thread: 2008-09-23 : Nonformalism?
On 2008-09-24, Vincent wrote:
Thanks, everyone!
"Natural language roleplaying" is interesting.
So in Chess, let's say. The game is made of our pieces' moves on the board. If I pick up one of my bishops and make a legal move with it - and I'm not trying to teach you how to play - I don't ever have to say out loud "this is a bishop so moving it diagonally is legal, but it can't jump any pieces, so I'm moving it to here." I can make my move without any spoken reference to the game's rules at all, as long as I abide by them.
In roleplaying, the game is made of things we say about our fictional characters and their fictional setting, not pieces' moves on a board (or in addition to pieces' moves on a board; that's fine). Like in chess, in a roleplaying game the players have a variety of legal moves they can make - a variety of things they can legitimately say about the fictional stuff. "Allison goes to find October." "They hold Kal down and break his hands with a hammer." "Foster invites Damson to dinner." Under some circumstances, each of those would be a legal move; under others, illegal.
Let's say that I'm the GM, and one legal move by this particular game's rules, under current circumstances, is "NPCs separate the PCs." If I make this move, it has specific, concrete consequences: "separated characters can't help one another, so their players can't combine dice."
What I say out loud is, "Foster's thugs slam you down, Mary, and twist your arms behind you, and drag you out of the room. Foster watches without much expression, then turns to you, October. 'Eat dinner with me,' she says."
What I don't say out loud (unless I'm teaching you how to play) is, "because of [this] and [this], 'NPCs separate the PCs' is a legal move, so that's what I'm doing."
In Poison'd, when I GM, when I bring a cruel fortune into play, I pretty much always declare it explicitly. "Because your character made a deal with the devil, and he thinks you're trying to weasel out of it, I'm bringing 'abandoned to fate' into play." When Graham GMed Poison'd for us, he didn't. I think that's just fine, and in the case of Poison'd it makes very little stylistic difference.
However, in other games it might make a HUGE stylistic difference. In Chess, what matters is where I put my bishop, not the fact of its diagonal move. In some rpgs, same thing. What matters most about the moves are their details - which of the PCs is still close to Foster? Which is getting kick-stomped by thugs in a locked room? - not the facts of their bare mechanisms.
