anyway.

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thread: 2006-03-22 : Mechanics and Flinching

On 2006-03-27, Vincent wrote:

Ron: Flinching vs. Shuddering.

So it's DaddyCon a couple of months ago. We're sitting down to play PTA about bootleggers (somebody who can still search the Forge forums from work, find "Quicksilver" and pop a link in marginalia, please?). It's me, Joshua, Clinton, Judd, and my local friend Tony Page. We've listed a bunch of characters we want in the show and we're talking about who'll play whom and what'll their issues be.

Clinton says that a) he's going to play the cop, b) the cop's gay, and c) the cop's lover is Tony's character the driver. I get all bouncy in my seat. I'm like, "yeah! and I'm going to play the boss' daughter! And I'm Tony's character the driver's girlfriend." And everybody's like, oh fuck.

There's me creating adversity for Clinton's and Tony's characters. If I'd flinched instead, maybe I would've said "...and I'm in love with Tony's character the driver," offering the adversity if they want it but not, y'know, making it be. I'd've respected their ownership of their characters and not impinged on their vision blah blah blah.

So that's my baseline for flinching - flinching prevents you, as a player, from doing what's called for.

Now on top of that we have these two levels of unsafety. Shuddering is all about perceiving the genuine unsafety of personal contact with challenging subject matter, right, so flinching away from THAT unsafety would be, for instance, White Wolf's denial and adolescent bogosity you talk about. You flinch to protect yourself from whatever it is made you shudder.

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