On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 10:55:56PM -0600, Karen J. Cravens wrote: >Carl's been discussing some interesting things on his blog, and I keep >coming up with things that I think would be interesting to discuss there, >so I was thinking maybe I should start a parallel blog. Or ask him to >turn his into a group blog. And then I thought... geez, we already have a >group blog on the Phoenyx, only we call it "a mailing list." (Insert here my standard rant about how blogs and web-BBSes are reinventing newsgroups and mailing lists, only _really badly_.) Looking at "What's the game about?", I find that I'm hearing a lot of this "basic story" idea recently - the pitch-style description of "what do the PCs do in the game". While this may be OK for some of the very specific games we're seeing these days (DitV is a canonical - sorry - example), I think it does a disservice to many of the more interesting worlds. Take Crimson Skies, for example. The pitch isn't about PC activities at all - it's "alternate-history pulp 1937 with airships, weird planes and a balkanised USA". The "basic story" could be given as "PCs are heroic aviators who fight sky pirates", but there's a whole lot more of interest; I've just finished running a hard-boiled private investigator game, which did have occasional flying but was mostly earthbound. It's a useful tool, in other words, but like any tool it's easy to overuse. R -- Roger, gaming grognard Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
