[UA] Players screwed over

[Chad Underkoffler]

From: Royal Minister of Stuff yokeltania at yahoo.com
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 23:50:45 -0700 (PDT) 

> You, sir, sound like someone to whom the term
> "metagaming" holds no fear.  

Depends. I'm all in favor of using a metagame perspective like
"the world works like a movie (cars explode when they crash, the
villain will tell you his dastardly plan, etc.)," but I find the
use of Out-Of-Character knowledge annoying, if not actively
wrong.

> I suspect you allow "tabletalk" without flinching as well.

Well, mild amounts of banter and silliness are de rigeur. Unless
you're talking about OOC strategizing, in which case, no.

> > And often, they get frustrated, because they'd
> > rather be in a different sort of story.
> 
> Yeah.  I wish I could run the sort of story people
> seem to want to be in, but I just plain hate Farscape.

THis came off as sort of a non-sequitur to me.

[excited, then threw tapes out the window]

Apologies, I must be obtuse this morning. I don't get your
point. Could you expand? 
 
> > I also feel that a player being very immersed in a
> > character may increase the frustration level to 
> > ludicrous heights thorugh continual failures and 
> > getting whomped on in an UA campaign. And UA just
> > won't work in a pure "playing piece PC" mode. So 
> > there needs to be this odd, half-immersion thing.
>
> Actually, I didn't follow this bit too well. I,
> personally, don't beleive in total immersion.  I
> rather like the Brechtian idea of occasionally telling
> people what's SUPPOSED to be happening in a scene.
> That's one of the reasons I tell my players as much
> about the OU when we get started.  It's up to them to
> play dumb or not.

See, I worry about OOC knowledge creeping in. Granted, my
players are pretty good, but on occasion the need to "win"
trumps good gameplay.

What I was saying above is that I've experienced two main modes
of gaming:

1. Immersion, where you try to fit yourself into the head of
your character and react as he would react, and

2. Token, where the character is just an playing piece/extention
of the player into the game world.

Most RPGs seem to lean towards 1; the perfect examples I've seen
of 2 are beer & pretzels level D&D and many CPRGs. Indeed, the
couple times my group tried playing D&D3, the shift from a more
immersive mode to a more playing-piece mode (possibly due to the
way we all played D&D when we were younger) was disturbing.

Now, both modes have their benefits and disadvantages: sometimes
I want to vicariously experience and adventure, and sometimes I
want a token to move around.

UA might suffer (at least as per my group) in that an immersive
style is necessary for UA games to have real impact, however,
the incidence of failure makes immersive playing depressing.
After all, if you identify strongly with your PC and he keeps
getting the shitty end of the stick, you're gonna be bummed.

If you try to play UA from a more "playing piece" position, some
of the postmodern horror falls flat because it can't get at you
very deeply. It's sort of like being desensitized to horror
movies: it takes something else to get to you.

UA seems to require a mode of play that stops just short of full
immersion with strong token aspects of "this is how my token
will react to having his arm ripped off." It may or may not
adapt well to the metagame perspective (aka genre rules) 
mentioned at the top of this email (pulp, cinematic, lowdown and
dirty perspective, etc.). This is a hard mode to play in,
requiring partial buy-in but retaining strong boundaries. 

I think it may be psychologically easier to decide either to get
totally into the world (immersion) or treat your PC as a playing
piece (token).

Again, YMMV.

Comments welcome.




=====
Chad Underkoffler [chadu at yahoo.com]
http://www.geocities.com/chadu/index.html
God isn't silent, he just speaks very softly. In Etruscan.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices
http://auctions.yahoo.com/

_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua