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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2431267" data-attributes="member: 7240">Gee thanks. I am smart but I have a separate skill in sounding smart. Stacked, they can make me scary but my personality is equal parts knowing and appearing to know. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Still, whatever the answer to #1 turns out to be, the answer to #2 is probably correct given the racket in which I work.Pretty well, actually.Well, I deal with this in a few ways: first of all, I create game systems and campaigns in ways that allow people who are unaware of what I'm doing to participate without too much difficulty. I often achieve this by making their characters actual moderns. In my latest effort, I took a really popular historical period (the 13th century) and misleadingly told people I was running an historical game and they should make historical characters. I can also make a difference by generating high-quality background materials.Sometimes, also, people who are really into simulationist styles of play tap into culturally different characters on that person, visceral level of player-character relationship that always eludes me. One player in my current gaming group (the only one playing a non-European) just seems to "know" how to play a member of a hunter-gatherer society. Many players escape thinking like moderns through other, non-academic ways of knowing that I don't have access to but love and celebrate in my games. But by far the most important way is that I am good at finding clever people and talking them into gaming with me and, in stark contrast to how I function in the world of gender relations, have absolutely no problem with rejection (in this case represented in the form of people joining my campaigns and then quitting in disgust). Where I used to live, I assembled a group who could enjoy my games gradually and haphazardly over a long period of my time, the composition of the group changing gradually as my GMing style became more sophisticated. Where I live now, I've had a fair bit of a revolving door of players. Since I started my campaign in December, five people have quit my campaign. But I know what I want in a player and where to look for one so that's not too much of a problem.I like those games too. They scratch a different itch for me, though. I'm much happier as a player in those games than I am as a GM. Just because I've discovered new ways of gaming in a fulfilling way doesn't mean I get nothing out of other ways of having fun at RPGs I discovered earlier. Also, I can design world puzzle games for audiences like this. But, then, the puzzle is just there to entertain and inspire me with no hope or intent of the players apprehending it.Well, the person I learned this style from had given up on anyone ever noticing what he was actually doing. To him, it was a big game of manipulating unwitting people through a maze so deftly constructed they hadn't realized it was a maze. Demanding anthropological fidelity from players, that can annoy them. But most of the other stuff I like, the symbollic stuff, shouldn't be either noticeable or consequential for people who aren't into it.Well, if they appreciate 100% of them, then I'll know I'm doing something wrong because my game will have become too didactic. But, yes, my particular weird mixture of social skills lets me find players who can enjoy and appreciate whatever portion of my project they can perceive and be either unaware or accepting of those things beyond their ken.People shouldn't build my kind of world unless they are comfortable with the risk that they themselves will be the only ones to "get" what's going on.Now I really can't wait for the inevitable political discussion attached to our up coming beer at Gencon. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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