[Wild Talents] Same page survey for Aberrant game

[watergoesred]

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And the pattern continues...

At first I thought this just repeating question 1 (i.e. importance of winning). I can see parallels, insofar as keeping your character alive is a solid way to "win" some games. But right now I can see this question has a little more depth.

[Trithemius]

... excusing this with "I'm just playing my character".

This is a personal peeve of mine. And by peeve I mean that it sends me into a rant-spiral far more easily than most other things. Not that sending me into a rant-spiral is really very hard.

Okay... I said that more bitterly than I expected. Hmmm...

No bitterness need be deemed to much in response to this sort of behaviour! Although maybe it shouldn't be applied to hypothetical instances with such gusto?

[watergoesred]

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Aaah, here's a meaty one. Well maybe...

I mean, the spread in responses could make no practical difference if the rules are good enough at making a decent story or fitting the genre or feel of the game. But I'm partial to discussions of rules so I'm going to indulge in assuming the discrepancy means something.

So one question to ask is should the rules be followed in a situation that the rules are designed to cover. It strikes me that if this question is being seriously considered, then the players must not trust that the rules can deliver them fun. I guess this could be a pragmatic approach: we'll consider rules as just another tool to make a game more fun. They do not have to be strictly followed; follow them when it's fun and don't when it's not. I guess the attitude could be what ever works, right.

It seems, however, that the pragmatic approach is just following another rule: only do something if you consider it fun in the moment. It's kinda of hedonistic in that way. Go where the pleasure is and flee where the pain is.

That's interesting because sometimes hedonism isn't enough. I mean, sometimes I want a game to confront me, to create situations and force decisions that I don't want to have to deal with. Funnily enough, that reminds me of chores that "build character", like cleaning the pool and earning your first wage. In a game, it's at these points where hard choices have to be made that characters are forged. So call me masochist but sometimes I follow rules in games because they hurt what I care about.

Or maybe I don't trust myself enough to always rise to the challenge, to take the hard route, to bite the bullet and be a bastard. Maybe I can't help being "nice", even if that cuts short the heights of awesome the game could reach.

Now, let's see if I can salvage something from this rather tangential rant. Hmmm, how about these responses suggest to me that the players either don't all trust the rules or don't trust themselves to make the game as fun as it can be. I recommend dancing and MDMA.

[watergoesred]

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And the last question. Hmmm... the spread isn't extreme yet driving a PC to betray the others could cause some upset. Player versus player can be a magnet for trouble if everyone isn't onboard with it.

[Trithemius]

And the last question. Hmmm... the spread isn't extreme yet driving a PC to betray the others could cause some upset. Player versus player can be a magnet for trouble if everyone isn't onboard with it.

Where is the variant on #3 where you talk to everyone, not just the GM?

[Narayan]

At first I thought this just repeating question 1 (i.e. importance of winning). I can see parallels, insofar as keeping your character alive is a solid way to "win" some games. But right now I can see this question has a little more depth.

The more I think about these questions, the more I consider that they'd be better used in the context of a group trying to decide what kind of game and system to play, right from the outset. This question is a good example of that. Some systems emphasise that the player should make wise choices to ensure that their character survives. This is fairly typical in "deathtrap dungeon" games, where the game would be littered with puzzles for the players, through the lens of their PCs, to solve. Quite simply, if you made a bad choice the system would punish you. There is a certain skill, I think, in playing games this way that can only be learned through playing them.

However, this isn't the case with most other games. Most of the time, PC survival is de-emphasised over things like story. A good example is Call of Cthulthu, where the system itself is intentionally toxic to the PCs. The more exposed a certain PC becomes to occult features in the game, the closer she gets to becoming unplayable and the object of the game is to investigate occult happenings. From a "PC survivalist" point of view, this is self-defeating - why play a game where the more you play, the more chance of your PC dying or suffering some other horrific fate? But the emphasis is on the story here - the group is interested in what else the PC can achieve, if survival is more or less off the cards.

A game were PC survival isn't even a concern is pretty rare, but a lot of collaborative systems like Dirty Secrets and In A Wicked Age have trappings of this. In Dirty Secrets, there is only one protagonist who is central to the game - every other character is secondary and their survival is not a concern. Because players can rotate between playing different characters, everyone still gets the chance to advocate for a character - just not a character that is "theirs". While players get assigned characters in In A Wicked Age, there is no guarantee that a character will return for another session, or even survive. Indeed, the We Owe mechanic is a nifty method of determining which characters continue on in the game and which don't.

So, what I am saying is that this question is highly dependent on what kind of system the group wants to use. If everyone chose answer three for Wild Talents, I'd say we might be using the wrong system, given that it took us two and a half sessions to make characters. Luckily, they didn't, so I am off the hook for that one!