thread: 2012-12-20 : Positioning: Retroactive
On 2012-12-21, Josh W wrote:
Vincent, what happens when you write play reports of your games, then read them through before starting? Would you say that turns "fictional" into "cues", in the sense that they are now nailed down in reality?
'Cos there are some things about shared creation in rpgs that strike me as literally about the vagaries of memory, and how they can be utilised, and others that are about lack of formality in causal structures: A position of a chess piece in a still room is a physical fact, but what it does, how it moves, that's open to rules hacks, although convention fixes it as certain things. And in rpgs, there's a whole series of things we have nailed down but not yet considered the significance of. Everyone knows my character is the baron of some kingdom, what does that mean?
That gray area as you get further from the computer like formal systems and into those complex interacting assumptions of causality that different players have inherited or inferred from other fields, strikes me as the perfect ground for developing "tabletop rpg" ideas. I'm sure that's where you're heading too Vincent!
Also about the retconning stuff, instincts from burning wheel and mechanics like that are absolutely killer for setting up an ambiguous status quo in short order; establish the usual, the default, with exceptions, such that other players can play off of it.
