Difference between revisions of "Matts Gaming Maniphilosophesto"

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Instead of working at work, here I am talking about the kind of roleplaying I like to do.  Fantastic.
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It's unfair for me to say this is the only way I like to play or run games; I'm perfectly happy running a conventional game where I make up a universe and you all frolic in it.  That said, there's also other people in our group who enjoy that probably more than I do, and would be better choices for that sort of game.
  
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It's probably no surprise to anyone, but my penchant is for roleplaying where a story is told, collectively.  The reason we all sit around at the table with dice in front of us is because when you tell a story to yourself, a) there's no one to listen, and b) you already know what you're going to say.  With your friends, when you tell a story, they say, "that's cool, but what about if this happens?" and you realize, hot damn, that is way more compelling!
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I have a lot of personal and professional interest wrapped up in the idea of collective authorship.  I see interactive media as being a fundamentally different beast from old-school narrative media, but I haven't seen the promise of it played out.  I came into the game industry with a lot of talk about how it was an untapped medium full of all sorts of promise, but to date, I haven't really seen many people crystallize that promise.  The best games I can think of are of a straightforward narrative fashion (Grim Fandango comes to mind), and are touching examples of a great story heightened by interactivity.  But they're still fundamentally linear.  Even games with "morality tracks", like Knights of the Old Republic, are still just broader-scoped versions of a linear progression - any action you take has to be explicity expected by the designer, and the various outcomes, while interesting, depend entirely upon the designer's point of view and not the player's.
  
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I'm firmly convinced that we as a group can tell stories that, by virtue of all our participation, can come out with more gripping, and more entertaining than the best TV, because we made it, but also because there's real depth and real choices we made during play.
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With collective authorship, the balance changes, so that the player's perspective and "narrative agenda" and the designers' carry a more similar weight, and the story that emerges is wrought between them.  Obviously, this assumes that the product of these two visions combines in more than a linear average, and that the result is really compelling and memorable; maybe not a "great story" if we were to sell it, but that the action of creating this story is made fun by our participation in and ownership of it.
  
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What helps make those choices neccesary are the rules.  We're all attached to our characters, and our friends, and we all get that sort of sick feeling in our stomachs when we're watching tv and something goes horribly wrong for the people we love on that show.  It takes discipline to get past that sick feeling, whether you're writing a story and it's time for your favorite character to take some real licks, or whether you're running a game with your friends and it's time for the character everyone likes to really get hammered.  The rules, in my opinion, should help facilitate that sort of discipline.  I want the rules to help me in not feeling guilty when I throw a big challenge at the players, so that I can throw the same magnitude of challenges at everyone.
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The most memorable experiences I've had when gaming seem to come from when the players jump the rails; when the players' idea of what should happen and the GM's collide and something comes out of it.  My primary example here is in the Iliadic game, when Dieter blew all his honor to gain the power to smite the evil troll king, in what was basically an improvised move.  When you rehash it narratively, it sounds sort of anticlimactic, but at the time, it was the coolest thing ever.  It got me thinking that the GM's plan for an event usually isn't the most interesting for the players, and that a lot of the time, the group will take a left at Albuquerque, and you'll be left out in the cold.
  
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I know I harp on Dogs a lot, but reading and running that game jumpstarted a lot of thought for me, and I expect I'll diverge more in opinion the more I think.  But he said something that really stuck with me, on his forum or something:  The rules need to make me, the GM, impartial.  I can referee from a legalistic perspective, making sure everyone sticks to the rules, but what I'm not supposed to be doing, or more accurately what I as a GM don't want to do, is to say, "this is how the plot's going to happen."  I think that for me to have a "plot", with predefined villians and places I'm trying to steer the game for high and low points, defeats the purpose of having the rest of you there.  At that point, I'm a director and you're the actors, which is absolutely not how I view the relationship.  Instead, I want to be making a setup, letting you as players loose in that setup, and facilitating everyone having a good time.
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Hence, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about requiring the players to author a significant part of the drama, in more than a reactive fashion.
  
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I'll try to keep my rants on the topic limited to here though, as I'm sure everyone is getting sick of my bullshit.
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In the one-shot, all I did was define some characters.  Sure, some trended towards turning the villians in your characters' mind, like Ronald Tester.  That was by design; we've gamed long enough that I've got a reasonable idea of how you as players are going to see the NPCs.  But it would have been an equally valid thing for your characters to have pegged George Milk as a selfish loony who had turned the town into a dependent abettor to his revenge fantasy, and shot him in the street.  Granted, it wasn't set up so much that way, but the point is, by the time I get to where I want to be as a GM, *it should be*, so that all I'm doing is creating a setting, adding enough hooks in it to keep you guys as players engaged (including between-session conspiracies and the like), and then seeing what happens.
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I'm not saying that the way we've done things up until now is somehow wrong; I think that to whatever degree you guys agree with me, we've been getting at a similar thing from a number of different angles.
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But, again, I'm at work.  I'll wrap it up with a bullet list, because that's my favorite wiki feature.
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IN SUMMARY, I THINK GAMING SHOULD BE ABOUT:
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*collaborative storytelling; everyone shapes the story.  That doesn't mean that one or two strong personalities shape the story and everyone else defers; it means that everyone HAS to shape the story in some way.
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*having to make hard choices, and squeezing drama from the consequences
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*As the GM, setting up the pins, but not interfering with how they fall (assuming they all obey the proper rules in their falling)
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*As a GM, making sure those pins do fall; nobody's really interested in a session where nothing happens.
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Latest revision as of 15:27, 2 April 2007

It's unfair for me to say this is the only way I like to play or run games; I'm perfectly happy running a conventional game where I make up a universe and you all frolic in it. That said, there's also other people in our group who enjoy that probably more than I do, and would be better choices for that sort of game.

I have a lot of personal and professional interest wrapped up in the idea of collective authorship. I see interactive media as being a fundamentally different beast from old-school narrative media, but I haven't seen the promise of it played out. I came into the game industry with a lot of talk about how it was an untapped medium full of all sorts of promise, but to date, I haven't really seen many people crystallize that promise. The best games I can think of are of a straightforward narrative fashion (Grim Fandango comes to mind), and are touching examples of a great story heightened by interactivity. But they're still fundamentally linear. Even games with "morality tracks", like Knights of the Old Republic, are still just broader-scoped versions of a linear progression - any action you take has to be explicity expected by the designer, and the various outcomes, while interesting, depend entirely upon the designer's point of view and not the player's.

With collective authorship, the balance changes, so that the player's perspective and "narrative agenda" and the designers' carry a more similar weight, and the story that emerges is wrought between them. Obviously, this assumes that the product of these two visions combines in more than a linear average, and that the result is really compelling and memorable; maybe not a "great story" if we were to sell it, but that the action of creating this story is made fun by our participation in and ownership of it.

The most memorable experiences I've had when gaming seem to come from when the players jump the rails; when the players' idea of what should happen and the GM's collide and something comes out of it. My primary example here is in the Iliadic game, when Dieter blew all his honor to gain the power to smite the evil troll king, in what was basically an improvised move. When you rehash it narratively, it sounds sort of anticlimactic, but at the time, it was the coolest thing ever. It got me thinking that the GM's plan for an event usually isn't the most interesting for the players, and that a lot of the time, the group will take a left at Albuquerque, and you'll be left out in the cold.

Hence, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about requiring the players to author a significant part of the drama, in more than a reactive fashion.

I'll try to keep my rants on the topic limited to here though, as I'm sure everyone is getting sick of my bullshit.

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