thread: 2009-04-27 : Dice & Cloud: a Symmetry
On 2009-04-27, Moreno R. wrote:
No, Callan. "caring" is not enough. I play with people who like to use their imagination. But we have found out that "imaging for the sake of imaging" isn't fun. It's a more general version of the Czege Principle, I think: it's not only about conflicts: when narrate something and it doesn't "push" against anything else, simply floating around, play isn't fun. These systems lack something very important. In every game, not only ours.
What the people who "have that discipline" are doing is, like Ben put it, "pretending that it does matter". It's a lot like learning to play with traditional rpgs: there are big holes in the rules, the procedure doesn't work, but you can make it work if you are "good enough" to know how to add what the game is missing. I think that it has a lot do to with having played a lot with games that had that sort of problems: you learn to compensate it. Me and my group maybe are simply lucky enough to have discovered indie games late enough that there a lot of games that work very well without that discipline, so we never did learn it.
That forge thread was very strange when people began to talk about games "crashing and burnings" if people didn't imagine the SIS. We are roleplayer. Why know how easy is to imagine a SIS. If the game make we want to. It's not "this one work with a SiS, so it's weaker than that one who doesn't need one". It's "this one CREATE a SIS, so it's way stronger than this one that doesn't, by itself, if you don't play a lot of other games before that teach you how to do it even when the game do nothing to help you do it"
Nothing of this apply to IAWA, I think. The problem with IAWA is more nuanced. IAWA do a very, very good job of creating a SIS with the oracles and character creation, so that the GM is pushed to think that he has a very "hands-off" role, letting the people build all this beatyful world together... and then when a conflict start that SIS vanish and the conflict go straight to the player's level!
