thread: 2011-02-21 : Into the Unknown?
On 2011-04-12, Josh W wrote:
Ok, an example.
What I was going for was, in rock of tahamaat, you basically set things up so that the characters will go after the space tyrant, or at least try to make a stand against him. Then you give them opportunities to do so.
Say one of the characters is an engineer who goes 50% dead space guy, 50% mission impossible guy, all mag-teathers, jury rigging and paranoia. After his attempts at sobotage get outed and lead to his family being killed, he's suited up on the outside of the habitat that used to be his home, and all the players are rooting for him. But at the same time we're a little protective, we basically want to see him do well, after all he's lost, and he's cagey enough that we feel that suggesting potential problems is enough.
This guy starts building himself a ship out of wreckage to go after Rock, and it's cool, but it's a bubble of rules avoidance. He's not getting into "right now!" danger, he's not confronting society directly.
If that game were real, I'd probably start trying to build some stealth/scavenger game subsystem in, all for him! It would help us keep thinking of the dangers of living outside the system in a hard-edged airless moonbelt.
Still fits a lot of the game, because everything still orbits and draws towards Rock himself; you've drawn enough of a trajectory for rebellion and given clear requirements to reinforce it over time. There's just not as much focus on producing intermediate conflict.
So that's an example of sailing in zero g past rules structures, but it's contrived, because you've got a big fat inlet on your rules, that will catch any of the normal kinds of actions you expect from that kind of activity; of course they are going to be aiming towards getting into conflicts, and into danger, so the rules will come up!
But aren't I putting the causality of design backwards there? When designing it, didn't you start with the IIEE spec and work backwards to situations that would lead into it?
I'm wondering how you set intial conditions and stuff so that characters fire into the sort of conflicts (or generally interactions involving player creativity) you want. Do you just sort of go at it intuitively, when a world picture and character arc seems to have slots to fit a mechanical thing your playing with?
In the context of Dave's game, I'm wondering about how to condition character creation (becase that seems the biggest influence on player style of any rule element, given the high immersion way it works) and/or local people creation, so that things shift away from browbeating and torture (things the game engine is likely to be crap at, and I reckon you don't really want to play David!) and more towards detective anthropology and working with people's best interests.
