thread: 2009-04-27 : Dice & Cloud: a Symmetry
On 2009-04-29, Moreno R. wrote:
Errata:
"Contenders is much, much, much more Board-game-like for me"
Galactic. I wanted to say Galactic. Contenders has no right-ward arrows for me but it's not boardgame-like.
@Mathieu: Paul Czege clarified, in a "letter to Italian role-players" that was included in the italian edition of My Life With Master, that MLWM wasn't intended to be played that way (with the rolls dictating the fiction) at all, at it was very much a "follow the fiction" game. But at the time it was published that kind of play was "normal", so he didn't feel the necessity to say it. In any case, even if you play it like a PTA hack, the sincerity, desperation and intimity dice are very strong right-ward arrows.
You post address, I think, a part of the problem I did choose to ignore until now to avoid complicating the discussions even more: sometimes, the rightward arrow is RIGHT THERE, but people ignore it because they don't see it, or they believe for some strange reason that there is not right-ward arrow and refuse to see it (I played a very strange demo of DitV with a guy like this once), or because it's not very clear in the rules. As always when there is a text and a reader, sometimes the misunderstandings come from the text, sometimes from the reader, and most of the time from both working together.
I have seen this problem most often with MLWM and PTA, because both games with historical reason (they were published before this became a problem) don't explain this very well. I have still doubts about my playing of 3:16 about this (but I checked all the actual play posted here and on the forge and they confirmed my reading of the rules)
And, exactly as there is people who need no rightward arrow in the rules, there are people who LIKE to play without any rightward arrows, and they would not consider playing playing PTA o MLWM as a sort of "narrative workshop" (re-using Paul's terms) as "wrong".
