thread: 2011-02-21 : Into the Unknown?
On 2011-03-28, Paul T. wrote:
Thanks, Vincent! I'm glad you responded to that.
I'm quite certain that Dave's vision (and many/most? other game designers) is looking for precisely that feeling you're describing:
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"THIS GAME IS GREAT!" he said [...]
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I believe this is also what a lot of people mean when they say, "the rules get out of the way": their predictions of what they should do and how they should do it, what "should" happen, are supported by the rules of play, no hiccups. It's that mental process where you can think about what you want to do in the fiction, or what you think should happen, and the rules give it to you, without you having to consciously consider them. The mechanics fade into the background not because they're not being used but because they don't intrude on the player's decision-making process, as you describe happened in your Mechaton game.
I'll be curious to hear from Dave, but my personal perception his game is that, yes, it's 90-something percent principled freeform (even though he doesn't like that term).
There may be some nugget of wisdom in this line of thought.
Let'say you're seeking to create an experience for the player where any plan s/he considers logical and clever *should* work, unless the player can see that there are considerations they didn't know about or didn't take into account.
How does a principled GM give that experience? Is mind-reading necessary?
Here's one of Dave's earlier "principles" for this style of play:
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"If the players honestly think a certain result is 'what would happen', unless you have conclusive knowledge otherwise, go with it. For fuzzy cases, the rule of thumb is that magical items do interact; 'nothing happens' should only result when nothing else could make sense."
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That seems like a functional way of helping this kind of thing along, if I'm at all on the right track in talking about this. What are others? How far can this kind of principled design go?
