On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, Roger Burton West wrote: RBW>The actors and script-writers and directors don't forget, though. I I'm not so sure. At least in the script-writer's case, I imagine it's quite possible to get sufficiently caught up in your story that you can at least push to the back of your mind the fact that it *does* have to work out at the end. (Certainly that would explain some bad stories, where it looks like the writer *didn't* have a clue how to make it work at the end, and then was too in love with the midplot to change it so it made sense.) And only the first reading counts for the actors and directors, since after that you're just someone who already knows how the story goes. RBW>think that's a key difference between RPGs and statically-presented RBW>fiction: the tension comes from a _genuine_ absence of knowledge about RBW>how the story's going to turn out. I think you that to do otherwise you I'm not sure which you mean... in an RPG the players (at least) have a genuine absence of knowledge, and in fiction the reader/viewer does too. Or do you mean in the RPG there's an absence of knowledge about whether the story's going to turn out well or badly? If the latter, I don't like that tension, because it's not real if there's no chance of failure, and if there's a chance of failure some of your games are going to, well, fail. RBW>need players who are prepared to take a much more professional attitude RBW>towards the game than is usual, and I'm not sure that it's necessarily a RBW>good thing even if you have them. I dunno about that, at least if it could be made to work right. Basically, the notion is just to eliminate story-breaking rolls. I don't want to remove the risk of things going (badly) wrong, I just want to channel it into *interesting* ways things can go wrong. -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
