Via one of those tangents that happen when you start poking around on the web, I just spent a while looking at various articles and games and reviews related to (tabletop, not computer) roleplaying games, and I was struck yet again by something I've noticed before:<\/p>\n
It seems like there are a lot of games in which there are a lot of aspects of game mechanics that exist primarily to prevent players from doing unreasonable things, things that would be out of character, or things that would disrupt the story.<\/p>\n
And I would rather just play these games with people who are actively interested in working together to create a good story.<\/p>\n
I guess this is sort of like saying \"A lot of real-world laws exist primarily to prevent people from doing unreasonable things; I would rather just live in a society with people who are actively interested in promoting the common good.\" But unlike living in real-world society, in a game you can often pick who you play with.<\/p>\n
(Okay, yeah, I do understand that there are sometimes social constraints that lead to the social necessity of including disruptive players in a game. But still.)<\/p>\n
Of course, a lot of this comes down to what you're looking for in a game. My primary interests are character and story; in general (with some exceptions), the fewer trappings of gameness I can get away with, the better. Whereas for lots of people, the game aspects are the point, and character and story are subservient to the goal of making a good game.<\/p>\n
These paradigms are apparently generally known as narratological and ludological, respectively. And if I had time right now, I would write an entry twice this length, full of links to all the pages I've just been looking at, that would expand on that distinction. But I don't. Perhaps later.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Via one of those tangents that happen when you start poking around on the web, I just spent a while…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roleplaying"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}