Questo è in inglese perchè vorrei che Ron partecipasse alla discussione, e perchè in ogni caso parlo di giochi disponibili solo in inglese: se non riuscite a leggere questo thread, comunque non riuscireste a giocarci
--------------------------
This thread is in English because it start from Ron's post here:
http://www.gentechegioca.it/smf/index.php/topic,4898.msg122027.html#msg122027 and in any case it talks about not translated games, if you can't read this post you can't read these games too.
__________________
As Ron said in that post, I was the one that asked him to post that diagram and talk about that subject. And I wanted to reply, but I was stumped for some days because I couldn't form a coherent answer. Thinking about it afterwards, I realized that it was because I wanted to talk about too many things at the same time, so I am starting some spin-off threads to address the single points.
This one is about gaming texts. I start from this one because it is maybe the more difficult one, because it's the one where I think I disagree from Ron. (or, at least, with his omission of a specific and very real problem with older games)
Quoting the specific part I am talking about (but it would be better to read the entire post):
As Moreno mentioned and as my first post to GCG expresses, I think the Italian indie/new-wave discussion community would benefit from more familiarity with many of the games, especially in this historical context.
Specifically, the games that I think would matter most include Orkworld, The Riddle of Steel, Hero Wars (or probably later version, HeroQuest), as well as the literally criminal omissions of Matt Snyder's games, Dust Devils and Nine Worlds. I regret that Violence Future isn't available, to my knowledge. Certainly The Pool (for which I hope my recent essay is helpful essay), Universalis obviously, and perhaps Fastlane.
Now for why I am saying any of this. What exactly do I perceive as possibly missing for the Italian community represented in this forum? As many of you know, I am not famous for tact. So I will say it in the way that I think it. My question is, are Italian role-players wimps, or in cruder English terms, pussies? My answer is, "Maybe, yes!" - but let me clarify. I certainly do not think this is due to personal inclination or to a limitation in creative ambition or ability. I think it's a matter of understanding the available tools at a visceral, emotional level. I will try to explain.
When we were developing the games just over the dotted lines in the diagrams, we did not think in terms of perfect, pure, or packaged items which would provide a neat and well-molded product of play. We were thinking in terms of personal rebellion and making a given system that could be pushed as far as it could in the service of a given emotional need during play. In fact, pushed past the fictional applications of which we, the designers, were currently capable ourselves.
Therefore a game was like a door, or as I like to say, a set of musical instruments. If I designed X, just how far could it be employed? If I invent the electric guitar, that's not because I am Jimi Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix is another person, who showed what the electric guitar could do. The goal was to design in ways that might be discovered and developed into such explosive and inspiring experiences through others' play. I see that as very different from many of the so-called story games of today, in which the goal of play is to experience the designer's vision, as carefully packaged and explained for the user. I see them as Rock-and-Roll Hero toys - the music is already written and indeed, already performed.
Specifically, the Italian community did not experience and develop the thematic savagery at the root of the left-hand branch, distilled into pure form in Sorcerer. By thematic savagery, I mean being willing to discover that your character is or isn't a good or successful character, and for that to have its own meaning. Effectively, to discover through play whether your intended or initially-conceived Batman is actually the Joker, or whether your very heroic and wonderful protagonist has instead, through play, become the dead or destroyed counter-example to the theme which emerged. It is clear to me that this desire and ability does exist among Italian players. That's why my compliments to the players at my Sorcerer game at INC were not empty. I was convinced that they were, in fact, able to play this game, even if they had only barely seen a little bit of what it could do at that session. I had seen that they were willing to find out. But I am not at all convinced that people in this community collectively realize that this kind of "breakout" play is even possible, or that games like Sorcerer (or Dogs in the Vineyard) exist primarily for this purpose.
On the right-hand branch, this community did not experience and develop the freewheeling openness of Universalis and The Pool. If the creative freedom of Primetime Adventures seems outstandingly broad to you, for instance, then it's valuable to learn that it is actually a reduction and specification of the vastly wilder and wider freedom of those two games. After playing Universalis and The Pool a lot, playing Primetime Adventures allows channelling and shaping that same energetic freedom in productive ways - but if the first thing you encounter is Primetime Adventures, those forces may not have been "released" among you and your group, resulting in a much more imitative version of play, tamely reproducing the content of television shows instead of literally creating a new kind of television via playing the game. It's also valuable to realize that The Pool is not a game which permits the wild and free creation of back-story among every member of the play-group, whereas Universalis is, and I think it's essential to understand what creative freedom can produce within each game's very different constraints for this issue
OK, let's start from the things I agree with (or, at least, I think we are in agreement about these things, said in my words): the general assertion that there are really A LOT of games created by people the Forge community (even before they met the forge) that not only merit play, but are absolutely non inferior in any way to new "darling of the month" games, that if a game give you only a pre-written story where you only have to roll a few dice without personal input is a wind-up toy (and it could be called a new form of story-before where instead of the GM you have the game designer), and most of the other things Ron said.
Where I begin to differ (I don't know how much, and I would like to ask Ron about it) is the suitability of older (and some newer) text as teaching text, as the first "taste", both for people used to D&D/Parpuzio and for people completely unfamiliar with the hobby.
My own personal story is of somebody who did meet these games first... and didn't get ANYTHING from them!
Ron, I brought Prince Valiant and Over the Edge at the time. and saw nothing so different from older games (I see it now). Oh, I saw the semplicity, ad some nice techniques, but I am sure that if I would have run them as a GM, I would have played Parpuzio. Nothing in the game manuals would have made me even suspect that it wasn't the way to play them
I did play the pool at a convention. The impression I got was of a nice gimmick that was not even a complete game, something like Sherpa, very rule-light. I didn't understand the narration rules.
I did play Dust Devils at another convention. That, I liked very much. So much that I brought the game. Than I tried to run it for my home group. It was... "meh"... nothing new, nothing different. Less functional that most of the other games we played at the time. I didn't understand why the convention experience was so different, so I assumed it was because the other players were not fan of western movies and tropes. Now I realize that I tried to run Dust Devil as parpuzio, with a pre-written story. Why not? The game text didn't tell me to not do it. It just assumed a way of playing the game that "everybody already know" (a the forge), the same as D&D ("everybody know how to GM, you just have to be a good GM")
At the time I had already brought Sorcerer, attracted by the "buzz" already sorrounding the game. I didn't even try to run it, I couldn't even make head or tails of how the game was supposed to be run (better than Dust Devil, where I thought that I understood it but I didn't: Sorcerer at least was "strange" enough to confuse me)
These were (and you said so yourself talking about Sorcerer) games for people who already did know how to play them. They weren't teaching texts.
We already did talk a lot of times, by forum and email, about teaching text, and I know that you said that it's impossible to write a teaching text for everybody. But many of these were not a teaching text not even for a single segment of the possible audience. They just assumed an audience that had no need for teaching.
But what is a game manual, if not a text written to teach readers a game?
I don't think that most of these games were ready to be published as complete games. They were late-stage playtest draft, circulated in a inner circle of designers. The next stage should have been a lot of blind playtest to get the game text to a good teaching stage. But that phase was done post-publication, with the questions of the puzzled buyers. And seldom resulted in revised texts.
I don't think that buying, playing or reading these text would work as a mean of diffusion of more mature play. Hell, it DIDN'T work! It produced the culture of pre-narration, stake-chesting, social bullying at the table as substitute of IWNAY play(or exalted as the best sort of IWNAY play). And Story-games (the forum). Most of the social and creative lesson of the forge got lost because it was absent from the gaming texts.
Why Dogs in the Vineyard worked, with me? Because it was the first one to tell me "ehi, you have to stop doing THIS and you have to start doing THIS". It was not enough, obviously, as the mass of posts I wrote in the lumpley games subforum asking about rules can prove, but it was enough to make me understand that I had to GM that game in a new way.
Not many people know that DitV should have been the first "forge" game published in Italy. It was the first one Narrattiva tried to publish. Because when you want to teach people a new way of playing, you can't start with The pool. Primetime Adventures (that is a teaching text, but inferior in that regard to DitV, in my opinion) was published first because DitV took too much time to go from "request" to "ready to publish".
So, people should not play older, less polished game? No, I agree with you that these games should be known. For this reason I WOULD LIKE TO SEE NEW EDITION OF EVERY ONE. Like Trollbabe. I really didn't understand how that game was played from the first edition. It was very influential for a lot o f people, true... but most of these people I think played it with you. The second edition still left me with a lot of doubts (and you know how much I tried to turn it even more in a teaching text in translation) but at least I was able to run it before asking the first question (and with results good enough to convince Claudia and Michele to publish it)
Dust Devils is another one: the "revenged" edition is much more clear. Now it's a text that would have told me how to run it.
You don't want to rewrite Sorcerer? OK, I can understand that (I would not want to rewrite all that, too. And that text, warts and all, is GAMING HISTORY), but an annotated edition would go very far in making it usable by people that don't already play like that.
Without new editions, annotated editions, or some essay or article that better explain how to play, I would not give most of these texts to people outside of this forum (people in this forum can ask questions, it's different). When I play some new games with Claudia and Michele and they ask my opinion about publishing it (not that they need to ask, I would tell them my opinion anyway. I can't shut up), the clarity of the text is one of the most important factors I consider. There are games that intrigued me and that I had brought myself to their attention, but afterwards I was against publishing them, because at one time or another I discovered that I didn't know what to do, and the rules didn't tell it to me.
There are a lot of good indie games today. Too many to be able to publish them all. But good teaching texts are still rare. They should be the ones most suggested to people.
3:16 is a satire, yes. I think the reader has to be a complete militaristic moron to take that game for a warhammer40000-like power fantasy. The reason I don't like that game is that when it said to me "oh, be a good GM, you know how to do it" it terribly resembled my old AD&D 2nd edition DMG that said to me the same thing. I demand more from a game manual.
I don't need texts that say to me "you are free to play this game any way you like, it's enough that it's a good way". I remember a time when, in a Forge discussion, someone told me when I asked about how to decide what happened in a conflict in his brand-new game "oh, use the usual way your group use", and I was like "ah, so I should buy your game... to play as I would play anyway without your game? I can do that already, saving my money, than you"
Because, what bug me out at this moment is that, after having a good moment in the 2004-2007 period, teaching texts are on the wane again. A culture that more and more built around a succession of gaming contests where you don't playtest your old game because you have to produce some "new newness" for the following contest, where there is more "cred" in posting every week about your "games in the work" than in producing something actually playable, there is no time to write clear instruction. And, anyway, the author would need them if he wanted to reach some new player, but if what he want is only to impress the same little group of people, why bother?
After all, who needs new players?
Oh, well... I don't even know if you disagree with me on most of this. Something i already know you agree with. What started me on this tirade was the impression that you underestimate, in my opinion, the issue of text clarity (something that seems very strange to me, thinking that at this late stage, you are one of the very few that write very clear instructions in your games). Some time ago, talking about a game, you said to me "that is really a very good game, not a bad game. The problem is that every single example of the game's procedures in the text is wrong". And, to this day, I am still thinking "there is a difference? If a gaming text is teaching me a bad way to play, there is some difference for me if there was a functional game somewhere in the process that produced that book or not? In any case that book is useless to me"
The answer of course is that the only difference is that maybe that game could resurface in an updated edition sometime. But until that day... no difference for me.
The world is not so black-and-white, obviously: some texts can be turned into teaching texts with some alteration and corrections in translation. Or a lot of alterations and corrections, pestering the author for months with questions (and no, Trollbabe was not by far the worst offender in that regard, I was so annying with all these questions because the text was so "almost there", as the best teaching text for that kind of play, that I wanted to iron even the littlest wrinkles)
But what, then, about the old games that had no revised/improved edition? Should we forget about them? Obviously not. But they should be played when you already know how to play them. Seeing that they don't teach it, but sometimes their "children" do, they should be played after their children.
If I played today The Pool, I would play it very differently than six years ago.
And what about the things you wrote about the way people play some of these games, not even touching what can be done with them?
Well, this could be the topic of an entire new thread. But in my opinion, this can't be cured by playing more and more different games. That is a sort of late-stage storygames plague, the "play a bit and then move on thinking you have already digested all the meal" syndrome. I see people post lists of games they played more long that my arm. People who played these games for half the time I have, and played more than double the games I played. And I have to play a lot of "little bites" of games , too many I think, to help Michele and Claudia check them out for publication. There is simply no way these people had played even a third of these games for a complete cycle. They played the "gaming expert show-off tour": a single city of DitV, a single pilot episode of PTA, a single adventure in Trollbabe, etc: they think they know these games, but when you talk to them they don't know the first thing about how DitV really play, or how is a entire season of PTA is.
The important word in your post, when you talked about playing Dust Devils and the Pool, is "a lot". Ron, you played them A LOT.
I think that today, playing A LOT DitV, PTA, and other games, would yeld similar results. And it would be easier for people who have to learn new ways to play, than doing it with the pool. The the range of play available with these games would be apparent after a while.
So, I don't think it's so a bad things for people to play DitV like a straight CoC rip-off. OK, they miss the best of the game (OK, they miss the entire game...), but if they like it, maybe they will continue to play putting more and more of them into the game. They have many more chances of understanding DitV than the people who play a single city because "everybody is talking about DitV" and then go on to the next "darling of the month" to get "forum cred" with other people.
