Notes from the Lab

I did a stealth quickie-writeup of the first session in the original Etheric Sea post. Go there first.

This has sat on my phone for a -very- long time (the second ES game was what, a week after the first?) but I figured I should finish it up and post it since I'm running again tonight. Yeah, that's a long gap.

( The second adventure began... )

Pamela, Lisa, Beth and I got together tonight to game, and realized we didn't have anything to play. (editing for ljnames will happen later). So, brushing aside Lisa's idea of pitching yet another PTA game, we decided to run a freeform pitch session, with the only constant at the beginning being that I'd GM and that we'd figure out mechanics as we went (via consensus, of course...like the rest of the pitch).
( Here's what we came up with. )

If people don't get your game, it's not their fault, and not the fault of their experiences, and it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them. Sure, if they've gotten training that's too close to what you're doing, it will produce cognitive dissonance -- just like learning a new language, or a new and different martial arts style, or a new dance style. But that's true of anything -- people with extensive experience as storytellers or actors often have to do a bit of retraining when they start -any- form of roleplaying just because the protocols are so different, and the actors often have it -worse- if they've done a lot of improv.

There are basically two problems I tend to see in this situation:

1. People misread the rules, or forget them and put artifacts of other gaming styles in place of them. Often, this is the fault of the game writer. If you underwrite your game, yes, people are going to put their own things into the gap. If you overwrite your game in the wrong directions, when people take a subset of what you wrote down to be "the game", the bits they remember may not be the bits that you thought were the most important. The only way to catch this kind of stuff is cold playtest -- with all your types of target audience, including veteran gamers.

2. People just don't have the skills, and fall back on the skills they know best. This is an interesting one. The early RPGs -- D&D, T&T, and the other hack and slashers -- are really, really easy. For that matter, other games that have worked as Intro RPGs -- VtM, Everway, even some LARPs -- are quite easy, and people can take things slow, playing the game more or less as a wargame, as they work their way slowly into the swing of things and eventually learn to roleplay. So maybe the Indie-Nar community needs (or needs to identify and push as such) some "easy" games that can act as etudes -- study exercises -- to get people slowly into the habit of using the skills they need to play these games right -- and which are still -fun- during the period where you're playing them wrong. And I suspect the study games that are most effective for non-gamers are somewhat different than study games that are most effective for veteran gamers. For example, it might be that Breaking the Ice is an easy game that's somewhat easier for non-Gamers, whereas PTA has enough explicit structure that it's a good game for retraining veteran gamers.