Re: (TFT) Jobs, Talents, and Buildings

["Jay Carlisle" <Jay_Carlisle@charter.net>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: mejobo
Subject: Re: (TFT) Jobs, Talents, and Buildings

"You cursed brat! Look what you've done! I'm melting! melting! Oh, what a
world! What a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you
could destroy my beautiful wickedness? Oooooh, look out! I'm going! Oooooh!
Ooooooh!"

You must have rolled a 3 on your "befuddle Jay" spell.
I fumbled my disbilef.

> Yea. I see it as two main ways to GM a setting:
>
> 1) Figuring it all out in extreme detail on one end.
> 2) Figuring out only what needs to be known at the moment.

Thesis and Antithesis?

> And then lots in between.

Synthesis! "David Hume, could out-consume, Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel!"
Of course Hegel refrenced Kant and... right.

Seriously though (and now for something compleatly different)
This might just be two sides to the same coin.
But then again maybe not.
I think that conclusion might hinge on what 'moment' means in this context.

I use the term open to refer to a campagin gameworld.
It's basicly a 'sandbox'.
I call more constrained games closed.
My best successes over the past... actually ever have been with the closed
side.
Over the past couple of years I've been trying to get really clear about
what I'm offering as far as the quid pro quo in the willing suspension of
disbelief.
I make the players Figure and give them the "roll" their going to play.
The Fame/Fortune/Happiness stuff lets me pass off Figures to whatever 
players show up or hand off NPC's to extra players and have the Figures 
still following roughly the same motivations in their Actions.
I frame game sessions in such a way that "I start digging" isn't practial.
Such an Action would effectivly remove the players Figure from any further
Action for the rest of the session.
A example of such a closed constraint on a players possable Actions might be
the structure of the show 24.
A season is 24 one hour episodes.
I'd call that roughly 24 play sessions to compleate 1 adventure.
A campagin allows for things like returns on Jack's investments, or
construction of his mountain-top lodge.
I find that if players can exercise meaningful Actions over these longer
time-Scales then players take more intrest in what's happening to a Figure
like James Bond between movies so to speak.
Without this dimension to play the game isn't a campagin IMO.
There's nothing wrong with that, I just find that calling an adventure, or 
even a group of adventures a campagin w/o allowing meaningful Actions 
between or after the adventure leads to confusion and disapointment for some 
players.

Also of note.
I've said it before and I'll say it again; I'm quite lazy.
I'll point out that I'm shamelessly comendering planet Earth for all the 
"details".
As for the second part... player information is an interesting topic in and 
of itself.
For example world maps were a sketchy matter in the 1500's and were 
considered state secrets.
TFT suggests that technology is at best early-renaissance, but the large 
number of informational spells likely means much better maps in much earlier 
periods w/o a history of spell development (like no Astrial Projection till 
the renaissance, etc.).
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