How much game-related talk is right for this venue? On the one hand, I want very much to write in greater depth about the games I’m working on and playing. On the other hand, I don’t precisely want to alienate people who tune out when we get to talking about dice pools, player agency, and ludology versus dramaturgy. Where’s the balance?
Right now, in the minutes between other projects, I’m writing down little notes that will soon become the Mage: The Awakening chronicle I’ll run at the office. A lot goes into preparing one of these chronicles, for me, from the general narrative terrain the game will cover (themes, atmosphere, the sorts of action that’ll happen “on stage” and the sort that won’t) to all of the choices that will inform or drive gameplay (like the sorts of character types that’ll be welcome and what sort of important decision points will be open to the players). I’ll generate pages and pages of ugly, geeky notes on this stuff, and often it ends up amounting to maybe just a handful of play sessions before real-world scheduling problems drive a chronicle into the ground.
Tonight, for example, I keep coming back to this question: “How much should my Mage chronicle resemble Ghostbusters?”
