thread: 2013-05-25 : Complete Games
On 2013-05-27, dwbapst wrote:
"What I find really interesting is my experience of writing 350 word D&D (a challenge I'd recommend to any game designer, btw) was that I needed to make the genre and tone considerably more specific that D&D, rather than less. It's not just less text -> less specified. It's considerably more complex than that, I think."
That is a great exercise. I want to go try that. The sad thing is that I'll never know what I would have tried if I hadn't played World of Dungeons already.
But this complex relationship between number of moving parts and specificity of agenda, maybe at some level, it's because creative and technical agendas aren't separate things. The range of creative agendas that one can experience in any given session of 'DnD' is enabled by the range of moving parts included. In other words, maybe one could write a nano DnD game that allows you to do everything DnD does, but there wouldn't be enough technical support for those creative agendas for the game to work / be interesting / be fun (...at least for the creative agendas generally approached in DnD).
Vast and Starlit allows for a lot of lee-way in gameplay (from what I understand from snippets of actual play accounts; haven't gotten to play it yet), but it's also very specific in particular ways, in that every character was a prisoner. It's kind of like how Steve Gould used to discuss the subject of evolutionary constraint: that constraint in one area allows for increased lability in another. With limited length, I think the choice of constraints becomes important, but those constraints don't need to mean removing specificity from the premise nor making the premise more specific.
This makes BL go "+1"
This makes VB go "Right on."
This makes anon go ""Lability"! Awesome word"
