thread: 2005-11-10 : Open House: Ask a Frequent Question...
On 2005-11-11, Vincent wrote:
Kip: Do you see what I mean?
Well, maybe.
I have a couple guesses, but I hesitate to make them; they seem too provocative to me. Like I'm putting you up to something when I'm not, really.
Promise me you won't take them confrontationally and read on!
I guess that you mean that playing a game without investing in it, playing a game on a Saturday afternoon, is too dangerous to even try.
Or else I guess that you mean that playing a game by its rules, not by the techniques you've developed yourselves, is too dangerous to even try.
Am I in the neighborhood? There's some reason you don't just say "hey [insert a couple random friends], wanna see what's up with these Forge games? Come over after dinner on Friday, let's give [insert random Forge game] a go."
This makes CS go "Questions of time"
Not to speak for Kip, but I'm in exactly the same situation, so:
the amount of time we manage to devote to gaming in the ongoing campaign is roughly as much time as we can manage to devote to gaming. Time taken to do other games is time taken away from the ongoing game. On going games need to be played regularly, or they lose most of their power. Because of the common issues of gamers that have led so many people to abandon ongoing campaigns for short games, our game is just inside the boundary of still having that power. Shift some of our sessions into other forms of play, and we could easily push the ongoing campaign beyond the edge into unsatisfying. (we just did that to Becca's game, which had plenty of issues, but also fell to having only 2 sessions in 4 months, and was no longer enjoyable as a result).
Now that Becca's game is dead (in which Kip and I both played), the chance of us actually playing Dogs or Polaris or Bliss Stage on a Saturday night some time goes way up.
As you've upped your play of short games, has your play of the onrunning notArs Magica game become more or less frequent? Has the play during those sessions become more powerful or less powerful? My guess from what little evidence I have is that they have become less frequent, I'm not sure on the more or less powerful question, so I'm actually interested to hear your answer on both questions, and don't merely intend them rhetorically
This makes KM go "Indeed."
"Dangerous." Loaded word. Then, so was "invest." Touche. --What Chas. says, yes yes: my gaming energy (beyond the perverse bit which still buys Traveler 2300 sourcebooks because I like having bits of worlds I've never been to littering the bookshelves) is pretty much focussed on the Known World. Dogs in the Vineyard? I'm jazzed, yes, but the likelihood I'd ever actually play it went up when it was suggested we adapt it to playing out stories of traveling Judges visiting the neighboring Gaetani villages. Polaris could be a keen way to explore the creation of the Gaetani myth-religion, in the dim days before the coming of Love and Reason. Etc. --The intensely concentrated experiences generated by engines like Dogs and Polaris seem to be a highly effective solution to a pernicious gaming problem--how to I get to the Good Stuff right out of the box?--but I worry that the digressive pleasures of the journey are lost in leaping straight to the destination; I worry that other possibilities are excluded by such focus. (Of course they are.) But maybe the baby I'm worried about is too hard to extract from the bathwater; maybe I'm fooling myself, and fretting over a baby that isn't there at all. Or maybe I'm just waiting for somebody to Forge up Aria. I dunno.
This makes BL go "Polaris"
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand, as such, but Polaris is set at the north pole of your fantasy world. So you might as well use it as such.
