Autore Topic: [inglese] Edwards su Cani nella Vigna  (Letto 3616 volte)

Moreno Roncucci

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[inglese] Edwards su Cani nella Vigna
« il: 2009-07-15 09:19:21 »
Mi stavo riguardando alcuni thread segnalati nella reading-lidt, e in questo post di Edwards, in un thread che parla del design di giochi narrativisti, c'è questa bellissima (per me, almeno) descrizione della premise di Cani nella Vigna (che parte dalla considerazione che Cani, che è un gioco basato sull'umanità dei personaggi, non ha un punteggio di umanità, mentre Sorcerer sì:

This is going to be a problem for those who've learned, superficially, that Forge-ish games are based on operant conditioning. They're not. You can't get someone to accept treats for performing aspects of X, when they don't bloody fucking want to do X. However, if they do, then treats that help generate X are a lot of fun.

Consider: the largest reward cycle in Dogs concerns whether you, the player, judge your Dog as being worthy to carry on as such. The minute you judge that he or she is not, then you have available the easiest death for your character in all of role-playing design, any time, anywhere - just Give during one of the common conflicts in which an NPC is trying to kill your Dog. "I Give." The character dies. There is no rules-mechanism, no in-game option, that can save him or her at that time.

All the Fallout mechanics, all the Escalation mechanics, all the helping mechanics, and every other aspect of Dogs as a game culminates in the moments in which that option (or similar ones, like "she tries to convince you to give up being a Dog and staying here as her husband") is available. The events between those moments are all steps of that cycle leading to them at the apex each time. The cycle very likely encompasses more than one town, perhaps several.

If you don't want to do that, then none of the smaller-scale reward mechanisms means a fucking thing. Not one. People who aren't in tune with that larger reward cycle are exactly the people who wonder, in their heart of hearts even if they don't dare come out and say it, why Taking the Blow and Fallout just feed into more character attributes. It seems like a hamster wheel to them, and if they don't buy into that larger cycle, then they're right - it is.

Dogs has no Humanity score because its ultimate Narrativist question is whether a young religious zealot, empowered with deadly force, can be a human being. That's what you play to discover, at least for that particular set of circumstances as expressed by character creation, character history, and repeated town creation. So having a score that expresses it would completely destroy its central and emergent status.

Sorcerer is different. There is a Humanity score, which by now you should realize is a dead giveaway that "is my character really human" cannot be the basis for the largest-scale reward cycle.
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