thread: 2006-01-05 : I suspect but can't prove...
On 2006-01-09, TonyLB wrote:
Dang. Teach me not to religiously follow the Blogs. Now I'm posting stuff down in the seventies, and who knows if anyone will read it. Ah well ... such is the deserved suffering of my vanity.
I think there's a lot of ground hidden in here that people are conflating. I'll try to split out just one thing that I'm working on in Misery Bubblegum.
Say I'm playing Josie. She's a rock-star.
There's: "Who decides what Josie does?", and that question can be answered in many ways.
There's: "Who decides what Josie intends when she does something?", and that question can be answered in many ways.
Let's assume a game where decisions still follow the outside-the-skin rule, but intended-outcomes do not. Say that, for instance, Bob (fellow player) is holding the card labelled "Josie's Temper." Josie's having a set-to with her agent. The stakes are whether she gets creative control. I decide (as is my right) that she just completely loses it, and yells that she'll walk out over the issue.
And then I turn to Bob to find out what this does to the stakes (does the agent fold, or does Josie walk out into the cold, hard world without any representation?) Indirectly, this helps to tell me why Josie got angry. If her temper is established as consistently working against her then we have to start considering whether she's being self-destructive ... who is she really angry at? Is yelling at her agent really her secret way of hurting herself?
And here's the real kicker ... what if Bob's used temper against me the last five times. Do I moderate Josie's behavior on the sixth? What's more important to me, Josie getting what she wants or Josie being who she is? And if I don't get angry on the one time that Bob would have had it be helpful, what does that get him thinking?
