thread: 2006-01-13 : Push and pull aside, co-ownership
On 2006-01-13, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
(Not a tangent. Really).
I played my first session of Prime Time Adventures this week, and I loved it, and I really enjoyed the "we're all brainstorming for each other's characters" part. But there were also times when I would say to a fellow player, "This cool thing you said about your character—therefore this other cool thing! Please, please, do it!"....and they wouldn't do it. (At least not all at once). And I would be sitting there, smoking with pent-up excitement, wanting some mechanical way to make them do it, or at least to bribe them to do it.
(Part of this is my habituation as one of the world's two most experienced Capes players beside the designer, and I mean literally beside him, as in at the same gaming table).
The co-creating each other's character thing—we already do that all the time. Vincent's said as much. Even the "okay, so back in Jamaica, when my character knew this girl..." "Yeah, and my guy slept with her!" "Ouch! I like it!" happens all the time. We're not trying to invent that here.
What we're trying to do is create mechanical systems—especially (as Ron always repeats) reward systems—that make this kind of co-creation easy and natural.
This makes MSW go "PTA bribes"
Totally aside, but yeah, if fan mail flows like water, there are times when you want to award like three fan mail just to say how much you liked what happened. And that also makes it hard to use fan mail as that B-word that Vincent doesn't want us to talk about. If I'm already going to give it to you for this other thing, what leverage do I really have?
This makes LP go "Side point"
Sometimes, saying "Please do X" makes people decide they must not do X. The dynamics of this are a seperate thread.
