Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3791968" data-attributes="member: 4937">I had sort of the same emotional responce to your argument.  I think you are the one taking an argument about social contract and substituting implicitively normative description.Do you think that someone must be a jerk before you can have a disagreement at the table?  Quite often this subject turns into, "If you think that 3rd edition takes away too much DM power, then you aren't just a bad DM, but you are a bad person.", or conversely, "If you think previous editions gave too much power to the DM, you aren't just a bad player but a bad person."  There are a number of posters on the boards who hold that position explicitly.You may have not brought up the notion of 'jerk', but you ran with it, and you ran with it very much away from the hypothetical context it was originally brought up in.  It seems to me that you suggested, if there is table conflict - which would never happen at my table - then someone is a bad person and you shouldn't play with them.Maybe, but this is complete non-answer.  I can agree that social conflicts require social handling, but that doesn't really deal with the question of whether bad design can encourage social friction.  Consider a rules system like Paranoia with its explicit player vs. player conflict, explicit referee in an arbitrary adversarial role, and explicitly complete lack of player control over proposition outcome.  It works solely because its intended to be unserious, wacky, and explicitly humerous.  You could subtly imbed the same sort of mechanical assumptions in game that proported to be a serious game, and you might well have groups that could handle it, but I think it is fair to say that that sort of rules system would cause 'a breakdown in the social contract' (as it is called) fairly frequently and in alot of groups where you didn't normally see people acting like 'jerks'.  The question isn't whether or not social friction can be appealed to WotC, or even whether the rules could elimenate jerky behavior, but whether or not rules could tend to subtly increase or decrease social friction.  And I think the answer is pretty clear that they can, because you don't have to site RPG's to come up with examples to this problem.  Quite arguably, Monopoly has a rules set which tends to encourage player friction, and we can even describe the specific design choices that lead to it.And even if this isn't true, and the rules couldn't possibly effect social friction and social friction is entirely a metagame construct, it still wouldn't have alot of bearing on whether RPG rules could relatively empower or relatively disempower the referee in his role of arbitrator and judge.</blockquote>

Verification