Return of the Revenge of the Bride of Old Stuff Day (From 20,000 Fathoms?)
Old Stuff Day has rolled around again, and if there’s one thing it’s made clear to me, it’s that I had too much time on my hands this time last year.
Anyway, here we are again, plunging elbow-deep into the foul brown dishwater of the past, rummaging around in a desperate search for the shiny silver spoons that we know are in there SOMEWHERE. I’ve got three, one for each year that the blog’s been going:
The first Meta Gaming post I did, everything within which still holds true. The more things change, the more they stay the same…
My first contact with WFB.8, in which presentiments of doom (and missing my Vampire Counts) are already stirring. I still haven’t decided how I feel about it.
And finally, a post about how I think RPG world-building should work, i.e. don’t weigh it down with encyclopaedic cruft and don’t be afraid to show your work.
Happy Old Stuff Day, folks!
A nice selection Von. I’d missed the meta gaming post. Cheers.
Frontline Gamer
Friday 2nd March, 2012 at 12:33 PM
This might end up being a post over at my place, but in building a setting; must the idea strictly be mechanical or strictly a rehash of something else? I don’t believe this at all. I’m endeavoring to build something that can’t be described with charts or mechanical explanations- but explaining why doesn’t make a lot of sense out loud. I’m working on this part too- and there’s a LOT of work to be done.
loquacious
Monday 5th March, 2012 at 12:57 AM
A few things to say here. When reading, the ‘you’ should be taken as plural throughout – I’m talking about People Who Aren’t Me rather than Specifically Lo.
One: I misrepresented my point of view a little (and used the ghastly ‘should’). I’m of the opinion that how you build your world for your table doesn’t matter to me at all – I’m not there so I don’t get to tell you how to have fun. However, how you present your world as a product for me to be interested in does matter. I see far, far too many big fat fantasy encyclopaedias full of big fat facts of a kind I’m not interested in knowing about the real world, never mind somewhere where I choose to go for fun, and furthermore are largely detached from the considerations, terms and functions of Actual Play. If something is detached from Actual Play, why does the prospective GM/player need to know it?
Yes, there are things that can only be represented in abstract terms, but we’re back to Your Table and My Table now. The abstracts that exist and can be represented at your table can’t be expected to carry across to mine, so your published (i.e. ‘made public’, not necessarily ‘professionally printed and for sale’) material can’t depend on those non-communicable abstracts which simply might not exist for me, or for A. N. Other end-user. And I am of the opinion that anything that’s really important can be internalised into or derived from game mechanics by an intelligent reader/player, if they just think about what they read.
Two: I wouldn’t use the term ‘rehash’ myself, it’s loaded with the assumption that neither process nor product has any merit. I do believe that ‘creativity’ is largely ‘rearranging things that inspire me and filtering them through my unique thought and sense processes to make things that are not the same as other things’, though, c.f. Lawrence Lessig. Nobody makes stuff up out of nothing; everything is experiential, everything is shaped, everyone has something in the chair with them when they create.
I’m more interested in that process of What You Read and How You Thought About It and how that created What You’ve Made than I am in population charts, principal exports and imports, bad fake elf poetry and the other tedium that people insist on cludging their RPG supplements with. The first one shows me how to be a good GM. The second one shows me how to write a fictional Humanities textbook. You’ll notice, as well, that it’s still describing a tangible process – How Inspiration Gets Turned Into RPG Material. Very much concerned with how Actual Play, or in this case Actual Prep For Actual Play, goes about being done.
That said, I’m always open to having my mind changed, so I look forward to your post.
Von
Monday 5th March, 2012 at 7:15 AM