thread: 2013-09-24 : What even IS the object of an rpg?
On 2013-10-01, Josh W wrote:
On your uncompromising opinion, can you play a savyhead without "things speak"?
Perhaps you could say it like this "player motivation and directed-ness is a non-negotiable component of a tabletop game, and if you're going to be designing anything, you have to be able to work with those interactions" - or if you're good and being clever, around or against them etc.
I think you can do this by trial and error, or by unconscious copying, but being able to interact directly with a text in advance of playing to do it is so much faster, especially if we are working on games that are longer form, or we're being conservative with our freinds' time and effort.
But yeah, basic tool, sometimes hard won.
It occurs to me that this kind of design understanding can completely stop designer led "mindfucks". You read the game text, and go "hang on I'm supposed to want to x, but you quite clearly are going to just y if I do that."
Supposing you want some of that, you can pull that off with GM only chapters/books, or assuming all of the books are just for the GM, and I'm sure some games somewhere have created "player only" books too. There's also games that mix up their text in odder ways, like D&D 3.5, which although it probably wasn't intended that way, is very good for playing weird games like that from a non-GM end, in that you can try to get a book brought into the group's rules cannon, used by a few people and then pull out content from it that sends things in a very different direction, requiring players to completely reinterpret their motivations towards the game.
A complete game text, open (and feasibly readable) to all, cuts out potential for that kind of confusion/deception about what the players are there to do, at least up to the limits of your group's ability to read designs. And conversely, a game that succesfully orients players to what's fun about it skips a whole load of analysis.
Now this is going further afield, but all roleplaying games that include future fiction into their system will be incomplete to some degree, and so many will be open to their object changing through player additions. I think that too is something you can effect in your design, the extent to which it diverges from itself in terms of motivation, or rolls back to the original line.
As a blunt example, just like you can have lines and veils and stuff to protect players, you can have lines and veils to protect the object of the game. In no chess game do people sign a peace treaty between white and black, that they will share the board and stick to "their own" coloured squares (sorry bishops), rpgs naturally open up possibilities like that in fictional content and it's relationship to broader context or in the rules that come from it. So groups will often skip out certain stuff that undermines their character's mission or the attitude the players take to that mission.
Conversly, games like sorceror find their object in finding out precisely how the core relationships of the game will break down, with the end game marking out the different ways that the original object has been voided in the case of this character.
