mneme: (Default)
[personal profile] mneme
If it wasn't obvious to anyone who knows my preferences from elsewhere, my comments re taxonomy here are so much posturing. Of -course- I'm a narrativist.

I was a narrativst when I decided that it was important that rpgs feel like stories -- that the point was to play in stories.

I was a narrativist when, a year after VtM came out, I complained that it got all the ideas wrong.

I was a narrativst when I discovered and fell in love with OTE, Everway, and Nobilis.

I care about the fact that the game creates a story more than I care about being in a competition; more than I care about being consistent, and that settles that.

I haven't suddenly stopped being a narrativist just because people have started making games that focus -more- on the story than I'm comfrotable -- games that interfere with other parts of (the usual aspects of) play to try to create a better story, or ask the players to play out painful situations to create a better story, or which otherwise do things that make me uncomfortable, not out of pretention or over-use of elements which interefere in story, but out of a sincere desire for a better story.

I don't have to like everything (neither, FWIW, does anyone else). I certainly don't have to like all (or even most) narrativist games to be a narrativist, any more than I have to like, say, Titan or Railroad Tycoon to be a board gamer (I am, I don't, though I'd like to try Titan again at some point now that it's been a decade and the pain has faded).

Now all that said, while story -is- important to me (very), there are things that are more important.

One is roleplaying -- or to pick a less loaded term, portrayal. For the purpose of RPGs, I'm not intrested in playing games that divest me of the pleasure of portraying characters (the act of roleplaying, in my mind, as opposed to the much wider spectrum of activities in a rpg). I'm not really all that tied to the GM/Player paradim (though I think it's as powerful in its simplicity as Dom/Sub, and as reliant on trust and lack of abuse), but regardless of which side of the table I sit (or whether there's a table, or a differentiation in seats at all), I want to get a chance to act, and more than that, to converse in character. I don't deny that there are roleplaying games that don't involve any actual roleplaying (in fact, this is self-evident in the computer game genre however much one might want to argue that those aren't "real roleplaying games", and the rpg roots of those games is clear), and I'm not even all that disinclined to play one, but it won't scratch the itch which drives me to rpg.

Another is tempo -- which really comes down to doing things for as long (no longer, no shorter) than they deserve. I did an essay on this inspired by an Alarums and Excursions theme of "shopping" which I'm still quite happy about. Oddly enough, I posted it a year ago -- nearly to to day.

Another is fun. If I'm not having fun doing something, I want to know when I'll start, and if that's too long in the future, I'd like to do something else, please. I'm just too much of a hedonist that way. And part of my fun is not having to encumber the rest of my play with too many rules (see tempo for a definition of too many) or more complexity than anything deserves. I like freeform fine, I've got the skills to make it work for me and those I play with, and I both trust anyone I play with and my own place in the universe well enough to not have problems with it, so that means that any system much more complex than the near-freeform aspects of OTE amd Everway is going to have to offer quite a bit.

To give you an idea of where I am on this, Nobilis is a bit too much for me. I've run it, and it was fun, but it's got a anti-immersive "penetration" rules and a fairly complex resource allocation system. No, this kind of complexity (or much more) isn't an issue in a board game, or even a not-really-playing-it-as-a-RPG game like D&D. But I've had some close to perfect games which mostly involved 2-5 players, with mechanics that didn't involve us roleplaying at one another or describing what was going on only coming out when they added to what was going on, rather than merely serving for our lacks, so a game that imposes a more coercive structure is going to have to offer something to make it worthwhile.

If I get enough round tuits, I might post something on formal game rules as impediment vs crutch vs tool vs handicap at some point.
mneme: (Default)
[personal profile] mneme
If it wasn't obvious to anyone who knows my preferences from elsewhere, my comments re taxonomy here are so much posturing. Of -course- I'm a narrativist.

I was a narrativst when I decided that it was important that rpgs feel like stories -- that the point was to play in stories.

I was a narrativist when, a year after VtM came out, I complained that it got all the ideas wrong.

I was a narrativst when I discovered and fell in love with OTE, Everway, and Nobilis.

I care about the fact that the game creates a story more than I care about being in a competition; more than I care about being consistent, and that settles that.

I haven't suddenly stopped being a narrativist just because people have started making games that focus -more- on the story than I'm comfrotable -- games that interfere with other parts of (the usual aspects of) play to try to create a better story, or ask the players to play out painful situations to create a better story, or which otherwise do things that make me uncomfortable, not out of pretention or over-use of elements which interefere in story, but out of a sincere desire for a better story.

I don't have to like everything (neither, FWIW, does anyone else). I certainly don't have to like all (or even most) narrativist games to be a narrativist, any more than I have to like, say, Titan or Railroad Tycoon to be a board gamer (I am, I don't, though I'd like to try Titan again at some point now that it's been a decade and the pain has faded).

Now all that said, while story -is- important to me (very), there are things that are more important.

One is roleplaying -- or to pick a less loaded term, portrayal. For the purpose of RPGs, I'm not intrested in playing games that divest me of the pleasure of portraying characters (the act of roleplaying, in my mind, as opposed to the much wider spectrum of activities in a rpg). I'm not really all that tied to the GM/Player paradim (though I think it's as powerful in its simplicity as Dom/Sub, and as reliant on trust and lack of abuse), but regardless of which side of the table I sit (or whether there's a table, or a differentiation in seats at all), I want to get a chance to act, and more than that, to converse in character. I don't deny that there are roleplaying games that don't involve any actual roleplaying (in fact, this is self-evident in the computer game genre however much one might want to argue that those aren't "real roleplaying games", and the rpg roots of those games is clear), and I'm not even all that disinclined to play one, but it won't scratch the itch which drives me to rpg.

Another is tempo -- which really comes down to doing things for as long (no longer, no shorter) than they deserve. I did an essay on this inspired by an Alarums and Excursions theme of "shopping" which I'm still quite happy about. Oddly enough, I posted it a year ago -- nearly to to day.

Another is fun. If I'm not having fun doing something, I want to know when I'll start, and if that's too long in the future, I'd like to do something else, please. I'm just too much of a hedonist that way. And part of my fun is not having to encumber the rest of my play with too many rules (see tempo for a definition of too many) or more complexity than anything deserves. I like freeform fine, I've got the skills to make it work for me and those I play with, and I both trust anyone I play with and my own place in the universe well enough to not have problems with it, so that means that any system much more complex than the near-freeform aspects of OTE amd Everway is going to have to offer quite a bit.

To give you an idea of where I am on this, Nobilis is a bit too much for me. I've run it, and it was fun, but it's got a anti-immersive "penetration" rules and a fairly complex resource allocation system. No, this kind of complexity (or much more) isn't an issue in a board game, or even a not-really-playing-it-as-a-RPG game like D&D. But I've had some close to perfect games which mostly involved 2-5 players, with mechanics that didn't involve us roleplaying at one another or describing what was going on only coming out when they added to what was going on, rather than merely serving for our lacks, so a game that imposes a more coercive structure is going to have to offer something to make it worthwhile.

If I get enough round tuits, I might post something on formal game rules as impediment vs crutch vs tool vs handicap at some point.

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