Posted by Jim at February 22nd, 2006

My wife recently noted that I hadn’t written much of anything in my blog lately and she’s right. I’ve been somewhat busy, wretchedly tired, and generally unmotivated for the last week or so. Nonetheless, I do have something to write about at the moment even though it is something that Kristen will find entirely uninteresting.

I’ve been roused from my stupor by the on-going crankyness related to Ron Edwards’ post about how some people who play role playing games have had their ability to enjoy stories (and notion of what stories are) damaged by certain sorts of games. Specifically, he seems to mean the games of Mark Rein-Hagen.

He may be right about this, but, I’ve no way to know from experience. As someone who’s done an awful lot of gaming with Ed and Joe, I’ve never actually played Mark Rein-Hagen’s games (with the exception of Ars Magica which was co-written with Jonathan Tweet). Though I had some mild curiousity about Vampire, I never ended up playing it–largely because either Ed or Joe (I’m not sure who) regarded it as a pretentious pile of steaming crap.

I don’t know that anyone used that precise terminology, but that’s the impression I got.

Anyway, I’m not going to go too far into the specifics of any of that. Ron Edwards may be right and he may not. I don’t know, but, the idea that you’re marked by the sort of role playing games that introduced you to the hobby does interest me.

Personally, even though I like a lot of the ideas and games that come out of the Forge, I find that I’m still drawn to the old player/GM relationship in which the GM gets to do pretty much whatever he/she wants and everyone else ends up responding to his/her ideas.

I’m not saying this is good. In fact, I’ve had some of the better gaming experiences of my life with Forge influenced games so I’m open to the possibility (even necessity) of changing this relationship.

What I am saying is that my perspective on gaming is undoubtedly colored by my introduction to the hobby in the form of Basic Dungeons and Dragons (which was quickly followed by AD&D). As experimental as my gamng has overall been (I dropped dice entirely following the release of Amber Diceless RPG till last year), certain things haven’t been questioned.

In messing with some Forge-influenced games and reading some gamer theory blogs, I’ve run across yet more things to experiment with and that’s a good thing.

That being said, everybody’s got a point at which they somehow lack the ability to quite grasp a particular change and incorporate it into their thought.

In reading a history of Jazz, I noted that the writer would often point out that a great musician was trained during one movement in Jazz, broke with that training and became known during the next movement in Jazz, and couldn’t quite absorb the movement after that. I don’t remember why he thought that musicians failed to absorb a third iteration of the music.

I do remember listening to an interview with Ray Charles (who was not primarily a jazz musician though he did play jazz) talking about rap. He basically felt that he had nothing to learn from it.

It seems to me that in order for someone to move away from the view they find comfortable, there’s got to be something cool on the other side that they want. I know that I want the level of player involvement that I’ve seen in Forge influenced games. That draws me. A critique of what’s wrong with me probably wouldn’t draw me in.