thread: 2009-07-13 : How About Some Q and A
On 2009-07-14, Vincent wrote:
Adam: This is super important stuff. I'm glad you're asking.
Each act of resolution happens at the intersection of two timelines. Timeline 1: what the players are doing. Timeline 2: what's happening in the fiction.
Timeline 1 is this: Who says what about what, when, and how do we negotiate about it?
Timeline 2 is this: What must we establish in the fiction before resolution? What must we leave unestablished in the fiction until resolution? Emphasize in the fiction.
Here's what goes on in timeline 1: Who gets to say that there's a tower on the hill? Under what circumstances should we agree that, yes, there's a tower on the hill? Do we roll dice? Who can contradict whom, and when?
IIEE goes on in timeline 2, though. What must we establish in the fiction before we resolve whether there's a tower on the hill? I dunno, that there's a hill? That there could reasonably be a tower on it? That's probably all already implicit. Certainly we don't have to establish that a tower intends to be on the hill. That's what makes IIEE character-centric; non-characters don't have intent.
For the alphabet soup-happy, here's a dense little sentence: just like IIEE is a character-centric approach to timeline 2, DFK(itM/atE) is a mechanics-centric approach to timeline 1.
Adam, you're talking about DFK(itM/atE). What steps does something have to go through in order to be established in the game's fiction, right? Well, first a player has to say it. Then we all have to agree to it. In Rock of Tahamaat in particular, we agree to it if the player rolls certain dice and they come out a certain way, so it's a Fortune mechanism. It happens to be FitM, but whatever.
I(FitM)I(FitM)E(FatE)E.
Does that help?
