Seeing Universalis everywhere I look...

[Robotech_Master]

It's funny--I've been so immersing myself in Universalis over the last couple of days that I'm starting to think of movies and TV shows and things in Universalis terms.

"Luke being Leia's sister? Oh, yeah, one of the players thought that would be kewl, and even though they had the Fact of Luke kissing Leia from the first movie that they could have Challenged with, the other players thought, 'This is kinda neat, let's see where he goes with that,' and let it pass."

And then I saw a certain serial TV show tonight starting with a caption "Two weeks later" and thought, "Oho, one coin each to all the other players..."

It's funny how many weird story decisions make a kind of sense when you apply Universalis logic to them.

[Mike Holmes]

Yeah, often ignoring the theoretical ramifications of facts can be very interesting. With Lucas, I think it's accidental half the time. This happens in Universalis quite a lot. Somebody will forget that Leia kissed Luke (for Luck!). Play goes on for a while. And then you remember the earlier fact. And suddenly things take on a new cast to them. You could, of course, try to explain it away. But, time having passed, usually what players do is to try to figure out what the gaffe "means."

That is, in most RPGs, a "mistake" like this becomes something to "retcon" or otherwise fix. In Universalis they're often treated like serendipitously found gold, and turned into something cool.

Also interestingly, Universalis can often be somewhat post-modern (if you will), in that sometimes something completely contradictory will happen. And nobody fixes it, because nobody finds it all that important to spend on to fight. So you get storylines that have huge gaping logical holes. But it doesn't seem to bother anyone. Which is fascinating.

Related is the fact that Universalis play tends to result in dangling plot-lines. Essentially many potential plot-lines are created in play. But through a Darwinian winnowing process, only the really interesting ones get played to completion. Sometimes it might leave a niggling sensation of not being tied up nicely. But I rarely hear actual complaint about it. More commentary.

I think that the secret is that Universalis (and RPGs in general) are not about creating "stories" per se. A story is a creation you make to be consumed by somebody, and you get to deliberately set the plot up nicely in order to do so. RPGs are more about making up myths, which are more about making value statements than about just entertaining each other.

As long as you get to have characters, and they stand up or fall down, play is fun.

Mike