thread: 2013-10-02 : The GM: Holding the Object for the Group
On 2013-10-07, Dom wrote:
I've answered your question before. It's not legit because it's not measurable. What I mean by that is: play session needs a sense of direction. You can't measure or even approximate whether you've moved from the starting point unless you can measure your progress. And you mark your progress along the direction axis. Is my advantage in chess greater than 5, 10, 20 moves ago? Did I pass any level in SMB in the last 10 minutes? Did I proceed towards the goal during the last RPG session? If not, my time seems wasted.
Where the problem may be, I just realized, is that I find it hard to distinguish object of a game from the object of a character (or group of characters). These are different things, sure, but they should support each other. Giving the game object as vague as "see what you do with the world" doesn't really validate the tools you're providing with your game. The other way I would put this would be: unless the object of the game suggests possible objects for the characters, it's too vague.
AW provides great tools validating a nice range of characters' objects but I fail to see how it validates game's object (I assume you're referring to the 4th page of the cover). You've written in another thread:
"Choose your favorite RPG. What?s the object of the game? What tools does the game give you? Do they make achieving the object of the game easy or hard, certain, unlikely, or impossible?"
What I find with AW is that the tools provided make it moderately hard and definitely entertaining to make achieving of the characters' object possible. Post-apo "choose your own adventure book" would also provide tools for making something out of the world. It'd be limited by author's imagination (and page count) but so are RPG sessions.
