Friday, October 26, 2012

Is alot of roleplay based on hypocritical practices?

I was thinking, the way players might expect some amount of creative control over a game - is that hypocritical?

Let's assume the game was good for them somehow - and because it was good, THEN they want creative control.

They only want in once the bread has been baked. As if they deserve creative control in a roleplay game they did nothing in building up from scratch.

Certainly if the game is somehow (in their subjective judgement) not good, then they (99% of the time) don't want to try and put in effort to build it up. They just abandon it.

Yet if it's good, then they want creative control. In particular this begs the situation where their creative input simply wrecks what's there - but again, why not, as they didn't put in any effort.

It's quite a dilemma. Roleplaying generally involves players having some creative control. But if it keeps getting handed out to people as if they deserve something they don't respect?

Possibly this is why leveling systems (like in D&D) took off - at the start the GM necessarily put in a great deal of effort. Here's some giant rats to kill. Done. In other words, no ones put any creative effort in as yet. So if all participants help nurture the game, it continues - the higher levels requiring greater amounts of creativitity as you start to deal with organisation of enemies, or even pantheons.

Perhaps RPG's could do with some system that ensures everyone either contributes to nurture the game from scratch?

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