thread: 2012-06-11 : Ask a Frequent Question
On 2012-07-15, Vincent wrote:
Yes, a game should communicate its own, concrete, individual creative agenda. No, the Big Model's named creative agenda families should have no part in it. The idea of creative agenda is and remains crucial; the idea of categorizing games' creative agendas into three families is obsolete.
"In this game, you play teenage Mormon gunslingers traveling from town to town. They come upon the scene or aftermath of a murder and they have to decide what to do about it, who to punish, how (and whether) to help the town survive it.
"There's a GM, whose job it is to create the backstory that led up to the murder. You roll dice to resolve conflicts between the characters, and the dice put a lot of pressure on everybody to escalate."
This is a game's creative agenda.
"Story Now" fails utterly to capture it. Saying that Dogs in the Vineyard is a "Story Now" game is as useless, as true but as empty and misleading, as saying that Rock of Tahamaat's resolution rules are "Drama" resolution, or that Murderous Ghosts' use "Fortune in the Middle."
There's no good reason left for anyone to care which category we old Forge heads would put something in. We should leave them behind too.
This makes BL go "Yay"
