RE: Re: Scenarios

From: Matthew Cole <matthew.cole_at_...>
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:16:04 -0000


even though I agree on the indictment "endless debate" I feel you deserve a response

 Laurent: you have sounded more like opting out for another approach, one which now even you admit is explicitly brought up as an option in the rulebook, is *wrong*.  

-then I erred bigtime from my own intention.

 me:

>I think that the ideal person to start playing HQ2 is someone who hasn't
>done roleplaying before. I think the problem that you, Trotsky and I are
>having is that we have all this trad RPG baggage that makes us think 
we need such things as numbers.
 LC:
A counter argument would be that we would like people who already like RPGs to play as well, rather than having to only recruit new players.  

LC:
a system can be capable of supporting more than one creative agenda,  

The aforementioned Marvel Super Heroes, for example. You could play quite Sim. You could also play quite Gamist  

>Whether or not you can play one agenda
>with some kind of flavour of another is not altogether relevant, IMO.

Umm... why? It seems to be what people are asking about.

> We have cathartic experience of these problems in our gaming group. LC: I don't even know what this means.  

 me:
- published rules need to give clear indication of how they should be used
in order to get the designed outcome. we are not all game designers and do not all have the ability to see how rules affect the experience.

 LC: But most of us DO have a decent of idea of how we like to play.  

For example (and this is not all with me running games, it's with two other narrators in the same group too):
When we got HW we played it just like we were playing RQ3 and had no idea why we were experiencing problems. This carried on until one of us started reading game theory and found out that we were confusing our agendas, that HW was designed to be a story game instead. I'm not saying this fixed things overnight but it did show us that we needed to change our modus operandi. This change is still ongoing and has been pretty hard (hence the aforementioned catharsis in the learning curve).  

me:
 >I'd hazard a guess that most people can't read rules and see how they will impact the overall experience. I find it pretty darned mind-bending.  LC:
You are not everyone.
- are you implying that I'm in the minority? I'd like to think so but from
what I read online in terms of people's struggle to do so, I find that hard to believe. I've observed that most people opt out of any game theory discussion altogether.

>Parting shot: it's the people with the baggage that are having the problems learning the new ways. these new ways are not hard to learn, they are just hard to convert to. I have two new players in my group and they took to it like the proverbial duck  

Remember that bit I said about zealotry? That whole last bit has that sound. "I have discovered the true way, and you should convert. It is only the baggage of your past lives that keep you from understanding the revelation this book has brought."  

First off, a lot of those elements were there in HQ1 to unlearn.    

Secondly, "this game is for new people, if you have previous RPG baggage, you will have difficulty" doesn't seem very inviting to people who have played a long time, since those are presumably people one wants to still buy products.  

Thirdly, the complaint isn't "We don't understand HQ2, it scares and confuses our old RPG brains that have spent so long in the heresy of Simulationism", it's "We liked this system. It is being revised, and in its revision, it is removing something that we find useful and practical from all future supplements. Now, to play in the world we like (Glorantha) we will have two choices of games, both of which will require converting the published material into a form we can find useable, which makes our lives more difficult." (At least, this is how I seem to read it.) And this seems particularly annoying to people who see accommodating their needs (numbers/benchmark) as quite simple.  

I'm sorry to have caused to passionate a reponse - I was only trying to help.      

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