{"id":1706,"date":"2009-09-03T18:50:34","date_gmt":"2009-09-03T18:50:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/random-average.com\/?p=1706"},"modified":"2009-09-14T12:50:21","modified_gmt":"2009-09-14T12:50:21","slug":"mix-maxing-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/2009\/09\/mix-maxing-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"Min-Maxing Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Entirely unrelated to this post here -> over on storygames, they’re kind of<\/em> talking about the same sort of thing I brought up in the last post: here<\/a>.\u00a0 I’m not sure if it’s something you’d want to read all the way through, but there’s interesting stuff there — I particularly like Paul and Ralph (Valamir)’s thoughts on things.<\/p>\n

It also kind of parallels this other thought I’ve been poking at since Monday night, which is what this<\/strong><\/em> post is about.<\/p>\n

Monday night, Tim and Kate and I were talking about gaming stuff (as we sometimes do between frames of bowling).\u00a0 We’d started out talking about that last post and the authorship\/acting issue.\u00a0 That drifted into other areas, such as the problems with splitting the party (it doesn’t bother me a bit, but it bothers pretty much everyone else, and I wonder if I can’t solve it universally across all our games with a little social contract related to playing NPCs), and eventually got over to this other topic, which Tim broached with the following (paraphrased):<\/p>\n

There are games, like DnD, for example, that have a minimum and a maximum amount of fun.\u00a0 Unless you get some kind of truly transcendent session, there’s a maximum amount of fun you will have with that system, but there’s also a guaranteed minimum<\/em> amount of fun you will have [Doyce says: “that would be my ’20 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours’ experience]. <\/em>The upside there is that, even in a worse-case scenario, unless the group totally implodes, you’re guaranteed x<\/em> amount of DnD-like fun.<\/p>\n

PTA (and other story-games) have no minimum and maximum, which is both bad and good — the maximum can go off the charts, but it can also potentially be absolutely zero fun at all — even negative-fun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And yeah, you can nitpick that and say things like “well, that all depends on familiarity with the system and blah blah blah”, but the basic idea stands, and I agree with it.<\/p>\n

There are games you can kind of phone in.\u00a0 DnD’s a reasonable example: if you’re brain dead from a long day, you just kinda want to crack some jokes, eat some pretzels, stab orcs in their stinky orc-faces, and take their stuff.\u00a0 You can be somewhat assured of having at least x<\/em> amount of that kind of fun if you just show up, assuming the group is functional.<\/p>\n

But that is not the case with some story-games. PTA, for example.\u00a0 You can’t just phone it in – everyone has to kind of be on their game or the game itself becomes less fun or unfun for everyone when it’s the tired\/disengaged-person’s turn.\u00a0 There are lots of games like that: PTA is one, but Don’t Rest Your Head is on there also, and I don’t think you have to put a lot of work into thinking of others — The Roach, DitV, Mortal Coil… hell, I just think of any game where, if I suspect the players are going to show up brain-dead, I want to switch to another game for the night due to the impending sense of personal exhaustion from carrying the added load.<\/p>\n

I’m not assigning a value of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ here.\u00a0 There’s times when you WANT to shoot for the stars in a way that DnD just can’t handle.\u00a0 Other times, that kind of no-brainer play appeals, because the idea of an all-in game is just exhausting.<\/p>\n

There are even a few story-games (or indie games) that allow this kind of … let’s call it cruise-control play. From my direct experience, off the top of my head, these include:<\/p>\n