thread: 2010-06-14 : A Bit of Hardcore
On 2010-06-18, Paul T. wrote:
One of the things a good set of rules can do is make something you value, or something you consider fun, easier to achieve. Or easier to achieve more consistently.
Most (or at least many) games, and most/many GMs, struggle with certain aspects of gaming. Maybe Julie finds it hard not to railroad the players in her group whenever she GMs, and Bob just doesn't have enough time to prep enough for a satisfying session every week. Sue's group, on the other hand, has a lot of fun pretty much all the time, but they have trouble making sure everyone in the group is getting an equal share of spotlight time.
A good set of rules can help you achieve these things. In much of the roleplaying world, the attitude is that a "good GM" is all that's required. With the corresponding years of experience, training, and failures. But not everyone is a "good GM". And no one's perfect. So, a set of rules or procedures can help you achieve your goals more easily or more consistently.
For instance, say you have a group that goes out to dinner once a week. You're interested in making sure that the majority of the people enjoy the restaurant that's chosen every week. Group A says, "Bob knows the most about restaurants in this area, and knows all of us well. Therefore, he'll choose for us." That's trusting a "good GM", right? Group B says, "How about we implement a procedure for this: everyone can suggest a restaurant, and then we vote." For group B, that may be more reliable than trusting one person's judgement. And in any group that doesn't have a good, impartial, well-informed "Bob", the voting procedure will probably work better.
Same goes for: dramatic concerns, tactical challenge, or whatever else you want to enjoy in your game. If it's hard to achieve, you may benefit from a well-tested structure that helps you get there every time. For instance, most people can't just invent a good tactical challenge off the top of their heads, and arbitrate it fairly, while giving the people playing through it lots of equally good choices. But if you play a game where that's built in (I don't know, the latest version of D&D, say), you have a structure that lets you do that even if you don't have those skills.
Likewise for preparing for a game, or coming up with "the next plot". There are many great "no prep" games out there now.
This comes back to this issue you mentioned:
"If setting up conflicts of interest and rolling to see how they play out were enough, being a novelist would be a lot easier and involve more dice, and computer RPGs could be both open and dramatic."
I disagree with you here. Most creative artists (whether authors, composers, or visual artists) struggle with "writer's block" or similar problems. They get "stuck" doing the same thing over and over again, or maybe they run out of ideas, period. Many, many good writers use some kind of procedures to break through that: they may draw random words out of a dictionary, pull a story out of a random newspaper, or even roll dice (there are whole schools of "aleatoric composition", for example, in the classical music world).
A good set of rules (or a new procedure) can help you, or your group, break through an established "creative rut" and turn to some new unexpected creative ground. That's another thing many people need help with, and major reason a lot of people buy "sourcebooks" or new games: to get their games to go in a different direction, to explore something new and different. That's not easy (at least not for most people) to achieve on their own.
