email and technoir
Jun. 24th, 2012 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishI would dearly love to know what's gone wrong with my ability to write email. I used to think nothing of pounding out paragraphs upon paragraphs day after day, and now it takes a week and concentrated effort to get the same amount of communication. Being out of the habit accounts for part of it, I guess, but that's not the only thing going on.
GMing Technoir has been an odd experience. It reminded me that I tend to construct overly Byzantine plots simply because I already have all the information; it was also a brand-new system that I'm still not at all confident in. 'Normal' RPGs have you checking to see if you accomplish any given task: you want to hack the computer system? Roll your Hack skill. Some have you only rolling against contested actions: you want to hack the computer system and steal a file? Okay, but the guy who owns the system doesn't want you to, so roll your Hack against his. In Technoir the only times you roll are when you're trying to do something specifically to someone ('assert an adjective on them' in gamespeak). This is a paradigm that I was never able to get my head around, and as such I wasn't able to explain it sufficiently well either.
The background is, oddly for me, too thin as well. I'm used to winging the setting; apparently I'm used to either winging it based on detailed pre-existing content, or making it up entirely out of whole cloth. Technoir gave me a bunch of interesting plot hooks with a sentence or two about each one, and as a result my improvising felt like a movie set: looked alright until you poked it too hard and then it fell over.
The random-plot-generation works well if I can just stop randomly generating more plot and let the plot I have resolve. Overall I remain fascinated by Technoir. I would very much like to play in someone else's game sometime. Or run my own again, learning from and building on my failures.
And J-- (at least) disliked the system, and M-- turns out to not like roleplaying noir so much. So that collapsed in a pile of ennui on Thursday night, and we're now playing Agon. Agon is best summarised as "Competitive Greek-myth D&D." It's far more number-crunchy than anything I usually prefer to run, but that's what M-- seems to want, so we'll try it and see how it goes. After that, who knows.
GMing Technoir has been an odd experience. It reminded me that I tend to construct overly Byzantine plots simply because I already have all the information; it was also a brand-new system that I'm still not at all confident in. 'Normal' RPGs have you checking to see if you accomplish any given task: you want to hack the computer system? Roll your Hack skill. Some have you only rolling against contested actions: you want to hack the computer system and steal a file? Okay, but the guy who owns the system doesn't want you to, so roll your Hack against his. In Technoir the only times you roll are when you're trying to do something specifically to someone ('assert an adjective on them' in gamespeak). This is a paradigm that I was never able to get my head around, and as such I wasn't able to explain it sufficiently well either.
The background is, oddly for me, too thin as well. I'm used to winging the setting; apparently I'm used to either winging it based on detailed pre-existing content, or making it up entirely out of whole cloth. Technoir gave me a bunch of interesting plot hooks with a sentence or two about each one, and as a result my improvising felt like a movie set: looked alright until you poked it too hard and then it fell over.
The random-plot-generation works well if I can just stop randomly generating more plot and let the plot I have resolve. Overall I remain fascinated by Technoir. I would very much like to play in someone else's game sometime. Or run my own again, learning from and building on my failures.
And J-- (at least) disliked the system, and M-- turns out to not like roleplaying noir so much. So that collapsed in a pile of ennui on Thursday night, and we're now playing Agon. Agon is best summarised as "Competitive Greek-myth D&D." It's far more number-crunchy than anything I usually prefer to run, but that's what M-- seems to want, so we'll try it and see how it goes. After that, who knows.