Weekend

[firstfrost]

The walnut/date pie was a success - similar to a pecan pie, but enough different that it's distinctive. Cassoulet is now the Infinite Pot of Leftovers, but I like it, so that's all good. The mushroom pierogi were an interesting experiment - I cheated and used the Very Non-Standard egg roll wrappers instead of dough, as rolling out flat dough is one of my least competent cooking skills. They were ugly but tasty - I really need to stop judging food by what it looks like, this is why I always think I don't like dim sum.

At the "wedding potluck" for Oath, the plotting-out-the-future wrangling after the wedding was a moderate success. It's a difficult balance between wanting to have hard choices in the run occasionally, and players who like wrangling hard choices, and the ones that don't, and the ones that like doing so but not in as much detail, and the ones who like wrangling as long as they win... well, it's an interesting dynamic, and one that's gotten to mostly-working.

Comments

Wrangling Tech

[(Anonymous)]

As she-who-is-fascinated-by-social-dynamics, I have to note a couple of useful tools that helped make it a productive conversation (which may all seem obvious, but boy did they help avert possibly sailing off into chaos):

1) People were good about explicitly discussing what players wanted versus what characters wanted

2) At some point the conversation was explicitly cast in terms of 'compromise means I give you something on issue A, and you give me something on issue B, so no one wins every issue but everyone gets something dear to their heart.' You don't always want to cloud the waters by discussing multiple issues at once, but I think here it helped get over otherwise insurmountable differences.

3) As a group, we evidenced at least minimal ability to say "Wait, we've gone into the realm of things we might care about in theory but can never pin down in reality, let's get back to the stuff we can actually manipulate." And to be OK with that particular type of meta-think.

4) De-escalation happened. I'm not sure how, but yay us for civilized behavior. :)

Katya

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Okay, your claim that you don't do livejournal is getting nearly as thin as arcanology's. :)

[desireearmfeldt]

There, happy now?

But I still claim it's a foreign paradigm. :)

What was the middle part again?

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

I must have left at the point of maximum escalation. I was ready to explode, which is especially silly as I'm not even in the run.

When I left, the distinction between players and characters wasn't clear, and it seemed that people were not making it clearer. It sounds like that changed, probably soon after I bailed. I would guess that the de-escalation was the result.

I don't understand not wanting to make hard choices. It seems like that reduces the game to a hack-and-slash. Why develop a character with a personality and then avoid any interesting problems?

Personally I'm a fan of a run where the players are not sure they're going to win. I like it when it feels like the GM would let a character die unplanned. The feeling of heroism is sharper.

I understand that this philosophy favoring the belief in mortality is personal, and I can sort-of understand why someone might feel differently, but the idea of wanting to avoid making the difficult decisions seems pretty lame.

Re: What was the middle part again?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't think it's quite a question of "I don't want to personally have to make any hard decisions" but more that making hard decisions (if they're actually *hard* to make) will involve other people in the group disagreeing with you over the right choice. And some players would rather not argue with other players for fun, and some would rather not be argued at by people who argue more ferociously than they do.