I'm writing from New Zealand, where Monday will be Labour Day. Long-weekend augments the Friday effect on philosophical discussions.
> > And why is it so tempting to create a society and then place
> > characters
> > outside it? Is this just the role-playing dilemma of getting
> > players started
> > in a world where they don't know the social rules?
>
> Because interesting characters are those with conflict built in? And
> being "outside" society in some way is both a cause and a result of
> conflict?
Yet there are plenty of conflicts within society that lend themselves to gaming if the players know the society well enough to figure out appropriate actions and responses. That's a big "if", though, so it's common to introduce players to a society either from the perspective of characters who are encountering it for the first time or by getting the players to read fiction set in the society.
(Fiction is a hugely useful guide into a world. In gameplay I never much cared about how one character's hair was braided or whether her marriage bracelets rattled, but in fiction you can squeeze both realism and symbolism from that level of detail. Once that information is out there it becomes part of the shared world. A vignette about my then-aspiring-to-be-Vingan spying on the clan's (Humakti) champion while he did "the cuts which divide night from day" has led to a world where one of the aspirations of a young rural Humakti is to take part in the massed dawn kata in the arena of Humakt's temple in Nochet.)
Cheers,
Jennifer
-- Jennifer Geard
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