2008-10-27
: Hear that?
That, my friends, is the sound of a new spring.
We've been doing this rpg theory and design thing for a while, and anything you do for a while has its seasons. This winter is ending! I can hear the crocuses shrugging up against the snow crust.
NO JINX TOUCH WOOD here comes the next spring.
1. On 2008-10-27, Seth Ben-Ezra wrote:
Hey, Vincent. Why do you say so? I'm not arguing; actually, I'm wanting to see what you're seeing so I can be happy with you.
We can be like Damiel and Cassiel comparing notes in the opening of Wings of Desire.
I drew a picture of a guy with a hat and a sword, and I labeled his hat "positioning" and his sword "effectiveness" and his heart "resources," and I imagined how putting down his sword could make him change his hat, and how changing his hat could break his heart.
Positioning is where you are in the fiction, what you say your character says, where you say you are, what your group decides is going on.
Effectiveness is the umph you get from all of those things: mechanically, the stir your group allows you to make in the beehive of the plot, how hard your fictional foot feels when it lofts into someone else's behind.
Resources are what the system (as written and in play) gives you to boot that sucker around. The stuff in your mechanics is your cues, the stuff in the fiction is your leverage.
Ha ha ha! That's if I'M the little guy I drew. Or you are. Roleplaying. Here's us tomorrow night, wearing our hats, holding our swords, making with the Apocalypse World.
Where's it going to be happening, though? Online? (The Forge, Stry Gams, the blog diaspora, ?) Or in meatspace, as a thing local to Massachusetts or suchlike?
I threw a wrench into the conversation by changing the subject, unfortunately.
Vincent was talking about actual game mechanics and harking all the way back to my "components of character" idea, including Currency. Kind of a back-to-basics, hey look what we already know kind of thing.
Then I hopped the same concepts up to the real world and said the same images can be used to express our excitement and hope for the RPG independent scene as well.
They're linked in real life because the new economic approach that Vincent and I are doing is re-juicing our excitement about play, design, and talking about both.
I can't say pleased I am to see this, late to the party as I am. Theory kinda left my bizarre playstyle/group behind, but this position nonsense is most assuredly my kind of nonsense. I'm excited about Ram and I having things to argue about.