In my last post, I mentioned that my current RPG group my deal very well with a relatively free-form system. I thought I'd expand a little bit on what I meant by that.
Free-form is a tricky thing in a lot of role-players' minds. People who are used to stuff like D&D, or even lighter fare like World of Darkness hear the phrase "free-form" and think that it means no rules, no structure, no way to define your character and thus differentiate him or any number of other things. Well, to be honest, this stuff isn't necessarily accurate. Sure, you could potentially just have a game in which whatever people say goes, but then you get into a tricky situation.
When we play RPGs, all of the people at the table are imagining stuff. But unusually, we are all trying to imagine the same stuff. So when one person says something happens, and another person says that it doesn't, there is an obvious problem: if we are trying to keep the imagined stuff consistent, only one of them can be right, and we basically come to an impasse if we can't figure out who to go with.
So, you have to have a way of figuring this out. In most traditional games, a GM is set up as sort of a final authority on this, such that when he says something happens, that's the way it is. The other players sometimes have a chance to roll dice or narrate other stuff, but the GM acts as sort of a gatekeeper to the imagined stuff. You might say "My guy stabs the orc," but until the GM approves, it doesn't happen. Or, more traditionally, you would say "My guy tries to stab the orc," and then roll dice as a sort of neutral way of determining if it happens, if your guy stabbing the orc actually becomes a part of the shared fiction.
There are all kinds of ways to determine where the authority for deciding what happens falls. Does the GM decide? How is he restricted? Do the players decide? How are they restricted? Do we appeal to some sort of non-player force, such as rules, or "realism," or "story"? As an aside, that's not all that rules are for, by far, but it's certainly something important to realize they do; a big part of the system we use to play a game is figuring out how we decide what becomes a part of the imaginary stuff.
So, most RPGs that are called "free-form" have that. Online play-by-post games have rules like "you can't contradict what happened in the previous posts" or "don't be an asshole" or "you can't kill other player's characters without their permission." The rules tell us what is ok, what we allow through the gate. Face-to-face games tend to have a stronger, but sometimes unnecessary, reliance on stats and dice rolls and weighty mechanical doodads. But here again, the rules are telling us what's ok. When we agree to use a certain set of rules, we are agreeing to abide by a particular way of letting things into our shared imagination.
Sorry if this is starting to ramble or sound redundant... it's late. I'll get to the real point here.
If we all agree to some combination of "GM as final authority," "Authentic feel of the source material," and maybe a minor little mechanic that allows the players to represent the strengths and weaknesses of their guy (for example), then we don't need much else. And from my experience with the group I'm in, it would probably work fairly well. I'll be thinking about this, because I really feel like it would be enlightening to try.
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So, what existing games do you think do this? Or is it simply a matter of whipping something up at the table? Surely there's something out there that fits the bill....
ReplyDeleteLots of games can be played this way, in fact, despite not being written for this specifically. People just ignore the rules that they don't like, or that they feel are too complicated, until we have a really basic, almost free-form situation. We act out social scenes, despite there being mechanics for social stats and skills. We hand-wave money and expenses, despite there being rules for money. And even when we do start to call on the actual rules in the book, perhaps for combat, we ignore results that we don't like... I'm sure we've all had the experience of the GM fudging the result of a roll to keep a particular character alive.
ReplyDeleteThat's not to say that I think that all role-playing is free-form. It's just that in a lot of cases, the rules are drifted and remolded to fit the style of the group. And sometimes, that means moving away from concrete rules in a book, to a concrete system of player-level negotiation and appeal to "realism" or "source material." It's just quite rare that the latter is made explicit, despite the fact that it's just as concrete.
There are a couple of published "free-form" games that I can think of off the top of my head, but for the most part, gamers don't like to spend money on them, since if it's a style of play they like, they have probably already adjusted their own game with house rules (explicit and unspoken) that achieve the same effect.
And to specifically answer your question: The Window, Everway, In Spaaace..., Wushu, Primetime Adventures, and tons of others have aspects of free-form play. These games often have other structures that make them not entirely free-form, but they are a lot of fun.
We should definitely try a "free-form" or "mostly free-form" game out. As much as I like Dogs in the Vineyard, we might as well see what else we could do.