[Irk rather than Rant]: "Cinematic"

[MerakSpielman]

The guiding principle becomes not "What would logically happen next?" or "What would the real-world consequences be?", but rather, "If this were a movie, how would it play out?"

This is entirely a matter of opinion, I admit, but I LOATHE games like this. It totally and completely ruins the fun for me.

But that's me.

 

[xbrokenxswordx]

But that's me.

And those are the key words.

For myself, I like differnent kinds of games. Mindless dungeon crawls, cinematic wire fu space(fantasy?) opera, grim and gritty survival, high fantasy, characterization over plot, plot over action, action over all. Aspects of them all are entertaining to me. That's what I like about Eberron, it has that over the top feel to it that no other D&D settings do.

 

[JPL]

This is entirely a matter of opinion, I admit, but I LOATHE games like this. It totally and completely ruins the fun for me.

But that's me.

Different strokes, man.

But it's a continuum. There are games out there where the PC can do ANYTHING, provided the player describes it in a cool way. That's not my style.

I don't like to ignore the die rolls altogether. I just try to encourage attempted coolness. If the player rolls well, I try to describe it in a visually cool manner. And if they fail, I try to make that cool, too --- just a dramatic setback from which to come back.

Recent example --- 14th level d20 Modern characters. One is a stuntman. He sees the bad guys and the hostage through a big plate glass window.

Now, the door was right there. It was closer. It was probably unlocked.

But he's a stuntman, and the hostage was his father, and there's this BIG PLATE GLASS WINDOW crying out to him. And he charged it, and I described the shattering glass and startled baddies in loving detail --- slow motion, really.

In my games, a stuntman PC who tries to do something cool and stuntmanny like that is gonna succeed. High level helps, action points help, but I would've made sure, one way or another, that such a potentially cool moment paid off.

Even if he had rolled a 1 and bounced off the thick glass, I would've had the startled baddie shoot off a clip of armor piercing rounds at him, weakening it enough so that next round he could crash through --- provided he didn't mind charging right into the baddies' field of fire.

That, to me, is cinematic.

 

[Wrath of the Swarm]

For myself, I like differnent kinds of games. Mindless dungeon crawls, cinematic wire fu space(fantasy?) opera, grim and gritty survival, high fantasy, characterization over plot, plot over action, action over all.

Were you intending for this progression to be circular? Or did you have some especially subtle point I just haven't noticed yet?

 

[JPL]

Were you intending for this progression to be circular? Or did you have some especially subtle point I just haven't noticed yet?

Sounds like he's saying that there's room for all sorts of styles out there --- and that he's a guy who enjoys the full range of the spectrum, from the grim and realistic all the way to the pulpy/swashbuckling/wuxia end of the scale.

 

[Savage Wombat]

You know, I have an idea for a Champions game I've been working on. Basically, it's a response to some complaints by another player about the way the other game has been going - too much "real world" stuff and long-term consequences for her taste.

To describe the flavor of my new game, I've been referring to it as "Champions: the Animated Series." Works fairly well.

 

[xbrokenxswordx]

Were you intending for this progression to be circular? Or did you have some especially subtle point I just haven't noticed yet?

Basically I was just rambling about all the different styles and genres that I enjoy inside of RPGs. So yeah, that was my subtle point I guess.

 

[barsoomcore]

The guiding principle becomes not "What would logically happen next?" or "What would the real-world consequences be?", but rather, "If this were a movie, how would it play out?"

And where that principle guides one of course depends on WHICH movie is used for the determinant.

Player: "I dive behind the car, grab the two automatics on the floor and slide out behind the rear wheel, shooting for the bad guys' kneecaps."
DM: "Okay. You hit the concrete and (roll, roll) knock yourself unconscious. The bad guys come over and shoot you in the head while you're lying there."
Player: "Hey! I thought this was cinematic!"
DM: "It is. You never saw Killing Zoe?"

Hee. I think what people mean when they say "cinematic" is "Like movies I think are cool."

 

[Faraer]

In this useage, those words are now largely dead metaphors which conjure a now pre-existing meaning about RPGs, or fiction, rather than a vivid metaphorical picture -- because the metaphor is bad and imprecise in the first place. Those pre-existing meanings are reasonably shared, so certainly 'cinematic' and 'gritty' aren't here without use, but also fairly unexamined and variable. So we think we're talking about the same thing but we can't be sure because the words haven't been in wide and long enough useage as worn-down dead metaphors for the new meaning to be strongly established.

And people often use 'cinematic' or 'gritty' out of laziness, without bothering to come up with a more exact and useful description, which leads to people talking at cross-purposes. In this sense, they're cant. It may also be that their areas of meaning aren't the most useful chunk of meaning to refer to.

There you go!

 

[JPL]

Hee. I think what people mean when they say "cinematic" is "Like movies I think are cool."

A point well taken.

But not just "movies I think are cool", because I don't mean "The Commitments" when I tell the players the game will be cinematic.

It's "like a movie" as opposed to "like in real life." It's an attempt to evoke the very qualities that make certain movie different from real life [or a real-lfe simulator, like a war game]. It's adopting the style of patently unrealistic tales of heroism and derring-do.

If I can play Eberron in a style that's "Lord of the Rings" [the movies] meets "Raiders of the Lost Ark"...sign me up.