thread: 2009-05-29 : Live on the internet: Clyde and Me
On 2009-06-05, Vincent wrote:
> It sounds like you're saying that if you don't have a prior
> discussion about what you want you don't have a creative
> agenda, but you also said that when you really really hate
> playing with a group, and often leave, they're probably
> playing with an agenda different from yours.
First part: oh no no no. You need a working agreement, not a prior discussion. You know how I hate prior discussions, I think prior discussions are terrible for creating working agreements.
(They're very good for making an inertial mess of hobbling compromises, that you then have to overcome in order to create your real working agreement, if you can.)
Second part: I didn't say that every single time roleplaying sucks it's because of legitimate but incompatible creative agendas. Intentional social sabotage, for instance, can (a) ruin the roleplaying but (b) be fun for the perpetrators. So can "we play together so that I won't feel left out, even though I hate roleplaying."
Intentional social sabotage and "we play together so that I won't feel left out, even though I hate roleplaying" aren't creative agendas, they're social agendas. Also "Vincent, mediate our dispute over the $40 Mitch owes me while we pretend to roleplay" and "guys, whatever on your game, can't you see that we're flirting here?". They aren't about having fun roleplaying. In fact, any give one of them, bad roleplaying - roleplaying that systematically denies fulfillment of any creative agenda - might be exactly what it demands.
It does not sound to me, again having not heard the story, that the people you're talking about were trying to have fun roleplaying. It sounds like they were trying to have fun doing something other than roleplaying, and whatever it was, bad roleplaying served it.
