thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-06, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
In my experience, actually, part of the paranoia with Capes is that in fact there is a "don't say no" rule: You can narrate anything without anyone stopping you (most of the time), but they in turn can narrate anything without you stopping them. So if you want a "safe space" feeling, you might need MORE allowance for people to say "hey, wait, I don't like that," rather than less.Now, a few posts back, Ian Charvill wrote about constraints: "But you always, always have a cool thing already ...the parts of your life that you have an emotional investment."
And yes, absolutely; in fact, I'd argue it's very hard NOT to bring in your personal emotional life to a game. (I spent years making up characters who just happened to have—putting it delicately—issues with anger management and with authority figures before I figured this out).
The catch is that all this personal emotional stuff tends to be
- (1) vast and inchoate, so saying "bring something personal to the table" is, as a question of practicality, not really narrowing things down much beyond "bring something to the table."
- (2) really personal, so saying "bring something personal to the table is, as a question of group dynamics, hardly less scary than "bring something cool to the table."
One of the great things about science fiction/fantasy as a genre, and roleplaying games as an art form, and therefore about their intersection in SF/fantasy RPGs in particular, is that they allow you to bring out real issues in imaginary cloaks, which can help create a "safe space" to deal with them. (Or you can cloak everything so heavily you never ever have to deal with the real issues, which is, well, lame; fetishization is, I'd argue, an extreme form of this avoidance, where you're not even making your own cloak, just borrowing someone else's).
And as I write this, I begin to wonder if the "seed crystal"—the initial Cool Thing which is placed on the table for players (GM included) to build off of—might in fact work better if it is NOT strongly charged emotionally. If, as I think Ian is suggesting, every player has a powerful store of emotional experiences to bring to the table, then the seed crystal doesn't need to provide the emotional intensity; it just has to coax the players' own intensity out. Which in turn means a seed crystal needs to be evocative but not overwhelming, so different players can see different things in it and respond in different ways.
Which, darn it, is just the Dogs in the Vineyard GM advice on plots scaled up for whole settings: As setting-creator or adventure-designer, don't have an answer in mind, just have a provocative question.
