LotFP: Made of Lies!

So Weird Fantasy Role-Playing is being discussed on the Forge (here!).

I feel like I should say something, but I don't speak Forguguese. So I'll comment here so I don't derail their conversation over there. (I post this here because much more people actually read the blog, but any actual discussion about my post here should probably take place on the LotFP forum).

First of all, I do not understand the connection between "consistent moral underpinning" and "horror." Nor do I understand how "ironic and cynical relativism" is "antithetical to straight-up gritty weird historical horror."

My mind keeps twisting towards Scream-esque "rules of horror," and thus shit-ass awful formulaic horror movies, when I try to think those through.

But I think my difficulty in understanding Baker comes from a fundamental conflict between game philosophies.

"What is this game about?" If the game strongly defines this for you, it's not a good RPG due to being too narrow in focus. "What do we do?" should be defined by the adventure or environment (and so it's the Ref who decides by either creating or choosing the adventures or placing the elements of a sandbox), not the game.

(how's that for a deciding "old school/new school" definition?)

(and yeah, never was a big fan of Pendragon for this reason)

LotFP campaigns could be about witch hunters whose terrorizing of the countryside is simply collateral damage in their quest to stamp out evil, it could be about those seeking knowledge and riches in order to gain influence and better society, it could be about some greedy fucks looking for gold, or it could be about honest-to-gosh do-gooders helping people and smashing evil.

But if the Ref and the players have different expectations, it could get interesting. If the players create a bunch of terrorizing witch hunters and the Ref presents adventures for do-gooders helping people, I think that's going to be one hell of a rip-roaring game provided everyone runs with it instead of running away from it.

James Nostack had an interesting comment: "The rules of the game directly reward getting rich and, if necessary, killing whoever gets in your way... These are shitty moral values if taken seriously: in the real world, they would be the values of a psychopath."

One frequent criticism I get is that my game needs some sort of insanity rules, because of course any horror game worth its salt requires them, right? I figure that PCs in RPGs are pretty much insane by definition, especially in the Lovecraft mold of their insanity being a result of seeing more of the true nature of the world than most people. When it's commonplace for a group of characters to all get one room at an inn in a peaceful countryside, and take turns keeping watch in that room... or insisting on wearing armor and weapons in town no matter what... or they're already completely crazy, no mechanic required. Adding rules for insanity to tell players how their character should behave strangely is completely redundant.

I do want to note that I consider "Weird Fantasy" to simply be a euphemism for "horror," and really the difference between "horror" and your favorite genre is simply one of presentation.

(for example, because of all the gore and sometimes raw violence on display, I often have trouble thinking of mystery shows like NCIS, the Las Vegas CSI, Silent Witness, and Waking the Dead as not-horror because of the presentation. I think it's why I like them more than the Poirot/Marple/Lewis/Frost softer-edged style mysteries)

(I digress again: They can't win when showing the autopsies in these shows. Silent Witness has no problem showing nude bodies on the autopsy table. My wife noted during one scene that the actress must have been cold on the set because of the goosebumps and erect nipples the body had while the pathologist actors are all stone-faced talking about the contents of her stomach or some such.

My reaction? "um, dear... why are you looking at a cadaver's tits? That's pretty sick."

But on NCIS, they can't show the naughty bits, which is an issue because just about every episode features a scene about the autopsy. Sometimes they just have bright light covering up the nads. But in one episode I saw last week they covered up a girl's nipples with a flap of skin from the y-cut that opened up the torso.

US broadcast standards: You can see the mutilated insides of a human being in detail... but no female nipples.)

And my view about the one of the original poster's games: I think I view Dogs in the Vineyard differently than its author. I see everything about The Faith and the setting given in the book and the rules for making towns to be pure flavor to push the players' buttons. The game seems to me (rather plainly so) to be about Player vs Player conflict, so you need to set that up in a group that's supposedly working together. In my experience a united party just romps through that game, and PvP conflict usually happens when one player takes the setting and fluff seriously and another uses their real-life sense of right and wrong to guide their decisions.