As per usual Vincent Baker posts some things and then I have a lot of side thoughts either about role-playing in...

Originally shared by Jesse Burneko

As per usual Vincent Baker posts some things and then I have a lot of side thoughts either about role-playing in general or my own work. Here's Vincent's post:

https://plus.google.com/+VincentBaker/posts/hreaAFy1GE8

So, here's the thing: I know exactly what Vincent is talking about and understand what he means about being out of patience with it. I'm kind of out of patience with it too.

Haunted is in a place that is struggling with this. Overall, Haunted is in really good shape. The mechanics work. It has the right amount of tension and pressure. Where it's suffering is FLOW.

The main problem I was seeing come out of Haunted sessions was how much "editing" I was doing. As Vincent says in his posts when setting up and playing scenes there are wrong answers and to make the game work I had to personally call out all the wrong answers and that's no good. I could write down a whole bunch of advice and hope that whoever is acting as facilitator could do all the editing I do but as Vincent says that's punting.

I recently added some things that solves a lot of the "editing" I had to do during setup. When you create characters you have to say what drives them and those drives have to put pressure on the murderer. This works well, except to clarify that rule I have to do a lot less talking during setup.

The next place that needs attention is "scene framing". In Haunted there's really only two ways to start a scene.

1) Follow the murderer from point to point.
2) Someone picks up a Supporting character who in some way intercepts the murderer (i.e. confronts him at home, the office, calls him, cuts him off in traffic, stalks him at his favorite cafe).

That's really it. That's all the group should be doing. It really should be very casual. And maybe spelling these two things out will be enough.

But the broader point I want to make is that as I've been playtesting Haunted I've really come to believe that the unwieldy "lurching" from scene to scene is one of the biggest barriers to entry that a lot of "story games" have. All my current development on Haunted has not been about making the game "work" (it's worked for a long time), it's about making the EASY to play.

And now I'm going to say something really controversial: Burning Wheel with it's all its cogs and levers and switches and dials, is, at the end of the day an easier game to play than a lot of "simpler" story games with awkward setup and scene framing procedures precisely because it leaves the players with a lot of blank spaces and not a lot of real tools to fill in those spaces. It "trusts" the players to have the creativity to fill in those spaces, which is all fine and good but completely disavows the idea that creativity of that kind is work and effort. It's HARD. And the HARDER the work necessary to play your game the more you alienate your audience.

In Burning Wheel once you write your three Beliefs (the hard part) everything from that point is EASY. You just say what your character does to fight for his Beliefs and the GM is responsible for dropping road blocks to that. That's it. That's the whole game. All the cogs and wheels and levers and dials are there to actually make that EASIER because every time you go to do something, there's a tool ready at hand to make it happen.

In early drafts of The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven's Hollow the players made up a lot of stuff: Children, Locations, Adults, Ravens, etc. As the game took more and more solid form as a card game a lot of those things are now provided: Children Cards, Location Cards, Adult Cards, Raven Cards, etc. I was really really worried people were going to be disappointed they didn't get to make that stuff up. Do you know how many people have complained they didn't get to make their own children or locations?

ZERO.

Not one.

We like to think our "lite" story telling games allow for a greater range of creativity and freedom. And to some extent they do, but what you now have is a creative work load balancing problem. Making up stuff is fun, but it's also WORK. The point of game design is off load some of that WORK, so you that the group can focus on engaging the substantive part of play.