NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9392508" data-attributes="member: 42582">On "cool" in RPGing, I like <a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/389" target="_blank">this</a>:The real cause and effect in a roleplaying game isn't in the fictional game world, it's at the table, in what the players and GM say and do. If you want awesome stuff to happen in your game, you don't need rules to model the characters doing awesome things, you need rules to provoke the players to say awesome things. That's the real cause and effect at work: things happen because someone says they do. If you want cool things to happen, get someone to say something cool. . . . If your rules model a character's doing cool things, and in so doing they get the players to say cool things, that's great. I have nothing against modeling the cool things characters do as such. Just, if your rules model a character's doing cool things, but the player using them still says dull things, that's not so great. . . . You want your rules to actually GET them to say cool things. Turning to them like "okay say something cool. Well? Well?" is a crappy way to go about that, it doesn't work. No, what you have to do as designer is organize the game behind the scenes, like, so that what the players say without really thinking, what they say just naturally, are cool things. . . . I'm talking about what I think is cool. I design games to get you to say things that I think are cool. So should you, if you design games. My supposition is that you and your friends all agree with me about what's cool. If you don't, you won't pick up my games in the first place. (Which is fine. If you don't think is cool what I think is cool, you won't like my games, please don't bother.) If you don't even agree with each other about what's cool, I've got absolutely nothing for you. Are you sure you should be playing games together in the first place? . . . Seriously. I'm categorically uninterested in roleplaying, theory or practice, when the players' agreement about what's interesting isn't a rock-solid given. Any theorizing where you have to attend to "the speaker thinks it's cool but the listener doesn't," no thanks. I'm out, good luck and god bless.</blockquote>

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