Color-first Endeavor: back in action!

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Nathan,

Maybe. I certainly want to steer clear from any claim that someone should actually have been able to simulate or conduct play for the characters. Running it with real play actually wouldn't have addressed what I wanted either, though, because I'm most interested in an internal processing of Color, and its relationship to stuff on the sheet.

I wish there had been some way to articulate the whole thing to focus on expectations or ways for Reward to occur. Also, it is instructive to see the difference between systems like Heroic Do-Etcetera (the one I used) which are strictly about getting more points to spend, and those like Freemarket in which numerical changes and listed items come straight from events in play.

I'm trying to keep it from being a trap by focusing on the two characters who seem to have most -- well, been most arbitrarily de-Colored, at least given my biases about the games.

I also think there's a lot of gold in the thread, with plenty to talk about, and I hope to see more thoughts about it (e.g. Davide's). I figured it was a matter of honesty to get my crabbier points made up front.

Best, Ron

[davide.losito]

Well, you know, I am "special"... I am the one who start thinking stories of the pawn on the chess-board who doesn't want to go to war 'cause he has kids at home, or the bishop who is secretly in love with the queen and will defend her to death... and I make moves on the chess-board according to the stories.
And I lose the match, but guys... I have so much fun with that.

I think the main difference is (1) approaching a (rp)game with the idea of creating an emerging fictional series of events, that will be supported by a given system - as opposed to (2) approaching a game with the idea of having a set of rules that will generate a given output.

I strongly prefer the type of approach #1, in which I can develop - or at least try to... - all the aspects and feelings I get by the fictional facts themselves, as they start become more and more complex under my eyes.

So, for Chris, I imagined him, in the situation proposed, with the fiction developing, trying to look at him as you look at your memories of a decade past, tiding together those consequences who led you to the point you are now.
Consequences of a real life, or a good simulation of it.
I thought Chris had a strong behavior and cumbersome to some point, idealistic to the limit of overcoming the boundary that separates justice from "justicialism".
So the choice of leading him to the "Rage"/"Controls You" side of the game was a must, as this fictional events put in a single flow would have led to that, playing Dawn of a New Tomorrow.

In this development, the game either gives you mechanics that let you chose were to go, but also mechanics that gives you consequences you were not expecting, and then asks you to deal with them.
Dealing with them has no particular "rules", but it's what the game spins around.
Have you decided to use your super-power of Nuclear Blast to block the invasion of the giant ants? That's fine. You just Nuclear-blasted L.A. Wanna call home to see how mommy is? ... oh sorry... there's no more home... you killed your family, hero.

[Hans Chung-Otterson]

I know that the "play it in your head" step was a bit artificial. However, I was a little surprise that some of you specifically abandoned the only touchpoint you had - the superhero dollar motif - and focused on the game's reward mechanics in an effective void. For a couple of them, it was like seeing an exercise in "if I were playing a character with no distinguishing features at all, in a game stripped of all context except for scoring points."

What I want to do is see how Reward and reward mechanics can get separated. I'll pick two examples in which I think the account lost track of the starting Color in favor of constructing a more generic, reward-mechanic oriented approach to play. I've listed my more-or-less instant reactions to what I read, and I urge you to correct me if I'm being unfair or didn't understand you well enough. All thoughts are welcome.

Freemarket: As I see it, Reward at the character level in Freemarket is often about the memories - which are pretty much the only genuinely individualizing features they have. So -- why did the relationship memory get privileged as an arc, and the costume not? Did the costume mean anything to the audience, considering that Thin Slicing and Ephemera were available to make it mean something (and that was sort of the MRCZ's point)? Ultimately what could it mean for the MRCZ's vision statement? Why do you see Ickarus as peripheral to the MRCZ, rather than its indispensable front man? And at the community level of Reward in this game, what is the MRCZ's impact on the station's culture, which in this case is specifically and only an impact on values; how stable is the station in terms of such impact, and how stable should it be. All of which starts feeding into what I think of as Premise-level talk: how does power (real power) arise from popularity; what actually is a medium of exchange --

Hey Ron,

I think you're reading me fine.

I'll say that I think the relationship stuff got privileged over the costume stuff because this exercise was heavily colored (ha) by my recent experiences running FM. The Users in my longest-running game had some real human stuff going on, but seemed to shy away from those relationships in play (to the point of inflicting abuse as a way to show they were done with the relationship); I think I was just excited about seeing what that looks like in FM, and so I took that and ran with it rather than the dollar sign motif. I also tried to honestly depict FM play as I've seen it, and in most cases the characters are so mutable that original character concepts are not what comes to the fore in play; something else happens and the characters are different. Perhaps I wasn't honestly buying into the experiment.

Why was Ickarus peripheral rather than the frontman? Again, I think I was valuing trying to replicate an "authentic" FM experience rather than just follow the experiment. Being a part of a MRCZ often feels like you are being pulled in two directions (your own & your MRCZ's), and I felt that Ickarus would have gotten away too easy if he'd just been the head of the MRCZ and taken it in whatever direction he wanted.

I think the MRCZ's impact on station culture is negligible beyond a few other groups. They're a fixture of a certain subculture, and that's probably it.

Did I answer all your questions?

[Josh W]

I wouldn't be surprised if you give people a character they are not interested in, ask them to play it, and after a session or two almost all the details you focused on have dropped out of the picture!

I'm sure there are thousands of disappointed GMs out there who thought that pregened characters would be the saving grace of authenticity, only to find the other players' divergent interests resurfacing.

That sounds like the sort of thing that a reward cycle acting responsively to players' thoughts about colour would produce!

I wonder if something like "change one element of this character then stat them up", would have done a better job at retaining the rest of the colour, as people could take out the bits they find uninteresting and keep the rest.