thread: 2009-06-08 : Restating: Fictional Causes and Realization
On 2009-06-09, Vincent wrote:
Excellent! Good.
It's a thing because the fashions in indie rpg design right now don't offer good solutions to game designers trying to develop games at this end of the spectrum.
For the past year, I've been having conversations with my designer friends that go like this:
"I've noticed that when people play my game, the fiction is pretty, like, low-cal. It's too summary, it's not really realized. Sometimes that's fine and sometimes they've been unhappy with it, but either way I've noticed it. So ... I want the fiction to be more rich. I think I need to add more fictional effects to my fundamentally real-world cause, real-world effect rules, wouldn't you say, Vincent?"
My answer is: "I wouldn't say that, no. I'd say that people's investment in the fiction will gravitate to the fiction's value, so I'd say you need to make the fiction more valuable. I think you need to add more fictional causes to your fundamental rules, so that they treat the game's fiction as the basis of play, not an appendix to play."
So, the impulse to design - I want to design a game that works a different way - precedes the whole conversation. If you don't feel that impulse, of COURSE the conversation's going to seem unnecessary to you.
