Author: BlackHat_Matt (---.ameritech.net)
Date: 03-22-2004 18:54
What I meant when I said that, incidentally, wasn't so much that art and fun are mutally exclusive, in RPGs or otherwise. What I was getting was that if you focus on making your RPGs art, they can cease to be fun. To me, as a game designer, it's great if people are making art with their games (whatever that means to the gamers in question), but it's more important to me that they're having fun with it.
And yeah, when it happens that you create a story that's not only fun to participate in but has dramatic merit as well, that's frickin' fantastic. I've been there (with Wraith, mostly).
I suppose it all comes down to what you want out of the games. This is going to sound really awful, but I think if you set your expectations too high, you're setting yourself up to fail. That is, if you go into an RPG expecting some great artistic revelation, you're likely to be disappointed. If everyone in the group has the same expectation, you've got a better shot.
It's kind of like the difference between American actor training (which focuses more on a character's psychological center and motivation) and British (which focuses more on external actions). The former allows for some truly fine dramatic moments...provided the actor is capable of expressing them and the script is capable of conveying them. The latter is capable of that, too, but even if the script is substandard, the British actor is going to be more fun to watch.
Anyway, thanks for the articles; I need to go back and read the rest of them!
Ciao,
"BlackHat" Matt McFarland
Dark Ages Developer
WWGS
www.blackhatmatt.com
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