Roleplaying With The Four Pieces

Theory To Discuss: Roleplaying With The Four Pieces

When you step beyond the realm of pure mechanics, there are four basic aspects of a roleplaying game that will be in play that must be considered to cover the needs of the players.

1. Physical : These are the physical challenge aspects of the game. Not necessarily combat, but certainly it includes that.

2. Mental : These are the mental challenge aspects of the game, including puzzle solving, resource management and detective work.

3. Social  : These are the interaction challenge aspects of the game, including both interaction with the other personalities in the group, and with the npcs. Diplomacy, persuasion, discussion, intrigue etc.

4. Creative : This, finally, is the depth of the setting details and the realm of the Fantastic of Fantasy and Science Fiction when the game is about such.

Generally, from my observation, a game needs an equal balance of each of these four elements in order to please most player groups. When any one piece is given more effort, time or importance the game can become out of balance for some players and make the game become less fun.

Additionally when one of these is missing, it often can break the suspension of disbelief and cooperation for a game.

A Game where the Physical dominates becomes a wargame. A game where the mental dominates becomes as interesting as diagramming sentences in Latin or playing with a rubiks cube. A game where the social dominates becomes as interesting as a dinner party that never ends, filled with drama queens and soap opera exposition. And finally a game where the Creative aspect dominates becomes a prolonged tourist travel film or an experiment in memorization of the minute details of a tea ceremony.

It's only when the four together are present and nearly equal that a happy medium is achieved for most groups of players. It's one of the things that sets roleplaying games off from other forms of games - few games encompass these four pieces together on any level.

Now, take your favorite game system/setting sets and look at them thru the lens of this system. Do they hold up? Do they have problems that you need to address? How does your own gaming group approach these four points? Would you (or they) be happier with a balance of the four? Or would they prefer a different ratio of the four? And What about you?

The Eternal Dilemma

The other night my wife, and I had a discussion about the eternal dilema of game masters who play with a regular group of gamers.
 
For those who really don't know me, the major gaming group I am involved with has for the past 7 years played in a 'Round Robin' style, where we regularly rotate who sits in the GMing chair and which game is being played. The purpose of this is to give GMs an opportunity to play as well as GM, and to have a regularly changing mix of games and to some extent game styles possible.

We're going thru some problems over the past few months, mainly because of style clashes that are no longer singular to a particular game. A few months ago we decided to try a new approach, and had all the potential GMs for the next few months (since all but one of the campaigns had wrapped) sit down and hear what everyone in the group liked and disliked in games.

Then we had a pitch session, each GM was to present a 'pitch' of one or more potential games for the group to consider playing. People voted on which games they were most interested in from the pitches, and those would be what would be tried out.

The problem is that although in practice this sounds like a fun, fair and reasonably democratic method of choosing what to play and who would GM, it has some problems and connects to an dilema.

Do you simply pitch an idea with no detailed work done, or do you do detailed work and then present a pitch?

Time, for all of us, is limited. Designing the ground rules for character creation for a proposed setting, and potentially building the setting, learning or developing a game system, etc. for something that may never be played can be a real painful excercise in futility.

I've done this a number of times. Even done it and then had the gaming group I was preparing a setting and mechanic for fall apart before we ever got to the game I had proposed, and it not being really of interest to others it was proposed to in a later group.

But if you wait until you've presented the pitch and found out what people wanted, then you have a very narrow window of time to do all that work. And inevitably, time and again, the window is too small for many folks to work with. And if you make the players wait around for weeks, or months while you create everything needed, you may have folks lose interest.

Worse, in some cases a pitch can be grabbed up enthusiastically by the players, perhaps too enthusiastically, and you end up with a runaway game. Players may alreayd have character ideas full blown and ready to roll before you have even laid out the ground rules of character generation or what is allowed in the game or what the premise will be.

Then you end up with the characters that don't mesh together, or whoose player proposed back story doesn't fit the setting, or which the player will refuse to change since they have been working on it since the day you presented the pitch.

So Which choice do you follow?

Do you create and then hope? Do you Pitch and then create in a mad dash and probably not do half as good a job as you should? Or What?

I'm curious to know what folks have to say about all of this.

Personal Notes : My last campaign suffered from the Pitch then run syndrome, where not enough preparation was done or detailed balancing of the commercial set of rules being used in comparison to the setting. It ran off and on for about 2 years and then exploded in the end rather nastily, because of rules that were not balanced at the start, characters that were thrust upon me with not enough editorial control and reading time, and a difference in style that became far too obvious in the end.