What makes a good celebration?

[jhkimrpg]

I was inspired by Chris Lehrich's "RPGs and Ideology?" and Nathan Paoletta's "Simulationism". The various GNS takes on Simulationism don't form a coherent whole to me, but one of the more recent formulations was Ron Edwards' definition which put it in terms of celebration. There is a brief outline of this in the TheoryTopics Wiki Entry on "

Comments

[bar_sinister]

This is a really good examination of that nebulous Sim concept, at least for me. The whole point of this sort of play is to insert yourself into your favorite fiction. It can't be pure homage because that takes away a lot of your agency as a player, but you can't stray outside the spirit of the source material too much either without transforming it into something else. This is the tightrope of good Sim.

My concrete example is an excellent Amber Diceless game I ran in the early 90s. I did as you suggest above, and had the players replace the iconic characters rather than play as children of these characters. We had months of excellent infighting and vicious sibling rivalry. It eventually broke down when I took the game text's advice and started to introduce external adversaries for the players to rally against, and all of the family politics fell by the wayside. I think at that point the game had drifted outside of what everyone wanted out of an Amber game.

[jhkimrpg]

Funny you should mention it. I just put up my AmberCon NorthWest 2005 Report, where I tried Amber gaming again, not having played it since an early bad campaign.

My hypothesis is that celebration involves transformation/passage. My question would be -- what did the Amber campaign do to you? How was it different from the Amber books, and how did it change how you viewed the Amber books?

[bar_sinister]

Can you be more specific about what you mean by "what it did to me?"

As for the second part, it was different from the books initially because I had replaced the canonical characters with the player characters. Interestingly, resentment over maternity and characters viewing the mothers of other characters as usurpers became a major point in play, with the whole thing sort of an allegory about broken families and family politics in general.

[jhkimrpg]

I think the key to transformation is not Nar/Sim -- it is deliberation. When you know what you are doing and approach it in a way that lets you get at the "meat" then you allow yourself to get at things that matter.

I think I know what you mean, though I would say that "deliberation" is a poor word for it. In my experience, you can get extremely meaningful things if you deliberately stop thinking about things and just act unconsciously -- then look back and see what you've done. That's what a lot of immersive play has been like for me.

Now, in the case of the Conan game, it was deliberative on the part of me as GM -- the product of critical thinking. However, the James Bond 007 campaign was not -- I just went with the eighties thing and tossed in stuff as it went. I was playing the James Bond 007 system pretty much as written. For example, Jim's gay English spy was completely his idea, though I provided the sexy NPCs in response.

[eruditus]

I will respond to this post more directly but I wanted to mention that my wife and I were the one's that played in your Conan game two KublaCons ago. Much fun, thanks!

[eruditus]

The only thing I would add is a generalist view more than a theortetical view (which may or may not have any place here). :)

I find that it is realistic and natural to challenge these suppositions of genre and is probably the reason people play such genres is to challenge themselves. However, it is too easy to slip into our own mindset. I've even had a player that said out-right "I don't get why you'd want to play 'in-genre'" and completely rebels against anything that hinders her just doing what she wants.

No arguement. Your right that Ron's "celebration" theory is very evocative and really rings true. I wonder if these conversations (admittedly I tend to be a lurker of late) really hit upon why I have been largely dissatisfied with my gaming experiences recently, in taht I really am looking for that transformative/informative combination in my gaming and most of the players/GMs around me are pretty meat & potatoes dungeon delvers at heart.

[jhkimrpg]

Hey. You played the leader Cruaidh and Joanna played beast-master Daor, right? You two were great, by the way! My favorite moment of that game was when Joanna had Daor defy the guards by ripping off his loincloth. My jaw dropped and I still smirk over that bit.

What's interesting is that from my point of view, that game was really aimed at meat and potatoes D20 players (although I was still green as a D20 GM). All the PCs were classic, combat-focused barbarians -- and the center of it was a big monster fight. I was trying to play to the strengths of the system. It was based around the idea that the fight would be more interesting and more engaging if there was a real story around it.

Classical Threefold or GNS analysis might say that you were more Simulationist, while the other players are more Gamist. But I'm not sure if that's very helpful, though. It seems to me that one can include good tactical challenges as part of a celebration -- though I don't have a blueprint for how. Have you seen my post on Breaking Down D&

It's certainly what I want to do

[anonymous]

I've long been aware that celebrating is pretty much what I want RPGs to do