Taking Stock

I believe that I have become far too focused on the creation of my Preposterous card game in this design blog, I mean my focus in research is actually in storytelling, something I believe to be a lot of fun but is overlooked by the medium of games that can best express it - Tabletop & analog games.

So, to list some of my findings thus far - the problem I have found is that if you want to tell a story with a group of people you run into Ego. Everybody telling the story has to have a personal stake in the story, so they create a character for themselves, that character is their Protagonist; that character cannot fail or the player will loose interest in the story. This results in any two players falling into any form of competition to fall apart, neither one will allow the other to 'win' and get the better of their character and with no impartial systems or 'rules' they cannot progress. Hence the use of rules based around random chance in role-playing games, a chance based system is impartial and undeniable.

However, while this solved one problem it raised another.

Dominant strategy (or strategy in any form) emerged. The players of the game were presented with a system of rules, which, while it solved the problem of competition and resolution it focused the players on mastering a system and feeling dominant over everything else in the game; by adding quantifiable problems players lost sight of the storytelling and focused on strength based progression and mastery of a system.

This 'gamer logic' proceeded to shape tabletop role-playing in a big way, in fact to this day there are not many games in existence that do not focus the players on mastering some sort of system. Is that really role-playing? To me role-playing is putting yourself into the position of a character, putting on somebody else's shoes and playing out that character's story to it's humble conclusion.

I suppose that is where I separate from the rest of the audience a little bit, for a lot of people the game is about power fantasy, they want to be and feel like a mythical bad ass who is never wrong and could take on the world. Meaning that mastering that 'system', beating up all the bad guys and being stronger than the other players is where they derive enjoyment. My guess is that this is power fantasy at it's best, but there must be more to role playing than the power fantasy right?