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Why Didn't Harry Potter Change the Game?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7734358" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>It's worse than that. The setting contains inherent contradictions.</p><p></p><p>Try answering questions like this:</p><p></p><p>1) How many children attend Hogwarts? Given that we are told virtually every wizard child attends the school, how large therefore is the entire wizarding population of Great Britain?</p><p>2) Reconcile the answer in #1 with the number of professional quidditch teams present in England. </p><p></p><p>You can just keep going in that vein, but there are I think even deeper problems.</p><p></p><p>Why does anyone even like Quidditch anyway? It's a terrible sport both as a player and a spectator. It's impossible to imagine the sport surviving in its current form much less evolving to reach its current form. It is interesting only as a single player contest between Seekers from the perspective of the Seeker - which not surprisingly is the way that the sport is almost entirely presented. I think she realizes how bad a choice this is from a story telling perspective at some point, and tries to give the sport some semblance of depth, but it's never really believable nor is it ever particularly gamable in the sense of the party playing quidditch together and everyone enjoying spotlight. </p><p></p><p>The problem that we have with Rawlings from a gaming perspective is that her world doesn't really work from either a game perspective or a simulation perspective. Don't ask how anything works. Everything exists and happens to advance a narrative. The fantasy elements free her from needing to do any research, and empower her Marty Stu protagonist in escapist wish fulfillment. I'm not running her down, she's up there with Victor Hugo in terms of plotting out a story and are writing technique is pretty solid as well, but it's a pretty lousy basis for an RPG and certainly a traditional RPG. Consider the narratives relationship with time. Usually like a third of the book occurs in the first week of school, and then the rest of the book occurs over the course of say 10 evenly spaced out days during the school year. Those are the only days that Harry has any agency, and the rest of the time he's doing 'boring stuff' like going to school. To capture that sort of pacing, the GM has to take control of the story and skip to the bangs. But that means that the player only has agency when the GM says he does. You have a lot of pacing decisions that amount to, "Three weeks go by and you aren't able to do much of anything because you are too busy with classes. Then one day during potions..."</p><p></p><p>I've enjoyed at times running a 'Hogwarts' based game, but I'd not be anxious to do it if I didn't have some young Potterheads that cared about it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7734358, member: 4937"] It's worse than that. The setting contains inherent contradictions. Try answering questions like this: 1) How many children attend Hogwarts? Given that we are told virtually every wizard child attends the school, how large therefore is the entire wizarding population of Great Britain? 2) Reconcile the answer in #1 with the number of professional quidditch teams present in England. You can just keep going in that vein, but there are I think even deeper problems. Why does anyone even like Quidditch anyway? It's a terrible sport both as a player and a spectator. It's impossible to imagine the sport surviving in its current form much less evolving to reach its current form. It is interesting only as a single player contest between Seekers from the perspective of the Seeker - which not surprisingly is the way that the sport is almost entirely presented. I think she realizes how bad a choice this is from a story telling perspective at some point, and tries to give the sport some semblance of depth, but it's never really believable nor is it ever particularly gamable in the sense of the party playing quidditch together and everyone enjoying spotlight. The problem that we have with Rawlings from a gaming perspective is that her world doesn't really work from either a game perspective or a simulation perspective. Don't ask how anything works. Everything exists and happens to advance a narrative. The fantasy elements free her from needing to do any research, and empower her Marty Stu protagonist in escapist wish fulfillment. I'm not running her down, she's up there with Victor Hugo in terms of plotting out a story and are writing technique is pretty solid as well, but it's a pretty lousy basis for an RPG and certainly a traditional RPG. Consider the narratives relationship with time. Usually like a third of the book occurs in the first week of school, and then the rest of the book occurs over the course of say 10 evenly spaced out days during the school year. Those are the only days that Harry has any agency, and the rest of the time he's doing 'boring stuff' like going to school. To capture that sort of pacing, the GM has to take control of the story and skip to the bangs. But that means that the player only has agency when the GM says he does. You have a lot of pacing decisions that amount to, "Three weeks go by and you aren't able to do much of anything because you are too busy with classes. Then one day during potions..." I've enjoyed at times running a 'Hogwarts' based game, but I'd not be anxious to do it if I didn't have some young Potterheads that cared about it. [/QUOTE]
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