thread: 2011-02-21 : Into the Unknown?
On 2011-03-15, Julius wrote:
Err, so Dave asked me (as a long-term play-tester of said Delve) to contribute something to this thread. I am not going to pretend to have actually read the whole thing, and even less to have followed all the points, but I get the gist -
so a few comments of dubious coherence and value:
I think that dave has failed to emphasize the time-scale of some of the problem solving involved here, which I think shifts the balance in the GM prep/player control scenario. In the sense that the pieces are all there, I am sure dave has a pretty detailed magic system worked out and sitting in his notebook, but working out how things function and piecing it together for different effects has been really and truly left to us - I mean we found the "rosetta stone" for runes about two years back (real life time) and we have yet to figure out more than a handful of functions for the runes, a miniscule amount of grammar and a couple of ways of activating them - all with ingredients in short supply. The result of this is that we are constantly experimenting - with new runes, new materials, trying to apply the few shreds of information we have to new challenges.... these fail the vast majority of the time, so when we actually work something out, it feels very much like OUR accomplishment. ALso so when we finally got to a challenge where we actually NEEDED to use the rune language to win - an instance where there was a clear GM prepped problem with a relatively limited number of ways to solve it, it didn't feel like "oh, that is what the GM wanted us to do" because we had invested so much thought into just getting the basic tools to accomplish it.
I also feel like the degree of ignorance on the players of what really "works" also becomes a powerful tool for the GM to respond - and that leads to the sort of collaborative, player empowering moments Vincent is getting at. So at one point there was a stream that dave off-handedly mentioned was holy to the visitors, and one of our players decided this was "holy water". Now, I recall Dave poo-pooing that at the time, but the player carried it around and kept trying to use it on things- which for the longest, longest time didn't do anything. After a while, we finally got to a situation where bam, the holy water did do something unusual - now if I am right, I am pretty sure that Dave never intended that to be "holy water", but our stubborness gave us a tool, that let us (and him) improvise a solution to a problem. So it wasn't just about the GM saying - to stop the ghosts they have to find the holy water, it was about us making a decision on something, and then much later him making a call that that would bea valid solution.
Similarly, with the deck of cards - which is a great mood builder and definitely has pushed us into experimenting with different things. That said, I mostly have NO idea what the "correct" interpretation of the cards was even after we "solve" the problem. Perhaps Dave does have a crystal clear idea of what all of the cards means, but half the time I am clueless of whether our interpretation of the cards, even when it ends up being succesful, was the "intended" one. That is empowering actually, because it never feels like we were being rail-roaded or guided.
Now, how this is reflected in the mechanics of the game, is a great question as with Dave's style of GM I never know what is planned and what is improvised. But I think the conceptual key to what Dave is getting at is the concept of "immersion" and the related fact of how limited the information the players have about the world around them. That is why the perception powers work so well - because any knowledge we get feels precious and valuable, even if there is no immediate pay-off.
I am going to stop there for a while in my ramblings and see what bounces back....
