Sorry I'm late, here - I'm a landlord, and the opening to this month has been a complete bitch, among other things.
Closing arguments it is, then.
Much of this is revised from my "midway" arguments - apologies if that makes for boring reading.
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Roleplaying games combine gamelike and roleplaying elements into a unique whole.
Roleplaying games are much like what they sound like – there are elements of roleplaying, in a generally theatrical sense (but the bit about art not being special applies here too), and elements of gameplay like you’d find in a board or card game, and these things come together to form a unified thing distinct from it’s component parts. The gamelike components provide the real structure for the whole, and so it's often best for a designer to look more to those elements than others, and find ways that mechanics can stay out of the way of the actual roleplaying. Despite this, though, all roleplaying games provide at least slightly different fusions of these elements.
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Roleplaying Games create something that gives the same satisfaction as a good story; it's not a literary form, but story is the only word I have for it. But they aren’t for telling stories.
Every game creates stories, as a side effect if nothing else. People tell stories about their game experiences, reliving the moment; some of these stories can be good, or funny; some of them, you had to be there. They also sit back at the table now and then and think things generally like “That was really cool, story-wise”. That’s something some gamers want to explore further, and there are ways to do it.
But the first impulse of a lot of GMs when they meet this idea is to control the story so they can be sure that it’ll turn out ‘properly’. This is a mistake; if you want the story to turn out your way, go write it down. If you do it, you’ll take away the ability to make meaningful choices from the players and you’ll have to interfere with their ability to play their characters; this means that your game will have problems both as something to roleplay and as a game. If you want an RPG to act as an engine that works purely for the generation of collaborative stories, you’re likely going to push outside of the boundaries of what most people would consider a Roleplaying Game – it might be good, and RPG rules may be a good place to start, but you’re looking for a different creature than the one I’m talking about.
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Getting more ‘story’ from an RPG is simple.
You front-load, and you drive (I’ll define those in a second), and that’s all you really need to do. Going further than this can, again, carry your game outside of either “roleplaying” or “game” or both, and unless your players are with you in doing that, it’s best avoided. I’m going to talk about those two things for a moment.
Front-Loading: Front-loading is another way of saying that the group (sometimes the GM, sometimes the players, sometimes both together) builds a starting situation that focuses on the same stuff that the characters are focused on. Not only that, but this situation involves conflicts that the characters will be drawn into, but which could be resolved any number of ways. The person or people creating this situation should not know how things are going to turn out, only that conflict will always occur. This is just basic preparation – an evil army threatening the town where the characters live is some serious front-loading. The place where this turns into specifically story preparation is that a group (in this case, almost always the GM) can front-load elements that require choices from the characters – hard stuff that will give depth to the character no matter what they choose. Again, the creator shouldn’t have picked “right choices” out in advance, just created things that require those choices be made.
Driving: This may not be the best word for it, since ‘driving’ implies a degree of control that really isn’t involved. Driving is pushing the characters to make to those choices on their own, harder and harder, until they do, by adding intensity and requiring action based on each choice as play continues. This often requires that the GM bring on characters and events that hit those choices in new ways; this is the part that takes practice, because doing it ham-handedly produces artificial-feeling play.
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Every group has it’s own style of play.
No two players are the same – they have different attitudes, different past experiences, and sometimes want different things out of an RPG - some want more roleplay in their gaming, some want more gaming in their roleplay, some want more story, some want to get further “into character” than others. That’s just the nature of what happens when you get people together. But if they play together, they start to balance out a singular style of play between them that works for them. This group style includes how they use the mechanics of the game, the things they agree on as other rules, and even the social structures that exist between them when they sit down at the table.
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Games influence style.
Every actual game book out there has its own slant – the writers had at least some of the elements that make up a style of play, however loosely or firmly conceived, in mind when they wrote it. These are passed on to the players in a variety of ways.
First, and most obvious, a game book has advice in it that talks about how to run the game. Some games go on at length about how to get just the game you want from the rules, working to accommodate different playstyles. Others give the reader a solid impression of the kinds of play the creators had in mind, but also talk about adjusting it to get what you like. And still others (though not that many) describe a single, tightly focused style that the game is “fine-tuned’ for.
Second, and either more or less obviously, a game shows you what it’s about in the presentation of the material itself. If it has a lot of art, that can be pretty obvious. Even if it doesn’t, examples of play given in a book speak to the style, as do descriptions of the various smaller bits of “how you do things”.
Third, the actual physical components of a game can have an impact. If the game requires big piles of dice or miniature figures, its best played at an actual table, which can change the group dynamic to something less casual than just sitting around a living room.
And finally, the characters you can build, the various components of them, and the specific kinds of rules-based fun that you can get from those components, all speak to the style. If there are detailed rules on some specific thing, and players engange with those often and enjoyably, the game will be drawn to those things more often, making the game more “about” those things.
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Making things happen means sharing a vision.
This one is a little out of left field, but I'm convinced that it's true.
You've talked about the things that you think need to happen in gaming, I've talked about what I think, and we've found more common ground here than most people ever really thought we would.
I think that there's a vision of gaming, a real, positive, and realistic thing, that you're looking for, despite the consistantly negative image you put out there. And I think that you're in the habit of sniping in places where you should be building up, just as I'm in the habit of building up in a few places where I might do better shaking things off.
So let me give you a bit of advice on building up, if I may, and you can give me a bit of advice on tearing things down, if you're in the mood to do so. We've already both learned a fair bit here; why not a bit more?
Everyone shows off something about who they are that is really cool. Speak to that, and share with them a vision of the coolness that they have, plugged into something larger, and they will always respond to that, even if they don't show it. If you engage with the best things in people, then their best is what you get; if you engage with the worst things about them, then you get the worst parts of them. And if you make a habit of engaging them in one way, then you'll regularly get those same parts of them.
People are good. Let them show you.