Today I played a short game of Intrepid (2½h). It’s a “GMless structured freeform game”. In other words, it tells you how to talk to each other. There are characters, locations, and quests (plot lines); each quest has three scenes. For every scene, pick the character and quest and somebody else will act as GM for the scene. The scene ends when players get the feeling that a crossroads moment has been reached at which point both the player and the GM tell their version of how the scene ends and all the players cast their vote. The result is a random pick weighted by the number of votes.
The result was somewhat *meh*. There was little coherence in background elements and motivations. The suggested alternatives weren’t emotionally charged. There was no tension to speak of. It was nice, and pleasant, and perhaps it might have been great, and as Jon later told us, his first game was awesome and all the elements clicked but at other times games were similarly unexciting.
The things I wrote about Archipelago back in 2011 still hold: “When I sit down for my gaming session, I want to be entertained. I personally require some sort of struggle and tension for this to work […]. We took turns in telling a story. Except that we’re not awesome story tellers like authors of books. Stories in a good book are subtle, deep, novel, emotional, surprising, and we are not. Maybe we could become better story tellers over time, but I don’t have much hope for myself. […] I think this has to do with how my creativity works. I like constraints. Random encounters, random abilities, a struggle against opposition. The story I prefer is therefore a side-product of player action, game master plans, random rolls, twists and opposition introduced by others – it is a necessary side-product, but not something that I want to deliberate with my fellow players, not something I want to plan beforehand. I don’t want the author perspective on the story. I want to discover the story as it unfolds.”
#RPG #Indie #Intrepid