psychohist wrote:
> I remember the name, I just don't remember enough to associate him
> with a story orientation or threefold rejection. David Berkman was
> the real extremist in that regard, but that was before you started
> posting here. I think of Russell Wallace as being something of a
> story person, though that may just be by comparison with myself, and I
> do have the impression he likes to run different kinds of campaigns at
> different times.
In truth, all my campaigns have a fairly similar mix: large dollops of
dramatism and simulationism, a smaller but nonzero amount of gamism in
that I like to set up tough-but-fair challenges for my players. So I
think you're right, in that you're more towards the simulation and less
towards the story end of things than I am.
This came up a couple of days ago, in the latest session of my current
campaign, with a player whose style is more dramatist and less
simulationist than mine. His character correctly realized that pacifist
and moral relativist philosophy is ultimately inconsistent with
member****p of the Order of Serene Guardians of Humanity and therefore
resigned the latter and rode off into the sunset, so the player asked
whether he could play one of Windermere's Bonded volunteers (who lacked
the vitally im****tant nanomachine implants) and have his new character
be just as powerful as a Guardian, but even before I replied he'd
realized the answer was no. Why? Because of something I said at the
start of the session:
GM: Also a small retcon...
GM: I had described the power stations as running on geothermal energy.
At Jin Li's prompting, I ran the numbers and found geothermal just isn't
enough, so they actually contain fusion reactors. Everything else still
works as before.
Ryan: How do fusion reactors last this long?
Ryan: And wouldn't those make a really really really big boom?
Ni Jun: (They filter Deriturm, or heavy water, straight out of the
surrounding ocean)
GM: Fuelwise, they run on deuterium, of which there is more than plenty
in the ocean. Maintenancewise, the nanotech maintenance systems already
referred to...
Ryan: Allright.....
GM: As for big boom, not in the nuclear explosion sense - fusion
reactors don't do that - though there will certainly be secondary
explosions.
The player correctly reasoned that a GM who would trouble to thus crunch
the numbers in a game that was advertised as anime genre, would also be
unwilling to break established setting logic to make a new character
more powerful; and he was right. He applies that in his own game too -
no insult to him there, last time there was a problem, he and I talked
it over until I understood where his dramatist logic was coming from, so
I could propose a solution that would let his story work as intended,
while still letting my character's strategic planning also work.
So there you have it, no straw men, three good GMs well and practically
described as mostly sim, some of both, and mostly drama. The Threefold
does work at least somewhat well in practice.
--
"Always look on the bright side of life."
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