[Inspectres] A marial arts metaphor for Inspectres game play

[epweissengruber]

IndieRPG Toronto has started up an Inspectres mini-campaign.

Play reports and characters will be available here: (http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/indierpgtoronto/message/439)

One of our players came up with a martial arts metaphor to describe the process of gameplay.  I thought it might serve as an example of the kind of metaphors and analogies that will be useful for planning and discussing games:

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Inspectres = Push Hands‏
From: Ryan Stoughton (ryanstoughton@hotmail.com)
Sent: November 23, 2007 10:39:52 PM
To: Erik Weissengruber (epweissengruber@hotmail.com)

Do you know about push hands, the tai chi practice technique?

Two people stand in fighting stances with their chests about a foot
apart. They then raise their hands and press against the other's
palms. The first to be pushed or pulled off their feet wins.

The really interesting thing about push hands is that if you tense up
first, you get pulled off your feet, so whoever decides to try to push
the other off their feet tends to be the more physically assertive
one. As soon as you tense up you get tilted, so pushing and pulling
without tensing up is the whole experience. Very, very difficult to
learn. People who are good at karate are usually awful at push hands.
I'm this way, although my martial arts are a decade behind me.

Inspectres is like this, I think: Players - and maybe the GM - can go
with the flow but if they push for something, it's bad for the experience.

I'm not sure if this means I love Inspectres or hate Inspectres, but I
thought you'd want to hear the observation.

Cheers --ry

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It took me sometime to get Elfs and Inspectres.  I was used to a hard style: I have my NPC and send them against you.  You have your PCs and send them against me.  They have the same stats, same resources.  But for the 2 aforementioned games the NPCs are qualitatively different -- NPCs do not have stats like those of the characters, characters risk certain outcomes by engaging PCs but the decision to engage/disengage is in the players' hands.

I was trying to be too "push-y" and it didn't work.

Learning to balance push and pull takes time.

[Christoph Boeckle]

Good analogy. I've had to get around to that as well over quite a few play sessions. Jason's point about playing his character in the MLwM thread seems to me to be of a similar origin. I think it's good to be pushy, but I constantly have to take care not to be too tense/stiff, else it blows up in my face (like, I grope around for ideas and am stuck because I'm fixed on my oh-so-great ideas), for example in Dirty Secrets which has plenty of that as well.

Have you got any good examples of that from the InSpectres campaign?