By this point everybody in the design blogosphere has read Vincent explaining how to create situation. If you haven’t go do so, because that’s some good shit, there.

What interests me is that Vincent’s procedure begins first with a set of elements that will become the situation and then assigns characters to players. The players then elaborate the situation to something playable, which entails adding new details to the characters. The details of the characters are dependent on what the situation requires. In this, the characters come from the situation.

In Full Light, Full Steam, the characters are created before the situation is. The situation is built out of the things that the players have flagged as elements that they are interested in and have embedded in their characters. The creation of the situation does not change the characters (except maybe slightly, to the extent of saying, “By the way, you have a brother named Joe.”). Here, the situation comes from the characters.

Skipping back a generation or two, your basic prepackaged adventure has a situation that is created without any reference to the characters, and vice-versa. The characters have no effect on the situation, and the situation has no effect on the characters. Indeed, one of the parts of being a “good roleplayer” here is finding ways to relate your character to the situation that they are thrust into. So there the characters are, I dunno, installed into the situation.

I’m not sure where to go with this observation, though. My moral relativism tells me to say that none of these is necessarily better than the others, but I’m not even sure if that’s the case. Consider:

1. The latter two are probably somewhat easier to implement multiple and serial situations under, since the first would require rewriting elements of the characters for each new situation (which isn’t necessarily bad, just more work, and a little counter-intuitive).
2. The prior two are more likely to engage the players than the last one, since the situation has pre-arranged ties to characters.
3. The first and last are quicker to perform than the middle two-step process of characters, then situation.

And I’m sure I’m missing some. Is it as simple as different benefits from different approaches?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 2:11 pm and is filed under RPG Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.