I. Dear Reader, I know some people get annoyed by the fact that a lot of RPG discussions are repititive but I don’t. This is for many reasons but let me just illustrate one of them today.
Thanks for highlighting this framework. It seems like every day on FB or Reddit I read some AITA story or "how do I deal with the player who _____?" And, I always wonder if they have even tried talking to the Players (or to the DM).
Part of this is due to a skewed view of the layers, and each person's role in it, isn't it? Partly it's the idea that everything about the game has to be dealt with "in the game" otherwise it's "metagaming." Partly, it's due to the idea that the DM is "the God" of everything relating to the game, this leads to the DM not wanting to cone out from behind the curtain to have a human to human conversation about a problem.
I don't never see this in the games I play. Which might be because I rarely play D&D.
And there was talk about how RPGs "work" back in early 2005 by Vincent Baker (author of Apocalypse World and other indie games) : http://www.lumpley.com/archive/156.html
There probably was more about this in the blog-o-sphere at the time. I recall discussions about the "Big Model" and related things in the Forge (which was a TTRPG theory and design forum), in an attempt to get to a common language for tabletop game design, from 1999 on. (The Forge has been in read-only mode since 2012 or so, but is still available to browse -- http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php ).
Thanks for highlighting this framework. It seems like every day on FB or Reddit I read some AITA story or "how do I deal with the player who _____?" And, I always wonder if they have even tried talking to the Players (or to the DM).
Part of this is due to a skewed view of the layers, and each person's role in it, isn't it? Partly it's the idea that everything about the game has to be dealt with "in the game" otherwise it's "metagaming." Partly, it's due to the idea that the DM is "the God" of everything relating to the game, this leads to the DM not wanting to cone out from behind the curtain to have a human to human conversation about a problem.
I don't never see this in the games I play. Which might be because I rarely play D&D.
And there was talk about how RPGs "work" back in early 2005 by Vincent Baker (author of Apocalypse World and other indie games) : http://www.lumpley.com/archive/156.html
There probably was more about this in the blog-o-sphere at the time. I recall discussions about the "Big Model" and related things in the Forge (which was a TTRPG theory and design forum), in an attempt to get to a common language for tabletop game design, from 1999 on. (The Forge has been in read-only mode since 2012 or so, but is still available to browse -- http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php ).