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octaNe in play

Started by Clinton R. Nixon, February 04, 2003, 02:39:50 PM

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clehrich

Hey Alan,

I admit it, I haven't read octaNe yet [sorry, Jared!], but it sounds to me like the pre-prep thing kind of burned you going and coming.
QuoteSo when we started play, I threw out a whole bunch of elements for the players to start responding too. They responded in unexpected ways - but more to the point, they responded mostly in ways that disengaged them from the elements, rather than building on them.
You threw a bunch of elements initially, and it sounds like what happened as a result was,
Quoteplayers continued to look to me the GM for inciting events.
It sounds like an anti-octaNe dynamic got set up initially, and thereafter the players kept turning to the GM because they were confused by a kind of incoherence.  Sort of sounds like the two games got swapped: with InSpectres, it doesn't hurt to have a pre-generated plot, so long as it's a list of elements and not railroading, obviously.  But with octaNe, where the fun is exploring po-mo trash weirdness, if you get bound up with pre-generated stuff, the players lose that "Zen" thread and start looking for guidance.
Chris Lehrich

Ron Edwards

Hi there,

All of this post is premature to my review (almost done), but I think I'll support Alan in some ways by saying that octaNe is not a Narrativist-facilitative game. I'll explain what I think it is in the review.

Given the proclivities of the group in question, which seem to be rapid-fire light Narrativism and similar Gamism (right guys? tell me if I'm wrong), octaNe's Forge-local rep and their familiarity with the aggressively Narrativist InSpectres probably pulled a bait-and-switch on them.

I can't think of a better example of narration and its organization being, itself, neither here-nor-there relative to Narrativist play.

Or to put it another way, it's not the MoV's which make The Pool best suited to Narrativist play.

Best,
Ron

Clinton R. Nixon

Quote from: Ron EdwardsGiven the proclivities of the group in question, which seem to be rapid-fire light Narrativism and similar Gamism (right guys? tell me if I'm wrong), octaNe's Forge-local rep and their familiarity with the aggressively Narrativist InSpectres probably pulled a bait-and-switch on them.

I can't think of a better example of narration and its organization being, itself, neither here-nor-there relative to Narrativist play.

Ron,

You are correct with your first point, and even more correct with your second.

(Someone called Donjon "narrativist D&D" the other day because of player narration. That mix-up's getting old.)
Clinton R. Nixon
CRN Games

jdagna

Quote from: Clinton R. Nixon
Quote from: Ron EdwardsGiven the proclivities of the group in question, which seem to be rapid-fire light Narrativism and similar Gamism (right guys? tell me if I'm wrong), octaNe's Forge-local rep and their familiarity with the aggressively Narrativist InSpectres probably pulled a bait-and-switch on them.

I can't think of a better example of narration and its organization being, itself, neither here-nor-there relative to Narrativist play.

Ron,

You are correct with your first point, and even more correct with your second.

(Someone called Donjon "narrativist D&D" the other day because of player narration. That mix-up's getting old.)

Ron, I think your appraisal of the group is pretty accurate, though I tend toward Sim play myself.  I can get into a Narrative mood for one-shot adventures, but in the long term I always fall back into Sim.  I noticed in your most recent article that you classified Pax Draconis as a High Concept Sim game, which I think fits it perfectly.

Clinton, you might have to pick another term than "narration" to avoid the confusion.  I know I've corrected more than one person on your behalf regarding that.  There are just too many folks who think shared narration=narrativism.
Justin Dagna
President, Technicraft Design.  Creator, Pax Draconis
http://www.paxdraconis.com