Ordinary vs Extraordinay Characters/Worlds

[gorckat]

Mornin' all-

Apologies if this belongs in Play (as prep), but while skimming a book on writing SF this morning, I came across a quote by CS Lewis, which I will now paraphrase.

Basically, he said that the more extraordinary the world, the more ordinary your main character should be, as in Gulliver and Alice in Wonderland.  The thinking is that it allows the reader to better relate to the story.

As this pertains to gaming, this is best exemplified by games like Cthulu, where ordinary folks meet unspeakable horror.

I'm wondering how does the flip side relate to design- do extraordinary characters require a more ordinary world to run around in and for the players to relate to?

Consider Sorcerer, where the PCs would be 1 of 100 or so very powerful individuals- they can change the world, but are constrained by the fact that playing with Sorcery will damn them/ drive them insane, etc...

I guess I'm asking does creating an "unordinary" world for extrodinary PCs mess the ultimate quality of the game (and I guess this might apply mostly to 'real-world' games; fantasy games are completely extraordinary, else we'd all be playing 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court' kind of games!) such as The World of Darkness, where everything is so different from our world (despite any "our world, just darker" that the designers put forth) that it just becomes a tangled mess of various supernatural comspiracies and plots and critters.  (Not to say WW games can't be fun, but I think thats completly irrelevant here)

How does one evaluate this when either looking at a new game or designing one?  Is it something that should be pointed out to the GM and/or players when he's reading the book?

Cheers

[Ron Edwards]

Much better here than in Actual Play.

I think that if we adopt a strict dichotomy of (extraordinary character, ordinary world) vs. (ordinary character, extraordinary world), then someone, probably Jared, will come along and design a game which shows how wrong it is.

However ... as a default concept, I think it's a great starting point. It certainly matches my notions when I wrote Sorcerer, and you can see it in Trollbabe too. I'll modify it slightly to see what you think.

Change "ordinary" to "familiar" or "less effort to explain." Then change "extraordinary" to "full of unfamiliar but fascinating conflict." So the former means that you can confidently grab and develop features of the character or world without much hassle on anyone's part, during play. The latter requires some between-play effort and a sense of study or pre-existing depth.

Given that, then what we've got is a repeat of a point I made a long time ago, back in the old Gaming Outpost and Sorcerer mailing list days ... that this rough matrix is at least food for thought in game design:

Sketchy characters, sketchy world: think
Sketchy characters, rich world: think Castle Falkenstein
Rich characters, sketchy world: think Sorcerer
Rich characters, rich world: think World of Darkness (in application, as you say)

Where "sketchy" is best understood as "interesting and fun, but easy to understand and probably to be developed further during play." Most modern-day settings fall into this category even if they list lots and lots of stuff.

However, the range of available games has changed a lot since I first thought about that, mainly from authors who were or are active at the Forge.

It seems to me that octaNe, Universalis, and Capes are all in the first category, but fruitfully so - the latter two especially have built-in mechanisms to make both elements richer.

The Shadow of Yesterday, Dogs in the Vineyard, My Life with Master, and Conspiracy of Shadows all seem to me to find ways to interrelate setting and character in a more complex fashion than traditional play, so that one really can't say one or the other is richer or sketchier.

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

I think the critical point is that the players need some way to relate to the in-game events.

You bring up fantasy, but I think you miss the point there. Looking specifically at D&D games, you've generally got either a pretty bog standard European medieval fantasy setting familiar from a thousand Rings clones, or you've got an Oriental setting that echoes every martial arts movie ever made. In the midst of this, you've got all character types that fill those fantasies--knights, barbarians, wizards, priests, thieves; or samurai, monks, ninja, bushi, wu jen, yakuza. Thus we already relate to these characters and these worlds because they're the worlds of our fantasy.

Compare that to Legends of Alyria. These people are rarely exactly human, and the inhuman ones don't fit any of our standard models. The world is a frightening and yet hopeful place, difficult to determine whether it's really magical fantasy or science fiction or some blending of the two. It defies all categories. Yet it works. Why? The players start the game by jointly creating characters who have conflicts between them that the players can understand. The fact that one is a Blessed and another is a Nameless and a third is a Cultist, all truly strange types, doesn't prevent us from understanding the conflict between them, particularly since we created that conflict. With the setting, we pull in those elements we find valuable, and put them where we want them, and ignore the rest. Thus we relate to it all because to a large degree we created it all.

So the point is that participants need a vehicle through which they can participate--they have to relate to something in the game in order to have that understanding that means they're connected to it.

--M. J. Young

[Nathan P.]

Coming off of M.J's point, I feel that not only do players need something to relate too, they need something to invest in. Which leads to some thoughts on "sketchy"-ness. There's the sketchy in the sense that Ron identifies, but there's also sketchy in the sense of "this is what you will be filling in during play" - basically, there can be a sketchy arena in which players can invest. So, when looking at a sketchy/rich split, there's relate-to-it richness, and invest-in-it sketchiness, as well as invest-in-it richness.

So, for design purposes, you have some decisions - do I want a rich and complex area for the players to relate to (and thus hook into play)? Do I want a sketchy area for the players to invest in? Etc.

I'll present Prime Time Adventures as an example. The "setting" is something that everyone (who watches TV, at least) can relate to right off the bat. Characters start off pretty sketchy, but they're what you invest in, as a player. Through play they become richer, whether you want them to or not. The sketchiness in PTA is "that which must be developed during play".

I hope that wasn't too tangential...

[gorckat]

Actually, Nathan, I think that might be what I was getting at without knowing it-  maybe its now something that can be answered by GNS ( and I'm still on System Does Matter)- is the game/world set up for investment or relation-

It seems that Ron's examples of sketchiness can be combined with those terms mentioned by Nathan and M.J. relation and investment.

Thanks all- I'll ponder some more and see if there's anthing else I have unanswered by the above.

Cheers

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I must not have been clear. Nathan's description of "sketchy" as meaning "to be filled in by play" is exactly what I intended by the term, and I was under the impression that I'd described it that way. We're all saying exactly the same thing.

Best,
Ron