Author: Burger (---.tjgroup.com)
Date: 07-02-2004 06:52
Action and achievement vs. emotion and immersion?
American tradition vs. Nordic tradition?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it seems like the Nordic tradition has been adopted worldwide in P&P games ever since I began playing them.
Bascially, you imply that Myrskyn Aika promotes emotion and immersion as roleplaying goals and other games don't. I maintain they are methods and player goals, and they are that in every P&P roleplaying game I know of. They are not exclusive to any "tradition" because they are the cornerstone of the player experience in roleplaying games.
All characters, like real people, have personal goals and measure their personal success through achievements. Unlike in other types of games, the goals in roleplaying games can be highly personal, unique, changing, constant, unreachable or there can be new goals when and if the old goals are reached. The player is allowed a choice on what part of the roleplaying experience he or she derives most pleasure and I think emotion and immersion to be the most typical choices among players of my age. Identifying with the character, feeling his joy or sorrow is a feature of this hobby, not of any single game.
Myrskyn Aika promotes contemplation of character's feelings by offering numerical bonuses as rewards for well-grounded sentimental arguments. Many other games do this by means of allocating points to character traits as in-game advantages, but in Myrskyn Aika the score is dynamic and involved in every randomized, character-initiated event. Nice and good, slows down the gameplay by forcing the player to constantly explain his character's motives and gets tricky when those motives are something the other characters in the party should not be aware of. And of course, the gamemaster will now have to rate the player's(!) oral performance on a scale of 0 to +6 and keep track of any events that might change the rating during the encounter.
It is a more complicated version of what you already have in many games: explain to the gamemaster why a certain trait would or would not affect the encounter. Ars Magica and generic point distribution systems spring to mind. Hardly something I would build a tradition on.
The real innovation of Myrskyn Aika is two-mode gameplay, allowing the same character to be used in both tabletop gaming and LARPing without extensive conversion, or so goes the theory. I'd have to be a LARPer to be able to confirm it, but it seems plausible when I read it in the text. It is a good thing and a good idea, and something I might copy when I do the next game I consider to have LARPing potential (Miekkamies 2.0, probably). Maybe two games would be enough to make it an exclusively Nordic tradition.
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