Over on the Forge, Ron made a statement that hit me like a lightning bolt:
...jumping into immensely consequential, resource-eating mechanics without any in-the-moment investment in the fictional events. Play needs to permit that investment to develop and grow. We don’t have scenes in order to have conflicts, we have conflicts in order to make scenes consequential. So the scenes, including content, have to be in progress first before the conflicts become recognized.
I realized from this that a whole lot of issues regarding how/what/why conflict resolution versus task resolution are tidied up just by understanding you do that thing above there first just to find out what you're rolling for.
Other than that, which deserves its own post, it also described part of what ORX has been missing. In ORX, the mechanics are all there, and most of what you do or what you're supposed to do and what it should look like, but I've always felt that a big chunk of "How To Play" was missing...or maybe not missing, but only poorly or incompletely described. Like I was writing around "what play looks like" instead of just writing "what play looks like".
Honestly, I always felt that section three of the book--the How To Play section--was the worst written part. That it was me beating around the bush trying to show the reader a pheasant rather than just showing a pheasant, and I think that's because I didn't know what the pheasant was supposed to look like in concrete detail. Or so to speak.
"It's a bird with wings and feathers and it flies and it's probably brown. Here, let me show you...{beat, beat, beat}...well, the darn thing won't come out, but hopefully you get the idea."
So there's this whole section of the book I've just never been happy with as the writer because it has always felt that something was missing, that it wasn't clear enough, that it wasn't complete enough, but that I also never could put into words the part that was missing.
There's this whole "story part" that's a core part of play, but only vaguely indicated. Something that arises if all the players know what they're doing, but if you don't, isn't going to happen. Which I think gave rise to a number of the sessions I ran that I was fundamentally unhappy with as expressions of the game (even if other folks liked them well enough).
And THAT was enough to put me off playing my own game until I could figure out what was causing that to happen and describe how to make the right thing happen: it was all about setting the stage to allow a story to occur, and providing the necessary tools
to make it a good story.
Then someone posted something about "flux", I don't recall exactly, and the word and some ideas used in the Mythic GM Emulator crashed together into these notes:
What my orc wants is in Flux. These are story threads. They can be complex or simple.
Lists of things the orc wants. As background, or developed in play. Things he hasn't gotten are listed as in Flux.
Negative conflict resolution affects one of the things in Flux.
Or, alternately, affects one of the things he has Attained and removes it/threatens it.
That's where I happen to be at right now, along with some progress on the Random Adventure Generator/Oracle. Clearly I need to detail this so it makes more sense to someone other than me, but this is a decent step towards making the story portion sing and helping others know what is supposed to be done at the start of an ORX game and how that makes the rest of the game happen.
On reflection, in a way, this has ended up being a progression of what I was doing with the setting bible in
At the Dawn, much the same way ORX was a system-progression of what I was trying to do with
PGE.
Note: the music listed on this post is my MOST FAVORITE SONG EVER!!!!!!!!! I once drove my sister absolutely insane by listening to it for four hours non-stop (I would have kept listening to it, too, but she snapped and did something I don't recall to the radio and made me a sad monkey--I took solace in having annoyed her so much).
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