thread: 2009-01-13 : Storming the Wizard's Tower ... in SPAAACE
On 2009-01-14, Christopher Kubasik wrote:
Hi Vincent,
I think your points about Dogs are well taken. Really well taken. I sometimes read people posting about potential Dog hacks and all I can think is "Really? Star Wars using Dogs? I'm not seeing it.... but good luck!"
But StWT is a who different cup of java. It's funny when you say "read the home town creation section generously"—because those rules already ARE so generous. In a very good way.
What you've done in StWt—and what you've done in all your games, I think—is a great job of setting up a procedure for getting play going in a clear and organized fashion. The procedure involves everyone at some level, sets the baseline color and situation for the game, and gets everyone on the same page.
I think the procedures in Sorcerer got this kind of ball rolling, but you can see it Polaris, Steal Away Jordan, The Mountain Witch and other games. But you, consistently, pull this trick off.
Now, as you point out, the PLAY of the games vary. And this is why some hacks, to me at least, with some games, don't click. But that's just me.
But the reason I'm excited about this is that I see a bunch of kids getting caught up in the procedure of play over issues of color that, in the case of StWT just are not as important. Both StWT and Mouse Guard are incredibly robust in terms of "what you do in play"—both in set up and in execution.
This, to me, is a very exciting time. So much of the "guess work" about "How do we play these kinds of games?" is evaporating, leaving us with games that actually, clearly, say how you go about playing them from start to finish.
The other half of that is that both StWT and Mouse Guard, while being robust in this way, also offer a crazy amount of freedom in terms of what can happen, what color to add (even if you stay in the baseline settings) and so on. Some games are very clear in procedures, but really confine play (at least to my taste.) These are two examples of games that are very clear about how to play, but are so elastic in what play can be about it's never going to feel like you're playing the "same story" again... which is quite a trick.
