Games for the Mind

So, I’ve been thinking about my GM-ing style as I read through some designers talking about how to design a game.  Lots of it, with a determinately Forge basis, focuses on how to develop the mechanical elements to suit the thematic elements. 

What’s funny about a lot of it is that it focuses on the game itself and not the players of the game.  So, you get a mechanic designed to address the issue of a character rather than the issue of a player playing the character.  This makes good sense, on one level, since you get to players only after you have a mechanic with which to run a game.

However, it also means that you can end up with a game that only grabs a player who is engaging heavily through the ‘socket‘ the mechanic addresses.  If you design a mechanic to address character issues, you will only grab players who access that character socket.   And, of course, those who just like to play with system bits.

Now, I’m pretty darn good at the systematic-mechanical dimensions of a game, it’s one of the ways my brain just works.  When I was young, I used to buy games almost entirely for the fun I got out of making sense of how to use them.  However, I don’t like it when my play gets to be about the system, when I have to spend time figuring out rules in play. 

What I do like is responding to players, playing to their interests, providing some mystery, npc, conflict, nifty description, that tickles their interest.  What most mechanics don’t do for me is allow me to do just that.  When I bring the system in too much, it pulls me away from the players and the game. 

Which makes me think that the real game mechanic gold may lie in mechanics that help the players and GM (or just the players) interact with each other more directly.  Keys in TSOY are pretty darn good, especially for the way they allow players to signal changes of interest quickly.  But it would be interesting if there were some ’space’ in which the players and GM’s could externalize other negotiations that go into making a good roleplaying session.

It makes me wonder, sort of absently, if one of the reason there is such a myth of the good GM is because, to some extent, there is some truth behind it.  That certain ways of interacting with players qua players facilitates a more dynamic, multi-socket game.  And, one of the reasons people tend to respond ambivalently to ‘dirty hippie games,’ is that a lot of them are pretty tightly wired to a couple sockets.