anyway.

---

---

thread: 2006-03-20 : Creating Situation: a practical example

On 2006-03-21, Sydney Freedberg wrote:

You would, you macho-Nar-pushy-yanger, you.

For the mystified: Vincent's (presumably) referring to my conclusion that "this experience suggests that 'Nobody Gets Hurt' is a fine philosophy but impossible to implement in Actual Play, precisely because two people of good will (i.e. no 'dickery' going on) can honestly disagree on what they want to happen and, without realizing it until it's too late, come to want incompatible things....real greatness depends on a willingness to get hurt—and, even, to inflict hurt."

I'd love to see what Meguey thinks, seeing as she discovered the distinction between "nobody gets hurt" and "I will not abandon you"—and seeing as she also wrote a whole essay on how an apparently quibbling creative difference came near to a game-breaking moment.

Personally, I think my desire for "strategic" mechanics linking here-now to everything-eventually is about wanting the possibility of being hurt: I don't want to have a subjective decision as a circuit-breaker between "I do this thing here and now" and "as a consequence, I lose what I love most in the big picture." It's also about wanting the risk of hurt to be systematized and depersonalized: If the here-now linkage to everything-eventually is subjective (Drama, structured or un-), then the person making that subjective decision—the GM in a traditional game, the whole group in Prime Time Adventures, my character's "underwriter" in the notional Ars Magica knockoff, whoever—is really on the spot and likely to flinch away from the "unsafe" outcome, deciding not to hurt me for pure social-decency reasons even if I'd honestly prefer it.

If I wanted to control the potential outcomes, then I'd go write a novel by myself. If I'm playing a game with other human beings, the greatness comes when I give up control and let them surprise me, and themselves.

---

---

---

---

---

---