anyway: post a comment

On 2010-02-17, Gregor wrote:

OK, when I think back to early games that I played a lot of (Red Box D&D and Dragon Warriors) there was I think a lot of Positioning for our characters. We were a party of fighters and thieves with the odd magic user or demi-human. We had character classes and obligations that came with them, and expectations of what we were supposed to do (in the party and in the imagined game world). I also think the Positioning between our characters was pretty coherent. Our characters "fit" together if that makes sense? That maybe lasts up to 1992, when I finished running Cyberpunk and a long campaign of Pendragon.

Then I chose to play games where Positioning had become less clear, more haphazard, and when it did exist it was incoherent between characters (it wasn't thumping to the same beat). The characters didn't fit easily together. In those games I can clearly see where our characters had (often "balanced") Resource and Effectiveness, and the games had often detailed mechanics for linking those two. But Positioning didn't relate to those two things well (if at all), and what positioning characters did have varied widely in content and tone.

In the place of Positioning we perhaps had colour, but it wasn't the colour that informed or affected anything in the fiction, really. ("Colour" that could do that would have had to be a Resource or Effectiveness in those games.) Does that make sense?

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anyway.