I think it's better to spin this off from the White Wolf discussion, since it isn't really specific about WW and I find it very interesting indeed.

Noon wrote: What I'd already written about in that thread is that it is unguided drift. And that because of that it can seem marvelously succesful with certain groups. Why? Because these groups are already in unison creatively, or they have the skills between them to become so. This is purely a quality of the group, not the book.

It's much like a piece of equipment or a program that doesn't come with instructions. Some people have the aptitude to work it out on their own. Others don't, but this doesn't make them some sort of scape goat where they can be described as the wrong sort of group and thus the designer doesn't have to take responsiblity for them. There are really wrong groups and then there are groups who go wrong from lack of instruction.

This 'they just need the right group' thing is just bad form. It's like saying you can give a music band a jug, an DJ desk, a trombone and a triangle and say 'Ah, with the right group it'll be magical'.

Primarily, I think the first thing you do to guide drift is assist it. This means assisting the negotiation process. From 12 year olds to, ahem, some older gamers, negotiation is a skill that doesn't always come naturally. Indeed there's the hang over from board games of 'these are the rules, we follow them, end of negotiation'.

This may sound odd, but discussing how to talk as a group, managing give and take on both sides rather than one must stand negotiation, getting around problematic issues like 'having to make sense' (something I spoke about in a recent post) and how to handle not having your exact artistic vision met (and how that can be beneficial). This may sound odd to veteran gamers because you already recognise the need or do it so intuitively that you don't even recognise your doing it, thus instructions for it are odd (like instructions for breathing would seem odd...then again, think of yoga, etc).

Then you can get on to instructing how to drift the game. First you give a solid idea of the direction the game is in now. If it's about killing monsters for rewards but your group would like something more nar (and you describe nar, or use more layman like words), it's going to require some considerable steering, for example. Give an idea of what to ditch, and tell them it's because it rewards a whole different direction of play. Refer back to group discussion when it comes to group agreement on ditching stuff.

I'd cover more, but I'm probably rambling.

I think that you'll find a lot about guided drift if you do a search on "transition", and particularly if you look at the work of Fang Langford and his game (Scattershot? It's been a while.). There's an inactive forum for it, as it was never completed. He was working on a system through which players would recognize what they wanted and adjust the mechanics to facilitate it.

I did not mention in the White Wolf thread that Multiverser uses unguided drift rather centrally; it doesn't say so, because the terminology didn't exist, but it is generally the case that play finds its feet through the give and take between referee and individual players. A few notes on how and why that happens might help point toward how to guide drift.

• One thing that is very significant in this is that Multiverser really plays like several game sessions occurring simultaneously. Since players are frequently in separate worlds, it is rare that the actions or activities of one player impact any others. Thus if I want to get out there and join battle with a dangerous enemy, and Joe wants to organize his equipment and spend time practicing new skills, and Pete wants to deal with the question of whether orcs are people too, that's fine, because I don't have to wait for them or hassle with their interests. They can watch when the spotlight is on me, and I can prove that I've got whatever it takes (or go down in flames if that's the outcome), and then when it's their turns they'll do what they want without impacting me in the least.

I mention this, because if you want to have drift in a game I think you still have to have some sort of cooperation between the players. Either they have to be all willing to drift together, or the game has to be set up such that they can each drift individually without having any impact on each other's play.• One thing that I didn't notice about the game until long after it was in print and I was deeply involved in theory discussions was the degree to which setting was integrated with system. Multiverser's "setting", such as it is, is "any and every universe imaginable by anyone at any time, and then some". Right in the game rules are the framework for "interfacing"--in essence, having Multiverser player characters become characters in other games governed by the rules of other game systems. We recognized then that sometimes the only way to reproduce a world was to reproduce the mechanics of it. What we didn't realize was that every setting introduced elements to play that influenced how players played. A world with strong challenges in the form of ethical and moral issues tends to bring out narrativist play; one with a call for a hero to accomplish some task tends to bring out gamist play; one with a lot of interesting nooks and crannies and other bits to explore tends to bring out simulationist play. That's not guaranteed; players will often ignore aspects of a world which don't interest them. However, you can drift a game by bringing in situations which point toward one or another agendum. I can clearly remember a bog standard D&D game that became extremely interesting in a narrativist way when the referee dropped a situation in our laps which went directly to the differences in alignment that existed between party members. Suddenly we had to come to terms with a moral and ethical disagreement, and we had to do it quickly, because in a few minutes it was either going to be a battle or not, depending on what we did.

Those should spark some thoughts, I trust.

--M. J. Young

Hi Frank,

Guided Drift is usually known by another name: House Rules. Drift can be a collaborative process by the group as a whole, or it can be laid down from the GM or whomever is deemed the "rules authority". The key point to having it be "guided" is that the drift has to be conscious.

Many folks drift games because they don't know any other way to play. You'll find them failing to parse, or even read entire sections of a game text, then wondering why it either "is just like every other game" or else, "is broken".

Chris

Thanks all of you!

I'm confused. Okay, now am I messing this up? Does Drift necessarily require a tweaking of the mechanics? According to Ron's definition in the Provisional Glossary, it doesn't:

Changing from one Creative Agenda to another, or from the lack of shared Creative Agenda to a specific one, during play, typically through changing the System. In observational terms, often marked by openly deciding to ignore or alter the use of a given rule.