thread: 2014-07-15 : Procedure, Components, Object, Strategy, Style
On 2014-07-16, Moreno R. wrote:
@Vincent: Oh, yes, but it's more difficult to find good examples. When something doesn't work, when someone do something at the table that is ruining your fun, it's easy to notice. When everything work, instead, I usually am so "in the moment" that I can't tear myself from the game enough to think about how the pieces are working.
Probably it's a consequence of my total lack of interest in designing games myself: it's like with my car, I am not interested in understanding WHY it work, the important thing is that it works...
But thinking about it, I have a "positive" example of style over rules, that I noticed precisely because there was something that was not working.
We were playing Annalise, with a new player added at the last minute (I met him literally during the first session). His only experiences were very traditional rpgs, and Annalise is not a simple game for people who never played a GMless rpg before, so I had some doubts about it, but he was a friend of another player that specifically wanted to try that game that his friend had described to him in enthusiastic terms.
And, as I suspected, he had a lot of difficulties with the game procedures, I had to remind him how the rules for Moments worked in every single scene, he never remembered how he could use Claims (and he had taken very few of them), etc.
Truth to tell, I was not very happy about his presence at the table when these difficulties did slow down the game to a crawl when it was his turn, but then.... I did choose him as the Guide for the next scene for my character, because he was the only one who had not played as a Guide at that point... and he did frame the scene, and play the NPC, demonstrating a clear understanding of the aesthetics at the table, and making these NPC really interesting characters.
I was much more relaxed afterwards. Because, as I wrote in the previous comment, usually the problems at the table are about style. The procedures can be learned, playing the game. Difference in style are much more difficult to overcome.
He never did really master the rules of Annalise, in the few sessions of the game duration, but he got better, and even with these procedural problems, I think that everybody enjoyed the game very much. And now he is a regular player in our group.
Is this positive enough? :-)
