thread: 2008-03-01 : Respecting the fiction
On 2008-03-04, valamir wrote:
Actually, I was just commenting on John's post. He left it open ended as to whether he thought the teasing-it-out part when the mechanics don't say was a good-and-necessary part of roleplaying, or a bad-but-often-the-case part of roleplaying.
So I was pointing out that I consider it a bad-but-often-the-case part of roleplaying which designers should work hard to avoid.
To put it more explicitly, the text is there to tell players how to play. Whereever the text leaves important parts out (or vague, or hard to parse, or easy to overlook) there will be holes in the players' understanding of how to play. Since play requires those holes be filled, players will fill them with whatever assumptions they can to make the game functional.
If the players' assumptions are close to the assumptions the designer used when they designed the game, then the players will enjoy effective functional play and may not even notice the extent to which they had to invent the game themselves, believing that the rules worked just fine.
If the players' assumptions are different from the designers' they may still manage to move forward and have an enjoyable time, but play will tend to be somewhat lurching and players' will be more aware of struggling with the incompleteness of the text.
If the players assumptions are very different from the designers', and the holes are frequent or critical enough, its possible that play won't happen at all, or suck if it does.
All text, no matter how carefully written will have some holes...perfection is unobtainable. But if a text has so many holes and in very critical places as to render the game unplayable unless the group just happens to be channeling the same set of assumptions as the designer, and so "luck into" how to play...I consider that text to be fundamentally flawed, incomplete, even broken, regardless of how good the underlying game is.
If, by your comment, you were wanting to tie this back to our previous thread on Poison'd; yes, I consider the Ashcan text of Poisn'd at this time to be be full of excessive holes in critical places relying on the players to channel your assumptions about how to play in order to make the game work...or more bluntly put, fundamentally flawed, incomplete, even broken. But I'm reasonably certain you already knew that was my opinion.
I certainly don't imagine you disagree with me.
I do imagine that you don't think the holes in the current text are as extensive or critical as I do (would I be wrong about that?)
I don't think our problem was an obsession with leading with the mechanics and an inability to lead with the fiction (especially given who was at the table), but I do think the main problem was an inability to determine which you intended from the game text.
In any event, it was not my intention to turn this into a Poison'd thread, except that I didn't know how else to take your post, so I'm happy to leave it there if you like.
