thread: 2005-03-18 : Audience?
On 2005-03-19, TonyLB wrote:
Okay, I don't get how "Audience" is going to correlate to anything else important. Why is it important to make a distinction between players whose characters are present, and those whose characters aren't? That's sort of like making a distinction between those whose characters are left-handed and those whose characters aren't. If the game system importantly cripples your ability to contribute to what matters if you're not left-handed, then yeah that makes a difference, but otherwise it's just narrative color.
A player who has no character present in the scene is not inherently barred from explicit, assured and unabridged contribution to what matters in the game. They can be Engaged.
They are barred from that contribution if what matters in the game is "what our characters do", or if their best/only tool for engagement is their character. But that's only true of a subset of games.
PTA, for instance, makes sure that every player can be Engaged in every scene, through the mechanism of fan-mail. They can always contribute to the game, by shaping the reward structure within which other characters operate (and thereby training/bribing them to do certain things).
