I command you all to use Adventure vs Thematic.

Do not accept the connotations of trad/indie. It´s a marketing win for the Forgers!

Or we could just use neither. Stick to plain English, and stuff.

I've never found such labels particularly useful. In theory, when we meet some new gamer who's interested in joining our group, they could say, "I'm an Alpha-type player, with Betaist tendencies!" and then we'd know exactly their favourite game play style. But in practice, everyone has different ideas of what these sorts of labels mean. So the person labelling themselves, it just confuses the issue.

If you want to know what sort of game play style a person enjoys, it's easier to ask them about the gaming they've had, and what specific things they enjoyed about it. Labels are counter-productive.

I'm going to give this one more shot. (blakkie and droog, your comments are most welcomed)

As I mentioned before there are numerous plot threads in my The Day of Living Dangerously campaign. I think two could be considered examples of proactive play.

We have only played five sessions so far and there already 13 plot threads in play, one way or another. The following are just two examples which I think may be relevent to the discussion at hand.

Plot thread 8 - Two sessions back, one of the characters whose background includes a heart wrenching stint in the UN was in the midst of a tense negotiation with some factory workers when she noticed a group of young children hanging around the dangerous area the negotiations were taking place. Talking to them she discovered that they were orphans living in a decrepit orphanage close by.

Now, this was a totally improvised thing on our part. I didn't know she was going to talk to the background scenery so to speak. Furthermore she followed them to their "home" and discovered that there was some evidence that the children were being pimped out by a shadowy figure they were all afraid off.

So, now, with all this other stuff going on, this player has her own personal plot thread going on, in which she has enlisted the aid of another player. And I, who didn't even think of going down this route, have got a couple of npcs out of nowhere. And at least with this plot thread a Keyser Soze BigBad in the form of a very dangerous pimp. How, this will effect the main adventure remains to be seen.

Plot thread 11 - This has more do with the background research the players did for the campaign. In particular the player who did a lot of research in the way how the military operates within Thailand.

Now, I had already established certain military figures before play began. The players knew who the big guns were and had defined their relationships with them. But one of the players sensing that some trouble with Muslim hardliners could occur in a certain area decided to take some prudent measures (which I had not thought of) and contacted an unknown general in one of the Southern states with the aim of moving a small detachment of troops (covertly in the guise of a military parade) to a place nearby the possible trouble spot. Off course there will be complications....

So, during the game I had to create this general, whom the players had not heard of - a real shifty piece of work, with an agenda of his own - and shift the "map" dramatically in terms of which locations were in play.

Now, the only role I played in this and plot thread 8 was the npcs I created. The situations evolved from the active participation of the players...or something like that.

These could be examples of proactive play. Or at least it seems to me like examples of proactive play.

Regards,
David R

@JimBob: Whatever you call it, a distinction would have saved this thread. As predicted it went blakkiewards and now is deeply into the "If" and not the "how" again.
My life is too short for that shit. Handles would spare time. You know like in plain english...:rolleyes:

Quote from: SettembriniI command you all to use Adventure vs Thematic.

Do not accept the connotations of trad/indie. It´s a marketing win for the Forgers!

Well in this case it would serve the purpose of not including BW here. :haw:  Too bad I happen to think it's a wierd and even less useful label for the actual discussion at hand.  Anyway, off to that thread now.....

Quote from: jhkimInteresting.  Can you give some more detailed examples about how this works in practice, Elliot?  In my experience, without something concrete to riff off of, players are rarely quick to take action.  Offhand, I don't think I've ever seen a game work like this.  I think TonyLB mentioned something similar in a recent Story Games thread as the "Tyranny of the Blank Slate". I'd buy there are ways around it, but I'm not sure how they work.

Actually my second case was basically giving lip-service to the method of encouraging proactivity which seems to be endorsed in a number of Forge-style games and glosses of them. I'm thinking especially of Sorcerer, though my actual experience has been with (a tiny bit of) Polaris and a full game of The Mountain Witch. (The latter offers small-scale proactivity inside a mission-based scenario.) Based on those, I find the method pretty much antithetical to the feel of an external game world, but it meets the basic goal of enabling proactivity even while having the player act completely through the character (i.e. without use of out of character tools to influence the game world).

I think it might be possible to achieve a more "immersive" feel (that is a sense of an external world), though, if the GM operates with a strong vision of pre-existing facts, but the combination of PC competence and GM modulation of opposition is such that the PC(s) can't really screw up, in a strategic sense. So if the player maneuvers his PC into a confrontation with an evil sorcerer, we assume the PC knows what he/she is doing. Whether the player then describes the PC (a) sneakily ambushing the sorcerer, (b) brawnily hewing through his minions, or (c) magically overcoming him is basically an expression of the character's nature according to the player's vision, and we assume that the character is always smart or lucky enough not to step into a situation where s/he's hopelessly outclassed.

But I think this is outside of what Balbinus is looking for. I think if handled right, it could be a lot of fun. But I mainly described the method so as to draw a contrast with a method that's more "world as simulative model".

@Jeff: I made a new thread

http://www.therpgsite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4715

Quote from: Settembrini@JimBob: Whatever you call it, a distinction would have saved this thread. As predicted it went blakkiewards and now is deeply into the "If" and not the "how" again.
My life is too short for that shit. Handles would spare time. You know like in plain english...:rolleyes:

So long as our labels are plain English, yes. If we make up new words (like "proactive"), or give new meanings to old words (like "Incoherent"), then we just get into endless arguments about what the word actually means. If we stick to everyday words with commonly-agreed meanings, then we can step around the "let's define our terms... no wait, that's a bad definition" bullshit, and get down to discussing the actual issues.

This could have been a thread talking about how to make quiet or reactive players more active. It could have been talking about how to have more interesting, fun and satisfying game sessions. Instead it went semantic on us, and instead is not really about anything.

Edit: though if you are going to invent new words and phrases, "the thread went blakkiewards" is a fucking funny one. Unfortunately no-one outside the forum would understand it, though. A bit like Forger jargon, really...

QuoteThis could have been a thread talking about how to make quiet or reactive players more active.

At least I thought this thread actually wasn´t about that either.

Quote from: blakkieWell in this case it would serve the purpose of not including BW here. :haw:  Too bad I happen to think it's a wierd and even less useful label for the actual discussion at hand.  Anyway, off to that thread now.....

LOL, stupid double negatives. I editted out one half of the double negative in my post and forgot about the other half. There, now it's fixed.

Quote from: JimBobOzIf we make up new words (like...)

Proactive

Don't you hate on-line dictionaries?

Quote from: JimBobOzSo long as our labels are plain English, yes. If we make up new words (like "proactive"), or give new meanings to old words (like "Incoherent"), then we just get into endless arguments about what the word actually means.

Er, that is a plain English word, used in its normal sense, at least within my essay.  The dictionary definition is:

Quoteadjective
1. descriptive of any event or stimulus or process that has an effect on events or stimuli or processes that occur subsequently; "proactive inhibition"; "proactive interference" [ant: retroactive]
2. (of a policy or person or action) controlling a situation by causing something to happen rather than waiting to respond to it after it happens

where here I was talking about #2.  

The usage is important because "reactive" is not the same as "inactive".  You can have a fun game where the PCs are doing lots of stuff where the PCs are still reactive.  They may be picking up on GM hooks and bangs, and enthusiastically pursuing them.  That is "active" but not "proactive".

Johnny-come-latelies!

Ned

"Proactive" is a tautogical nonsense, like "irregardless".

It's also a management buzzword, and therefore using it will turn off readers right from the start - at least, readers who've ever worked in an office and met management and HR people - and that's a majority of the sorts of people who read articles online, so there you go.

People don't say it in everyday conversation. They say "active", instead, and everyone knows what they mean.

In general, though, John Kim expresses himself in very well-written and plain English. This is just his one tiny flaw, this "proactive", like the whiteheaded pimple on the face of a handsome man. Pop it! Then your handsomeness will be unmarred.

FFS, it's not: it is the antonym of reactive and 100% totally, correctly used in this thread. Face it dude, you are wrong. If this was rpg.net we'd all be posting pictures of zebras by now.

However:



"You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me, it's a full-time job. Now behave yourself"

Ned