A Dark And Quiet Room

This is an excerpt from a discussion I’ve been having with someone about Dirty Secrets. It seemed like it had broader ramifications for roleplaying, so I figured that I’d post it. The context for the discussion is the pre-game customizing of different areas like Humor, Violence, and the like.

I actually don’t [like pre-game customizing]. To explain my first reason, I’m going to tell you a tale of two board game designers.

On the one hand, you have Reiner Knizia. He is famous for laser-focused designs that constantly partake of difficult decisions but with a relatively simple ruleset. He designed games like Tigris and Euphrates, Tower of Babel, Blue Moon, and Ra.

On the other hand, you have Wolfgang Kramer. He is famous for his diversity of design, often with the cleverness of the game built into the game components, not simply the ruleset. He also does a lot of collaboration, having worked on games like El Grande, Princes of Florence, Tikal, Torres, and Java.

Many Kramer games include game variants that radically change the nature of the game. Torres is a poster child for this; you can play three different ways which are almost three different games.

In theory, this is interesting to me, but I prefer Knizia games. When I sit down to play a game, I don’t want to be doing game design. I just want to play. The same is true for me and storygames/roleplaying games/whatever we’re going to call them. I don’t want to have to design the game at the table. I just want to play.

The second reason is that most players don’t actually have a practical knowledge of their lines until they are close to being violated. This is especially true of delicate subject material (Ron Edwards’ “Lines and Veils”), but it can also be true of things like humor. When should a Dirty Secrets game be funny? I’ve read a bunch of the original material, and I’ll tell you that the stories can be really funny without losing their fundamental seriousness. Sometimes, the humor is a direct coping mechanism by the investigator to deal with what he is seeing and discovering. How can a group dictate that at the beginning? They can’t. Rather, they need to be willing to police themselves and to say, in the moment, “No, that doesn’t really belong here.”

All of this goes back to the fundamental reason for playing Dirty Secrets: group creation of the story. I make no bones about it in the book; this is exactly why you play the game. As a result, the emerging story will not be anything that any one of you could have created, but it will be the result of your working together in harmony to create a story that all of you can enjoy together.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Dirty Secrets Development and Playtest, Roleplaying Games.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.