benlehman

Hey Ben,

The difference between D&D and DitV and Sorcerer is that they encourage the gms to listen to what the players want and not get hung up on what they (the gm) had in mind. A thing that most 'good' d&d gms come to understand sooner or later.

But how wierd. Randomness is your friend. That's the mantra I've been holding in my head lately. Maybe we're all just dreaming our theory out of the same collective unconscious. My take on it is that what we're doing all the time is getting inspired. Dead ball is a lag on inspiration and, like you say, randomness can "unstick" our muse. It also allows a group to unlock conflict of interest between players or in ones own self (ie I don't know what my character would do because I can't disentangle what I want them to do from what I think is/should/could be happening and it's getting in the way of my muse).

The other part of it is that humans are these wierd symbol manipulating monkeys. Whatever you throw at us, we are going to read into and create meaning with. And for some reason that is easier than making it up whole cloth. We'll do it with things other folks describe, like in your golem example, or with tarot cards and dice results. You can do it on a raw dice result, with no structure given, if you're open to doing so. One our favorite mechanics to use in the Improv System games is a set of 6sided dice that have faces on them (smily-frowny-angry-neutral). Whenever we want to find out how characters may have reacted or been effected by something, we roll the dice and interpret away. The dice help us "believe" in what we've made up, by helping us overcome the conflict of interest issues above, and also by just giving us something to rif off of so we can get unblocked.

best,
Emily