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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8644376" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here are some actual play examples:I've snipped most of the detail - if you're interested, you can get that by going back to the original posts. What I've tried to show is the contrast between (i) play that is oriented towards exploration which therefore involves a significant degree of GM exposition, and does not involve the generation of momentum; and (ii) play that is oriented towards "moves snowball", and which therefore involves - as [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] put it - a willful practice by players, GMs and systems to sustain the momentum of play. To embrace tension and keep things constantly in motion.In the second of the previous two quotes you can see me engaging in that "wilful practice", by deliberating having the NPC announce a return to the surface from the site being explored, which - given what had taken place during the exploration phase - would yield conflict in the way that Campbell has described.And it did achieve that, just as I intended - the relationships between the PCs and the NPCs melted down in various ways, reached various crescendos, and ended in the death of Toru and many of her friends. One group of PCs left the world before that climax, but by returning to their spaceship I was also able to introduce another source of conflict, in the form of Alien-style medical experiments carried out by the "mad scientist" NPC who is the romantic partner of the PC Vincenzo. (For various reasons to do with prior fiction, this had to happen on the vessel.)The overall point of these examples is to explain why my agreement with Campbell is not driven by theoretical commitments, but by the actual experience of my RPGing. The function of the theoretical analysis is simply to permit me to have a better grasp of these dynamics of play, and hence to engage with them more fruitfully and deliberately.</blockquote>

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