We took a break from Deadwood tonight, to watch two episodes of the frothier, less arduous fare that is United States of Tara, but I can't stop thinking about the Old West
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I felt I lost most of the roleplaying games I was in, because of the dramatic possibilities constantly being undercut or thrown away completely.
This is an interesting point. I'm not a big fan of character-over-plot, but nonetheless some of the games I've most enjoyed were those where particular characters managed to achieve some measure of depth and interaction.
the only way to win was to amass the lion's share of the plot
Players - particularly in large games - often do hoard plot, but I don't agree with your analysis as to why. The usual problem is that there's far, far too little going on relative to the number of PCs. If you don't want your character's meaningful storyline to be him accompanied by an ensemble cast of 20+ then you'd better keep it quiet.
The challenge as a GM is to try to make each PC matter and have a satisfying storyline. This is sometimes feasible in a tabletop, but when you've got 20, 40 or even 60 players all stomping around the same game it ends up basically impossible. Our stories are too much like
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Possibly-relevant point from pervasive game design is that designers don't generally think it's possible, or desirable, to have a large-scale pervasive game that tells a story in which the players are characters. Prevailing wisdom is that the best thing to do is to use the game design to set up situations where people will generate their own stories, through their in-game actions, but the stories are stories of play rather than plot - that the things they recount at the end are things like "I had to get over to that building, but I could see Enemy Player in between with a walkie-talkie, so I..." or whatever. Failing that, you can just about have a story with actors / sets / whatever, which players explore through their play but aren't a (significant) character in.
Obviously now that I've written that down, I want to design a game to disprove it, despite the fact that it's a small enough field that "prevailing wisdom is" basically means "I said once in a pub and nobody contradicted me".
Certainly when I was running Inferno (OURPGSoc society game with 5 GMs and 50+ players in the room each week), we couldn't possibly generate enough one-on-one material to keep every player as engaged and catered-for as they would expect to be in a tabletop game. So yes, the objective was very much to find mechanics that would encourage the players to compete with each other in various aspects, in such a way that they would, basically, write plots for one another. It may be really hard work to write a satisfying murder mystery as an author, but as a freeform GM all you need is one player to kill someone and then try to cover it up... all you have to do for the next few weeks is arbitrate their turnsheets
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This is an interesting point. I'm not a big fan of character-over-plot, but nonetheless some of the games I've most enjoyed were those where particular characters managed to achieve some measure of depth and interaction.
the only way to win was to amass the lion's share of the plot
Players - particularly in large games - often do hoard plot, but I don't agree with your analysis as to why. The usual problem is that there's far, far too little going on relative to the number of PCs. If you don't want your character's meaningful storyline to be him accompanied by an ensemble cast of 20+ then you'd better keep it quiet.
The challenge as a GM is to try to make each PC matter and have a satisfying storyline. This is sometimes feasible in a tabletop, but when you've got 20, 40 or even 60 players all stomping around the same game it ends up basically impossible. Our stories are too much like ( ... )
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Obviously now that I've written that down, I want to design a game to disprove it, despite the fact that it's a small enough field that "prevailing wisdom is" basically means "I said once in a pub and nobody contradicted me".
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Is it bad that I want to play that game rather than all the presumably-successful ones that established the prevailing wisdom?
"I said once in a pub and nobody contradicted me"
That's still one up from "I wrote it on someone else's LJ"!
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