thread: 2005-06-07 : Periodic Refresher
On 2005-06-08, Charles wrote:
Vincent,
While fictional stuff doesn't appear directly in the first diagram, there are two ways that it ties into that first diagram very strongly.
1) If we actually filled in the details of that diagram for a specific game, the fictional stuff would appear to the extent that the fictional stuff is part of the rules. Rules concerning the use of slayer powers would appear if we were detailing a Buffy game, but not if we were detailing a Dogs game.
2) In a related manner, the decisions about what rules to use will be influenced as much by fictional concerns as they will by player interests. While player concerns are very important in deciding what rules to use (Exalted didn't work for Thor, or AM for you or me, not because they didn't fit the fictional world, but because they didn't fit our play styles), fictional concerns are also extremely important. If you were playing D&D and got interested in playing court politics in the game, you would quickly find that D&D didn't do court politics very well, and you'd probably start jettisoning the written rules. Likewise, if your game of Breaking the Ice turned into a dungeon crawl, the Breaking the Ice rules probably wouldn't help very much and would get jettisoned.
I suppose you could describe both of those situations as being a failure of the rules to provide the style of play the players wanted (leaving out the fictional stuff from the description), but it seems to me that this elides the big distinction between "I want to run an Exalted-like game, but the Exalted rules don't do it for me," and "I don't think Breaking the Ice works very well for dungeon crawls." A player who enjoys both Breaking the Ice and D&D for their appropriate subject matter is in a different position than a player who just doesn't like Exalted.
Perhaps what you need is a diagram showing the interplay between the top diagram and the bottom diagram, showing how the bottom diagram has fingers that extend up into the top diagram (or at least into the penumbra around the top diagram that controls the feedback loops that allow the top diagramed structures to evolve).
But yes, the distinction between "game text" and "how we play", with "how we play" being the system, no matter how closely it resembles the game text, nor how completely lacking in game text we are, I totally agree on, and I think the distinction between ad hoc and principled is also useful.
I do think there is a significant blur between ad hoc and principled decision making, with a lot of "well, generally we'd handle that like this, but right now lets handle it like this instead" overlapping between the two, but as long as that blur is taken as read, I think the distinction is a useful one.
