Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7612196" data-attributes="member: 4937">I had that experience with pretty much all of The Forge some years ago. Stance does not directly address motivations for play.  In theory GNS as a whole addresses motivations for play, but in my opinion has some huge holes in it.   When I address motivations for play, I use the 'aesthetics of play' terminology.   Stance only addresses the relationship of the player to the character.    In pawn stance, the character is to the player only a playing piece, but the player could still have most any aesthetic of play, including narrative.  Director differs only from pawn stance in that the player treats the entire fiction as if it was his character, and doesn't draw a line between the player character and the setting.   At The Forge, director was typically treated as if it was inherently the superior and more mature stance.  I tend to treat it as if it was the least useful and least mature stance.   After all, if you watch the play of a group of pre-schoolers, they are really only able to play in director stance.  As the participants in that play mature, eventually the director stance becomes incapable of meeting their maturing aesthetics of play, and unless they evolve a more mature stance most of them will give up their game of make believe.   Now from the perspective of making Director work, yeah, it probably requires more skill than any other stance.  I wouldn't really want to participate in a game that allowed director stance to players that wasn't composed entirely of participants sophisticated enough in their RP to successfully run an RPG as the GM.   There is just two much that can go wrong with fiat call outs.  I'm interested in playing more with a skilled group, but only because I want to find out whether anything can be achieved with Director that really can't be achieved in other stances.   I'm hoping to have some time to go to a Con, but I don't have a lot of hope that a random group of convention players is high skill.There is also a problem I have with the canonical definition of the Director stance in that unlike the other stances, it doesn't fully address the player's relationship to the character.  It notes that there is a difference between the other stances and director in that the other three involve delimiting your character and in some fashion playing within the character with varying degrees of RP primacy, by contrast and Director doesn't do that but treats the whole imagined setting as something available for you to play, but to me you could make a Director stance call and be in any other stance.For example, you manipulate the setting to meet your goal as a game participant, irrespective of any justification for it.  You want the goblin dead, so rocks fall.   This mirrors pawn stance where you offer propositions regardless of whether they make the slightest sense from the perspective of the character's knowledge, stated personality, or goals.  Or, you manipulate the setting to meet your goal as a game participant, but you try to put a color of verisimilitude or reasonableness to that manipulation.  In other words, you beg for suspension of disbelief which mirrors how you play in Author stance.Or, you make a call on the setting because you think it is highly realistic, even if in doing so you are potentially thwarting your own goals.  For example, you might call that your character has become sick from ingesting polluted water because you legitimately think that is the sort of thing that should happen, and not because it helps you win or gives you some mechanical benefit or makes for a good story.  This mirrors playing in Actor stance.So it's possible Director isn't even a stance at all.</blockquote>

Verification