thread: 2014-08-30 : AW:Dark Age playtest preview: Peoples
On 2014-08-30, gk230 wrote:
On one hand, you refer to real world languages and, (meguey says) while not a specific year under a specific king, how things generally looked like in the historical ?dark? ages. On the other hand, you have things with changed names which seem to tell me that this is not the dark ages.
In addition to this inconsistency (at least it looks like one to me, I'm sure you have thought about this long and decided on it based on good reasons), something else about this does not capture me yet. I suspect it might be a mixed signals in terms of what to expect, because usually I seem to either like games where I can dive in deeply, and actually experience How Life Is for the characters. In those games, I like game text that helps me explore these things, so some amounts of descriptions and rules are nice. Or alternatively I like everybody to heavily participate in world building and story generation, defining many things on the fly. In those games, I love good guidelines on how to make the collaboration fun, and meta-guides when I should throw the guidelines overboard.
This game seems to speak to both these sides, giving me both details I want to immerse myself in (A clan of displaced Celts? How does their language sound? Did the Romans move whole families or did Celtic auxiliars marry local women or sth? What are their legends? How do I best interact with them?) and questions of flavour I need to answer myself (I intend to recruit some people from this village, so how do I make a people that feel right for me going there to recruit, and for living in this particular place?) ? but somehow in a way that doesn't make me go ?Yay, the right game for both my preferences in games?, but instead post this long wall of text about my doubts. (This is somewhat related to the first remark, because a familiar name somehow tells me that I should deal with how it ?really? is, and not make up stuff.)
So I feel I would be more enthusiastic if the specific world were either more veiled or more explicit. But I'll definitely play this anyway ? after all, I have sometimes seen that the right type of game makes me want to play it lots, even though I did not initially dig the setting description. And also the opposite.
