thread: 2011-02-07 : Design scales: to the text!
On 2011-02-08, Jeff Russell wrote:
Hmm, this is hard. I'm going to have to think about it some more, but the easy answer is that the buffy rules show less direct link between the 'right now' and 'overall' categories, mostly because the overall category is extremely vague. It counts on the reader inferring 'stories like the TV show' from the references used rather than saying 'hey, we're playing interpersonal teen drama thrown into sharp relief by supernatural weirdness' or what have you.
TSoY has links, but you have to look for them a bit. Like the weapon rules tie into the fact that the world of Near is violent and dangerous, but the refresh rules (specifically the examples) and the secret relate more directly to the love, sex, and style mentioned in the overall description.
The connections between the immediate and overall 'what we're doing here' categories in Spione strike me as fairly opaque, but both are individually pretty clear, so that might be closer to the 'barriers between the two' you talked about in your other post.
The connections for Burning Wheel seem pretty clear, but in a different way. The overall explanation says there will be a lot of manipulation of numbers within systems and tells us this will interact with character drives to create interesting results, but leaves the interesting results pretty open ended. The specific moment to moment play focuses on those numbers and systems, but references the motivations. I'm probably cheating a bit because I've been rereading a bunch of BW books recently, most especially the adventure burner, so the connections in that case have been spelled out a bit more.
I feel like all I've done is description and no analysis here, like people in my high school English classes during discussion, but it's definitely forced me into a useful perspective.
