[UA] Game Contracts

[Bryant Durrell]

On Tue, May 14, 2002 at 07:06:44PM -0700, Royal Minister of Stuff wrote:
> --- Patrick O'Duffy <redfern at thehub.com.au> wrote:
> > My campaigns used to suffer from a LOT of assumption clash problems.
> > A few years back, I started writing up clear outlines and contracts
> > for my games -
> 
> You've mentioned these before and, I'll admit I balked
> because they sound too corporate.  I'm trying to keep
> a more open mind.  What would a game contract look
> like, please? Can you print up a short example and
> post it?

It does seem pretty corporate.  But it's pretty useful, too...

I don't have one handy, but... ah!  Bless AltaVista.

http://afters.wartworld.net/contract.html

http://www.magma.ca/~lapalme/rpg/walker/gamecontract.html

A lot of this is sort of obvious, right?  But the trick is, if you write
it down, nobody has an excuse for saying "Well, I didn't understand."
It also provides a single source of house rules, rulings, etc. -- a good
game contract is a living document.

And you get some stuff that usually doesn't get talked about.  Lethality
is a good example of that.

You might also find it useful to document where the campaign falls on
this scale:

http://www.occam.com/campaign/

Or not.  I think some of those concepts are useful and they remind me of
the sorts of things I want to put in a contract, but I don't often use
those exact scales.  Still, it's nice for the players to know that your
campaign is going to be one in which heroism isn't a major factor, say.
Or that you will be relying on the PCs to stir up their own conflict.

-- 
        Bryant Durrell [] http://www.innocence.com/~durrell [] 9/11/2001
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                     I'm not doing this *just* to be weird.

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