On Thu, 9 Mar 2006, Roger Burton West wrote: > On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 02:51:42PM -0600, Tim Hall wrote: > I think what I was trying to get at is that the sort of story that will > flow out of, say, a Firefly RPG - assuming there are no rules in place > to encourage or force a particular story type - is not going to be the > same sort of story you get on the TV series. I think it's a fair > contention that anything vaguely artistic is shaped by the constraints > of the medium. >From what I've heard from several people, the Buffy RPG does a very good job of producing play like the tv series with very character-focused mechanics. One of my Saturday group is planning on running a game, so I'll get to see how well it works in practice. Based on that, it seems that it's possible to make character-focused games that emphasize play that suits a particular story. The obvious key is have mechanics that reward in-genre play and marginalize out-of-genre play. In some ways, I'm doing this in the soon to end Star Wars game I'm running. Blasters aren't as effective as lightsabers; the Force can do a lot of things easily; the characters have a ship, but any sort of adventure trading they decide to do will be glossed over and mostly ignored. The characters are Jedi, and the game rewards them doing Jedi things. Hopefully I'll be able to manage similar tricks for the game I'm about to start running for Carl and Karen's group. I just have to figure out what "in-genre play" is for the game. :p -Bill Hamilton ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
