this is a great review and really makes me want to play Oath!
I read a lot of those little indie pen-n-paper RPGs, like, the ones you find on DriveThruRPG and the like. Unfortunately I have not worked up the nerve to ask people to play them with me, haha (they tend SO narrative heavy and I am shy!), but the sense I get from a lot of them is a sort of... high-handedness...? from the creators of the games? Like, there's a certain point where you're dictating so many details about the world, how to engage with it, and so on, that it stops feeling like an exploration and more like I'm just acting out your short story.
And yet, when I complained about this once, to a friend deeply involved in his local LARPing scene, telling him that The Quiet Year really seemed to want to shove its message into the players' throats—he told me, oh yeah, I played that game once, and turns out, even with all that high-handedness, most his players seemed to focus on "ooh, making a map! how fun! i want to draw a horsie!" rather than the intended themes of the game, so, y'know, maybe I'm all wrong and they aren't as railroad-y as they look, haha. I need to try some out sometime...
indeed this is very much the experience I've had playing Quiet Year and listening to LPs of Quiet Year! but this doesn't make me disagree with your original point, either, I think they're not contradictory. I have no strong feelings about how to accomplish this in game design but I am increasingly convinced that 'flavor text' isn't it, or I should say isn't only it. The mechanics themselves must create the effect! when players given a game that is intended to create x y z emotional effect, but instead creates a different one or doesn't create one at all, having a loving book written about how it's actually supposed to be 'about' a community on the brink of loss won't make it so. Mechanics can't be asked to do everything in a ttrpg, otherwise you're not getting any of the RP nutrients, but they have to not work against the emotions you want to create! Ludonarrative dissonance is so so real, and so is consonance, when everything gets going the right way...
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Date: 2023-08-25 04:31 am (UTC)I read a lot of those little indie pen-n-paper RPGs, like, the ones you find on DriveThruRPG and the like. Unfortunately I have not worked up the nerve to ask people to play them with me, haha (they tend SO narrative heavy and I am shy!), but the sense I get from a lot of them is a sort of... high-handedness...? from the creators of the games? Like, there's a certain point where you're dictating so many details about the world, how to engage with it, and so on, that it stops feeling like an exploration and more like I'm just acting out your short story.
And yet, when I complained about this once, to a friend deeply involved in his local LARPing scene, telling him that The Quiet Year really seemed to want to shove its message into the players' throats—he told me, oh yeah, I played that game once, and turns out, even with all that high-handedness, most his players seemed to focus on "ooh, making a map! how fun! i want to draw a horsie!" rather than the intended themes of the game, so, y'know, maybe I'm all wrong and they aren't as railroad-y as they look, haha. I need to try some out sometime...
indeed this is very much the experience I've had playing Quiet Year and listening to LPs of Quiet Year! but this doesn't make me disagree with your original point, either, I think they're not contradictory. I have no strong feelings about how to accomplish this in game design but I am increasingly convinced that 'flavor text' isn't it, or I should say isn't only it. The mechanics themselves must create the effect! when players given a game that is intended to create x y z emotional effect, but instead creates a different one or doesn't create one at all, having a loving book written about how it's actually supposed to be 'about' a community on the brink of loss won't make it so. Mechanics can't be asked to do everything in a ttrpg, otherwise you're not getting any of the RP nutrients, but they have to not work against the emotions you want to create! Ludonarrative dissonance is so so real, and so is consonance, when everything gets going the right way...