thread: 2012-12-04 : Positioning: Two Timelines in Text
On 2012-12-05, Vincent wrote:
Okay, good! Clearly this helped.
Ben: Yep.
Gordon: Not important in principle, check. It may or may not be important to a given piece of game design.
Regarding "either": Good spot! I agree with you that the question's hanging (and furthermore, does the player choose which, or does the GM?) I don't think that the particular answer matters in principle, it's just a design question.
As it happens, Monster of the Week answers it elsewhere in its design (player chooses, nobody second-guesses), so it's just fine that the move doesn't spell it out. If every move had to spell it out every time, that'd be pretty redonk.
Tim: Yep.
Christoph: "Surely" I could have? That depends on the game design. In Monster of the Week, maybe I could have, but it's not a given that I surely could. I'd want to pick my battles.
"You can go anywhere you want, if you can invent a reason why you've visited there before" is not quite the same move, not quite the same piece of game design, as "you can go anywhere you've visited before."
Treating fictional timelines concretely or arbitrarily is a design decision. As a designer, you choose whichever way better serves the rest of your design. I may later go on to explain why I think it's fruitful for designers to choose to treat them concretely, but for now my point is really just that you can choose to treat them concretely, and that "fictional positioning" is a name for one way of doing so.
Greg: Feel free!
This makes GcL go "More concrete = more to check in determining "legitimacy"?"
I won't be sure about this until we learn more about a "legitimate" move, but - the fundamentally arbitrary nature of fictional timelines often makes treating them as concrete problematic. So - good design matters (surprise, surprise).
This makes GcL go "Oh, and "player chooses" . . ."
cool, and redonk understood, but - how 'bout tying the decision to the fiction? Entirely optional? Preferred? Required? Player can decide whether or not the character is even aware of the decision seems like a very different move than the player mudt decide if the character chooses "miss target" or "leave friends". Unless I'm missing something?
This makes VB go "Entirely optional in this case."
But like I say, that's just a design question.
This makes CB go "But, what's the difference..."
between inventing a mother for a protagonist and anticipatory scouting? Why was the first example okay, but not the second?
This makes VB go "Aha, good!"
This is exactly the next question. Stand by.
This makes CB go "Thanks! Standing by."
