Re: (TFT) High Level Play ... and "House Rules"

[Mark Tapley <mtapley@swri.edu>]

At 3:01 -0500 11/12/10, Chris wrote:
> If Conan is a PC I might want him to escape.
> Putting him in a hole and seeing what he does next is part of the game.

"I dig!"..."Ah'll pe beck!"   :-)

At 3:01 -0500 11/12/10 (yeah I'm on digest), Jay wrote:
> There are psychological reasons why people play games. ... As a
> general principle, the locus of control variable may be thought of as
> affecting behavior as a function of expectancy and reinforcement within a
> specific situation (Carlise-Frank, 1991)."

	Cool stuff!
	And honestly, I'm in a bit of quandary here. I think this is 
a different axis of the referee-ing trade space than we were 
discussing originally; that was "House Rules" and when and whether 
the referee can change/make up rules to fit the situation. I argued 
the answer to that is "as rarely as he can get away with", to help 
the internal self-consistency of the world and hence to assist the 
players' "suspension of disbelief" that allows them to immerse 
themselves in the world.
	In describing my opinion of that, though, I strayed over into 
the territory of "scripted adventure vs. players'-choice world". And 
that's an area where I have a lot less strong opinions.
	Given a true player-choice world, most groups of players will 
architect a scenario where they all get rich and none of them gets 
killed, and live happily ever after. Boring.
	On the other hand, I would never enjoy playing an adventure 
where the referee tells me, "you do this. Next, you do that...." so 
the concept of an adventure which is totally "scripted" is also kind 
of anathema to me. I like the idea of an adventure where the players 
have a serious challenge, with several ways to approach the 
challenge, *any one* of which could succeed, but *any one* of which 
is hard enough that it will probably kill off a small percentage of 
the party (or at least accompanying NPC's). Death Test is a pretty 
impressive achievement in meeting this criterion, in my opinion. It's 
neither totally "scripted" (since the players do get to turn left, 
turn right, use magic early, use magic late, etc.) nor is it totally 
free-form (you can't back out, once started).

	To me, that's the hard part of GM'ing. Figuring out 
"flexible" challenges which are also interesting.

	Flexible means both,

1) scales nicely to the size of the party, by referee fiat 
on-the-spot if necessary, *and*
2) can be met by any of several techniques (magic-heavy party, sneaky 
party, brute-force fighter party .... ) and the party can choose 
which technique to apply.

	That second measure of "flexibility" is what's crucial in 
satisfying the "locus of control" criterion Jay referred to, and 
getting that right (neither too scripted nor too open) is an 
important part of the art of entertaining the players, in my opinion.

--
						- Mark     210-379-4635
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