thread: 2011-06-13 : A roleplaying game has two centers
On 2011-06-16, Ron Edwards wrote:
OK, I think I have a bit of time. There are three ways to look at this, one of which is two-centered but messed up, and the other is one-centered but messed up, and maybe, just maybe the last is one-centered but valid and is maybe synonymous with two-centered as Vincent is describing, if I'm reading it right.
1. Two-centered but messed-up. The most extreme form of this is best described as "fun later." We've all seen it a hundred times I'm sure. It could be classic fantasy party play, in which we fuck around for hours and maybe fight a little here and there, and some kind of corridor puzzle keeps us occupied, and all the while I'm looking at my character's twenty-page back-story and wondering why I did it, or if I know that, why I'm doing this.
That example represents a particular disconnect between what we do now and what we're doing it for, but there are lots of others. Sometimes it's a CA thing in that the rules we're using right now are actually quite great for CA 1, but since you or I or the GM is playing in hopes of CA 2, it's going nowhere. Or other times it's just that the rules suck and go nowhere despite the pretensions of the main text (and our goals at the table), as I've criticized the early versions of Vampire and Mage at length, but it's not restricted to them.
So that's two-centered, but we need that like we need an extra pair of elbows. Probably less.
2. One-centered but messed-up. The most extreme form of this can be seen in many of the story games (I hate that term as it's more of a clique-identity label than a substantive descriptor, but OK), in which the theme is X, the situation is fixed with X glowing in the middle, each character is a different fixed take on X (or the same take with different funny hats), and the currency and endgame are all about resolving X in this instance. Even the customizable ones are merely genre-switches of no consequence. My take on playing these is that I go through the motions and we see what happens, and my only enjoyment is at most an appreciation for the designer's foresight in taking care of us via the system no matter what we did, and upon that appreciation, asking, "Well, so what."
For reference, I think Dust Devils isn't one of these games although it *is* genre-heavy, issue-heavy, currency-heavy, and personal end-game heavy. There's a certain limitation and for lack of a better word, "mere curiosity" in the sense of a strange little widget, to the games I'm talking about, whereas Dust Devils is more like a blank canvas with a well-chosen arrray of paints and brushes. So playing it won't yield a "mere curiosity," but rather your group's own original western, measuring up as well or as poorly to the existing texts as you can manage.
3. I suppose I've already moved into the third version, then: one-centered if we're thinking about the fiction, two-centered if we're thinking about play procedures and real time. Whether it's Sorcerer, HeroQuest, Dogs in the Vineyard, Dust Devils, or My Life with Master, and in the revised versions, The Riddle of Steel or Burning Wheel, the big themes and issues play may be found at a "big" level: personally philosophical, setting-heavy, or anything like that, quite abstract when articulated. But play is then drilled (refined? distilled? baked?) into an imagined situation which expresses these issues not only as mere representation, but giving some *spin* to them - what I've called in another essay, "Oh yeah?" You read the rules for Sorcerer, especially character creation. Even going that far is taking the rules as general phenomena ("the rules for Sorcerer," full stop) and turning them into an "Oh yeah?" even before play begins. In fact, the process I'm talking about occurs at a kind of among-persons interactive membrane concerning session prep and character prep, as I began to discuss way back in those Color-first threads.
So one is not merely taking the big questions/issues/Premise as given and then doing "it" yet again merely with another kind of hat. Rather, every single time one plays these games, it's almost like a whole new game, because the circumstances of *this* setting and *these* characters yield an utterly different moral or tactical landscape, with different stuff on the line for both the characters and for ourselves.
What about the two centers in all this? In this case, I think it's a matter of time. It may *seem* as if early play is more procedure-first, resolution-roll first, as characters begin to act and stuff begins to respond to the outcomes. And it may *seem* as if later play is more thematically-full, character-arc first, as the scenes and sessions look more and more like novella or movie endings. But I'm seeing it more like concentric circles as opposed to two centers.
Vincent, I may be butchering your initial idea very badly and totally missing the point. If so, head me off, shut me up, and get all this back onto your intended track.
Best, Ron
