Hydrogen Complications

Welcoming the unwelcome

2011-05-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

So, getting right to it - I read Vincent Baker's anyway blog from time to time, and a recent discussion (http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=585) grabbed my interest, on two counts. Both are quibbles, that I expect Vincent fully understands, but I could be wrong. And while quibbles, they seem important enough (at least from a communication perspective) to post about.

Comment 43 is the easiest place to build my first quibble on. The thing is, IMO, the someone-who-is-David would NOT be entirely wrong to say "so it's not really unwelcome." If it becomes satisfying, by some understandings it is definitionaly not unwelcome. What I think Vincent is pointing at though, is true and very important - that the game design should push us into something that we wouldn't have already have been likely to do, and that the push will be, in many cases, uncomfortable. It's not easy to come up with terminology that communicates just exactly what Vincent is talking about, and I totally understand why someone might object to "unwelcome." On the other hand, I *think* I totally get what Vincent is pointing at, and he's right. So . . . "pushed by the designer into an uncomfortable place" is my substitute for "unwelcome." 'Cause I can welcome being uncomfortable, I can be satisfied by being uncomfortable, and maybe I can't be satisfied by something unwelcome.

Quibble two is easier, and again I think entirely a communication style issue rather than something Vincent has "wrong." When he says (in comment 42) "a game should sometimes force the group to violate its social expectations" (emphasis added), what he means is a game should coerce. Should encourage. Should establish as a principle (heck, a requirement) for desirable play. Maybe even (for some games) should trick, fool or otherwise deceive. And etc. Because, as he makes clear he understands in other posts, a game can't force a group to do anything, the group (and individuals in it) always have the option to negotiate outside the game rules and/or simply stop playing at all.

To repeat - what Vincent is getting at here, to me, is how the designers job is to make a game that will lead a group somewhere they wouldn't already have gone. And to make that work. And that along the way something uncomfortable (using my word pretty much as a replacement for his "unwelcome") really needs to happen.

He's dead on with that, IMO.

Giving up, then pushing on

2011-05-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

So I've given up trying to coerce myself into a re-engagement with net interaction - either it happens, or not, on a case by case basis. Clearly claiming "I've got to start this again" and then not, for years, is useless.

But something over at Vincent's anyway blog (http://www.lumpley.com/) grabbed my attention, so - a post will follow.

Still Here (and that wasn't a given)

2009-04-29T22:38:00.000-07:00

OK, so for years I've abandoned this blog, and lapsed into a non-participatory, scan-and-keep-tabs relationship with net socializing and the indie/theory RPG community. My personal RPG development has been stalled, but RPG play has been pretty good, if limited. Life's been OK - consulting was good for a stretch there, lousy for a while, and REALLY lousy of late, but Jenny and I have managed to have fun along the way.

Then last Wednesday night (04/22/09), I had a heart attack.

There are details and complications - doctors aren't perfect - but the bottom line is I'm now home, recovering well and a have a mostly-excellent but not-yet-solidified prognosis. The doctors remain a bit surprised - my risk factors, while not non-existent. weren't all that high - but the fact remains that it happened, I'm now recovering, and my life now includes "heart attack survivor" as a descriptor.

And it's just not acceptable to me anymore to not participate with some of the great folks I've met at the Gaming Outpost, the Forge and beyond over the years. I still have no clue how to make the current environment work for me, but I'm gonna dive in and try. Maybe not quickly - I'm told, and accept, that nothing happens quickly in the weeks after an MI - but I gotta make it happen.

Neglect, and frustration

2006-08-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

(Do not ignore the comma)
So, I've sadly neglected this blog. That I do NOT feel bad about it doesn't change the fact that it is true.

In other news, I am utterly frustrated by the Forge "diaspora." If you have no clue what this is, you can ask me (but it's probably not worth it). If you do, I'm not reaching out in the hopes of finding others who share my frustration - some do, some don't. I'm just acknowledging a fact, here.

Anyway, the frustration is that a good portion of the time, I have no clue as to where to post, what discusion to join in, and etc. So I don't. I'll have to find some kind of solution to this, acuz frustration is useless, and not participating sucks.

Character "Ownership"

2006-01-31T01:32:00.000-08:00

Over at http://www.lumpley.com/, Vincent has broached the subject of character ownership in RPGs (tabletop role-playing games). His key points (as I see 'em):

1) You actually don't own a character like you think you do.
2) This is a GOOD thing (for collaborative and thematic play, anyway).
3) It doesn't have to mean you lose character identification, either.

I think he's entirely right. Oh, and like him, I'm just going to talk about collaborative and thematic play - not that this issue has no meaning in other forms of play (I think it does), but I'm just not up to the challenge of adding that complication right now.

I quoted ownership in the post title, because I actually think ownership is a terrible word to use from the get-go. In demonstrating that characters are basically always formed by collaboration, it seems to me that we discover that fact: ownership is not the right concept here, ever. Thinking it through, the best I can come up with as a replacement label is "character authority", as "person who has final authority about aspects (usually all aspects) of a character" is just too unwieldy. In most traditional RPG's, what is really meant by "a player owns a character" is (to my thinking) "a player is the final authority regarding their character."

There's a lot that could be said about how this (or any) authority arrangement historically has been (and always potentially can be) abused. But for this post, I just want to point out that what we're actually talking about is authority. Because when you do that (it seems to me) , two things happen:

1) The de facto collaboration of the others involved before "authority" is invoked becomes more visible.
2) It becomes rather obvious that the authority can potentially be divided up in an endless number of ways.

Note that (IMO) granting some authority to something like "the dice" can be a particularly useful thing here . . .

Besides character authority, the other concept in Vincent's key points as I saw them is character identification (that is, to take a stab at an incomplete but hopefully useful definition of the term, a player feeling close to, and experiencing the events in play from the viewpoint of, a particular character). I take Vincent's points about character identification to be these:

1) As implied above, it can't be a function of ownership, because we've seen that ownership doesn't exist .
2) Additionally (this is the tough one for some people, I think), it does not require you to have total, final authority about "your" character.

Again, I agree with these points, though I would add the understanding that there will be some personal variation in just how much authority can be split-off to other people before character identification is lost. And the kind of story being constructed matters. And the WAY in which authority is shared matters. And . . . lots of stuff. The nitty-gritty here (System, in all its many senses) is a meaningful factor.

I assume diving into that nitty-gritty is what Vincent is really interested in. It is certainly possible that there are times when having one player with total or near-total authority over "their" character is good (remembering that even this doesn't equate to ownership or the absence of collaboration - a fact which I probably need to make more clear in SNAP). Equally, sometimes it won't be. But starting from this understanding, it seems possible to build both games that do involve high individual-player authority regarding their character and games that don't.

I'm looking forward to seeing these games get built.

PERSONAL ASIDE: My early D&D play (mid-late 70's. Yup, I'm THAT old) involved each player running multiple characters (and serial GMing, for that matter). It is only later that I began to assume that in RPG play I would have only one character. And I'm pretty damn sure I and my group(s) are not the only people this is true of. I'm not sure what that means, but for some reason it keeps coming up as I think about this issue: the "one player gets one character" model was not, for me and (I assume) a good number of other folks, the default assumption of roleplaying. Now, I happen to think it can be really cool, and very much a feature rather than a bug - ESPECIALLY if you back off on the singular authority over each character (and the other elements) in the process. That is, we each have OUR character, AND some ("some" needing much amplification) authority over other things (including, but not necessarily limited to, other characters) - but we don't have total-final (again, amplification needed) authority over "our" character.

A blog is started

2006-01-30T23:44:00.000-08:00

OK, time to join the blogosphere. The blogspace. The - whatever you want to call it.

This one'll be my home for game-related thoughts. "Game" used rather than "RPG" (or even "indie RPG") beacuse I want to keep the boundries pretty big.

And that'll do as a first post. Substance (at least, what I HOPE will qualify as substance) will soon follow.