thread: 2006-03-08 : Between-session Activity
On 2006-03-09, John Laviolette wrote:
How's this?
Collaborative play = Game
Non-Collaborative play = Pastime
Pastimes can be enjoyable and are also useful, even if not later incorporated into the game. Think of it as a learning arena. You could make ten characters, ten towns, ten worlds before you feel you've learned enough to make something that's going to click in a collaborative setting.
What I'm reading as the general desire, here, is to improve the "learnability" of a game design so that the amount of required non-collaborative play is as small as possible. That's one angle.
The other angle, relating to splinter groups and big groups, is that, despite the identification of the big game as "the game", it's really non-collaborative, for the most part. Another pastime, this time at a higher level than where the game occurs. For example, when a hundred people buy a gameworld book and read it, they are participating non-collaboratively in a pastime to select arenas of interest within the overall setting, so that they can find other players interested in the same arenas and begin a game. Again, the general desire here seems to be to reduce the required learnability of this "meta-pastime" so that the required time to select good arenas is as short as possible.
I see both of these angles as the same problem, but on different levels (single-player pastimes and community-level pastimes.) One possible solution to both is the previously-discussed concept of generating Setting Color on the fly through procedural rules, instead of creating trivial details for hundreds of facets of the game arena beforehand.
An example: instead of recording personality traits for every person in a city, record the traits for three or for regions of the city, or three or four social classes. ("East enders are stubborn, nobles are sadistic".) When dealing with an individual, assume those traits to start, but allow, say, a majority of 1s on a die pool roll for the first interaction of a given type to indicate a more positive or more negative trait related to that kind of interaction. "Oops, you failed to bribe Sir Boris, and I rolled mostly 1s; he's Honest." "You successfully persuaded Lord Marcus to finance your expedition, and I rolled mostly 1s; he's Generous."
