9 minutes ago, Archlyte said:

Great post Vondy! No I asked for the stuff in the thread so I'm not saying that I asked a question and now I don't like the answer.

But I am also saying **** the first rule of gaming, and the rest. I have come to believe in what I call the Tao of RPG. Each thing is right when it is right, and not because of a rule. They told me not to interfere with player agency, so I did it just to see what would happen. The conventional wisdom said to ask them what they want to do, so I didn't. I found that these rules are just there to guide you, especially in the early years of gaming, but they are not absolute truths. I have broken almost every rule (that isn't just being petty or hateful, I'm talking about the rules for Role-Playing every game has usually in it's Running the Game section) that I could think of, and guess what, the games did not go down in flames. I'm sure there would be circumstances where a wrong move could have done that, but these things--these rules of RPGs--are not physics.

I think the problem is that the notion of "player agency" is taken to an unworkable extreme in contemporary gaming circles. Its also a reaction to a problem that was never as ubiquitous as it was made out to be and has been mythologized: the tyrant game-master who rail-roads and humiliates his players for kicks. Most of us old-school grognards have dealt with that GM in our careers on occassion, but the vast majority of us have also dealt with fantastic game-masters who worked hard, ran good games, and made this a hobby we ended up sticking with. Some of them even inspired us to become (hopefully) fantastic gamemasters ourselves. Gaming is a social endeavor and that means the group has to have a social contract, be it implicit or explicit. Players have to remember that the game master is also a "player" in the sense that they a member of the group who gets a say and has a right to "agency" themselves. And, quite frankly, I would say that the gamemaster should have a somewhat weighted say because, more often than not, they are doing the heavy lifting. That said, every single person at the table is responsible for the group, not just themselves, having the good time everyone agreed upon as a goal. Over the years I've learned that games work best with limited agency . A game needs a tone, tenor, style, and set of genre conventions. Players need to have some wiggle-room and a chance to help tell the story, but not at the expense of any other person at the tables fun and satisfaction. We are all supposed to be cooperating at the table. Sadly, "player agency" is often taken as a license to ignore the basic social contract, and sociability, that RPGs are predicated on in the first place. Its not "choose your own adventure." Its choose our adventure together!

First of all, may I say that it is confusing as **** to have two angry penguins around here. Sir, I insist on pistols at dawn! Now on to business. . . .

12 hours ago, Maelora said:

One PC uses 'kriffing' a lot, and there are quite a few 'Star Wars-y' sayings, but other PCs use real-world swear-words.

I have found that when I swear in game (versus out of game where F is usual punctuation for me), it's usually motivated by a quick, intense emotion. These are conditions that generally don't lend themselves to me thinking "I need a swear word. Let me pick something appropriately Star Wars-y so I don't break the moment. . . . hmm."

No, usually I need a word and I need it now . By the time my brain process something star wars-y, the moment has past - so you get "fuckety ****" instead. I might give you a Smeg, as decades of Red Dwarf has pretty much baked that into my brain as a "I need something I can say at work that wont get me fired". It also has the benefit of sounding guttural and visceral - a bonus when you're F bombing out of anger.

Bah! Stupid double posting forum software! Smeg! Fuckety ****!

1 hour ago, Vondy said:

I think the problem is that the notion of "player agency" is taken to an unworkable extreme in contemporary gaming circles. Its also a reaction to a problem that was never as ubiquitous as it was made out to be and has been mythologized: the tyrant game-master who rail-roads and humiliates his players for kicks. Most of us old-school grognards have dealt with that GM in our careers on occassion, but the vast majority of us have also dealt with fantastic game-masters who worked hard, ran good games, and made this a hobby we ended up sticking with. Some of them even inspired us to become (hopefully) fantastic gamemasters ourselves. Gaming is a social endeavor and that means the group has to have a social contract, be it implicit or explicit. Players have to remember that the game master is also a "player" in the sense that they a member of the group who gets a say and has a right to "agency" themselves. And, quite frankly, I would say that the gamemaster should have a somewhat weighted say because, more often than not, they are doing the heavy lifting. That said, every single person at the table is responsible for the group, not just themselves, having the good time everyone agreed upon as a goal. Over the years I've learned that games work best with limited agency . A game needs a tone, tenor, style, and set of genre conventions. Players need to have some wiggle-room and a chance to help tell the story, but not at the expense of any other person at the tables fun and satisfaction. We are all supposed to be cooperating at the table. Sadly, "player agency" is often taken as a license to ignore the basic social contract, and sociability, that RPGs are predicated on in the first place. Its not "choose your own adventure." Its choose our adventure together!

Cheers to you sir! This rings really true to me and I would add your Limited Agency term to my vocabulary concerning this topic. I agree 100% with what you said about the experience of having that spectrum of GM's that forms what you do and don't want to do as a GM. I also think that the social contract is another thing that tends to be so nebulous as to be inconsequential for certain groups who can't mesh. If you have a different implied contract in everyone's mind then you really have nothing. I know as a player I am extremely flexible on this and I amend my contract in the first few sessions to make sure I can accommodate the GM who is hosting me. I also tend to adjust it based on my fellow players as I want to support them as well because as you say it is best done as a team.

Sometimes though, you are not a team. In those times is when you have to do as you said and throw a bit of weight around. I like nothing better than when the players deliver a game that I in no way saw coming. That's just great fun as long as it hasn't devolved to the point where I won't respect the game in the morning. The last couple of sentences in that last post are just awesome. Interestingly, the people I have had the most trouble with as far as Player Agency have been guys who basically only GM and never really play as a Player. I think Player time is important for you if you are going to be a GM, because you have to learn how to follow if you're going to lead. You need to have that experience of working at it from that other viewpoint and making it work with the tools that you have at your disposal.

I think in total you have highlighted for me that my current experiment is being enacted as an act of disobedience to the larger expectations, and I am not really violating rules so much as I am seeing what the actual systems are that work and how they work. I recently told my players in one group that I am going to actually filter what goes into continuity, that if I feel something purely meta is going into the narrative I will hit the pause button and break the flow in order to deal with it. This was about the biggest no no I could think of, but in practice it happened like 2 times in a session and hasn't happened since. Nobody called the ACLU on me or left the table in tears. It was a non-issue really, even though I could go on nearly any RPG forum, state that as my position, and watch as pages of posts come in denouncing me as a creep for breaking the prime directive.

Thanks for the great post Vondy. Just excellent.

Did someone say smeg?!

On 9/19/2017 at 1:33 PM, Archlyte said:

I don't know how in the **** Jabba could have possibly been sexually attracted to those dancers.

Probably for the same reason bestiality exists among humans. People just want to put things in places that they are not biologically meant to go, for reasons we can't explain and don't want to think about.

6 hours ago, Degenerate Mind said:

Probably for the same reason bestiality exists among humans. People just want to put things in places that they are not biologically meant to go, for reasons we can't explain and don't want to think about.

I think where this whole thing is really pivotal is not so much in the possibility, because in fiction anything is possible, but in the choice to do this as a writer. Let's see, we have a PG sort of story that is about good and evil, and we have space battles and we don't show defecation urination or sex, but what we need is something like bestiality.

That's the part that I reject. Jabba is bad, he has already been more than convincingly shown to be bad with everything else they did to build his character. The EU writer's version of the children having an orgy in Stephen King's It is the idea of Jabba wanting to have sex with his dancers. It's unnecessary, stupid, and does not fit the rest of the story.

Durdging this discussion point back up again, are we? Excellent. I haven't seen two thread locks in one week since the ErikB days.

Next we discuss the gender dynamics implied by Smurfette being the lone female in the Smurf village.

6 hours ago, Archlyte said:

I think where this whole thing is really pivotal is not so much in the possibility, because in fiction anything is possible, but in the choice to do this as a writer. Let's see, we have a PG sort of story that is about good and evil, and we have space battles and we don't show defecation urination or sex, but what we need is something like bestiality.

That's the part that I reject. Jabba is bad, he has already been more than convincingly shown to be bad with everything else they did to build his character. The EU writer's version of the children having an orgy in Stephen King's It is the idea of Jabba wanting to have sex with his dancers. It's unnecessary, stupid, and does not fit the rest of the story.

I suppose? I've never really put that much value on having a movie feel to games set in the galaxy far, far away, and I've certainly never felt that the entire galaxy has a pg-13 rating, let alone wanted it to. ROTJ was my favorite movie as a kid, for two main reasons: Jabba's Palace and the Ewoks. Say what you want about the latter, flesh-eating teddy bears with no moral quandary with cooking sentient beings alive are metal as crap, and there is nothing you can possibly say to convince me otherwise.

As for Jabba's Palace, that place got me thinking a lot harder about what we don't see in Star Wars. I didn't get the full implications of Jabba's behavior for a while, but the place in general always made me think that just beyond the edge of what we could see on camera, Star Wars was a very dangerous and frightening place, full of unwholesome things that simply should not be as they are.

Maybe I'm the odd man out here, but I don't think the entire Star Wars universe should conform to the tone & feel of the movies; that strikes me as an egregious waste of the setting, and a ludicrous oversimplification of the people in it.

1 hour ago, Stan Fresh said:

Next we discuss the gender dynamics implied by Smurfette being the lone female in the Smurf village.

This new direction piques my interest.

25 minutes ago, Degenerate Mind said:

I suppose? I've never really put that much value on having a movie feel to games set in the galaxy far, far away, and I've certainly never felt that the entire galaxy has a pg-13 rating, let alone wanted it to. ROTJ was my favorite movie as a kid, for two main reasons: Jabba's Palace and the Ewoks. Say what you want about the latter, flesh-eating teddy bears with no moral quandary with cooking sentient beings alive are metal as crap, and there is nothing you can possibly say to convince me otherwise.

As for Jabba's Palace, that place got me thinking a lot harder about what we don't see in Star Wars. I didn't get the full implications of Jabba's behavior for a while, but the place in general always made me think that just beyond the edge of what we could see on camera, Star Wars was a very dangerous and frightening place, full of unwholesome things that simply should not be as they are.

Maybe I'm the odd man out here, but I don't think the entire Star Wars universe should conform to the tone & feel of the movies; that strikes me as an egregious waste of the setting, and a ludicrous oversimplification of the place.

Amen.

57 minutes ago, Degenerate Mind said:

I suppose? I've never really put that much value on having a movie feel to games set in the galaxy far, far away, and I've certainly never felt that the entire galaxy has a pg-13 rating, let alone wanted it to. ROTJ was my favorite movie as a kid, for two main reasons: Jabba's Palace and the Ewoks. Say what you want about the latter, flesh-eating teddy bears with no moral quandary with cooking sentient beings alive are metal as crap, and there is nothing you can possibly say to convince me otherwise.

As for Jabba's Palace, that place got me thinking a lot harder about what we don't see in Star Wars. I didn't get the full implications of Jabba's behavior for a while, but the place in general always made me think that just beyond the edge of what we could see on camera, Star Wars was a very dangerous and frightening place, full of unwholesome things that simply should not be as they are.

Maybe I'm the odd man out here, but I don't think the entire Star Wars universe should conform to the tone & feel of the movies; that strikes me as an egregious waste of the setting, and a ludicrous oversimplification of the people in it.

Yeah and somehow while that sounds good it's really most often just an excuse for people to show up at some dude's house and get his generic sci fi game re-skinned as Star Wars. You don't have to have Star Wars be Star Wars is your argument. If I play in a Star Wars game that is what I would expect, that it resembles as closely as possible the tone of the movies. If I wanted to play sex in the galaxy and trainspotting sci fi I would play another game, not try to re-skin those genres into some abomination.

1 minute ago, Archlyte said:

Yeah and somehow while that sounds good it's really most often just an excuse for people to show up at some dude's house and get his generic sci fi game re-skinned as Star Wars. You don't have to have Star Wars be Star Wars is your argument. If I play in a Star Wars game that is what I would expect, that it resembles as closely as possible the tone of the movies. If I wanted to play sex in the galaxy and trainspotting sci fi I would play another game, not try to re-skin those genres into some abomination.

That is not my argument. My argument is that Star Wars is far more than just whar the movies were allowed to show in theatres during the 70's while keeping a profitable rating of PG.

1 hour ago, Degenerate Mind said:

Maybe I'm the odd man out here, but I don't think the entire Star Wars universe should conform to the tone & feel of the movies; that strikes me as an egregious waste of the setting, and a ludicrous oversimplification of the people in it.

I mean, we know that not everything that's Star Wars is entirely like the movies. The Rebels show is quite different from, say, Revenge of the Sith, which is quite different from the Star Wars Tales comics, which are rather different from The Clone Wars. There are great differences in tone and content between those.

3 minutes ago, Degenerate Mind said:

That is not my argument. My argument is that Star Wars is far more than just whar the movies were allowed to show in theatres during the 70's while keeping a profitable rating of PG.

What's even the issue? Jabba being gross and ****-y is a bridge too far, but people getting their limbs cut off left and right and being burned alive is cool and all? I don't get it.

Just now, Stan Fresh said:

I mean, we know that not everything that's Star Wars is entirely like the movies. The Rebels show is quite different from, say, Revenge of the Sith, which is quite different from the Star Wars Tales comics, which are rather different from The Clone Wars. There are great differences in tone and content between those.

Anyone who thinks Star Wars isn't compatible with sex hasn't seen Obi-Wan flirting with everything that moves in TCW.

In all seriousness, I'm not advocating turning Star Wars into some kind of magical realm adventure for Jimmy to play out his Hutt-**** fantasy like @Archlyte seems to think I am; I just think that pretending weird sex doesn't exist in a setting that includes slavery and genocide is a very strange line to draw.

1 minute ago, Stan Fresh said:

What's even the issue? Jabba being gross and ****-y is a bridge too far, but people getting their limbs cut off left and right and being burned alive is cool and all? I don't get it.

Wait, did you say **** or ****?

Just now, Degenerate Mind said:

That is not my argument. My argument is that Star Wars is far more than just whar the movies were allowed to show in theatres during the 70's while keeping a profitable rating of PG.

I contend that Star Wars is first and foremost the movies, because in 1977 that was how it was first introduced, it is the oldest and most pervasive form of the thing.

If you stray too far from the spirit of the thing you no longer have the thing. You have what you want to do with a faint tincture of the original set of ideas and themes. You can't be non-star wars and star wars. The EU writers thought you could, but they are dismissed from history now, and in ten more years won't matter at all other than being nameless sources for the newer movies to draw vague inspiration from. If the movies that come out ever get to the point where they have lost the thread of the originals this will occur for them too.

The original ideas and themes are the central piece of what makes this stuff feel right, and there is only so much you can add on before the stuff you glom on covers the original idea and chokes it under a pile of dirty fanboy what if's. You grew up, maybe you enjoy pornography a lot, stories about the seedy side of life (crime, drug addiction, prostitution, Tarentino stuff) and so you figure hey I could combine my love of this stuff with Star Wars. I say that doing this actually kills the Star Wars element and makes the other elements stick out like stickers on a wonderful oil painting.

4 minutes ago, Archlyte said:

I contend that Star Wars is first and foremost the movies, because in 1977 that was how it was first introduced, it is the oldest and most pervasive form of the thing.

Then why are you arguing that the movies - which include Jabba's behavior - are somehow not truly what Star Wars is?

5 minutes ago, Archlyte said:

You grew up, maybe you enjoy pornography a lot, stories about the seedy side of life (crime, drug addiction, prostitution, Tarentino stuff) and so you figure hey I could combine my love of this stuff with Star Wars.

Except for the pornography (to which: WTF are you even on about here anymore?) all of that is either directly present in the original trilogy, or implied by events on screen.

8 minutes ago, Degenerate Mind said:

Wait, did you say **** or ****?

****

The thing is, this Jabba thing isn't solvable. It breaks down to this: I think the idea of adding super seedy elements to Star Wars sucks.

It blows ****, or inject whatever impolite saying there to indicate I feel it is editing room floor garbage.

I know you are going to run Pulp Fiction Star Wars or Hentai Action Star Wars, and I don't care.

I will never accept that it is better to include these hypersexual or societal woe issues in any strength into the narrative and especially not in the backdrop. To me these are simply faulty design choices and so there is no point in going on about this.

1 minute ago, Archlyte said:

The thing is, this Jabba thing isn't solvable. It breaks down to this: I think the idea of adding super seedy elements to Star Wars sucks.

It blows ****, or inject whatever impolite saying there to indicate I feel it is editing room floor garbage.

I know you are going to run Pulp Fiction Star Wars or Hentai Action Star Wars, and I don't care.

I will never accept that it is better to include these hypersexual or societal woe issues in any strength into the narrative and especially not in the backdrop. To me these are simply faulty design choices and so there is no point in going on about this.

Hentai action Star Wars? Hypersexual ? What are you smoking, dude?

3 minutes ago, Archlyte said:

I contend that Star Wars is first and foremost the movies, because in 1977 that was how it was first introduced, it is the oldest and most pervasive form of the thing.

If you stray too far from the spirit of the thing you no longer have the thing. You have what you want to do with a faint tincture of the original set of ideas and themes. You can't be non-star wars and star wars. The EU writers thought you could, but they are dismissed from history now, and in ten more years won't matter at all other than being nameless sources for the newer movies to draw vague inspiration from. If the movies that come out ever get to the point where they have lost the thread of the originals this will occur for them too.

The original ideas and themes are the central piece of what makes this stuff feel right, and there is only so much you can add on before the stuff you glom on covers the original idea and chokes it under a pile of dirty fanboy what if's. You grew up, maybe you enjoy pornography a lot, stories about the seedy side of life (crime, drug addiction, prostitution, Tarentino stuff) and so you figure hey I could combine my love of this stuff with Star Wars. I say that doing this actually kills the Star Wars element and makes the other elements stick out like stickers on a wonderful oil painting.

So now I think Star Wars can survive including themes that are already in the OT because I like porn a lot? You're drifting pretty close to ad hominem, Arch.

Unfortunately for your One True PG Star Wars, modern canon has already acknowledged crime, drug addiction, and weird sex. Just in the novel Life Debt alone, there is an Imperial Admiral with a (terminal) spice addiction, a homosexual couple, and a human-zabrak relationship. Even worse, it was well-written to boot. The dreaded adultification that began with ROTJ isn't going anywhere.

9 minutes ago, Stan Fresh said:

****

Alright, thanks.