thread: 2011-04-12 : A background in Principled Freeform
On 2011-04-25, Simon C wrote:
Breaking rules? The issues I remember us struggling with were: 1) does this break my concept of the world? (re the Ret-conned murders in the winter) 2) does this break my concept of this character? (re the sexuality of the shared play character Avis) 3) does what you did violate our shared contract of what information I had or needed before you whomped me with that grief? (re my character Trey "helping" Murinus Mus with her Twilight by bringing in the unscrupulous doctor) and 4) Can I make this decision on an outcome given that I play this other character who will also be affected by it (re various internal conflicts of interest).
Cool. I meant "rules" in a pretty broad sense, like in the other post where Vincent is talking about "things which change our normal social interaction", of which "content" is clearly the most important.
So what you describe here is pretty much what I was thinking about.
The reason I brought all this up is that I've played games where it's just people describing what their characters do, with no expectation of conflict or resolution or rising tension or escalation, and it is dull as shit. What you guys were doing was clearly very different from that, but I couldn't see how.
The missing piece in the dragon example, for me, was the escalation. That's the bit that turns it from "let's describe our characters doing some stuff" into something that's actually going to put the characters under pressure and reveal something about them. I suspect that there was a similar pressure in other scenes, but possibly arrived at through different means?
