thread: 2011-02-21 : Into the Unknown?
On 2011-03-25, Vincent wrote:
Insights
I know you have insights into roleplaying as a practice. You need more than that to make a game.
In the real world, what do you think makes one person better at gathering information (more information, more complete information, more quickly, with more confidence) than another? What makes a person better at it one time than they are another time? Luck? Instinct? Trained skill? An open mind? What's most important? What are the most important barriers to it? In the real world, what are the benefits of gathering good information quickly, and what are the consequences of acting on bad or insufficient information?
In the real world, how do you think a person identifies mutual benefit, builds mutual benefit or the illusion of it, and then acts on it to overcome social barriers? What makes one person good at doing those things and another person bad at it? When, why and how does it fail? Are there any social barriers that mutual benefit won't overcome?
In the real world, what do you think makes one person better at identifying a decent option or strategy than another? What makes one person able to act with confidence on their initial choices, when another dithers and second-guesses? Some people have blind spots, topics on which they're simply bad decision-makers - how come some people do and some don't, and what can a person do about it? And then, what makes one person better than another at convincing others to give her preferred option or strategy a try? In the real world, what are the benefits of working together? Does it matter whether the group is truly convinced, or has just agreed to go along with the leader's plan?
And so on.
Don't answer these to me here! You answer these by designing your game. You reconcile your insights into how things work for real people in the real world with your insights into roleplaying as a practice and your insights into your subject matter, and your game is that reconciliation.
Attempting the unknown
If I were to design from "the only way to progress in the world and learn how things work is to ask questions and attempt the unknown," here's what I'd do.
When a person asks questions and attempts the unknown, what are the possible outcomes? I'm brainstorming.
- She discovers a hole in her understanding.
- She fills a hole in her understanding.
- She exhausts her resources.
- Something interrupts her.
- She learns that there are more variables than she knew.
- She nails one of the variables down.
- She discovers something about another topic altogether.
- She confirms her working theory.
- She learns what she should try next to learn more.
What circumstances matter?
- Downtime! Insights come after (1) rigorous study, then (2) sleeping on it. Let her subconscious brain work on it too.
- The more topics she's studying, the better opportunities for cross-insights and drawing surprising connections.
- Time and other resources matter a lot. It'll be especially hard for her to focus when she's hungry. Interruptions, too - she should be able to limit, but not outright control, what interrupts her.
How does learning how things work let a person progress in the world?
- It means that she can recognize opportunities and then take them. Recognizing opportunities is every bit as important as taking them.
That's a solid start. Now I take these insights into the real world and reconcile them with my insights into roleplaying as a practice and my subject matter, and see if rules come out the other end. If I'm adding this stuff to Apocalypse World, for instance - for a science-minded playbook, maybe - it's all just details. I'll decide whether I can express it in one character move, or will I need several, or should it be some crap instead like a savvyhead's workspace or a quarantine's stasis. Do I create a custom stat like for operators, "thorough" or "curious" or something else, or can it work just with sharp or weird, and maybe barter spent? Then I'll decide how to handle decision-making in the moment, per feature: hold & spend? ask from a list? mix & match partial outcomes? +1forward, -1forward, mark experience? you ask the MC vs the MC asks you?
GMing by design
I wouldn't boil it down to obligations. A game's rules give permission and create expectations - they tell you what you can do and what you should do. They do this mechanically, by creating the unnatural, abnormal dynamics, relationships and considerations you act within when you play.
A complicated game like Apocalypse World needs a chapter orienting you to its unnatural dynamics and your position within them. (Maybe all games do, but complicated games surely do.) It can't fairly ask you to intuit them just by reading and enacting the rules and then feeling them out in play.
Telling someone what to do without creating the unnatural dynamics that make it the right thing to do isn't game design, it's wishful thinking.
You can make prep a central focus of your design if you want to, of course. But there, again, just telling people what to prep isn't the same as making it the right thing to prep.
