[ricordo a tutti che le segnalazioni di link esterni vanno nella sezione "Segnalazioni e News", tranne nel caso in cui si parli di teoria o di termini tecnici, e in questo secondo caso vanno qui in "Sotto al Cofano"]Stavo mettendo a posto alcuni link di cose postate su G+ quando ho trovato questo pesso, da un intervista ancora inedita a Ron Edwards. È stato postato dallo stesso autore qui:
https://plus.google.com/+PaulCzege/posts/EpK93XjHQFR (è un post pubblico, dovrebbe essere leggibile senza problemi), in una serie di post che avevo già segnalato
in un altro threadQuesto brano è particolare perchè, a differenza delle altre risposte in quei post, non è una risposta al ricercatore francese, ma è come detto un pezzo di una risposta in una intervista ancora inedita, e ho deciso di ripostarlo qui perchè spiega bene l'annosa differenza fra "storia" e "fiction", cioè fra quello che si intende nel Big Model per "storia" e la successione di eventi immaginari giocati in un qualunque gdr di qualunque tipo, fra una storia creata tutti insieme al tavolo e una storia imposta da un "Dio del gioco" seduto dietro lo schermo del GM. e visto che è una specie di FAQ, ricopiarlo qui mi permette di aggiungerlo alle FAQ del forum.
-------------------------
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.
Visualizza post
