On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 09:28:48AM -0600, Karen J. Cravens wrote: >But some people seem to have a lot invested in it. Yeesh. The feeling I get from talking to indie gamers is that they have had experiences of bad RPGs and want to codify rules that prevent those experiences from being repeated. While avoiding bad RPGs is a laudable ambition, I don't think that doing it with rules is the way to go. In my "day" job in computer security, we call that "technical solutions to social problems", and it doesn't work. In fact, my sloppy terminology may give a new handle on the problem: more or less any given _game_ (thing that is published) can be enjoyable or not, depending on the GM and players. (OK, I have my doubts about FATAL.) If a particular group isn't enjoying a particular game, the proximate cause is most often the people in the group, not the game. Certainly some groups can have a more enjoyable experience by going to the lower-immersion, more mechanical style of a "standard" indie RPG, but that isn't going to work for everyone. (Even if everyone could agree on what a "bad game" is...) As someone who typically GMs more than plays, I tend to resent the deliberate limitation of the power of the GM that indie RPGs tend to encourage; it may stop me from running a bad game, but it will also stop me from doing something that the players won't immediately like in order to set up something really fun that happens later. >At any rate, some of the indie stuff seems to be trying awfully hard to >codify what has always happened naturally in PBeM. To a certain extent, >this is cool for me, because I've never quite worked out why it is that it >works in PBeM but I can't make it work face to face. Can you specify _what_ it is that works for you in PBeM but not face to face? >Overall, it makes my head hurt. "Hard choices" and "playing like you mean >it" sound good until I start hearing precisely what whoever happens to be >championing it at the moment really *means*, which always comes down to >"If you don't game like me, you're having Hurting Wrong Fun." Or rather, >"you only *think* you're having fun, but if you'd overanalyze it you'd >realize you can't possibly be." That seems to me a reaction to the "bad GM ruins good game" concept. In fact, what really put the indie-games ideas into perspective for me was the Arkham Horror boardgame. It is purely a board game - you move your marker around Arkham and other places, you pick up clues and equipment and so on, and you fight monsters. Played purely mechanically, though, it isn't that interesting; what makes it fun is that, because it's a very familiar setting to most gamers, one tends naturally to role-play. Now, this is basically at the level of snarky comments; it has no effect on the game. But one could certainly argue that in some respects it's a close match for the indie RPG concepts: there are rules to cover the things the game designer considers important (for example, the rising level of terror as more monsters turn up on the streets), and the role of the GM is entirely eliminated. -- Roger, gaming grognard Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
