thread: 2010-06-14 : A Bit of Hardcore
On 2010-06-17, Vincent wrote:
Some history!
When this whole indie rpgs thing really started, back in 2002-2003, Rafael, questions like yours were a big deal. They were serious challenges and serious threats. I'd been playing a co-GMed game for years, for instance, so I knew that it was fun and could be done, but there were no games available to show anybody else how to do it.
Designing and publishing a game is already very difficult. In those days, designing a co-GMed game was really risky, too. Mostly when you talked about it, people would demand that you justify yourself, so you had to deal with that on top of the innate difficulties of the endeavor. It was no fun.
These days, whew. Someone comes along and demands that you justify yourself, like you have, and it's just not the threat it used to be! We already know co-GMed games can be fun. We don't have to fight for it anymore.
I never quite designed a co-GMed game. You may not know it, but I'm a big advocate of strong GMing, personally. A bunch of my friends did, though:
1001 Nights
Breaking the Ice (and the rest of her games!)
It's Complicated
Mist-Robed Gate
Polaris
Shock: Social Science Fiction
Universalis
If you want to know what's fun about them, the answer is different things for each of them, not any one thing they have in common. If you're really interested, the only thing I can possibly recommend is that you give one or another of 'em a try. You'll see what's fun about it, you'll see what's not fun, and you can make up your own mind about what you enjoy. If you aren't interested enough to try them, I dunno! I'll answer questions but I can't do any more than that.
