Doing Things Better #1: Entertaining your fellow-players

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

I tried my best to clarify in my original post that these were the, as you say, necessary conditions, not the total sum of roleplaying.

The place where you failed to do that, and indeed conveyed the diametric opposite, is where you said, "Even if people just shoot the breeze and drink your beer and eat your pizza and make jokes and completely fail to connect with the game, if they have fun, they'll consider it a success and will want to do it again."

At that point, you have said "the game part isn't necessary to have a successful game; the hanging out part is sufficient without the gaming part." And that is what you are getting negative responses on. Or it's the main thing.

(Note that semantically, a, b, c, d, and e are necessary conditions says that they're things you need; but a, b, c, d, and e are the necessary conditions says that they are the only things you need, that is, that the are sufficient.)

I'd also say that the social part isn't all that crucially necessary. I've invited people into my games who weren't friends—some who were friends of friends and were recommended to me, some who heard about my games and asked on their own hook, even some whom I met through the newsgroups. Some of them went on to become friends; some didn't. But the ones who didn't were still sometimes entirely satisfactory players. So a model of rpgs as "friends getting together to hang out with each other" is a poor fit for what I do; there are people at some of my games whom I wouldn't ever see if we didn't game togather.

Bill Stoddard