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A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7572959" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>Sure. I think the people I play with enjoy our games too - certainly no one is forcing them to set aside every second Sunday afternoon and come along to our sessions.</p><p></p><p>I suggest that your account of films is confusing cause and effect - it's not that films are time limited and hence show highlights; it's that films want to tell well-paced stories and hence show only selected events in the (notional) lives of their (fictional) subjects.</p><p></p><p>Of course there are real-time films, like some of Andy Warhol's, but I find it hard to believe that more than a handful of people has ever watched all 5 hours of Warhol's Sleep.</p><p></p><p>Good RPGing also involves management of pacing - not by retrospective editing (given the way RPG fiction is created) but by managing scene-framing and transitions. (Even if this is as simple as Moldvay Basic's <em>no play, only healing, happens between dungeon raids</em>.) I don't want to RPG doing the laundry, cleaning my character's teeth, or collecting wood for a campfire. I find managing resources rather tedious, and prefer RPGs where that's not really a consideration (this is one respect in which Traveller shows its age, design wise - your suggestion that you <em>have to</em> do this suggest you don't have much familiarity with the many RPGs where that's not true).</p><p></p><p>I am interested in exploring characters, but that precisely requires generating situations that force choices in the way I've described.</p><p></p><p>And as far as exploring the gameworld, you can't do that in as much detail as you like, at least in a <em>GM-decides</em> game - you can only do it in the detail the GM likes!</p><p></p><p>In my experience, this means that the actual fiction produced by way of RPGing is less compelling, qua fiction, than that which is written by more professional authors with the opportunity to edit.</p><p></p><p>The fact that it is produced spontaneously by and for the participants goes a long way in overcoming this issue. In that sense, I see it as similar to making one's own music.</p><p></p><p>But in any event, the particpant-audience aspect seems rather orthogonal to the question of whether RPGs can't sustain drama.</p><p></p><p>I've been running periodic RPG sessions for about 30 years without much interruption, so maybe close to a thousand in all; and haven't experienced the problem you hypothesie.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7572959, member: 42582"] Sure. I think the people I play with enjoy our games too - certainly no one is forcing them to set aside every second Sunday afternoon and come along to our sessions. I suggest that your account of films is confusing cause and effect - it's not that films are time limited and hence show highlights; it's that films want to tell well-paced stories and hence show only selected events in the (notional) lives of their (fictional) subjects. Of course there are real-time films, like some of Andy Warhol's, but I find it hard to believe that more than a handful of people has ever watched all 5 hours of Warhol's Sleep. Good RPGing also involves management of pacing - not by retrospective editing (given the way RPG fiction is created) but by managing scene-framing and transitions. (Even if this is as simple as Moldvay Basic's [I]no play, only healing, happens between dungeon raids[/I].) I don't want to RPG doing the laundry, cleaning my character's teeth, or collecting wood for a campfire. I find managing resources rather tedious, and prefer RPGs where that's not really a consideration (this is one respect in which Traveller shows its age, design wise - your suggestion that you [I]have to[/I] do this suggest you don't have much familiarity with the many RPGs where that's not true). I am interested in exploring characters, but that precisely requires generating situations that force choices in the way I've described. And as far as exploring the gameworld, you can't do that in as much detail as you like, at least in a [I]GM-decides[/I] game - you can only do it in the detail the GM likes! In my experience, this means that the actual fiction produced by way of RPGing is less compelling, qua fiction, than that which is written by more professional authors with the opportunity to edit. The fact that it is produced spontaneously by and for the participants goes a long way in overcoming this issue. In that sense, I see it as similar to making one's own music. But in any event, the particpant-audience aspect seems rather orthogonal to the question of whether RPGs can't sustain drama. I've been running periodic RPG sessions for about 30 years without much interruption, so maybe close to a thousand in all; and haven't experienced the problem you hypothesie. [/QUOTE]
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