Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Topics - Strangelet

Pages: [1]
1
RPGs / Turning rpg:s into improv games?
« on: March 22, 2015, 10:51:02 PM »
Hiya guys!

I'm a lover of all forms of interactive entertainmen: video games, rpg:s and theatre. I'm going to hold an improv exercise with a gaming and competitive mechanics theme at my local theatre club, so I'm thinking of various ways of converting the systems of 'game' games into faster and looser improv games. Often the rewards in improv are simple, the laughter of the audience, getting to stay up on stage, guiding the direction of the story. In order to make challenges or settings a bit more rule-bound I think I could try to constrain the reward systems.

One exercise could be: three persons on stage, they have a character weakness each, there is a challenge in the scene such that only a strong effort of one or many players can clear it, as reward the players who cleared the challenge gets to overcome their weakness, they end the scene when the outcome is obvious.

A variant can use status as the placeholder for other weaknesses, letting them go from low to high or vice versa.

How could we gamify this a bit more? One way is to force a ranking, let the players feel who weighed in the most vs least and let their transformation be the most or least. Another can be to add some kind of points that they have to bet on their actions. We could also try to qualify the challenge somewhat more, like having a series of distinct requirements for it to be cleared.

Another exercise: three persons on stage, one is a game master and does not control a character but have the power to define the setting or outcomes of actions, the others are actors who only author their own characters, the GM defines some challenge and narrates the outcomes of the players actions, the scene ends when the challenge is cleared or they fail.

A gamification here could be that the players both win if they work together, but if one of them clears the challenge alone then s/he and the GM wins.

What do you think of ways to merge rpg mechanics with improv? Any input on my examples?

2
General Chaos / On adapting to others.
« on: December 03, 2010, 01:17:15 PM »
Hiya!

There is a person (bonk) in my group who have some quite severe restrictions on bonk's ability to enjoy the roleplay, to achieve immersion bonk needs the experience to be absolutely free from metagaming, the others players need to be totally secure in acting out their characters and bonk may never be interrupted even in character. If these are not satisfied bonk goes into a really bad mood and completely holds up the game and starts ranting out a lot of bad feelings toward the other players.

The other players, and me as a GM, have restrictions of our own; I am lazy with writing notes and other things that can help immersion and I'm generally intolerant toward people who are not flexible in their playing style in order for the game to progress, and several of the players assume that information gained by one character will always be shared with the others or have restrictions on their willingness to act out in character.

So you can guess what happened. Anyway, the questions are:

1. How far you as players and GMs prepared to change your styles in order to accomodate the other people in the group?

And

2. On which end of the axis from "My duty" to "Our duty" to "Their duty" do you place yourself when it comes to see who it is that should change to make things work in a group?

Of course question two may be circumvented by saying that "it all depends on who is actually factually right", but try for this case to specifically think of cases where it's primarily a matter of preference in gaming style rather than a conflict over which set of rules actually works or not or something else more determinable.

Edit: Hej Bonk! Om du hittar dig hit och läser denna tråden efter att jag tipsat om RPPR, försök att inte bli helt sinnessjukt förbannat, det här är mest en ögonblicksbild av uppdämd irritation efter första WoD-mötet. Visserligen har du varit ganska så jobbig även efter detta, men nu är det på en hanterbar nivå, och nu senast var du superbt integrerad i gruppen utan ett enda utbrott.

Anledningen till att jag inte bara tar bort texten är att jag är öppen för udda konsekvenser av handlingar som kan ge krydda åt tillvaron.


Pages: [1]