Familiarity does not breed contempt
I love the winter sky. These were the first constellations and objects I studied, and those that I studied most. Within seconds of stepping outside, I find Orion, pause, and reflect on what I've learned.
To say that I did not always appreciate my knowledge is an understatement; I used to despair that my enjoyment of music would be spoiled by theory, or that the experience of a film would be lost while I tried to reconstruct the editing structure, the camera placement, or the lighting design. I feared analysis paralysis in not only my decision making, but in my leisure time as well. This line of thinking was especially insidious because of my obsessive learning habit. Then as now, I read Wikipedia for fun, and for far more time than is healthy. Sometimes I read about the soft-bodies of bizarre Cambrian invertebrates preserved in the Burgess Shale (more on them in a future post!), and sometimes I read about comic book characters.
These fears were part of a systematic effort on my part to undermine my happiness by all available means, but I've since put down that rebellion. My attitude toward the facts and techniques I've accumulated may not have changed for the better were it not for Elizabeth Fowler. She's taught me so many things, but the one that most affected me is the importance of a certain kind of question, or perhaps line of questioning. It's probably an obvious approach; I must need the obvious spoon-fed to me sometimes. She first introduced the question to me in the context lyric poetry. As best as I can remember, the question goes something like, "Why would someone read this poem; what is it for; what does it do?"
I'm no utilitarian and neither is Fowler (I don't think), but I am embarrassed at how I've ignored big-picture questions like "What IS this thing?" The cliche about "not seeing the forest for the trees" exists because people often need the kind of wake-up call I got in Fowler's class. I've even gone so far as to re-frame this question as "What am I doing?"
Rob Donoghue's amazing post, " 10 Useful Pieces of Gaming Technology," turns this line of inquiry to RPGs. I've got some answers of my own, but take your time and read Rob's piece.
All finished? Awesome! Here's my take on some of RPG technologies, with a focus on technologies that affect the "shared fiction" (note: I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with the term, but it might be the best one we have for what RPGing "does").
Some of the comments to Rob's post talk about sitting around and having fun just rolling up Traveller or D&D characters. While fun, I don't think this is what Rob meant by Character Creation as Play. A character sheet that just sits in a binder doesn't change what happens in play. I'd probably call the technology "Character Creation as Group Play" or "Group Activity," to avoid confusion. The best part of this technology is how portable and modular it is. My friend Mark (I hope I'm not putting words in your mouth!) had a lot of success starting his most recent RIFTS game with a Spirit of the Century-like group character creation session.
I'd be inclined to lump what Rob calls Generators together with Rich Dice. Both technologies are a means by which gamers can defer to the game designer and fate to establish facts. I almost wrote "facts in the shared fiction." Bleh. Anyway, Generators and Rich Dice are more than just arbiters of narrative authority - they are authorities unto themselves.
I think Rob is much too modest when he talks about Weighted Skill Pricing. He says,
BESM remains the only game I've seen this explicitly addressed in, but you'll find that it is subtly worked into a lot of games with fixed skill lists by keeping costs the same but changing the scope of skills. If "Handguns" and "Science" cost the same amount, it's pretty clear there's a little weighting going on there.
I do remember that BESM and other Tri-Stat games say something along the lines of, "Hey! Here's where you can step in and play game designer! Change these skill prices around to reflect the relative importance of different activities in your game!" I could be wrong, but I seem to remember that Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks' toolbox game FATE 2.0, and Stephen O'Sullivan's Fudge before it, are pretty explicit in their advice about constructing skill lists tailored to the emphasis of the game and the druthers of the players.
I'm not sure what to add when it comes to Rob's remaining seven technologies, he covers just about everything I like about them. I do think he missed a technology, though, and I have to move away from my shared-fiction stance to cover it: Asymmetric Design. This is more of a group of related technologies, but I still think it's worth mentioning.
This one is literally old as the hills - turn order makes every game asymmetric to some extent. I'm more interested in the kind of asymmetry one finds in board war games, both those that simulate historical battles and more fantastic scenarios like Steve Jackson's Ogre or Dean Bass's Space Hulk (both of which are games I've only read about. Insert frowny face here). The distinction between player and referee or game master is the most obvious example of asymmetric design in the RPG hobby. The third edition of Dungeons and Dragons had a lot of elements that minimize asymmetry - both sides of the table used nearly identical rules, which could result in burdening the dungeon master with a lot of paperwork; many "monsters" made viable player characters; etc. I don't own fourth edition, but it seems swings the pendulum quite far in the direction of asymmetry.
Classes and other forms of Niche Protection are common instances of Asymmetric Design, but they can lead to problems: the individual thief, scout, or hacker that takes up table time at the expense of the other players. Asymmetric but Concurrent Play is the branch of this technology that I'd like to develop further. I've read rumors that Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition is built to simultaneously resolve "skill challenges" and combat encounters. That may be a start, but it seems limited in scope.
GM-less "round-robbin-y" Story Games have a kind of rotational symmetry to them; before the roles change, they have an asymmetry that's more interesting than the traditional GM/Player dichotomy. How We Came to Live Here, with its "inside" and "outside" GMs is another interesting example.
Though the applications of asymmetry are varied and numerous, there is an overriding purpose to the technology: to divide the " work" of play into manageable portions.
To say that I did not always appreciate my knowledge is an understatement; I used to despair that my enjoyment of music would be spoiled by theory, or that the experience of a film would be lost while I tried to reconstruct the editing structure, the camera placement, or the lighting design. I feared analysis paralysis in not only my decision making, but in my leisure time as well. This line of thinking was especially insidious because of my obsessive learning habit. Then as now, I read Wikipedia for fun, and for far more time than is healthy. Sometimes I read about the soft-bodies of bizarre Cambrian invertebrates preserved in the Burgess Shale (more on them in a future post!), and sometimes I read about comic book characters.
These fears were part of a systematic effort on my part to undermine my happiness by all available means, but I've since put down that rebellion. My attitude toward the facts and techniques I've accumulated may not have changed for the better were it not for Elizabeth Fowler. She's taught me so many things, but the one that most affected me is the importance of a certain kind of question, or perhaps line of questioning. It's probably an obvious approach; I must need the obvious spoon-fed to me sometimes. She first introduced the question to me in the context lyric poetry. As best as I can remember, the question goes something like, "Why would someone read this poem; what is it for; what does it do?"
I'm no utilitarian and neither is Fowler (I don't think), but I am embarrassed at how I've ignored big-picture questions like "What IS this thing?" The cliche about "not seeing the forest for the trees" exists because people often need the kind of wake-up call I got in Fowler's class. I've even gone so far as to re-frame this question as "What am I doing?"
Rob Donoghue's amazing post, " 10 Useful Pieces of Gaming Technology," turns this line of inquiry to RPGs. I've got some answers of my own, but take your time and read Rob's piece.
All finished? Awesome! Here's my take on some of RPG technologies, with a focus on technologies that affect the "shared fiction" (note: I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with the term, but it might be the best one we have for what RPGing "does").
Some of the comments to Rob's post talk about sitting around and having fun just rolling up Traveller or D&D characters. While fun, I don't think this is what Rob meant by Character Creation as Play. A character sheet that just sits in a binder doesn't change what happens in play. I'd probably call the technology "Character Creation as Group Play" or "Group Activity," to avoid confusion. The best part of this technology is how portable and modular it is. My friend Mark (I hope I'm not putting words in your mouth!) had a lot of success starting his most recent RIFTS game with a Spirit of the Century-like group character creation session.
I'd be inclined to lump what Rob calls Generators together with Rich Dice. Both technologies are a means by which gamers can defer to the game designer and fate to establish facts. I almost wrote "facts in the shared fiction." Bleh. Anyway, Generators and Rich Dice are more than just arbiters of narrative authority - they are authorities unto themselves.
I think Rob is much too modest when he talks about Weighted Skill Pricing. He says,
BESM remains the only game I've seen this explicitly addressed in, but you'll find that it is subtly worked into a lot of games with fixed skill lists by keeping costs the same but changing the scope of skills. If "Handguns" and "Science" cost the same amount, it's pretty clear there's a little weighting going on there.
I do remember that BESM and other Tri-Stat games say something along the lines of, "Hey! Here's where you can step in and play game designer! Change these skill prices around to reflect the relative importance of different activities in your game!" I could be wrong, but I seem to remember that Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks' toolbox game FATE 2.0, and Stephen O'Sullivan's Fudge before it, are pretty explicit in their advice about constructing skill lists tailored to the emphasis of the game and the druthers of the players.
I'm not sure what to add when it comes to Rob's remaining seven technologies, he covers just about everything I like about them. I do think he missed a technology, though, and I have to move away from my shared-fiction stance to cover it: Asymmetric Design. This is more of a group of related technologies, but I still think it's worth mentioning.
This one is literally old as the hills - turn order makes every game asymmetric to some extent. I'm more interested in the kind of asymmetry one finds in board war games, both those that simulate historical battles and more fantastic scenarios like Steve Jackson's Ogre or Dean Bass's Space Hulk (both of which are games I've only read about. Insert frowny face here). The distinction between player and referee or game master is the most obvious example of asymmetric design in the RPG hobby. The third edition of Dungeons and Dragons had a lot of elements that minimize asymmetry - both sides of the table used nearly identical rules, which could result in burdening the dungeon master with a lot of paperwork; many "monsters" made viable player characters; etc. I don't own fourth edition, but it seems swings the pendulum quite far in the direction of asymmetry.
Classes and other forms of Niche Protection are common instances of Asymmetric Design, but they can lead to problems: the individual thief, scout, or hacker that takes up table time at the expense of the other players. Asymmetric but Concurrent Play is the branch of this technology that I'd like to develop further. I've read rumors that Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition is built to simultaneously resolve "skill challenges" and combat encounters. That may be a start, but it seems limited in scope.
GM-less "round-robbin-y" Story Games have a kind of rotational symmetry to them; before the roles change, they have an asymmetry that's more interesting than the traditional GM/Player dichotomy. How We Came to Live Here, with its "inside" and "outside" GMs is another interesting example.
Though the applications of asymmetry are varied and numerous, there is an overriding purpose to the technology: to divide the " work" of play into manageable portions.