thread: 2011-04-25 : We are creative equals
On 2011-04-26, Frank T wrote:
Hi Vincent,
Great topic. I feel tempted to bring the term 'System' into the debate and ruin it!
Seriously though, I think in any conventional RPG, when you portray something, you answer to your fellow players for your portrayal, and they don't accept your portrayal sight unseen as given. That's Credibility, no more, no less.
As for all participants being creative equals, I agree with Ben: I would see 'equality' as a qualitative question ('what are your contributions worth'), rather than a procedural question ('what means do you have of contributing'). But that, of course, is a matter of definition.
I remember pretty vibrantly the explanation you gave back in Berlin about how that freeform game worked. I guess the approach you took there was pretty extreme, trying for something very 'pure', where there was only human judgment of creative contributions and nothing else whatsoever. It sounded rather tedious indeed, at least in the late stages when you all were very involved with your creation and would not follow along easily. On the other hand, freeform-ish episodes or 'rules transcendence' as I once dubbed it can be a very fruitful thing.
In particular when a group is really 'in the zone', in my experience there are a whole lot of situations where no rules are as quick or as fitting as the shortcut you take when you interact as creative equals and just follow your hunch. My current path of game design is to encourage that kind of freeform-ish shortcutting, and lead players up to the point where they can easily do it and still find the rules as an option to fall back on in case of need. It does include a GM though.
- Frank
