Posts Tagged ‘rob donoghue’

Rob’s got several juicy ideas to share here. I’ll quote the one that hit me deepest.

In other media, you may become invested in the characters, but in RPGs, the characters may become invested in you (or at least your character). The creation of a reality that looks back on the actor is huge, and it's often dismissed as mere sleight of hand since these people and places are not real, but I would counter that the fact that they are fiction does not rob this of its power. Most creative media rests on the idea that we may be powerfully and truly moved by fiction, and I see no reason to carve out an exemption here.

via Rob Donoghue: Considering the Medium.

That’s certainly why I keep turning to RPGs. They’re the only place I get the kind of reflective impact I crave. All I would add to that is that for me, it also matters a great deal that the act is extroverted and collaborative, so that there’s a whole slew of reflective potency weaving and surging around that moves everyone in ways that an introverted creative act can’t match.

Rob gets it right. I’m going to do what he suggests. So should you. ‘Nuff said.

Robert Donoghue – Award Fever.

Rob Donoghue is one of my favorite rpg gurus, and I’m just now figuring out that the reason I resonate with him so much is that he often provides a counterpoint to my emo gut-punch tendencies. Never has this been more clearly illustrated than in a recent post on his LiveJournal called “Why I Try Not to Go to 11″. Here’s the gist of Rob’s post, after which I’ll share my own thoughts on it:

note: I’m blockquoting a good portion of Rob’s post here but I really encourage you to go read the whole post, along with the comments, because there’s a lot more there than I’m focusing on here.

Shingu, Secret of the Stellar Wars is an anime I enjoy a lot … I had a repeat on in the background tonight, and there was an exchange I enjoyed. Two characters have a pretty close bond, but one of them has been keeping a secret. The other one has suspected this is the case, and the issue of this secret comes out in the conversation.

Now, in a more melodramatic story (by which I mean most other anime and the ideal put forward by many indie games) this would have been a point of tension and conflict, something that would have pushed issues and driven the interactions between those and other characters because conflict, meaningful emotional conflict, is the gold standard.

In Shingu, the other character basically said, “Yes, I knew you had secrets, but it’s ok, I trust you.”

I love stuff like this, and I love it in my games. On paper, and by any number of rules, that’s weak sauce. The numerous story opportunities were wasted, and whatever potential there was for conflict was promptly resolved. But to me, that was all about strengthening and redefining bonds. That expressed a level of trust that had not previously been laid out between the characters – it’s a small, subtle thing, but important.

I’m not a gut wrenching emo porn kind of guy. Sure, I like it from time to time, because it provides a potent contrast, but I prefer a baseline of building, strengthening and exploring relationships much more than pushing them to the breaking point. Without that baseline, I tend to feel like the higher octane emotional stakes are forced and false. But with it, those moments gain real teeth.

via Robert Donoghue – Why I Try Not To Go To 11.

This really drives home a good point. Because although I DO occasionally enjoy going to 11, I could not stand it if I had to play with the dial cranked up like that all the time. Furthermore, without those more subtle low-key moments, the emo stuff not only gets old really quickly, but it loses a lot of its oomph, too.

So yeah, although I think it’s fair to say that I probably jack things up toward 11 more often than a lot of players do, and I tend to make soap opera out of things whenever I’m not reined in, I hope I don’t go there too often. I have worried sometimes that I pushed the dial up on a few occasions when others at the table seemed, in retrospect, a bit off-put by it. I don’t recall anyone ever outright telling me to amp it down, but I can think now of several cases during my year with the Rolemonkeys when Chris Heim would undercut my amped-up drama-pushing ways with some sort of goofy or silly response, and I used to get kinda miffed about that but now I think he was just trying to get me to cool the hell down and take myself less seriously. I think maybe Chris Perrin was working a similar angle when we played together for the first time.

Then again, I think Judd Karlman makes a really good point in the comments to Rob’s OP when he points out that a lot of the amped-up emo porn that we hear about when people write/talk about their play experiences is due to people focusing their memorable (and thus most sharable) actual play tales on the big emotional stuff. Certainly I do that. Most of the roleplaying stories I’ve shared are the big emotional ones. But that doesn’t mean they happen all the time, even when I’m in emo DramaMonkey mode, and it doesn’t mean that I want them to happen all the time, because I don’t. It’s just easier for people like me to communicate those emo moments than the more subdued ones. Guys like Rob who write well enough to make “Yes, I knew you had secrets, but it’s ok, I trust you” still sound compelling, they’re pretty rare.

Matthijs Holter recently started a thread about Setting on Story Games, covering similar territory to the Rob Donoghue thread on Cultures of Play (CoP) that I shared yesterday, but with a different focus. In fact, although I don’t know this for sure, it seems likely to me that Matthjis may not even be directly aware of the CoP thread. But in any case, it adds an interesting line of thought to the setting-focused stew that I’m enjoying.

Story Games for Everybody – What are the functions of setting?

to be further continued …

Cultures of Play – Setting and the Unknown…

…wherin Rob Donoghue, with some very useful input from Josh Roby and several other folks, sparks a discussion about knowability/unknowability in relation to settings for rpgs.

I find this a fascinating discussion in the general sense, but it also serves to help reignite my passion for working on Vegas After Midnight, which is something I really fell away from in the past few months.  I’ve been struggling under the self-created burden of my own overreaction to a blog post from Jonathan Walton [Why Most Supplements Suck] about  supplements, settings, and how much  material should or should not be established in the text (as opposed to at the table).

Basically, as a guy who feels pretty strongly about the fun and awesomeness of collaborating on a roleplaying scenario and helping establish situations and settings with the play group, after reading Jonathan’s blog post I was led to wonder why in the hell I’ve been trying to finish and publish Vegas After Midnight, which is almost entirely pre-established setting and in many ways fits the description of exactly the kind of thing that Jonathan was suggesting as suckish.

Or maybe it was another excuse not to work on my creation and take the safe and easy way out. Who knows?

Well, the thread I’ve linked above has me thinking about it again, but at least this time I can say that apparently my self-doubt is enough in check that thinking about these issues is actually inspiring me rather than mucking with me. So the time has come to work on VAM, eh?

For that matter, I think the time has also come to let myself enjoy playing in a pre-established setting again. I’m particularly enamored with Shaintar lately. And I( miss playing in the Firefly campaign that I used to play with the Rolemonkeys. And I wanna try Hellas sometime, too.

To be continued …

RPG design auteur Jonathan Walton adds some very nice bits of gaming technology to Rob Donoghue’s list. I’m compiling stuff like this here so that when I DO get around to discussing this with folks, we’ll have lots to draw from.

4 New, Useful Things « one thousand one.

I am so buried under work this weekend that I can’t keep my head straight. But a glance at this post makes me REALLY want to talk about the stuff that Rob is highlighting here:

Robert Donoghue – 10 Useful Pieces of Gaming Technology.

This post has all my pistons firing. Inspiratius Maximus. Seriously. I don’t know when, I don’t know how – I’d hope that maybe on Canon Puncture we could hit this thing around a bit but I’d also love to see it be even bigger and broader than CP – but somewhen, somehow, I really would like to have the conversation. I mean verbally.