Any RPG potential in the wilderness?

[Frank T]

I think your going to have real problems with trying to have a game about hunting not be gamist.
(...)
And I really think hunting is gamist. In fact the 'kill them and take their stuff' joke is really a reflection of the hunting and gathering instincts within all of us.

Sorry if I interrupt with this unqualified comment, but I just have to get rid of it: Why should anyone bother about that? Isn't it enough to state what the game is going to be about? Does it have to be tied to a Creative Agenda? Isn't there a large congruence of G and S in this field anyhow, especially with that mentioned "hunting and gathering" instinct? Is it important if I go play out a hunt because I want to explore that situation, or because I want to succeed and thereby Step On Up? Since the situation is that my character deseperately needs to succeed, the result will be absolutely the same!

I don't want to launch a general discussion about the sense or nonsense of the GNS model, but I find it remarkable that Creative Agendas should be discussed for their own sake, withour any recognisable conclusion for the actual game design process. Just my 2 cents, sorry again for the interruption.

[Thor]

Sorry to jump in with a bunch of less directly related comments but here goes.

Getting away from the whole GNS discussion there was a game in the late 70's called Legacy. It was billed as a "second generation roll assumption game". Legacy was concerned with these same aspects of survival in a race of primitive people called the Keya-Tu. One of the aspects that I have held onto all these years was that the players were tasked with coming up with new skills for their characters in the form of things they discovered. Like those berries make you puke and big snakes eat people. I wouldn't look for the game, it was, in many ways, a terrible system and the one I hold most responsible for making me the kind of person who reads the forge and wonders what would make a good survival game. But thought that there was something universal enough in the idea of improvising society which would make a great role playing experience.

Part of what makes survival movies fun is that the protagonists don't have all of the skills they need to get the job done they way they are used to getting them done and are forced to improvise new ways. This leads to a picking and choosing of the aspects of the society they come from that they need to to keep and those they must do without to survive. Think of the breaking of the canabalism taboo in Survive or the class features of Swept Away(either version). I can imagine a kind of Sorcerer like system where the rolls are made to allow the character to create what they need to live in the widerness with the difference being that the easiest way is to become an animal but that does not a hero make and picking and choosing the vestiges of civilisation that you need is an important feature. It could devolve into Gilligan's Island or the Lodr of the Flies, but the idea that you could have any feature from society for a cost to your humanity seems to be the right question in this sort of situation. It would certainly help to have a knowledge about what can be done in survival situations but those would amount to spells and the important thing is how starting a fire affects the story. Possibly what being the one who canstart a fire makes you in the party.