On Thu, 15 Dec 2005, Roger Burton West wrote: RBW>The feeling I get from talking to indie gamers is that they have had RBW>experiences of bad RPGs and want to codify rules that prevent those RBW>experiences from being repeated. Makes sense. RBW>While avoiding bad RPGs is a laudable ambition, I don't think that doing RBW>it with rules is the way to go. In my "day" job in computer security, we RBW>call that "technical solutions to social problems", and it doesn't work. That's kind of been my feeling... now, some of the games that I've seen have been interesting in that yeah, it might be helpful to play under certain rules just to develop certain habits, or to get people over their inhibitions, or whatever. But I don't see playing the more stylized/ heavily scripted games as a regular diet. RBW>In fact, my sloppy terminology may give a new handle on the problem: RBW>more or less any given _game_ (thing that is published) can be enjoyable RBW>or not, depending on the GM and players. (OK, I have my doubts about RBW>FATAL.) If a particular group isn't enjoying a particular game, the RBW>proximate cause is most often the people in the group, not the game. RBW>Certainly some groups can have a more enjoyable experience by going to RBW>the lower-immersion, more mechanical style of a "standard" indie RPG, RBW>but that isn't going to work for everyone. (Even if everyone could agree RBW>on what a "bad game" is...) And having such closely defined games helps "sort" people into groups according to their preferences. We do, as I mentioned in Carl's blog, have some of that going on in our game: Chris is a newbie, and is still in the wish-fulfillment "I can do ANYTHING? Cool!" stage, where Bill and I are going other directions. RBW>As someone who typically GMs more than plays, I tend to resent the RBW>deliberate limitation of the power of the GM that indie RPGs tend to RBW>encourage; it may stop me from running a bad game, but it will also stop RBW>me from doing something that the players won't immediately like in order RBW>to set up something really fun that happens later. Yeah, I don't much care for downplaying GMs, even as a player. RBW>Can you specify _what_ it is that works for you in PBeM but not face to RBW>face? Clearly? Probably not. :} It'll come up in a later paradox post, though, but I'm not done with that one quite yet. -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
