thread: 2005-03-23 : Strong Stuff Indeed
On 2005-03-25, Emily Care wrote:
Hi JK,
Wow, that was a very literal interpretation of my words!
Superheroics is a great genre because everything is so richly symbolic. By creating a superhero with a name, costume, and powers, you are engaging in the creation of meaning. So, say, when Ron made Farslayer, or Joe made Archetype (who channeled ideals of social roles), or Craig made Statuemaker (who teleported by making bodies out of material that was there), or Ingrid made Nicole (a girl with an invisible friend), they were all rich with meaning. This was driven by the Champions system. They also got to engage by defining who their subplots were and who their enemies were. That's from the system.
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So you were supported by the specific rules & mechanics of the game in creating characters that were engaging and had elements that mattered to you & the other players. ie they were meaningful.
Great! How did the specific rules & mechanics of the game support you in continuing your exploration & development of the themes & issues raised by your characters? Was it by letting you as players develop sub-plots around them? Or by letting you craft your nemeses?
If so, then Champions did just we're saying is a good thing: incorporated mechanical structures that "facilitated, rewarded or enforced" what mattered to players in the game.
And you just said that there are games that don't do that that you wouldn't recommend. Sounds like our argument too.
I think there's a miscommunication here:
"Ninja Hunter J wrote: The system didn't support that. If your pointed nonuse of that power didn't give you resources, it was just a point sink
...
If, on the other hand, you didn't use it and got bonus points for not using it, for instance in the form of Great Responsibility dice, that would be a different thing."
John wrote: OK, here is where I completely disagree. This is exactly my objection to Vincent of reducing meaning to bonus dice.
Bonus dice was just a single suggestion, not the end/all be/all way to tell if a rules set is supporting the creation of meaningingful play.
Scene framing (like the subplot development you describe in Champions) is a perfectly valid way to support the kind of on-going development that Ron talked about. Kickers work that way. Issues in PtA work in concert with the scene-framing rules to help players do this.
(A side thought: PtA without fanmail would be a fantastic engine to support players in authoring stories about their own characters. PtA with fanmail is a fantastic engine to support players in authoring their own stories and to give feedback & support to each other's creations.)
