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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9083329" data-attributes="member: 71699">I believe a crucial question to ask is: how do you want the ludic player duality (player as simultaneously audience and author) to be expressed? The ludic duality seperates playful exploration and story creation from other forms. The answer to "how?" depends on your shared purposes. Deciding purposes happens - as I believe [USER=177]@Umbran[/USER] rightly implied - even before session 0, when you form a group with a system and setting in mind.So in order to answer your question, you need to ask some questions of your own. You've named two things that are important to you - don't give out advice, incorporate a high-level of lore. Those are are obviously in tension: if you are not forthcoming with information, then how can players best benefit from your lore?* However you resolve that, you still haven't asked players what their purposes in playing are.You will be able to solicit from players clues about what they want, and form those (along with your own wants) into an agenda. That agenda will inform where you must give players agency, and where your group will want to assign agency to you; such as over adversaries, and perhaps lore if that is one of the strengths you bring to the table (I would not rule out the possibility that some of your players could make equally strong contributions to lore.)I'd suggest starting there: asking your players some questions. In saying that, I am also saying that while it is helpful to understand common preferences, and while some very useful agendas have already been formed and many game texts have mechanics that explicitly enable their expression, no one today has any robust empirical basis for giving a finite list of possible agendas.-------------------------------------*EDIT [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER]'s post helped me better grasp the point I wanted to make here. If it is part of your agenda to supply an abundance of lore then the steps needed are to find out if players signed up for that? If so, the agency they will require is over how that your lore is explored, and the capacities their characters have to explore it will need to be responded to by you with a bias toward effectiveness.Backgrounds situate characters in lore. It would be consistent with a lore-promoting agenda to care about their backgrounds. And through caring about them, provide players avenues into lore.Couldn't agree more.</blockquote>

Verification