Celebration and Dragons of the Yellow Sea
So a while back, in December 2005, I had posted "What makes a good celebration?" -- where I discussed the idea of making a good celebration and applying that to RPGs.
I now turn back to that in light of some of the revisiting of Ron Edward's GNS theory -- notably Chris Lehrich's "A GNS Question", plus some Story Games threads including complaints ( Read more... )
I now turn back to that in light of some of the revisiting of Ron Edward's GNS theory -- notably Chris Lehrich's "A GNS Question", plus some Story Games threads including complaints ( Read more... )
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That said -- isn't there an innate tension between (some) celebratory games and the kinds of games you've previously (and justifiably) championed, namely games that are awake to (usually) buried or ignored issues of race and gender? How does one run a celebratory "Fu Manchu" game, for example? Should one? This isn't just academic to me -- I'm running a serial genre-jumping pulp campaign right now in which the China of the Future is one of the two major threats. If anyone has any good advice, in other words, I'm in the market.
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In my eighties James Bond 007 campaign, one of the twists was that one of the English superspies was gay. Quantin Q. Falstaff III, agent 008, was an old-style heroic English aristocrat and had a private though not closeted fondness for the same sex. He ended up meeting sexy NPCs like Phil McCracken, Edgar Hardwick, and Ivan Moorcock. I think of this as still celebratory, yet definitely smashing head-on against orientation issues.
There are defiinitely gender issues within the Dragons game. Korean culture is normally quite patriarchal, but many of the PCs are women. We've set the game on Jejudo, and a number of the PCs and NPCs are haenyeo -- diver women who are the bread-winners, and matriarchal heads of their families, in contrast with the Confucian standard in Korea. We're mixing some pulp tropes and Korean ( ... )
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I'd prefer to cite deconstructive works that are cool in their own right rather than saying that they are important to get to other good stuff. For example, Unforgiven is a deconstructive work that I'm quite fond of. And there is the hilarious "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" essay.
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Now that I really understand what aspects are for, it is difficult to avoid being tempted by the idea of loading them up to be useful in every conflict. My previous idea was that they were simply bits of "color" from the character's background, to make the game more interesting. However, that isn't quite right, either, since that ignores the mechanical function of aspects: an aspect, no matter how colorful, is pointless if it cannot be invoked by the player or compelled by the GM.
In other words, it is a fine line between useless aspects such as "likes pineapple" or "once had a pet turtle" and omni-useful but colorless aspects such as "never say die!" or "pulls victory from the jaws of defeat" or "is that all you got?". In the latter case, for example, it is difficult to conceive of *any* conflict (physical, social, etc) in which any of those three aspects could not be invoked by the player. Yet, they lead to a boring character.
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Ideally, though, the point is that the details of Aspects shouldn't be that important once you've got a set that are good enough. Invoking Aspects is limited by how many Fate Points you have. I think the idea is that with some skill/experience, you can define a set of Aspects that let you effectively spend all your Fate Points while still having some flavor.
Also, note that broad traits like "Never say die!" are easy to invoke, but difficult to compel. So, for example, the Aspect of "I'll hunt you to the ends of the Earth, Jin Hong!" is good for compels. This past session, you probably could have asked for a compel when you were a fugitive from Inquisitor Kwon. Still, you're probably not going to get more than a few compels out of Aspects -- so optimizing for that is limited too.
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