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Caring ABOUT versus caring FOR a character -- Fascinating critique of gaming principles from "The Last of Us"
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<blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 8945499" data-attributes="member: 71235"><p>This has been pretty heavily implicit in most of my trad gaming experience, and very much understood at most of my con games, especially with pregenerated charcters, but also with half-pregenerated characters and with characters created during the session. And I do remember having explicit conversations with people at said con, after the very first game I played there went off the rails due to a player turtling "because it's what his character would do", about what I called "accepting the premise" and just rolling with what the game & GM offered. This was before I'd heard of "participationism" but that's basically what it was. In a one-shot convention game, you have to go with what's being offered or torpedo the whole point for being there. (This attitude of course accommodates player-driven games just as well! If you sign up for Apocalypse World, you'd better not be expecting any prescripted narrative or puzzle and better not play as if there is.)</p><p></p><p></p><p>I have, rarely, and would be again—with one gigantic proviso. If the game promises to be about an aesthetic experience and winds up with 90% of the table time being round-by-round tactical combat, I am not going to be happy, and I am not going to remain in that campaign. I stuck out one yearslong campaign like that, I'm not gonna do it again (even though the end of that campaign was pretty cool).</p><p></p><p></p><p>Knowing ahead of time absolutely makes a difference. In my Torg Eternity campaign, the GM was running us an adventure in the Nile Empire, a reality of 1930's high pulp adventure, with loads of plot contrivance, tropes, and railroads (including a scene literally set on a train). It fits the genre so I was fine with knowing exactly what would happen once we got the MacGuffin: We were going to lose it—temporarily. That was half the fun! But in other areas, even with that same game system, it got old <em>fast</em>. Our GM didn't have time to craft his own adventures <em>and</em> set them up on Roll20, though, so we worked with the published adventures, which are almost all prescripted as heck (with a few shining exceptions—if you are interested in Torg Eternity, two thumbs up to the adventure "Mutie Town", set in Tharkold).</p><p></p><p>Edit: Fixed typos.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="niklinna, post: 8945499, member: 71235"] This has been pretty heavily implicit in most of my trad gaming experience, and very much understood at most of my con games, especially with pregenerated charcters, but also with half-pregenerated characters and with characters created during the session. And I do remember having explicit conversations with people at said con, after the very first game I played there went off the rails due to a player turtling "because it's what his character would do", about what I called "accepting the premise" and just rolling with what the game & GM offered. This was before I'd heard of "participationism" but that's basically what it was. In a one-shot convention game, you have to go with what's being offered or torpedo the whole point for being there. (This attitude of course accommodates player-driven games just as well! If you sign up for Apocalypse World, you'd better not be expecting any prescripted narrative or puzzle and better not play as if there is.) I have, rarely, and would be again—with one gigantic proviso. If the game promises to be about an aesthetic experience and winds up with 90% of the table time being round-by-round tactical combat, I am not going to be happy, and I am not going to remain in that campaign. I stuck out one yearslong campaign like that, I'm not gonna do it again (even though the end of that campaign was pretty cool). Knowing ahead of time absolutely makes a difference. In my Torg Eternity campaign, the GM was running us an adventure in the Nile Empire, a reality of 1930's high pulp adventure, with loads of plot contrivance, tropes, and railroads (including a scene literally set on a train). It fits the genre so I was fine with knowing exactly what would happen once we got the MacGuffin: We were going to lose it—temporarily. That was half the fun! But in other areas, even with that same game system, it got old [I]fast[/I]. Our GM didn't have time to craft his own adventures [I]and[/I] set them up on Roll20, though, so we worked with the published adventures, which are almost all prescripted as heck (with a few shining exceptions—if you are interested in Torg Eternity, two thumbs up to the adventure "Mutie Town", set in Tharkold). Edit: Fixed typos. [/QUOTE]
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