thread: 2013-09-23 : Game Texts on the Object of the Game
On 2013-09-23, Nick wrote:
Maschine Zeit is explicit about the characters' goals - "The main characters are survivors trying to see the next dawn" - but not about the object for the players. Should the players drive the characters towards that goal? Or deliberately throw things in their way? Or what?
(If I had the game, I could read the rest of it and make an educated guess.)
The Burning Wheel extract leaves me totally lost. I think it's explicit, but I find it very abstract - what priorities? What numbers? What am I actually supposed to do in this game?
Here are a couple that I like...
Dog Eat Dog
Dog Eat Dog is a game of colonialism and its consequences. As a group, you work together to describe the conquest of one of the hundreds of small islands in the Pacific Ocean, defining the customs of the natives and the mores of the outsiders arriving to claim it. One player then assumes the role of the Occupation force, playing their capable military, their quisling government, and whatever jaded tourists and shrewd businessmen are interested in a not quite pacified territory. All the others play individual Natives, each trying in their own ways to come to terms with the new regime. The game begins when the war ends. Through a series of scenes, you play out the inevitably conflicted relationship between the two parties, deciding what the colonizers do to maintain control, which natives assimilate and which run amok, and who ends up owning the island in the end.
(Emphasis mine.)
Monsterhearts
This is a story game. To play, we invent characters and roleplay as them. We say things, and the rules of the game respond to some of those things - changing where the story is going. The rules are there to keep the story feral - no matter how gorgeous and perfect we imagine our characters to be, they are never given the luxury of domesticating their fate. They are always in the lurch, which means they are always interesting. The rules are there to make sure that it isn't my story, and it isn't your story. Instead, it?s something between us, raw and alive. Specifically, it's a story game about supernatural romance and teenage desperation. Vampires, werewolves, witches: they dream and suffer among us. It?s unclear whether they can live among normal people, and whether their wicked hearts can be redeemed. When you play Monsterhearts, you become one of these teenage monsters. You explore their secrets and fears. You bring them to life.
This makes NJG go ""Game's Object" vs "Players' Jobs"?"
Am I getting confused between the game's object and the players' jobs? I found them a little hard to distinguish, when reading previous posts on this topic.
