"The Czege Principle says that when one person is the author of both the character's adversity and its resolution, play isn't fun."
Hmm. I am not sure this is true, since in solo play I have had a lot of fun authoring both. However it might be worth remembering, as Czege is a gaming genius. Since in solo you really want to come up with resolutions yourself, it tends to suggest leaning really heavily on your plot and situation generators, and pulling back as much as possible from inventing your own PC adversity.
http://www.lumpley.com/archive/167.html
It’s probably significant that the people who were thinking about this stuff at the Forge and elsewhere were not thinking of solo gaming at all. The game design environment was def focused on a group (minimum of 2) players.
ReplyDeletePaul never claimed this as any sort of voice of authority. It was a proposition that he put into a discussion once and after being chewed over, several people agreed. And someone (not him) dubbed it the Czege principle. In terms of group play, I think it is probably spot on.
Paul is a good, thoughtful, kind, guy, and very clever. And has written at least one game that provided two or three wonderful play experiences at the table for me. (My Life With Master). It always bothers me to see people mischaracterized because of the general bullshit that grew up around some of the stronger personalities at the Forge.
Todd Rokely I'm aware of most of the Scene by Scene generators you referred to in your comment.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I'm not familiar with Urban Adventures as a specific game/oracle/generator.
Do you have a link for that please?
It's a bit of a short hand I used without explaining myself. It's a part of Scarlet Heroes, specifically it's solo system for, well, urban adventures. While obviously designed for it's Far East/OSR style gameplay, it's a simple and generic system that is really, really easy to port over to other games--I use it extensively for my modern Vampire games, for example.
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, nothing special, just my short hand to reference a sub-rule set of Scarlet Heroes. Sorry for my vagueness!
drivethrurpg.com - Scarlet Heroes