thread: 2005-11-14 : Long and Short
On 2005-11-15, Ninja Monkey J wrote:
I've been promised an AP post about the first ever multi-session game of Under the Bed. I'm very, very curious about the outcome.
Shock:, of course, is designed for large-scale play. It also makes you decide to end your character's story, even end your character, but still have things take place in the world you've created; you can have new stories, new characters, and new themes, without losing your ever-developing metaphor.
Joshua, you're 90% incorrect about the development cycle of Forge-gestated games forcing short-term play. It's just that they get to the point, already, unlike so many others, and they recognize their limitations.
GURPS is a good example of a game that doesn't recognize this limitation. When your character gets to be about 250 points (that number could be wrong; I don't remember what I noticed exactly), the only time a die roll matters is when you roll a critical failure or success: 4% of the time, if I recall. It's a similar problem to Dogs, where the characters get too powerful for the statistics of the game to really matter. But in Dogs, you have a way out. You can leave your character behind, start with some free dice for stats, and make a new dude. The rules encourage that. Your protagonist's story ends, so the story ends, so you get a new protag and a new story.
Burning Wheel, Polaris, Shock:, PTA, they all support long-term play, but a) the rules of these games are efficient enough that they're not hard to learn, so b) it's easy to jump to a new story because c) the last one has ended in a satisfying way.
