Author: Peter Knutsen (---.cybercity.dk)
Date: 08-07-2005 02:31
A: To crush your enemies; to see them driven before you; to hear the lamentations of their women.
Players have a deep-felt (and *exceedingly* *valid*) desire to crush their character's enemies, in the sense of "final defeat".
The problem with this is that in just about every RPG system in existence, the only way to decisively crush another character, to achieve fial defeat, is through violence - or through GM fiat, also known as "playing the GM".
This conflicts, starkly, with the distaste that the typical roleplaying gamer has for playing the GM. He wants to play the *game*. Therefore he gravitates, almost always without being consciously aware of it, towards the realm of violence, because that's the only form of conflict in which he can get the best in life without having to step outside of the boundaries of the game, to play the GM.
(One might also say that achieving final defeat of one's enemy through playing the GM is intrinsically unsatisfactory. It is, after all, the equivalent of Conan praying to Kromm, and Kromm then responding by sending down a lightning bolt to turn the enemy into a pile of ashes - not exactly Conan's own accomplishment, after all...).
The solution is to expand the non-combat mechanics of RPG systems, so that players can get the best in life in many ways, only one of which is violence. So that it becomes possible, without GM fiat, to crush your enemy in the realm of economy or the realm of sociality or the realm of emotionality (psychology).
I'm doing that with Sagatafl, in terms of sociality. It's surprisingly easy to invent rules for numerical tracking of Popularities and Reputations, if you put your mind to it (and posses a minimum of creativity). Economy strikes me as easy too (as long as the campaig is world-based, of course - most aren't in the sense that they don't take place in a world, but rather on an ultra-tenous excuse for a dramatic stage). Psychology I'm less sure of. Tracking Sanity is easy, but apart from that, I'm wary of going too far into personality mechanics.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
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