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Role playing, board games, programming, and maybe occasionally political opinion

Thursday, March 16, 2006

How'd We Lose The World

This isn’t quite as poetical an entry as it’s title suggests. Basically, I want to get the following thought down: if passion and sincerity are our best tools against oppression (and I admit completely that I’m paraphrasing from an Onion AV Club article here), then isn’t our biggest enemy Being Cool?

I mean, here’s the thing. We go out of way to show how jaded and bored and above whatever we are. Or how obsessed we are over the trivial.

So of course corporate commercialism plays to Cool. It reaps huge benefits from any restriction on freedom. Where the individual loses, the Man stands tall. The more we can’t stand apart for fear of being different, the more be plow wads of cash into absolute crap, the more we let ourselves be screwed.

This is quickly descending into screed, but the basic upshot is this: clever irony, calculated apathy, gothic ennui, and nostalgic collection are all Bad For You. Now you’ll excuse me while I go buy South Park

Season 7 on DVD. Because it’s on sale, of course.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Conflicts, Situation, and Divisionism of Flags

Thinking about a certain kind of fiction, especially with a large set of characters, one of the things I’m seeing is that a lot of the excitement and tension in a certain kind of story arises because we watch the the conflicts arise between characters. To pull from contemporary examples, Lost (as I know it) is currently in a stage of rising tension, and it revolves mostly around characters ceasing to have so strong of an outside threat that they must band together, combined with the introduction of an ambitious but politically maladroit character into what was a strained but tense political situation.

This relates to role playing inasmuch that it seems then that’s there’s a situation like Clue going on: the game begins after all the fun. (With apologies to James Ernest ). Great faith in “GM prep” builds all the situations on the front side, and then play involves explicating and resolving those plot conflicts.

For clarity, I don’t think I’m talking about “conflict resolution” type conflict. I’m talking about plot level conflict. Difference being, a plot conflict is like “Herr Schlechtman is framing Joe with defrauding Yoyodine, Inc.” and conflict resolution is “Joe cracks the safe and recovers evidence to clear his name OR Joe gets caught robbing Yoyodine.”

Anyway, there’s been a lot of reaction from every side to Illusionist play and it’s less-fun (or really: less-successful) variants. GMs write the whole story, and the players are along for the ride. Either they know it up front, and participate and that’s fun, or the GM deceives them into thinking they’re participating (or they allow themselves to be deceived) and that can be fun, or they find out they’re being tricked, rail against the force the GM is pulling on them, and it’s almost always Not Fun.

One move has been to suggest that rather than plotting, a GM should establish a situation, that an object of the role playing act is the situation, and the GM’s role becomes to establish it. usually there’s a lot of process to produce a situation that relates to the characters, or the player’s interests, or the flags they’ve written for their characters.

But the situation invariably seems to include conflict, and if we’re suggesting that the GM shouldn’t have the final say on a plot, why should we let him write even that much? If we’re discarding the idea that the GM is Chief Storyteller, or Plot Owner, then I think we call into question what role the GM does play in defining the story we’re telling. You can’t just say “he shouldn’t come up with the ending” and leave it at that.

So, why is it that the only input players have to the situation is their flags? Don’t get me wrong, flags are a huge development, and good flags, especially ones that trigger reward cycles (in terms of in game rewards, rather than any other kind) do a lot towards driving the game.

I have two reservations about flags, though. First, in terms of influencing situation, flags are at two removes. First, the GM interpretes what those flags mean, often well after they were related to him, and second, the GM chooses which flags to emphasize, and usually reinterpretes those flags again in establishing the situation. It’s very possible for a flags driven game to produce situations that are no better tailored to the player’s interests than it would have been if the GM had just said “this jazzes me, and I think it’ll jazz you. Here we go.”

Here’s the notion that evolves out of all this: the players sit down and make characters, and they choose situation elements. Those elements need to be something that they, as players, want to see in the game. Their characters should relate somehow to their elements, since if nothing else, characters are our interface into the story. The GM gets to add some other elements, and some characters and whatnot.

Now, in the course of play, these elements get brought into conflict. Each scene is about juxtaposing characters and situation elements, and the game needs to reward building conflict just as much as it does resolving it. It’s possible that a really stodgy scene framing mechanic would be important here, including requiring that the partipants (both characters and elements) be brought into the scene at the beginning, and results be recorded at the end. It might be particularly interesting to establish mechanically how scenes follow, and who frames the next scene.