Autore Topic: "Perchè hai scritto questo gioco" (Recupero da G+)  (Letto 14216 volte)

Moreno Roncucci

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Questi commenti sono stati fatti nel 2014 in un post, pubblico, di Paul Czege, e da allora sono leggibili tranquillamente da chiunque. Da domani potrebbero sparire, quindi li copio-incollo qui.

Visto il tempo limitato, non ho potuto fare la cosa più corretta: chiedere a ognuno se non avessero niente in contrario. Se scoprirò che invece qualcuno di loro avrebbe preferito che non salvassi le loro risposte, le cancellerò.

Il post iniziale è di Paul Czege, a seguire le risposte degli altri

--- PAUL CZEGE------------
+Vincent Baker  and I both got asked to answer questions by a French student writing her PhD on RPGs in Comparative Literature. Her third question was:
How did you decide to create My Life with Master? What did you want to do with this RPG you cannot find in any other? What was your main inspiration? What were your goals when you created this game?

My answer was:
Almost fifteen years ago I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, which recommends artists doing three pages of stream of consciousness writing every day, as a way of letting your creative brain stretch and find its influence over you, and grow strong. I designed the core of My Life with Master as bursts of inspiration over several weeks in 2002 while doing this stream of consciousness. All I knew was I wanted to design a game where the players were the minions of a horrific master. Only later during playtesting did I realize I was inspired by my own experiences with controlling relationships.
Also, I was frustrated with the roleplaying games of the 1990s. I wanted to create a game I’d be excited to see on the shelves of the stores, one that felt like a unique roleplaying experience, with a design unencumbered by conventional wisdom.


Vincent, I presume she asked you a similar game-specific question?


---- VINCENT BAKER -------------------

She asked me two!

How did you decide to create Dogs in the Vineyard? What did you want to do with this RPG you cannot find in any other? What was your main inspiration? Why did you choose the Mormons people? Why this poker-style bids? What were your goals when you created this game?

I grew up Mormon. My main inspiration was the body of family stories and history that came down to me, and my own research into the religion’s history. My goal was to create a game that took my Mormon ancestors and their lives and faith seriously, while also taking seriously my own experience leaving the faith.

The poker-style bids have a straightforward technical procedural function, but I named them “raise” and “see” just to help people remember what to do.

What were your goals when you created Apocalypse World? Why, in your opinion, this game is so successful?

One of my foremost goals for Apocalypse World was to create a game that my wife would love to play. For years I’d been creating games she kind of hated.

I think it’s been so successful in large part because of how it illuminates the act of roleplaying, and especially the relationship between the player and the GM. It’s really easy and fun to play, and it keeps players and GMs – especially GMs! – coming back for more.

It can also help designers see clearly how to create the relationship between the players and GM (or between the players, if there’s no GM) that their own games demand. This is, I think, one of the fundamental reasons that it’s inspired so many descendant games.

---- EMILY CARE BOSS -------------------

What great stories about all of your games. Paul, the stream of consciousness impulse fits with your inital desire to be a fiction writer. Vincent, I love that you used "raise" and "see" as mnemonics.

 I also got two about specific games.

How did you decide to create Breaking the Ice? What did you want to do with this RPG you cannot find in any other? What was your main inspiration? What were your goals when you created this game?

I was inspired to write Breaking the Ice after participating in online conversations about people playing characters of a gender not their own. Someone made the comment in a forum that he did not believe anyone could convincingly play cross gender. I’d been playing with a group of men and women that portrayed people of various genders in a variety of ways, but all meaningfully and convincingly to my eye regardless of the gender of the player. In short, I thought this person was just plain wrong.

Some of the aspects of the game that arose from this inspiration make it stand out from most games that existed at the time, and still from the majority of RPs today. It is about a couple going on their first three dates, in a field that often shies away from love and romance. The players talk about themselves to determine how they differ, and then endow the characters with contrasting traits. Each player plays a character like the other person and unlike themself in that way, with gender the default difference if it’s being played by people of different genders.  It is a two player game, to lower the social stakes of playing a character not like yourself. The game is cooperative, with specific mechanics that reward the players for listening to one another and create a dynamic of support.

What were your goals when you created Shooting the Moon?

Shooting the Moon arose from the simple fact that I’d written Breaking the Ice as a 2 player game and some groups might have an odd number of players. So having another game to go with it that could accommodate 2 or 3 seemed like a good way to do so. (It later turned out that both games are adaptable to different numbers of players, but I didn’t know that at the time.) My specific goals in creating this game were to make it very accessible for new players (as I’d hoped Breaking the Ice would be). Both games provide a very clear story structure and a menu of options to take at any given moment of play. They have few numbers and no stats, so that the mechanical interludes are brief and straightforward. And the players take turns providing adversity (there is no single facilitator or Game Master), and are given extremely simple and direct instructions on how to do so. Being a GM always seemed like a big hurdle to playing RPGs, so I hoped this would be a good introduction to that dynamic.

---- RON EDWARDS -------------------

My answer:

I've answered these questions in other interviews and essays, including the annotations to the recently re-issued book, and it's a lot to summarize here. The following text is lifted from another interview I'm conducting right now for Bleeding Cool:
---
Role-playing produces made-up stuff: characters, doing stuff, stuff happening, cause-and-effect in that fiction … basically "the fiction" is a pretty good term for it.
When is the fiction a story? Two things make it a story. First, if the fiction gets real people's attention, which happens if a recognizable real-life human problem is somehow involved or invoked, even if the characters and situation are incredibly fantastic or impossible. Second, if the fiction includes escalating events which ultimately resolve the problem, in any way. (All this is Lit 101, boring version. I'm not pretending anything different.)
Now here's the key: there's no kind of role-playing that can't make a story. Nor is there any reason that it should.
The question is whether people are there to do that as a first priority, strictly as a matter of preference and mood. Now I'm not talking about fiction at all, but me and you and Joe and Sally at the table.
Because let's say I don't feel like that priority today and instead I really want to go to town on my fun of problem-solving under fire, even competition. I want to be at the table with people who are not only doing this too, but appreciating how well I do it (or how hosed I get when I try). Maybe what we end up doing at the table makes a story by the above definition, maybe it doesn't, and I don't really care either way. On the other hand, let's say that you're sitting at that table too, and although your character is absolutely perfectly suited for this game in rules terms, just like mine, you really do want the fiction to have that story quality, and to see it created and collectively appreciated in play.
See what I mean? I see no real question about what a story is (I'm not a Deconstructionist), so the only question is whether we want to enjoy making one in play, as a first priority, as opposed to any other first priority. This turns into trouble at the table if and when our first priorities clash.
But don't stop there. Role-playing history has landed us with 100 ways to mis-read what I just wrote. Stick with me for the next part.
Now, let's talk about people who like stories but don't want to risk seeing them made in play. I consider them cowards. They want a grand story to be there in play, period, and crucially, they know pretty much how they want that story to go. Therefore if outcomes of some kind at the table get in the way of that intent (or plan, or control), or if someone at the table does something counter to it, then this disruption must over-ridden.
You see what I did there? I'm talking about the difference between being there to experience and create a story, using the outcomes at the table, vs. the experience of your character being in someone else's guaranteed story, despite the outcomes at the table. Shocking, horrifyingly, the whole word "story" in role-playing culture has become associated with the latter, not the former.
How can that be? Why is one person slapping down others' story-excited role-playing and overriding the systemic outcomes at the table called "story-oriented?" Why is the system specifically called "Storyteller" the most egregious railroading mechanism known to the hobby? How can it be that this "story-oriented GM" play must control my every contribution at that table, so I can't make this kind of fiction my priority in the moment?
This is why the word "story" engenders rage and counter-attack from many role-players – not because they don't like stories or don't want them in play, but because they don't like being pushed around and rendered a penny-whistle at the table of the person who plays the Moog organ.
The rage is even fiercer from people want their characters to have agency and do dramatic, passionate stuff in the fiction. I understand this response perfectly because I share the very same indignation, but the historical hobby-result turned into a catastrophe: the priority of enjoying agency, excitement, and consequential action had – by the 1990s – been completely obliterated in the collective hobby-mind. The idea that you can get a story specifically by not planning that story was absent from any text and from any dialogue at all.
Sorcerer unabashedly states that story creation through play itself, through characters with agency, with unplanned and non-negotiable outcomes using the game mechanics, is possible and easy.
It's easy to understand the shocked resistance I met, not from those who didn't want stories in their games at all, but from those loved their self-image of the Good GM the Storyteller, who takes care of the game to make sure horrible players don't "ruin" the story. To people who preferred the other players at their tables to be infantilized and for their allegedly brilliant stories to be kept safe, and to publishers who'd defined their whole product line by delivering canned stories and telling people not to let the players mess with them, I was the devil. I understand that reaction perfectly and openly defied it: it's cobra vs. mongoose.
However, even those who wanted what I'm offering reacted with fear and confusion. Talking about this with role-players is nearly impossible. The disappearance of vocabulary for making stories with agency, without full control by anyone, is tragic. It's as if slavers called themselves the Freedom Lovers, and then bizarrely, the people who despised slavery bought into that and said they hated freedom. So then I come along and say, "Be free, I have some ideas how," and the very people who hate the slavery most say, "Freedom Loving! Aggh! Never!"
It's easy to get over this with only a little bit of non-hysterical interaction. No one who actually read my essays or talked about them and real play with me, ever made the mistake of thinking I'd call externally-railroaded plot "story-priority role-playing." It's patently obvious that I think it's the precise antithesis of any such play. But a person isn't going to understand this until he or she stops hyperventilating.
When I say I want to play story-centric role-playing, as a first priority (and again, when and if I want to, not always), I'm not talking about having a den-daddy Good GM ™ who can fold me into his or her brilliant story for me, so all I have to do is provide colorful dialogue. That isn't story-prioritized role-playing at all, because at that table, what we do is by definition never going to make the story – it's already in place as imposed by one person at the table, or (just the same) being improvised by one person at the table.
I must stress that this whole topic is merely about preference and mood. Wanting to make stories via the fiction of role-playing isn't a privileged or better priority. It's one of the possible priorities when engaged in this cool form of fiction-making, and that is all. In order to answer sensibly, I'm reading your difficult phrase "a gaming situation" very much with "a" as an individual time, not as a representative, blanket, or archetypal thing.
That said, my answer is, sometimes a lot, and sometimes not at all. It's a matter of my preference at the moment.
If it's a lot, i.e., if I'm in that particular mood, then I look for a game to play that reinforces that desire, for me and everyone else. No game can replace that desire, which is a creative and social thing, but its moving parts can be better-suited to it than another's, or it can have nifty features to reinforce the desire in a particular way.
Again, and to reinforce my point above, when I'm feeling that way, I totally don't want play which imposes story, in the sense that one person at the table is empowered to direct other characters' actions to conform with an intended outcome. Doing that isn't always personally and creatively abusive, but in my experience nearly all of it is, and even when it's not, I simply dislike it. So I avoid groups which seem to rely on it, and I avoid games which clearly include that imposition as an assumption for play.
Let's not forget that I might be in a completely different mood and have a completely different preference at some other time. If so, then I look for a different game that fits my current priority better. Similarly, I'll then pick among those for techniques that seem pretty cool for something specific about playing that way.
This all works the other way around, too – if someone else is already proposing a game, I say to myself, "Can I get behind the creative priorities and collective enjoyment this game best reinforces?"
All of this arose from developing Sorcerer led me to "this," or rather, to designing toward my desire to play with this priority. This goes back all the way to 1985 when I began organizing long-term Champions groups, but really kicked in about 1990 when I realized I had a bunch of proto-game notes all over the place (like many other people, then and now) … and then even more so upon encountering a number of game designs in the early 1990s, the ones I referenced in Sorcerer. I hit upon demon-centric, sorcerer-only play as the most uncompromising model for what I wanted in 1992.
What Sorcerer as originally written demonstrably did and still does is open doors to the kind of story-prioritized play I described above: not planning a story, but making a story via characters with agency, subject to non-negotiable rules outcomes. I had hoped back in 2000-2001 that the number of people who liked those particular doors would eventually justify a 500-book print run; it did not occur to me that any more people than that would be interested, or to plan for more printings.
Nor did I think it would have sparked interest in people who said, "There are doors like that? No! Really? How do they work?" Against my expectations at the time, that second audience – characterized by surprise and curiosity – is still there, a never-ending stream of arrivals, for the same reasons as before. Indoctrinated in story control as "story role-playing," they are simultaneously intrigued and fearful, and the raw defiance of the book as written – kneeing railroading in the groin – is exciting.

---- ADAM KOEBEL -------------------
You co­-created Dungeon World. Why did you choose this setting for this hack, and how did you adapt the game system? What were your goals when you created this game?

Sage and I were both playing a lot of Apocalypse World and at the time, it was really only starting to come to light what a revolutionary thing Vincent had created. I was playing a sort of silly throw-away game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with some friends of mine who had never played an RPG before, and their play style (“I’ll tell you what I do and you deal with the rules”) matched play of Apocalypse World surprisingly well. As Sage and I started to develop the game out of the seeds that Tony Dowler had created in Apocalypse D&D, we realized that this might actually be a really good way to introduce folks to a new way to approach the old dungeon-crawl standby.

Luke Crane talks about RPG rules as “technology” in that it’s advanced in the same way over time. That the technology we have, inherent in the roleplaying games available to us, is so much more advanced (though not universally “better” per se) than we had in the 1970s. What we wanted to do with Dungeon World was present a game that utilized this new technology, but in a way that would be easily adopted and understood by our audience. People might not attach to Apocalypse World as easily, given the style of writing, milieu of play, etc. With Dungeon World we’re leveraging a collective history that D&D put down.

Honestly, we realized it was something that would sell, too. There’s an element of wanting to be fiscally successful there, as well. Dungeon-crawl games are a pretty safe bet, to start with, if you’re able to differentiate yourself from the massive library of existing titles, which I feel we’ve done.

---- RON EDWARDS -------------------
My answers to all her questions are now posted at http://adept-press.com/ideas-and-discourse/interviews/

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Anche altri hanno postato in vari e siti le loro risposte, ho intenzione di aggiungere i link qua sotto man mano che li ritroverò (NdM)
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rgrassi

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Re:"Perchè hai scritto questo gioco" (Recupero da G+)
« Risposta #1 il: 2019-05-03 14:55:57 »
E la risposta di Ron è meravigliosa.
Rob
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Daniele Di Rubbo

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Re:"Perchè hai scritto questo gioco" (Recupero da G+)
« Risposta #2 il: 2019-05-07 10:19:32 »
Sì, sono tutte risposte molto interessanti, che dicono cose interessanti su quello che poi gli autori hanno sviluppato nei loro giochi. E, sì, la risposta di Ron è davvero molto interessante.

Mattia Bulgarelli

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Re:"Perchè hai scritto questo gioco" (Recupero da G+)
« Risposta #3 il: 2019-09-02 15:29:46 »
Ma... e se altri volessero intervenire per aggiungere i motivi per cui loro hanno scritto (o stanno scrivendo) il loro gioco?
Co-creatore di Dilemma! - Ninja tra i pirati a INC 2010 - Padre del motto "Basta Chiedere™!"

Daniele Di Rubbo

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Re:"Perchè hai scritto questo gioco" (Recupero da G+)
« Risposta #4 il: 2019-09-02 15:35:29 »
Basta sapere se per Moreno è o no in topic, suppongo. Male che vada basterà aprire una discussione parallela. ;D

Moreno Roncucci

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Re:"Perchè hai scritto questo gioco" (Recupero da G+)
« Risposta #5 il: 2019-09-02 16:35:00 »
Se qualche game designer volesse aggiungere i suoi "perchè" alla lista è il benvenuto...   8)
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