Per chi non ha il tempo (o voglia) di leggersi tutti i post nei vari thread collegati, ecco una piccola guida...
Il termine "Murk" viene usato da Ron per la prima volta in
questo post alla fine di un lungo thread sulla differenza fra Bangs e Illusionismo,
"Bangs&Illusionism - in which Ron beats down Confusion". Il thread è molto utile per capire appunto questa differenza (e diversi altri concetti: come thread riassuntivo è favoloso), ma se non vi interessa e non vi interessa nemmeno il sapere come si è sviluppato il concetto di Murk potete anche saltarlo per il momento. (ma prima o poi prendetevi il tempo di leggerlo)
Fra le altre cose, Ron in quel thread collega direttamente il concetto di Murk con il diffondersi del system-zero come "unico modo di giocare" in maniera plateale, come un vanto, invece di essere un trucco usato di nascosto:
"The whole diceless and in many cases pseudo-diceless issue that arose around 1990 is probably the first major sign that some people were getting tired of pretending to use dice/task mechanics when everything important was being managed by the unconstructed part. It's also about then that a number of authors just decided to admit that the "story" was being solo-controlled in their games, and to go ahead and foster that control rather than hide it. Both of these are the backbone of the cry that "system doesn't matter.""E cita un fenomeno ormai familiare anche in Italia...
"There's a positive side to all this. I think that full solutions are out there, waiting to be discovered and to be used. Polaris is a good start. Sorcerer is a good start, although the big problem there is people trying to apply the old mechanisms to it during play, not realizing (how could they?) that compensations or control are not necessary. I suggest that Trollbabe, My Life with Master, and Universalis all offer solutions. It doesn't surprise me that these games in particular, along with Polaris and Primetime Adventures, tend to be dismissed as curiosities by people who are at least comfortable in the murk and
with their subcultural status they associate with their partial solutions. I'm not surprised to see claims that removing the murk would, itself, destroy the role-playing experience."
(la sottolineatura l'ho aggiunta io, vista la situazione anche in Italia...)
Quel thread dà origine ad un thread successivo, in cui un altro utente chiede spiegazioni:
Ongoing failure to understand. Qui Ron usa come esempio la regola di Cani nella Vigna che permette di abbandonare i conflitti. E non solo mostra come il non capire (o usare) quella regola sia un esempio di "murk", ma ne dà una splendida interpretazione:
Anyway, what this shows me is that you do understand Giving in this game. So that means you aren't part of the trend which I've observed through a number of play-accounts. You can see it when someone in a group complains that working through all the dice is laborious, step after step, when they were ready to end the conflict long before; it's also apparent when someone complains that they "should" have won even though they rolled badly (in which case the person on the other side might have agreed with them if they'd brought it up). Clearly this is a group, not an individual thing, because it only takes one person to remind the others about the rule.
I used it as an example in the parent thread because it illustrates confusion within (causing) "the murk" as I described it there. How do conflicts relate to the rest of spoken material, during play? Who says when something's a conflict? Within a chain of resolution mechanics, how does one get out of (finish) them? I'm suggesting that people learn the answers to these questions through modeling (what the others at the table do) and through trial and error, often arriving at a highly local and highly uneasy set of conclusions. These conclusions are almost always tacit to the extent of being hidden from self-reflection.
I'm also suggesting that when faced with games which are less "murky," people's entrained understanding of how role-playing works makes it difficult for them to see or understand rules which contradict what they're used to. In most role-playing combat, there's no exit mechanism from within the middle of it. Once you're in, you're in until you lose or perhaps until you carry out a highly specific tactic. Whereas here in Dogs, omigod, there's this whole "Give" thing. What's it for? If they aren't even in the mode of looking for what Giving can do, then they won't get it even when they read it, and it won't even come up as an option during play.
[...]
I think Giving is the most original and important mechanic in Dogs. It means either side can choose whether Fallout (in some cases further Fallout) is going to be a serious consideration in this conflict. It means that someone can introduce important information in the middle of a conflict which alters how the other person wants to play a particular character (PC or NPC). It means Raising, Seeing, and Taking the Blow have potentially-significant content of their own rather than being "talking-tax" one pays in order to use dice. Therefore it allows judgment of fictional characters to play a huge role in the decision-making of the game.
Consider: the Dog's decisions are deemed morally right. So there you are, playing the Dog ... are you, the real human being, prepared to take responsibility for the Dog's fictional actions? Because no one can be blamed for it but you. No one can blame the character or his culture or the setting or anything bogus like that - the Dog is right. But you wrote/created/moved the character. What about you? [This paragraph paraphrases a key section in the rules.]
Giving is the primary mechanic that allows a player, any player, including the GM to sit in judgment upon the Dog and thereby to express personal morality to an extent that almost no RPG has ever done before. This judgment is expressed as a radical change in someone's viewpoint or situation (most extremely, instant death), right in the middle of conflict, either the Dog or the person he or she is disputing with. What if I don't like my Dog any more? He or she is a son of a bitch, and I don't even want to go through any kind of repentance or redemption in my mind - the character went too far, and I am responsible. OK, in a later shooting-based conflict in which I am playing the Dog the same old way, bam! I Give. The Dog dies. And a damn good thing ("nothing in his life became him as well as the leaving of it," I'm probably butchering that quote).
Or a positive one works perfectly too. The Dog argues with the steward to quit being such a prideful dick and causing all these problems. They roll! The Dog's dice suck. The GM sits in judgment of the Dog - "he's right. He's just right. The only way the steward would continue is if he's a psychopath, and he's not." And Gives, hence providing his judgment of the Dog's commitment. (This example exactly parallels the use of the Sincerity die in My Life with Master; it is not a fudge or a gimme - it's a judgment.)
So a group which misses out on Giving is playing half-Dogs, kind of an anime-adventure paladin game with guns which often throws up hitchy/confusing moments during play, and in which the point (besides shooting people) is a little obscure. Un altro esempio citato nel thread (da
Seth Ban-Ezra) è Polaris:
"The Necessity of an Aesthetic Sense
As I mentioned earlier, I have been writing a lot about tactics, particular the tactics of playing the Mistake. However, it is important to remember that Polaris is not about “winning”. The goal really is to create a good story through the use of the strategy and tactics. As a result, all the jockeying for position between Heart and Mistaken needs to be counterbalanced by a shared aesthetic sense of what makes for a good conflict outcome. (I mention this idea here.) There were several times over the course of our game that a Heart or Mistaken said, “But I don’t want to object to that. I like it!” That is good. It’s important for all players to be willing to say, “I like the outcome of this challenge, even though it means admitting that my opponent got the better of me.” When a player says something and everyone else nods, being a Jerk needs to go out the window. The scene is right; don’t mess it up."
(continua)
