thread: 2011-04-12 : A background in Principled Freeform
On 2011-04-15, Vincent wrote:
Simon: Mmm. The purpose of system isn't to prolong in-character conflicts of interest against their own resolution. It's to preserve them so that they escalate and resolve, instead of letting them evaporate in a cloud of player-level good will. What you see in that particular writeup is just the conflict between the dragon and the 3 wizards escalating and resolving.
The dice provided not just pacing but a structure for decision-making within the conflict. We set it up (on the fly) so that the 3 wizards would survive, but also so that they would reveal themselves under pressure. Ash helped Bloris before she helped Frantiska; Frantiska attacked Bloris and didn't attack Ash; when the dragon came upon them, Ash and Bloris fled together and Frantiska fled a different direction alone. We wouldn't've learned any of this about them without the dice.
Here's a funny thought! We'd never played those characters before. It'd make sense to think of that episode as their character creation. Instead of buying them with points or rolling up their stats or whatever, we put them through this episode with the dragon. It was like initiation in Dogs in the Vineyard in a lot of ways.
