Re: (TFT) Pitching game to newbies

[Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com>]

Yeah I see I'm My usual clear as mud there. I am most certainly speculating
from My remembered experience and what's stuck in My head as what I recall
from the more successful claims in that vein and what I've done Myself
which has gone through stages of narrative driven story and winging it and
in the final analysis it boils down to having an enjoyable play session
which is job one of game
 which is why so many "educational", promotional, and similar ride the back
of game games fall flat. They let educational (etc.) get in front of game
as entertainment. I'll admit to pretensions to provide something that can
be edjumacational as I try to use objective reference material in place of
rules for everything which save Me a shite ton of writing and ughhhhhh the
designing ughhhh  Niiiiice not many places in My own head I balk at
broaching but I'll be Mr G You've done pointed Me at one. I'm leaving that
door closed thank You very much. Could You Imagine Heinlein doing Middle
Earth? What would a 100+ lb pull longbow arrow flight look like? The
archers paradox in low g trace atmosphere? Hummmm ... Anyway its a shared
imaginative experience I'm trying to get to and THAT kind of wheel redeux
and do and do is NOT the most direct path to such an approach... seems more
like vying for longest, most difficult, something on that end of the
spectrum. I'm lazy and so I invoke a path of least resistance approach
which the Universe smiled upon or maybe it was a subconscious thing idk but
I answered stats as in what does 1 point of ? mean in terms of real world
force and time in the phase system breakdown from Champions which scales to
Movement (f/mps) and so onto Map (stride length @ pace into distance
covered gives the steps or foot placement and blah blah real world info
anamal tracking, Authur Murry dance charts, batting stances of players
starting and after swing, running backs and wideout routes, robotics, that
big piano in Big.... OH YEAH.... Fencing. Stuff like that. Not too mention
the more objective generally the better for communication for that
imagination sharing to work which is also steeped in a ton of stuff that's
beyond the ability of a mere objective ruleset to deliver. You won't get
group chemistry through the system used to play but the rules can "get out
of the way" by being an asset to the group in getting the head adjustments
tuned into a similar picture of what's where, when, its dimensions, and if
experienced with the type more detailed information like reach etc. the
idea being the Player who's Character's Figure is choosing their Action is
imagining at least the broad strokes of the same thing everybody else is
working with. This is assisted by other components and computerized it goes
great in basics in a voxel type setup using Lego as a primary tool
personally but top of the layout scaling for terrain and train model pretty
presentation people to fit their stuff into and have it play at any table
using same or Google Earth at given altitudes as Earth is the example used
again for as much objectivity as possible as opposed to the problems like
the arrow flight on Mars or the Foundation books and idk call it a six page
door to tag it totally off the top of My head the point is it's a ton of
exposition to tweak much less invent something very new... Dr McCoy's
instruments were salt shakers if I recall dug up by props as just that
futuristic salt shakers but Mr R decided the audience wouldn't recognize
them as such so got a shaker from the commissary and re-purposed the future
ones as McCoy's flux capacitor plot advance magic box which was almost
imagined then Flash Gorden'd into "Ie ca'n giv ya no mor pur C'ptn She'ill
ter ersel appart" Jay Joyce I ain't. GM? I might better resemble that
remark... then again these days I might not. The intranets have done a
number on what's expected uniformly via youtube and etc and evolved meaning
for some terms added terms from mediums like fps shooters and mmorpg's and
of course D&D does the time to buy a new library edition release and new
titles are dropped and I'm behind the curve on a lot of it... There's other
knocks on Me as analyst of generally postured as designer and whatnot which
is salting down speculation on the improv GMing here.
I note that the whole wing it approach shares some traits with "hacking",
stage magic, musicianship and similar fields of endeavour where the
audience etc isn't given the full picture of what's occurring. Hacking I'm
thinking omission where You keep lips zipped when speculation as to how You
cracked the password gets going as the unknown is far better for the hacker
image than the actual happened to see the thing jotted down and made a note
of it lends. Magic is misdirection see this flashbang while the other hand
is manipulating. Playing an instrument can be pulled off far from perfectly
by owning ones mistakes and most will never know it wasn't intentional note
for note. So when a GM seems to be improving why would they tell You the
whole story so to speak? Which brings Me to another point, one generally
doesn't wing what isn't well understood as a system. You fly by in a system
You are fluent in which brings not only a grasp of the mechanics but the
backlog of experience in various peeks and troughs of what worked well and
what did not and that provides a bit of a grab bag of encounter kernels to
tweek a group of random monsters around in order to fit a dynamic the GM is
familiar with executing to good effect. I'm not exactly sure what Your
seeing on "such a GM is forcing a story anyhow, even when they don't know
what
it is?" and don't mean to claim a blanket statement covering all instances
of the concept. Assuming Your confident that the GM is say randomly
generating encounters or whatever so that it's not just accepting the claim
on a trust Me but clearly driven by some engine out of the direct control
that's spitting the stuff then I'd say that generally the idea is to let
story happen which play will do albeit not necessarily a very GOOD story.
Mr Ward uses "light-touch roleplaying" along what seems similar lines where
the idea is to take what Players are doing and offer choice informed from
it allowing a feedback loop to build up that drives play rather than
"force" narrative that isn't necessary to the style of play.  A string of
random encounters won't be likely to make compelling reading in recounting
but technically speaking it's story and forcing a narrative connection as
GM isn't likely to do significantly better than feeding into what Player
feeds to the GM light-touch roleplaying does. Mentioning that the reading
quality of that random string depends heavily upon the pen it flows from
points to the same in RPG's.and there's quite a few who are drawn into the
GM seat that have real talent for preforming and groups with great
chemistry that can be a very large part of what the participants are
finding entertainment in. I'm not faulting any of this or making any
judgements other than I find that I'm not going to get to what I'm striving
for down that path. To get to sandbox play that is driven by play and
generates story I need to be able to set starting conditions up in ways
that provide potential for possible play direction a simple example being a
war situation in which martial forces in opposition are present in quantity
and there is one or more targets of some value that offer a focus or foci
to contest which isn't a given but a reason for the forces to be present
and if the Players are low ranked soldiers or basically order takers then
the npc leadership has purpose to start off play which can then develop.
With elements of constructive play Actions and non-combat focuses to add
into the destructive play with combat focuses mix some interesting
environments can be set up and in theory at least the thing can play solo
much like the micros and to lesser extent Tollenkar's crib can with solo
play a rather common back in the day feature but I'm still down Google
Doc's. I've had to recover from having a couple of computers go foomf and
relegating Me to craptop coblin currently and the plinking I've done has
convinced Me that an example is in order to reduce verbosity and provide a
hands on which I have fiddled with some video approaches that are just a
bit much for these machines to munch smoothly and edit. And I can't imagine
this is very clear at this point as I've got the nods and am taking the
suggestion and crashin with a tag that there's reference to alot of this
that believe it or not is pretty direct... may get to it afore the crash


On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 3:26 PM, Marc Gacy <marcgacy@gmail.com> wrote:

> Not sure what you're getting at here, since "flying by the seat of the
> pants" usually implies that there really isn't a story or agenda. Are you
> saying such a GM is forcing a story anyhow, even when they don't know wha
t
> it is? If you are, then is the GM simply around to present a situation th
at
> players determine their characters should encounter?
>
> On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 2:41 AM, Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > The more the style
> > is fly by the seat of the GM's pants the more likely it is they are rel
yi
> ng
> > on a scene A to B to C progression which is the model most viddie's
> > follow...
> >
> >
> ᐧ
>
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