thread: 2006-01-05 : I suspect but can't prove...
On 2006-01-06, Joshua Kronengold wrote:
I don't get it.
Why start of a perfectly reasonable topic—the question of what variations are reasonable (or present) in player/character identification and control—with a firestarter off-hand comment like the one on GM-control. Everway is still my favorite game (and OTE mys second favorite)—not despite minimal rules, absolute GM control and responsibility, and players-only-control-their-characters aspects, but because of them. Limiting most players to describing character actions creates an unparalleled sense of immersion. Making other trade-offs can produce a more collaberative gestalt, or whatever, but no given point is broken or stultifying. Certain specific games are broken, not the whole idea. Locking RPGs into one mode of thought is wrong, but not broken; it's an idea, not a system.
That said, yes, having widened character-player roles into quasi-GMs—forced to take a story-level view of events at least some of the time, the natural next step is to break open player-character identification (in fact, it's long since started, with Capes, Polaris, etc). It's worth keeping in mind the reasons for the meme—that if you're roleplaying the character—improving—rather than just describing his or her actions, it's very disconcerting for someone else to muck with his—your—inner state. Much more so than to introduce game-facts that impact the landscape indirectly. That said...well, going into third person-mode is a much greater imposition to character identification and immersion than second-party insertion ever is.
I do think that going too far along this road moves things away from the "rpg" label (in the same direction that the Laws "New Style" games did) and out into a more general category of story-making games where collaberative writing, murder mystery games, and Once Upon a Time live. But there's nothing wrong with that—a category is a descriptor, not a straightjacket.
