There's an enthusiastic bunch at Spelens Hus here! They were even up for a late-night Zombie Cinema game, sight unseen, "Ron has it in his bag? Sure, let's try it." The game is maxed at six players and I was turning people away.
The result was an extremely energetic session, occasionally shouty, with vivid characters and plenty of confrontational or reconciliatory moments.
Our topic this time is the length of play as it relates to game rules. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not as simple as seeing what the rules say and obeying them; people play long or short in defiance of those rules (when present) all the time. The question is when or how the rules facilitate the decision to continue to play.
Justin gave me a list of questions or topics for this session, and I realized they made most sense in nested form. So I grouped IIEE and relationship mechanics into the larger category of Bounce and system diagrams (specifically their feedback or activity loops), then put the whole into the biggest category of design processes as an experience.
Here's another discussion of Quella Volta Che, aimed at the nuts and bolts of "what happens" in play, due to player choices and statements. We couldn't have done this without the previous session which focused so intently on content.
Game Chef - boon or curse? I've been wondering since its very first days as a one-off "hey why not" by Mike Holmes at the Forge. So far, in official consulting, when someone shows up with "this was in last year's Game Chef," or even more so, "won last year's Game Chef," my count is about 50:50 between that's-cool/oh-fuck.
... Has This Been Goin' On? Alternative equally music-meming title: My Only Friend, the End. Or, wait, how about, Stop! In the Name of What?
This is about how long we play, in real time. It can refer to the length of a session, how many sessions relative to a given fictional situation, how long
Intent, Initiation, Execution, Effect - fictional things, probably the single most direct fictional content to be interfaced with real-people speaking and using rules, in the hobby. In a recent dialogue with Zac Porcu, he called it "the beating heart of role-playing."
Looking at the topic of distributing GM-tasks all sorts of different ways, which we all know well, but maybe its widespread use doesn't reflect enough of its potential.
One heart is an anatomical feature, available for, among other things, the draining of blood, the rough dissection, and the raw consumption by a depraved other person; by contrast, the symbolic repository of hopes, dreams, desires, and self. Concerning both, I direct your attention to the path-in-play of Naomi, arguably the hero of her own story, a perfectly viable and understandable fictional human being ...
This discussion took place a while ago, at the end of February. I wasn't sure it had enough content to merit posting, but as it turned out, BPG found it to be a breakthrough. We've done an intense further session about that, which is tied into the Boiling Pitch seminar and you'll see it, or a text version, soon.