I think of tabletop roleplaying gaming with many hats. These include player, game manager, scenario design, worldsmith and game designer. All of these hats overlap and stack on top of each other precariously, but since each supports the other they are far more secure than they appear.
Anyway, I have a tendency to create terms in my head to define things in a game that don't quite fall into the rather lofty language that some designers use. I'm not 'pure theorist' and I don't design games purely because of a challenge or some specific narrow criteria. I aim at games to be fun.
I game with players who are often not optimum for the more common styles of play, and personally my style is more a combination of Simulation and Storyteller rather than competitive conflict referee, challenge builder or extreme narrativist.
My players and fellow GMs, in recent years, are the sorts of folks who you would hand the D&D Planescape game setting to and they adapt it to use the Hero v5 Mechanics and then spend two months arguing with each other on how to fix the setting because the economics and government system as presented is horribly broken and they can't deal with the hand waving of where the food comes from in the city or why Faction XYZ hasn't become dominant since they control all the weapons traffic flow. Really.
When you deal with folks who think differently, who tend to have very specific 'suspension of disbelief' triggers that have to be handled and who have decades of gaming in their past you learn to adapt differently yourself and to develop ideas that don't quite fit 'the norm'.
Two terms that I've developed along the way that I use are Composite and Collage, and these pretty much are derrived from Arts and Crafts concepts of the words applying them to design.
Collage : In gaming this is when you take large pieces of diverse existing products (Setting pieces, politics, mechanics, etc.) and glue them together in a slightly different pattern to play a game in. You don't go out of your way to neatly trime away ragged edges or problems where they mesh, you just do it (sometimes in a rush) and hope for the best outcome and that everyone involved will have the interests, ideas and concepts of fun of everyone else in mind. An example would be my current game. Take GURPS 4th Edition basic rules, A setting based on the Historical Napoleonic Era Paris France (with a healthy portion of historical figures, and a few stretches of the imagination in regards to a few historical figures that some folks thought might have been dead by the chosen setting year of 1802 but might not have been), add in the historical and fictional versions of the Illuminati (Bavarian, Free Masons, etc.), Stir gently with a Ritualized and toned-down version of GURPS Magic (basically using the version done on the mygurps.com website, using paths instead of colleges, spells become techniques of each path and some of the casting rules from the 3rd edition GURPS spirits or Hellboy standalone GURPS book) and you have a collage. The players build characters appropriate to the material with little leeway from what the mechanics can definie, the scenario becomes an attempt to change the path of history (stop Napoleon from becoming Emperor and/or from leading to all the deaths of the Napoleonic Wars after the peace of 1802 without restarting the Terrors of the Revolution and destroying France). The system, setting elements etc. are all pretty much left intact, with the GM adding some NPCs that are influencing Napoleon as advesaries to the players. Investigative, Diplomatic, Propaganda, Political Intrigue, Magical Intrigue and possibly some violence ensues in the hands and choices of the players. It's not gaming 'fresh from the box' but it's not the same as designing from the ground up. It can produce a wide range of variety and possibilities, still needs a creative GM who is willing to do some research and effort, and can produce a challenge without necessarily falling into the classic pattern of many games of 'Loot, Pillage, Revenge, Celebrate, Get More Powerful, do it all again'.
Composite : A composite game is one where you take diverse elements and carefully trim, overlap, compare and intertwine them, like a 'Mixed Media' visual art creation. The initial parts don't necessarily look like they fit together, but you work them, find ways that they can be connected, and slowly find a way to refine it all. My current design project is a composite. It takes and makes a new set of mechanics by taking what I hope is the best elements of several existing mechanics that have flaws that can be removed to make them better fit the genre, style and points of interest to the players. In this case I want Action that isn't a lot of one-hit kills, but which also doesn't create combats that take hours to resolve. An initiative system that has the 'fog of war' elements to it, so that pacing is unpredictable and more story-like rather than a chess match. I want a skill system that allows characters to be versatile over a range of possibilities, but where specialization can be valuable to have (It's great that you have 3 characters that know First Aid when you need it, but it's also really good to have an expert in treating people with extreme trauma when they've had their leg bitten off by a shark as the first aid isn't going to really produce the same result if you want to reattach the leg). I want magic that fits a particular theme which really hasn't been done in another system except in a very generic way (detail, rather than handwaving, storytelling elements, atmosphere and religious overtones rather than 'I roll, I succeed, he takes 5d6 Killing damage'). I want a series of traits to reflect setting and social concepts of the importance of bloodlines, family history, and honor. I want nobles who by their blood and their position and by their linkags to the land are mechanically expected to practice noblese oblige as well as honor. I am using a roughly Victorian technology level, and that means research, picking and choosing elements of the period. I want a less dark less stifling Victorian setting, so I took it off Earth, but influenced by Earth of the period, and yet not some totally disconnected place. So we have an alternative world with the same tech levels and a group of individuals known as the 'Fabulists' who write fiction novels about this fictional world called Earth and centered around a City called London, center of that world's Great Empire. The stories are a combination of our London of Fiction and Fact, and the Fabulists are writing down tales that come to them in their dreams about this "imaginary" place, usuing them to influence their own society, technology and morals. This gives us Earth influenced, but not Earth, so that players can use real Victorian references in game in their fictional world. A composite drawn from history, but not historical, mechanics from several game systems (Battlestar Galactica, Savage Worlds, Cosmic Synchronicity, GURPS, Trail of Cthuhlu and a tiny bit of Hero), a health dose of Jess Nevin's "Fantastic Victoriana" and a number of original bits just for the project. I've been working on this for quite some time now (4-5 months) but feel it's a lot more 'alive' than my Collage Game or if I had simply taken one of the existing 'off the shelf' games (which inevitably have style, mechanics or setting problems that my players will pick apart even worse than my own).
Anyway, that's my first original blog post for rpgbomb. I hope that my need to define myself and describe a few things didn't bore you too much.
Namaste.
Tags: Composite Collage Terms Definitions Themes Styles Design Tabletop T
