Gencon and Brisbane, Campaign Law

[tcpip]

Recently returned from a solid four day's gaming and engaging in related seminars at Gencon Australia in Brisbane. Spent most of my time at various seminars and was impressed and amused by the various presentations by Tracy and Laura Hickman and the insightful comments by robin_d_laws. It was good to hear from other designers and their perspectives, including of course stephen_dedman along with quite a number of other Australian freelancers. Somewhere among all this managed to get a the opportunity to play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition which now bares very little resemblance to a roleplaying game in a systematic sense but rather is an very well designed single-unit wargame. Also managed to spend some time playing Feng Shui, watching movies, and visiting stalls.

The Con was also particularly good for caseopaya as there was a "Living With Diabetes" convention next door for the third and fourth day. The first day was a little surreal with the XXII World Poultry Expo next door with various delegate wandering around with little faux chickens attached to ID cards. Also whilst in Queensland went along to aromameet on Friday eve and spent time with the ever delightful drjon, one_bat and many others including Emily, the six-fingered librarian from Melbourne with turbercolosis (no really, I'm not making this up). On Sunday also caught up with doomydoombear before she moves to the UK.

Returning from the Con, discovered that the first draft for Campaign Law had been rejected by ICE who have decided that the much of the basic outline was wrong and out-of-date and much of the writing and material was not of high enough quality. I could agree more, although it has hit some of the other designers quite hard with at least three indicating they don't want to work on the project anymore. To me the only really annoying part is the time that has elapsed between submission of the first draft and this response (but I feel fairly confident it wasn't my writing or material they were referring to). So far I am the only one who has indicated that they wish to continue with development. Finally, I must also mention that my review of Mongoose's RuneQuest Deluxe has been published on rpg.net and apparently I've won a prize of some sort at said site for my review of Legend of the Five Rings.

Comments

Re: Narrow-focused question, here

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

The two attributes don't exclude one another , but it's hard to have them occur at the same time in a game session. Possibly impossible.

The narrative aspect must be differentiated from narrativism (this is something that strangedave beat into my head many years ago). Any roleplaying game can have a narrative insofar there is a sequence of events and even with an introduction, a period of rising tension, a climax and and a denouement.

Narrativism on the other hand is a systematic means for a player to grab hold of the story direction and put it under their own influence by introducing plot devices and so forth. If I'm going to be particularly broad, I would also include simulations of character personality as a "horizon" between narrative and simulation, in which case the closest thing that D&D had was the old alignment system.

But in D&D4e alignment doesn't mean anything in a systematic sense. It is entirely for colour and nothing else.