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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: 7579796" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>Yeah, that's why I said way upthread there's a collision of expectations.</p><p></p><p>It's a while since I've looked through a RuneQuest monster listing, but at least in my memory they don't exhibit the same lists of immunities, vulnerabilities, etc. And I think there's a logic to that.</p><p></p><p>Ron Edwards, <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">in his "story now" essay</a>, talks about "karaoke RPGing". He's got in mind a slightly different context, and gives Over the Edge as his example:</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px">This is a serious problem that arises from the need to sell thick books rather than to teach and develop powerful role-playing. Let's say you have a game that consists of some Premise-heavy characters and a few notes about Situation, and through play, the group generates a hellacious cool Setting as well as theme(s) regarding those characters. Then, publishing your great game, you present that very setting and theme in the text, in detail. . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">I'm not saying that improvisation is better or more Narrativist than non-improvisational play. I am saying, however, that if playing this particular game worked so wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming during play ... and since the players were a core source during this event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play ... then why present the <em>results </em>of the play-experience as the <em>material </em>for another person's experience?</p><p></p><p>I think that D&D - really dating from the publication of AD&D (cf B/X) - has suffered from a form of this, though (as you say) connected more to "gamist"/wargaming play than to the "story now" Edwards was focusing on in his remarks.</p><p></p><p>What produced the classic early D&D gamist/wargaming play was GM ingenuity, player experimentation, new monsters with wacky immunities, variations on variations on pit traps, researching new spells to counteract new GM tricks, etc. But (especially in AD&D), instead of getting presented with techniques for running this sort of game, we get canonical lists of monsters, canonical lists of magic items with cautions about breaking the game by making up new ones, canonical lists of spells with all the adjudication (does or doesn't fireball metl gold, or generate blast pressure?) already prescribed, etc.</p><p></p><p>Which I think can push the game towards karaoke/alienation/imagining what would make a good/plausible/reasonable story about this PC, rather than the <em>play to beat the GM's tricks</em> spirit that seems to have actually animated those early games.</p><p></p><p>That's not to say that I'm against immersion/simulationist RPGing of the RQ and C&S sort, but I don't think these puzzle elements that are such a predominant feature of D&D are a good fit for it. (It's not a coincidence, in my view, that they're not a big part of Rolemaster either.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7579796, member: 42582"] Yeah, that's why I said way upthread there's a collision of expectations. It's a while since I've looked through a RuneQuest monster listing, but at least in my memory they don't exhibit the same lists of immunities, vulnerabilities, etc. And I think there's a logic to that. Ron Edwards, [url=http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html]in his "story now" essay[/url], talks about "karaoke RPGing". He's got in mind a slightly different context, and gives Over the Edge as his example: [indent]This is a serious problem that arises from the need to sell thick books rather than to teach and develop powerful role-playing. Let's say you have a game that consists of some Premise-heavy characters and a few notes about Situation, and through play, the group generates a hellacious cool Setting as well as theme(s) regarding those characters. Then, publishing your great game, you present that very setting and theme in the text, in detail. . . . I'm not saying that improvisation is better or more Narrativist than non-improvisational play. I am saying, however, that if playing this particular game worked so wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming during play ... and since the players were a core source during this event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play ... then why present the [I]results [/I]of the play-experience as the [I]material [/I]for another person's experience?[/indent] I think that D&D - really dating from the publication of AD&D (cf B/X) - has suffered from a form of this, though (as you say) connected more to "gamist"/wargaming play than to the "story now" Edwards was focusing on in his remarks. What produced the classic early D&D gamist/wargaming play was GM ingenuity, player experimentation, new monsters with wacky immunities, variations on variations on pit traps, researching new spells to counteract new GM tricks, etc. But (especially in AD&D), instead of getting presented with techniques for running this sort of game, we get canonical lists of monsters, canonical lists of magic items with cautions about breaking the game by making up new ones, canonical lists of spells with all the adjudication (does or doesn't fireball metl gold, or generate blast pressure?) already prescribed, etc. Which I think can push the game towards karaoke/alienation/imagining what would make a good/plausible/reasonable story about this PC, rather than the [I]play to beat the GM's tricks[/I] spirit that seems to have actually animated those early games. That's not to say that I'm against immersion/simulationist RPGing of the RQ and C&S sort, but I don't think these puzzle elements that are such a predominant feature of D&D are a good fit for it. (It's not a coincidence, in my view, that they're not a big part of Rolemaster either.) [/QUOTE]
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