thread: 2013-05-25 : Complete Games
On 2013-05-27, Moreno R. wrote:
It's not only complexity that you sacrifice. It's cleariness that you sacrify, too.
For examplwe: in "Vast and Starlit" (that I finally got from Meg at INC! Yeah!) Epidiah write, at the beginning "Everyone Plays a prisoner..."
What does it means "play" in that context?
The author is assuming that I know that he is talking about a rpg, and the I already know how to play a rpg. But let's say that this is not the case: if I never played a rpg, I could take that "play" as in Monopoly or Risk, there are counters,or cards, and I have no idea I have to role-play anything.
In the rest of the text, Epidiah specify that the players take turns in setting up a scene, so I know that the game is divided into scenes. But i would not be able to play it. I would assume that there are cards missing, or that in any case I don't have all the pieces of the game.
Just to be clear: I am not ONLY saying that these games are not teaching text for role-playing. I am using that as an example only because it's simple. But what I am saying is that even if it's true that every game assumes a certain knowledge from the player (You need to know how to read, for example) and in this manner restrict they base audience, when you write a nano-game you risk reducing the audience so much that at the end you have to "cheat" explaining how to play by voice or in other texts, giving the informations that the nano-game lack.
It's not a problem for nanogames only: recently I was talking with a friend of mine who has arleady played a lot of rpgs, but she has a lot of difficulties with Monsterhearts. Why? Because of the way the scenes structure in hard-wired in the experiemnce points system. She had already GMd Apocalypse World and other Indie rpgs, but they allowed her to play in a sort of "fluid time" that was newver really cut in scenes, but had the time fast-forward and slow again depending on the situation (as is the assumption in D&D for example)
Then she did read (and GMd) Trollbabe, that spend A LOT of pages to explain its scene structure, and when she played Monsterhearts again, she used Trollbabe's scene structure to play it, and this time it worked.
What I am trying to say? That the axis from "nanogames" to "longer games" is not only about complexity, and often, a nanogame can be much, much more complex that a much longer game (compare Vast and Starlit + supplements with Spione, from a technical point of view). It's more about "who will be abe to play this", and even having played and GMd a lot of forge games doesn't count, if they were not THE exact hames that used THESE specific techniques
This makes BL go "Your mom's the GM"
