DB

As a budding game maker, I would like to think that the rules matter. The rules and mechanics imply the type of game that the game is great at supporting. The flavor text, which is vitally important, also supports that. The text of the book matters. Otherwise…otherwise there would be no point in playing other games. You could always just morph your current game to your needs–do the design work yourself for your table.

I think my inclinations come from being a band kid. In a concert band setting, we were pretty faithful about changing style and abiding by the score, or the chart. It was, and still is, the style of classical music. When the text says get louder, we get louder. When there’s notes about style, and ways to feel different time signatures, we note them. Our band director guides us through the context of the genre and the piece to produce what is a faithful recreation of the piece.

For a classical musician, perfection is attainable, and it is by abiding by the sheet music. Nahre Sol has a much more coherent discussion of improvisation for classical, and why that can be difficult.

But, if perfection was truly the “right answer” to music…why do we have improvisation? Why does jazz have the culture that it does? Why have we riffed themes, sampled them, referenced them in new contexts? Look at Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings”, which borrows from “My Favorite Things” from the Sound of Music. It borrows the melody and references the song in its lyrics as the song takes on its own identity.

Why? Why do we tell stories? Why do we retell them?

There are so many different personal accounts to that question. But, I would like to acknowledge that there are aspects of stories that we personally find engaging to us. They are so engaging in fact, that when we retell them, there are aspects of the story that we deem important enough to include or emphasize.

If you look at folk tales, which were passed down over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, you can see what was valued by a people and what continues to be valuable through the years to the people. There are many Asian myths that tell the story of rice, and where it comes from, as it is core to the diets of these people.

We don’t retell stories in our personal styles because we think that the original is bad. No, it’s because we enjoy those stories so much that we retell them for a palate that may not be used to them. We can see this in food culture. Filipino food has a lot of colonial origins, so perhaps it’s not always from a place of love and appreciation, but of a place of oppression. Despite the source of why an idea is carried–oppression or appreciation–it is adapted to the tastes of the people. Look at Japanese curry for one; it’s become its own thing.

To maintain or to mash

The question at the end of the day, for me and my games, is whether to engage in an act of preservation of the intention of these games and the culture that they came from…or to borrow its ideas and create my own thing.

Do I maintain the intention of the designers, and the culture that it comes from with my best intentions?

Or, do I take my inspirations, leanings, and the things that I enjoy of a game and mash it up? Make a new thing?

I think that even if you follow the sheet music or a script to its intention, there are places where your identity comes through. Maybe it is where you are drawing from when you perform. It may look similar, but there are subtleties where you come through. In the spirit of one of Patrick Bartley’s talks, originality isn’t something that you have to seek–the music and the performance is you, as soon you take the action, and the sound is coming from you.

So, deciding whether to maintain or mash something up can’t just be a question of ego. Maybe it’s just preference. There’s a skill to effectively sight reading a new piece of music from the sheet. There’s a skill to jam with new musicians. They can both be appreciated, and the world caters to both.

What I love in art

I am not the most technically capable person. It takes me a while, like anyone else, to get a combo down in a fighting game. It (used to) take me a while to get down technical sections in a piece, back when I was in band in high school. And don’t get me wrong, it feels amazing to really lock down a series of runs, a weird syncopated section, or a touch of death combo.

But, what I really value in both games and in art is the immediate decision making that creates new moments. This is the conscious repeating of a mistake to emphasize that the decision I made was intended, and was not a mistake. This is the vamping and filling in for dead space until your band mate or your scene partner knows or feels when to come back in. This is the decision to take a team fight because the enemy just overextended. It is when people are making decisions based on what other people did…those are the moments that really stand out to me.

And in a TTRPG, what does that look like? It looks like emphasizing a character’s overconfidence by challenging them beyond their means. It is noticing a heavy scene, and asking a player about what’s going on through both their head, and their character’s head. It is watching the players get curious about a mystery and continuing to provide breadcrumbs to that mystery (and on the flip side, providing a trail that they can trace so that they can get back at the people who did them wrong).

It is story. It is building on what the players, and what I think is interesting. And a lot of the time, that’s centered around the character and those relationships.

So, is everything going to be roleplay heavy?

Kind of.

What I’ll bring to each game

I can’t guarantee that each table that I run for and run with will always be the same. Hell, it won’t be the same. If you change even a single player on at able, or on a team, the dynamic changes.

Anyway. I think what will be important in most of my games is to maintain Fiasco-style relationships. There are a lot of things your character is and are, but it can be difficult to work from the beginning of a relationship unless the choices between the two characters directly strike within the interest of the other character’s… domain? Well. For a convention setting, to make things easier for interpersonal relationships between characters and players, we’ll follow the Golden rule of improv that was passed down to me to make things easier: play as if you have known each other for at least 6 months. Which means that a relationship would be there, and it’s just something to draw on. See: CROW (where I wrote about somewhere on this blog).

If not a relationship, maybe then a shared enemy. That can bring together folks in the right game and setting! And beyond either of those things, maybe an inclination of general vibes you have for that character, and maybe a reason why you have those vibes.

On top of encouraging interpersonal relationships, I will find ways to heighten character, relationships, and story for a game. I will describe an environment, and ask how it makes people feel aside from the obvious feelings. I will prime them and ask for leading questions like, “I want you to tell me what you find unsettling in this room.”, when that’s the tone we’re going for, or maybe, “What smell in this soft sunlight reminds you of simpler and kinder times?”

These are tools I’ve used before, and I think they are tools I will continue to use. They are useful, they are me, and they are the paints I carry inbetween each canvas. That’s how the table leans when I am with it–a little more grounded to those characters (if I can help it).