Less Points of Contact for me, thanks

[Frank T]

Hi Chris,

What is the consequence of this realization? Concerning actual play, well, I'm playing in a Sorcerer campaign right now and trying to put up a regular round of TSoY. I have also gone back to reading Unknown Armies, which I had abandoned before. But I have to admit some of what I read in there makes me go, "Oh, COME on."

Concerning design, in revising my game BARBAREN!, I am making it more SIS-heavy. Especially, I enable players to use SIS elements to their advantage in fighting and wooing (the essential conflicts in the game), something that was not possible before. I also have a lot of funky thoughts about games I could design next, that facilitate the kind of SIS-heavy yet meaningful play I have in mind. But given that my daytime job is eating up most of my life and I have only just started to work on BARBAREN! again after several months of hibernation, I'd better not start on another project.

Hi Judd,

as I stated, I was probably wrong in thinking that my concern is mainly about Points of Contact. I don't want to derail this thread with posting my guess on what PoC actually are, and I would ask everybody else not to go guessing. I don't mind if one of the experts gives an example, though. On the contrary.

- Frank

[Silmenume]

Hi Frank!

When playing SIS-heavy, the characters and the world feel more important and also more real to me. They matter more to me.

This certainly smells allot like a Sim tell to me.  If this “feel” is one of the most compelling reasons you play or the source of greatest or most powerful enjoyment I would say you are talking Sim “descriptors.”

I for my part can say that I tend to find “mere” interpretation of SIS and source material boring after a short while (this used to be different in the past). I mostly rely on hard conflicts of interest to drive play.

This has continually been the biggest problem in both the theoretical understanding and description of Sim.  I, too, rely on hard conflicts of interest to drive play – just like in the G/N agendas.  I keep arguing that such conflicts are just as central and defining to Sim play as in the other CA.  The problem that keeps cropping up is the one of “passive” vs. “active agendas” and the desire to keep them lumped together.  They don’t belong together because they have incompatible “processes of play.”  The play which you talk about, and the type I’ve been ruminating on, is the type of play where conflict is not only important but central to the actual process of play.  Both in terms of what drives the game forward as well as the “feeling” you are talking about.  I believe that the, “’mere’ interpretation of SIS and source material” is the “passive,” non-conflict form of play, which for many reasons I think belongs in a separate Agenda.  It doesn’t matter to me which gets called what, but one certainly creates new material by the players and the other virtually does not.

Also another Sim “tell” is the -

The way those fictional contents and choices were negotiated between the players. It's a Technical Agenda thing.

…

I prefer it if conflicts are resolved by player negotiation, deeply rooted in the SIS and in-game casualty, and assisted, not replaced, by fortune mechanics.

It is a Technical thing!  It is how “System Matters” in Sim.  This reliance on the game “causality” being used by the players to determine likely outcomes is mythic bricolage.  That you seem to like it so much says to me that you really enjoy being up to your bottom lip in that fictional space – the Dream.  For in order to work this way you really have to be dialed into an enormous amount of the “details” (or as I would call them – “rules of behavior”) of the fictional world.  This can only happen with long and active investment in the SIS.  Conflict makes darn sure that you do know “how the world works” or you won’t be able to effectively negotiate your butt out of trouble!

Part of the institutional problem is the miasma attached to “Drama Resolution” which is frequently used to mean “GM fiat.”  Mythic bricolage can only work in a “Drama Resolution” environment and this flies totally in the face of “System Matters.”  In this Mythic Bricolage resolution system (a “type of” Drama resolution) mechanics take a secondary role fortune mechanics assist in this process, the do not replace it.  What the players think the world should be like is more important than a set of dead mechanics.

I do have some thoughts on the actual “role” of  conflict in Sim, how “resolution mechanics” work, why that deep knowledge of the SIS is necessary and how they all facilitate that state of “Dreaming.”