thread: 2005-03-18 : Audience?
On 2005-03-22, Jonas Karlsson wrote:
Hello, all. This is my first comment, but I've thought about the topic of audiences for the last couple of days. I have to start by saying that the posts in the blog and their comments are highly interesting, and I have tried to wrap my head around many of the topics discussed.
It basically started with a game I designed, from an idea I borrowed from this blog, and posted to a Swedish roleplaying forum. The game's called Far Apart and each player controls two characters: a British soldier during the Great War and his girlfriend who work's in a factory back in England. They both have friends around them, but since I wanted the bond between the boy- and the girlfriend to be the strongest the players' soldiers don't know each other, and it's the same with the girlfriends. In the game I do encourage playing other character's friends or other people around them.
The most frequent comment was the problem of not being able to use more than one soldier character in each scene. People didn't like the idea of being turned into an audience by the system, even though it's no problem in "regular" games. I think the days when you were supposed to be quiet or leave the room are over, at least I hope they are. So if a player wants his character to go to the store on his own, the other players are turned into an audience and it's ok as long as it's not something inherent in the system.
Actually my group complained about the same things when playing My Life with Master. Usually the minions work on their own, and it's only the player and the game master who are active. The other people are not encouraged to play NPC:s, even if I suppose they could, and you have the same situation as in my game.
When thinking about game design the question is of course what you can add to make the players engaged in the story even though they are members of the audience for some time. We already have suggestions, but I think one problem is that the engaged audience is mostly a social thing and it's hard to write rules that change the social situation at the table.
Of course, all rules change the social situation, that's one of their main functions. But if you don't want to use direct rules, like The Mountain Witch or Paranoia XP, what can you do?
You could give the audience the power to frame the scene or to add people they want to see the game master portray. Another thing you could do is involve everyone in creating each others' characters, and you shouldn't start playing until you're interested in all of the other characters. Too often you're psyched about your own character, but only have a fleeting interest in the other characters.
Why do people get bored and start flipping through another game while playing? Are they uninterested in the situation, in the other characters or is it just baggage from the time when you were not supposed to interact with people at all when your character isn't present?
I don't know if I've added anything to the discussion or if I've just asked the same questions again as everyone else, but I think it's a topic worth discussing since audiences are part of every roleplaying game.
Yeah, a link to the game if anyone would be interested: http://jonas.dagar.se/rollspel.php (Far Apart, as html or pdf. I hope my html code works...)
