thread: 2011-10-19 : Murderous Ghosts for Halloween
On 2011-10-24, Simon C wrote:
Hi Vincent,
I've been thinking a bunch about this, and tying to get my head around this thing. It's hard for me to understand, because I get what you're saying in your last post, but on the other hand, I'm like "How does that help me win?" If it doesn't help me win, then isn't there some other agenda in play?
I've played a bunch of Step on Up. By which I mean, for example, I played a bunch of Tunnels and Trolls, where each week we'd see how much further we could get into this crazy dungeon full of deathtraps, and usually we'd all be horribly killed. I played a bunch of similar games too. When other people talk about Step on Up play, I recognize what they're talking about. When you describe Storming the Wizard's Tower, I'm like "Yeah, I know how to play that game".
But Murderous Ghosts just seems alien to me, and I know what it is. It's the bit where there's an explicit win condition, enforced by the real-world mechanics of play. That's something which I think is very different from other Step on Up supporting games.
In Mentzer D&D, for example (the oldest D&D I know well), there's no explicit win condition (well, there kind of is in the Immortals box, where it says you win if you go from 1st to 30th level twice with one character, but I'm fairly confident that's never been done). In Mentzer D&D, there's a shared commitment to the shared fiction because all the rewards for success in that game (building towers, hirelings, gold pieces, etc) only exist within that shared fiction. By contrast, in Murderous Ghosts, the reward for success (winning the game) exists outside the shared fiction of the game.
I think that's a fundamental difference. What do you think?
