thread: 2014-05-24 : Games that Take Off, Games that Don't
On 2014-05-27, David Berg wrote:
Nice! I like that way of putting it—"the crucial moment". I'm always staggering through that with my local group—I look at a game, get excited, want to play it, but then it becomes clear to me that either my friends won't be interested, or that getting them interested would take too much work on my part.
Sometimes it's because I can't quickly get a handle on all the rules and take that burden off the players. Other times it's because the player responsibilities are outside my friends' comfort zone. Then there are the games whose appeal is more procedural than fictional—"check this neat dice mechanic" is a perfect way to pitch a game to me, but my friends care more about "What's the genre, what's the setting, and who do I get to play?"
The games that succeed have to pass the following checkpoints in roughly this order:
1) Pitch—what's this game's unique identifier?
2) Genre?
3) Setting?
4) What character do I play?
5) What does my character do?
6) What mechanics do I use?
7) How many sessions, and how much commitment to attend, are required?
8) Is there another game I want to play more?
So, as facilitator, I need to have reasonable confidence about getting through this list before I'll pitch a game. Similarity to what's worked before definitely breeds confidence. That's frustrating for a neophile like myself, but it's what I have to work with.
I'm not sure how typical my group's preferences are, but one takeaway might be that, if there's a game which answers those 8 questions quickly and clearly in language that I can borrow when pitching it, then that game has a massive leg up on other games that lack those qualities. Beyond that, I dunno—"make settings, characters, situations and mechanics that people want to play with", I guess.
This makes VB go "+1"
Makes sense to me!
