jeff at Oct 4, 2004 6:48:18 PM
Jeff: I think that makes a big difference in collaborative games like AoP -- it makes it way easier to weave the story together and support each other's roleplay.
Coming back to the MUSH thing, I always found that the best way to get lots of roleplay was to deliberately look for ways to support whatever other people wanted out of a scene. By choosing a collaborative agenda, one created a reputation as a fun person to roleplay with.
Vincent: I'm with you up until you say "If we'd been playing Shadowrun we wouldn't've gotten it." At that point I cast my mind back to the epic eight hour Shadowrun one-shot Carl Rigney ran once, which was six highly divergent characters with six highly divergent goals, who had been given responsibility for choosing the next elven ambassador to Seattle. I remember touring North America and speaking to the various possible candidates. I remember my character slowly coming to a tacit accord with another character whose goals could dovetail with mine. I remember a lot of negotiations between characters that took the form of carefully choosing the questions we asked the candidates. I remember a satisfying outcome.
What am I missing? I guess you could say it wasn't really Shadowrun, because it's not like we spent much time rolling dice, but the player knowledge of the system definitely informed our actions. For example, if we'd been playing it in Feng Shui, I would have felt a lot better about starting fights -- it's not a very deadly system. So the fact that it was Shadowrun did matter.
It probably mattered that the players were all friends and we knew we'd be doing a lot more gaming together, from a pure spotlight standpoint. Sort of an implied version of the stuff in PTA where you determine who gets spotlight for a given session/show? I wasn't worried about giving Maeve a lot of spotlight time because it's not like her player doesn't give back -- even if not that game, a later one.
Posted by: Bryant at Oct 4, 2004 7:58:52 PM
Bryant: that cuts to the heart of RPG design.
You weren't mostly playing by Shadowrun's rules, right? If you had been, you'd'a rolled dice a lot. You probably didn't break its rules, they just mostly didn't come up, right?
So, what were you doing? What was your GM doing? How did you decide as a group what happened, what didn't happen? There were rules of some sort in place, or you wouldn't'a been able to play for eight hours, it would have broken down. They were just unspoken, probably unnoticed.
And they were a lot more complicated, I posit, than "Carl's the GM, what he says goes." They were all about what he said, why did he choose to say that, not this other thing? Why did he rule this way, not this other way? Why did he argue with this player, but give in to this other player straight off?
From this point of view, the purpose of a ruleset is to capture some essence of a social dynamic and make it portable to other groups. Exactly as your comment about spotlight time implies.
The social dynamic that Primetime Adventures distills and makes portable is extremely no-kidding functional. It works, as a way for human beings to interact and have fun with each other. It's natural, provoking, exciting, and rewarding.
Shadowrun ... not so much. The best times I had playing Shadowrun were when its rules just didn't come up.
(And, well, would you have said that the Shadowrun game made you a better person? Or was a significant part of your spiritual growth at the time? Or provided the foundation for potential life-long friendships? I used to really enjoy Shadowrun, but even its highlights were just fun.)
Posted by: Vincent at Oct 7, 2004 1:14:44 PM
I'm still thinking about what I can add here, Rob. I agree with the comments about MUSHing and rules-light play. I have a lot to say about that, but recent events have made it inadvisable that I go into too much personal detail about my experiences with emotional intensity in freeforms.
When it's good, it's really, really good: I've made friends through my online Amber gaming that are in the "not just move, move bodies" category. But when it goes south--and I've just seen that happen--it's really REALLY ugly.
I need to consider whether I can post more of the insights I've had here without hurting people's feelings.
Posted by: Ginger Stampley at Oct 7, 2004 1:27:34 PM
You weren't mostly playing by Shadowrun's rules, right? If you had been, you'd'a rolled dice a lot. You probably didn't break its rules, they just mostly didn't come up, right?
Sort of, yep. I think this really comes back to the excellent point that the mechanics for any given session of a game include all the negotiated social contracts between the people playing. E.g., Gretchen and I have a social contract that says "when we're in a game together, we will make sure that we work to ensure that at least one of us gets what we want out of the game, and it doesn't matter who (if it can only be one) because we pay each other back all the time." It's a pretty great social contract. It matters a lot and it's part of why gaming with her has in fact helped me become more well-adjusted as a human being.
So I agree with you that far. Where I disagree is that I don't think the Shadowrun mechanics were a serious obstacle to developing the kinds of social mechanics we needed and had.
I'm really interested in ways to take the lessons I learn from games like Trollbabe (and, I hope, PTA) and bringing them back into rules-complex games like D20 or HERO. I do recognize that you have to change some existing social mechanics from those games, like the strong implications of the GM role. But I don't think that's very hard to do.
This is important to me because I like rules-complex games with a lot of tactics in combat. I want to play those games, and I want to have peak experiences during playing those games, and I have found that this is, for me, something that can happen.
Sure, it's not directly supported by the rules as printed. That's OK. I like rules-tweaking too. And sometimes that's a bonus, in that not every group reaches this kind of peak experience in the same fashion. There are people out there who would feel deeply constrained by the PTA mechanic which (as I understand it) pre-determines spotlight time for a given session.
Is that rational? I don't know, but I don't care; I'm more interested in what is that what should be. Since I've seen people object to that in practice, and they're people I want to game with, I've got to figure out a way around it.
I also have found that yes, it is possible for me to get life-long friendships out of campaigns of those games. Carl was not a good friend before I started gaming with him, and out of our gaming experiences that friendship has developed, and those gaming experiences were HERO and D20 and Feng Shui and Shadowrun.
Posted by: Bryant at Oct 7, 2004 5:17:15 PM
Followup: I don't think it's impossible to design a game like PTA with complex tactical elements like D20, but I don't see it happening any time soon -- the design goals are very different and there's a very small subset of people who want both. It's easier for me to kitbash social group stuff into D20 than it is for me to kitbash battlemaps into Trollbabe.
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