Tuesday 26 June 2007

Current Story-Games Goodness

Some things over on Story-Games that are provoking thought for me at the moment.

1. TonyLB (again), on second-order bribery. Tony's thing is, you set up a Key so that everyone at the table will want to cause things to happen that hit the Key. His example is someone who gets rewarded for defending authority. That means that the other players are going to be questioning authority (because that is bound to get your attention) and the GM is going to be introducing questionable authority (because that is bound to get everyone's attention). Rewarding a specific kind of behaviour that creates a dynamic. I think that's what he means.
2. Tony is also talking about conveying things narratively rather than instructionally, which has inspired me to do some "false document" stuff in my setting for Underground Railroad (I've started a thread to toss out some of my ideas, which so far isn't attracting any posts).
3. He's also discussing his idea of a card-based mechanism for controlling authority which might possibly – possibly – see use in the Pentasystem. Maybe.
4. Sydney Freedberg (in yet another of TonyLB's threads) is talking about setting creation by giving some examples of things that exist and some principles or algorithms that are generally operative that can generate more such elements, and letting it flow from there. It makes sense; if you have a clearly-defined character, you know what your character would do in a given situation even if you've not previously devoted any thought to it. Likewise with setting elements, surely.
5. Finally, Daniel Solis is talking about having actions that typically occur around your character, rather than your character having "powers" as such – for example, a fighter may get ambushed frequently. His ideas (he admits) need further baking, but they lead in intriguing directions. Especially when combined with number 1.

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