thread: 2011-02-21 : Into the Unknown?
On 2011-04-02, Josh W wrote:
Dave, I've been wondering about something;
Does the structure of the conversation change when PCs talk to npcs?
Like, do people shift the third person-ness of what they do? Do they check less?
My gut impression suggests that in physical or usual social situations, group plausability reigns, and people ask lots of questions and then challenge or question stuff you say.
But in magical or personal situations, the information assymetry will put people into cagey-try mode. You'll be acting on information just not accesible to their characters, and quite likely different from the norms they expect.
If so you have an interesting split; a game about exploring unknowns, but probably not about deep character study, even though the nature of humans means that they will be at least as mysterious as your magic stuff!
In other words, the collaborative elements + hidden GM information might, with a bit of tweaking, naturally flag up the unknown/weird, but you might need some way to blur over human unknowns, because neither you nor the players are into plumbing out characters in the same way.
To put it in some bizare analogies, it's like you've set up a gallery in a room with printed wallpaper, or made a golf course out of a mesh that happens to already have holes in it.
Murder mystery novels often have red herrings that are where something weird happens because people are weird and have secrets, not because of the mystery people are supposed to be solving. And because the investigigators go round poking at weird things, they uncover them. It's one of the more humane ways those novels talk about "the human condition".
So maybe I'm wrong, and the way that your groups deal with social situations and magic is totally different, but if there is commonality. You might be able to:
Veil certain personal things like people do with sex scenes; tick the pacing dial up to scene summary, saving everyone the work of gaining a deep and complex character understanding.
At the same time, you could rework the scene summary stuff, so that the list stuff Vincent talked about appears;
"better than average/worse than average" may not actually be the best way to summarise such a scene, and it might be better to do add mechanics that tint it in terms of the effect that scene has on broader play.
And then get on with making the main meat of the game work better! You can always come back and work out a way to do those scenes at a finer detail grain.
