thread: 2008-09-29 : Creative Tension
On 2008-09-29, Ron Edwards wrote:
Um, not to derail the useful point being made here, but I *agree* that in playing Dogs, the system has its own corrective features regarding the supernatural dial. I'd rather not be cast as the dissenter in this case.
My mention of Dogs in this thread doesn't concern the supernatural dial.* It concerns much simpler things - for instance, one of my favorite moments during play, when my character crashed his horse through a stream in a "go" during a chase scene. I pulled in a trait, specifically the one I'd created in my character's initiation scene, "My hat stays on." (It wasn't a d4 trait either, by this time.)
The issue of whether it was "good enough" or not was *not,* I think, addressed in system terms. I called in the trait, period. No one objected, and I don't really know if anyone *could* object by the rules. That issue was addressed only in the same way that Maura's "can talk for hours" was approved as an augmenter: group consensus expressed in grunts, little cheers, thumbs-up, or similar. In this case, we all liked the image of the horse and the water-spray and the all-action imagery with the utterly stable hat at its center. But what if half of us, or the GM alone, or all of us but me, didn't?
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
* To forestall possible misunderstandings of my views toward the supernatural dial, my historical claim is that it can be spun to any position via play *without* affecting the baseline "GM as if there's no God" principle. I have also explained to people that you can use the rules for the rituals in full without glowy eyes and bolts of light *if* you want to. None of this should be interpreted as a hatred of supernatural narration.
