Although I basically agree with the intention, I feel we should think carefully about the benefits that the old systems offered, lest we end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are two particular babies that I want to discuss.
Simplicity
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The fact that two humans, a troll, a duck and a dwarf could wander round the countryside killing baddies and collecting treasure, with little care about delicate issues such as ecology, economics or society, is often cited as a weakness. I believe it is a strength.
The issue hinges on whether you believe that human beings like you and I
really can fully role play exotic creatures in an exotic world. I don't
believe you can, which is why I think it's important to have a number of
"filters" to take away world detail, until what's left is something you
can role play within.
This recognition of our own imaginative limitations is best illustrated by thinking about something closer to home - e.g. the sinking of the Titanic. I expect a number of us have tried to imagine what it must have been like to be on that boat, or on a life boat after the Titanic sunk. We may believe we could decide what we would have done in that desperate situation - though survivors of that disaster would tell us you can't possibly know until it happens to you.
Can you also really imagine what it must be like to be in love with someone (someone that you're not already in love with)? You can go through the motions of exibitting the right symptoms, but can you really generate powerful feelings of love inside you? Dont you find that when you are suddenly in the grip of strong emotion, you behave unpredictably?
So try to imagine role playing somebody in love on board the sinking Titanic, and you know you're likely to get it wrong - by which I mean the things you do in the role playing environment will probably not be what you would have done were the situation real. If you tried really hard to get it right I think you would have to expend so much mental effort with every movement you made that your role playing experience would grind to a halt. Accepting the limitation of our imperfect imaginations is the first, and probably most fundamental, "detail" that we filter out. It allows role playing to be playable.
As the characters that we play, and the situations and worlds that they find themselves in, become further removed from our own, we need to put more and more filters in place. Eventually we are ignoring a sufficient amount of the "true" nature of the world around us to allow us to play within it without needing an extra brain.
The traditional slice'n'dice RPG approach had a great many filters
present. So many, in fact, that it could never be thought of as much
more than a game. Still there was enough left unfiltered for role
playing to take place, since it is never possible to filter out
"people", i.e.other PCs. Interaction with the world might have been
pretty lame, but interaction between PCs was extremely rich. Perhaps it
was unrealistically rich because so much world detail had been filtered
out. You certainly found out who your friends were when you went hacking
down some dungeon together, and you found out a lot about yourself too -
e.g. how you deal with other (awkward) people in stressful situations.
Taking away some of these filters in order to add an extra dimension to our game is a good idea - for people who are ready for it. However it's also important to understand why they were there in the first place and what their benefits are. There's also no point getting too snobby about this. We remove some of our filters because we want to experience different things about our game. We can't go the 'whole hog'. This isn't an argument between realism and gaming - it's all a game. We each of us choose what bits we want to experience and what we want filtered out. I personally feel that the richest interactions we have are with other players, and the super-filtered world systems of early gaming suited this extermely well. We probably only need to start removing filters when we start getting bored of each other - but I guess it's a matter of taste.
Las Vegas
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It's easy to look down on a lot of dice rolling as a way of stupefying role play, and there does seem to be a trend in trying to minimise their use. Let me highlight a very non-role-playing aspect of dice rolling in our games - Gambling.
We may have called it rolling to hit a monster, or to cast a spell, or to get DI, or to see what wandering monster turned up, it was still basically gambling. Indeed there were times when we gambled our lives on the roll of a dice.
Crazy? Probably, but then gambling is. Stimulating and exciting? Certainly, but then gambling is that too.
Gambling is a strong narcotic. Embedded, somewhat hidden, within our games it played an important part in giving us that adrenalin rush which we felt when our fate hung in the balance and only lady luck was playing a hand. I feel this single factor has been most responsible for RPGs popularity, and I think any system which tries to do without the Gambler's fix is going to lose a powerful ally.
Furthermore, I can't see how the move away from dice rolling to
"outcomes by consensus" helps a storytelling GM approach. If that was
the case then we would be able to differentiate between "good" stories
and "bad" ones depending on what happens in them. Can that really be the
case? Is the substance of the story really a mark of its quality, or is
it the way that it's told that matters? I think heroic failures are
probably more interesting than heroic successes.
My motto would be: "Let the dice add the spice. Weave your stories around the outcome."
People often criticise the achievement value of successfully rolling dice, but this is a double edged sword. Any achievement in RPGs is suspect - try explaining your latest conquest to someone not into fantasy gaming and you'll know what I mean. RPGs aren't real life. If your character has achieved something in the game without rolling dice then you, as a player, have succeded in bringing to a satisfactory conclusion a conversation with your fellow man. This is fine stuff, but rather more modest than the achievement of your character, who may, say, have wooed a beautiful Lunar princess. If you succeeded as a result of rolling dice, *after* you had a long conversation with your fellow man, then you additionally coped with the uncertainty of the situation and the prospect of failure. Argueably you achived more, and because the situation was uncertain you might have felt something close to the real-life thrill of waiting to hear whether "she would say yes".
The Gambling buzz is just the uncertainty buzz after all, and for some reason, when there is real doubt of outcome, the rewards seem so much sweeter. And RPGs are not the only place where people extrapolate great achievements from a few lucky breaks.
Accepting that gambling is part of your game carries considerable implications for the GM - and I think this has been greatly responsible for my disputes on subjects like THE Glorantha, Blank Balastor, Complete Campaigns, and so on. If you are bookie, as well as story teller, then you need to make sure you're giving the right odds, dishing out the right rewards, giving the right challenges. Your needs from published materials change.
Talking about gambling and bookies and odds might seem strange in the context of RPGs, and the system does break down when you feel that basically this is all you're doing. It is the successfull combination of story telling and gambling which I think holds the key to a good RPG experience.
I don't think we should kick out the gambling side of our RPGs, or the detail filtering. I think it's great to examine and change their influence on what we do, but we should always remember their benefits as well as their restrictions.
Richard
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Richard Develyn Tel: (UK)-1732-743591 Principal Architect / Development Manager Fax: (UK)-1732-743597 Network People International http://www.nwpeople.com ------------------------------
End of The Glorantha Digest V5 #547
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