thread: 2009-07-13 : How About Some Q and A
On 2009-07-23, Christian Griffen wrote:
Comparing roleplaying with poker misses out on a lot of what makes roleplaying potentially so powerful. In poker, everything's mechanical. There is no fiction. There is no room for people to say things, within the confines of the game, that can gut punch the other players.
I played in a D&D 2e campaign for a while, in which the GM had the character of the 14-year-old player mutilated (cut his ears off etc.). He basically ruined the character for him. I should have said, "Hey, I know we gave you GM powers, but this is dickish and you're ruining his and my fun. Do something else." (At the time, though, I was still brainwashed with the whole "the GM gets to do whatever, I guess" idea, something I deeply regret now.)
As a sidenote, most trad games have Rule 0 (the GM can overrule anything), which means that it is perfectly in the rules for him to let my guy win even if the dice say he loses. So if I appeal to him for that, I'm not breaking the rules, I'm appealing to one of the rules of the game. There are several trad games I could dig up that even advise the GM to overrule the mechanics overtly or covertly (fudging) to have players win when they would lose.
I'm just saying that roleplaying games are much more complex and have such a focus on the fictional space that they require much more buy-in and have many more opportunities for people to have occurrences within the game that they couldn't foresee when they started playing. I know everything that could happen in poker. I'm far from knowing everything that could happen in the fiction of any roleplaying game I could think of. And for roleplaying to be fun, it matters that the fiction we develop together keeps everyone interested and doesn't push any one player away.
