thread: 2014-07-24 : The Trouble with RPGs (ii)
On 2014-07-24, PaulCzege wrote:
The reason I never published Acts of Evil is because players never managed to do what Jesse says, treat their characters as individuals who pursue curiosity about NPCs and situations and enjoy the journey. Instead they would just bomb into situations and beat out the minimum threshold of fictional details to trigger and advancement roll. Because everyone knew from the mechanics, even if I never said it explicitly, that the objective of the game was to advance quicker than the other players, be the one to achieve occult godhood, and then describe how everyone else meets their doom. And they played like this even though they knew it wasn't fun, and that it would be more fun to just enjoy roleplaying and occult craziness and see what happened.
And I couldn't have fixed the game by obfuscating the objective somehow or by including some text about how important it is to roleplay. There's no way to obfuscate it when the mechanics point to it so strongly. I toyed with the idea of making "roleplaying" part of the path. But that's not the solution. The solution is to make the winner less certainly determined by the working of the mechanics.
