thread: 2011-04-12 : A background in Principled Freeform
On 2011-04-28, Josh W wrote:
Emily, it's interesting to me you put it that way, it seems a very different tack to my own:
"We don't use A, we use B"
"What? I use A to do B!"
So if I've got this streight; it's not the fact that you roll for stuff that makes it suspenseful, it's the patterns of dramatic build-up, the important stuff involved, and all the specifics of event discription.
It's not the uncertainty, it's the content. So if you do use dice, it's not before you roll that you start to go "ooh", it's afterwards, the moment someone has turned it into game events.
And that's because the roll doesn't count for anything but inspiration, because the point of resolution is at when you propose something for the fiction and everyone agrees.
Now if that matches how you go about it, then I tend to drift broken games that way myself. The difference is that I almost always want a set of dice rolls or pacing rules to help me keep things within certain bounds, so that I can assure plausibility when I'm looking back at it later, keep events in a general reason that doesn't muck things up to much, so I can just get into the moment.
Whereas I take it you three had different requirements in that game of what implausibilities to roll with, and at the same time, were happy to take a view closer to an author, associating with the character in their situation while trying to keep half an eye on the arc and scene potential you want to keep open.
