One of my fond memories of those sessions is me, as Mr. Archibald, having an intense philosophical debate on Trotsky's assassination with my friend as the singularly named Pavel. All while we trod around this crappy old house completely lost in the atmosphere the Keeper was conveying, while we all get lost in the roleplay.
(1) Why wouldn't I just have that conversation with an actual friend?
(2) What does what you're describing have to do with playing Call of Cthulhu? That could be a session of GURPS just as easily - it's just GM narration + players talking to one another while pretending to be someone else.
pemerton said:
This claim is not true. The gameworld doesn't have to "exist".
Sure in the same way that we don't have to be playing a game.
I don't know what you mean by this. When I played The Green Knight, we played a game. There is a type of scoring and everything. No "gameworld" existed - just some situations.
One of the players decided his Bard had travelled to Britain from Jerusalem. So I guess that made Jerusalem part of our gameworld? As per my reply just upthread to clearstream, Platonism in this domain is hopeless, It doesn't get off the ground. It doesn't even start moving down the taxi-way.
RPGs are not just conversations, and that false assertion goes to the heart of what I'm talking about when I describe PBTA style games as having shallow gameplay loops.
Did you notice how you attribute to me something I didn't say. Here's what I posted:
The process of RPGing involves the participants saying things to one another, about a shared fiction. In a standard GM/player distribution of roles, the players say things about what particular imaginary people - their PCs - are doing; while the GM says some stuff about the imaginary circumstances in which those imaginary people find themselves, and also some stuff about what happens to them when they do things.
This doesn't require that the shared fiction have any particular content, except the people who are doing things, the things they do, the circumstances in which they do them, and the things that happen because of what they do.
What it does require is a way of working out new fictional stuff, in particular, the last bit - what happens next.
One way of doing that is by having the GM participant infer consequences by imagining other stuff - the "gameworld". But that's not the only means. The gameworld may be nothing but the sum of the people, their circumstances, their actions, and their actions' consequences.
So see how I
didn't say that RPGing is
just conversation. I said it
involves conversation. And I said it
requires a way of working out new fictional stuff, especially what happens next. This is what Edwards and Baker call
system.
Something else I don't get, though - in addition to your false attribution of a view to me - is how you reconcile your
denial that RPGs are not just conversations with your
celebration of some RPGing that, by your own account of it, was nothing but conversation.
Yes we're exploring a gameworld. Thats how it works.
What's "it"? I mean, obviously "it" includes the three sessions of CoC play "exploring" the "haunted house".
But "exploring a gameworld" is not how my RPGing works.
As I deftly predicted, we appear to be at a stage where the GM simply describing a room is problematic if the players don't get first dibs
Once again, you deftly attribute views to other posters which they have not expressed. I said nothing about describing a room; nor anything about whether or not it's "problematic".
It's very often
boring, to me at least - both as player and as GM - but that's a different matter.
What I will still say is that the apparent devaluation of the gameworld and relegation of it to mere "fiction" is telling
Telling of what? What else would the gameworld be but fiction. It's something that people make up. That's the very definition of
fiction!
Hell, in a more charitable discussion you could actually argue the gameworld
is the fiction
is the gameworld, but the sheer distaste that comes with denying the whole point of one existing betrays any chance of that particular consensus being reached.
Which is why Setting Books and Adventure Paths are a thing. Masks of Nyarlathotep, to pick one out of the proverbial hat, is huge and has more than anybody is gonna need to handle how any group plays.
And I'm sure you'll chirp those still aren't acceptable because its "someone elses fiction", but then you're just contradicting yourself because you just stated you don't want to make anything up yourself.
I didn't state that I don't want to make anything up myself. What I actually posted was "I just don't want to exert my creative effort thinking up a 'crappy old house' that I gradually tell the players about, in response to their action declarations for their PCs, which actions the players are declaring because they believe that, or at least wonder whether, "what they are there for" will be revealed to them if only they declare some appropriate action to prompt the GM." That is a very specific thing I don't want to waste my time on.
But you are correct that I have zero interest in playing an AP. A strong aversion, in fact.
And then we move on to you pointing at the players doing it too, but you're still fundamentally contradicting yourself, as no game you'd prefer doesn't still have the GM making something up. Many of them hinge upon that, in fact, a lot more than other games do.
Instead of just making up random stuff and attributing it to me, you could actually read my actual play reports, of which there are dozens and dozens on these boards.
de-protagonisim is phoney jargon and you'd face a lot less scruitiny if you just said "i want to collaboratively worldbuild" and not jump through all these hoops to pretend thats anything else.
I have no desire to worldbuild, collaboratively or otherwise.
Following the procedure of play, unless I somehow missed it when I originally perused the book before hopping into a game AND did it again when I re-read the whole book yesterday, would have you handing a piece of paper with the Signs written on it to the leader and then they read it and thats that.
That's fine for fulfilling the mechanical purpose of getting some possibly novel behavior to come out of how the leader thinks about it. But it is so, so, so dull.
For one, as stated, these islands do not have much to actually do, as they're only a tad above being purely linear experiences. This works against the mechanic because most leaders, unless they go out of their way to ignore the obvious, are going to interpret them in very similar if not identical ways as they run into the trials.
What I was relating was the much more clever idea of not just sliding the signs over and having them be a non-diegetic thing, but integrating them into the gameworld.
This makes me think that you have not really found what there is to be enjoyed in Agon. The conjecture that most players will interpret the signs the same way strikes me as completely implausible, given some of the diverse stuff I've seen in only a modest number of sessions of play. The suggestion that there is not much to do non the islands, and that they're purely linear, is also bizarre to me.
Even reading it now, I can't remember how we did Apollo's sign, but on Nimos Artemis wasn't revealed to the leader until we were about to slay the Serpent, which was described as a vision before handing a card over with the Sign. Given what happens when that Serpent dies, that was an excellent time to reveal that and wouldn't have been near as effective if they were just alreadly known and half forgotten by the time were elbow deep in whats going on.
Likewise, this suggest that you are playing Agon in a way completely different from how the rulebook suggests it should be played. I mean, what you describe here - assuming that by "revealed to the leader" you mean the GM narrated it in some fashion - is the GM taking over the players' job.
That would help explain why you find the player linear, I guess!
