Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7396289" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION], your post prompted a couple of thoughts in me.If the sheet of paper was literally blank, then there wouldn't be a RPG system to use! But if we mean "turning up to a session with the rules and that's it", well I've got no problem with that, and have done it from time to time.This reminded me of Ron Edwards's comment about "<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">karaoke RPGing</a>":This is a serious problem that arises from the need to sell thick books rather than to teach and develop powerful role-playing. Let's say you have a game that consists of some Premise-heavy characters and a few notes about Situation, and through play, the group generates a hellacious cool Setting as well as theme(s) regarding those characters. Then, publishing your great game, you present that very setting and theme in the text, in detail. . . . The first time I played OTE, I had a few pages of notes on the background and nothing on the specifics. I made it all up on the spot. Not having anything written as a guide (or crutch), I let my imagination loose. You have the mixed blessing of having many pages of background prepared for you. If you use the information in this book as a springboard for your own wild dreams, then it is a blessing. If you limit yourself to what I've dreamed up, it's a curse. [quoted from Jonathan Tweet's Over the Edge] All I see, I'm afraid, is the curse. The isolated phrases "mixed blessing" and "(or crutch)" don't hold a lot of water compared to the preceding 152 extraordinarily detailed pages of canonical setting. I'm not saying that improvisation is better . . . than non-improvisational play. I am saying, however, that if playing this particular game worked so wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming during play ... and since the players were a core source during this event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play ... then why present the results of the play-experience as the material for another person's experience?I think this phenomenon of "karaoke" is actually quite widespread. One example is the difference between spell descriptions in early D&D (preserved in Moldvay Basic) and AD&D - the latter have a whole lot of rules incorporated which seem to present the results of adjudication (eg what happens to a fireball in an enclosed space?) as inputs into subsequent play.Unless one really wants to play out the fiction someone else has written, then I think it's hard to reconcile the ultra-detail of a setting like FR, or some of the sci-fi settings, with RPGing. The "detailing in" can make it hard for game participants to exercise their creativity.</blockquote>

Verification