Sunday, November 24, 2013

Tabletop Roleplay: The Coin Principle

This is a simple exercise in psychology.

Take anyone and do the usual roleplay stuff (whatever that is), but about every ten minutes a player is to declare their PC flips a coin in the fiction. The GM has to say which side a fiction coin lands on. The GM isn't allowed to keep a record of his past declarations.

Further variations are that players will lose a large number of HP on tails, while gaining a small sum on a result of heads.

As well as players being somewhat annoying to the GM, or in other variations, buying the GM pizza.

The question is, will the coin always come up 50/50 on each result?

Or will a bias show?

This is the uncomfortable 'persuasion' argument the adept press 'your stuff' forum went through recently.

Really I think we all know a bias will show up. To what degree and in what direction depends both on the GM involved and the circumstances they find themselves in, so the bias is fairly unique each time.

Yet for some reason we have to keep a black screen us and that when it comes to 'How Epidiah decided range to target in Dungeon Crawl Classics' or '[D&D] Is the dungeon real?'

For some reason some of my posts on this had a higher traffic rate than my dragons crown posts - so I write on the idea there may be interest still.

Is it some sort of uncomfortable final disenchantment? I can't find Moreno's example of him recounting how he said his character hid amongst bodies so as to elude the zombies chasing him.

But the thing is I can see the persuasion lines in that - the bias. And I can still enjoy it! It seems possible, if certain variables went Moreno's way. To me that's all the fiction ever was - the idea that if certain variables were to just happen to go in someones direction.

Though as I've said before, a GM can, in varying circumstances (say if you bought him pizza, or if you've just said he's a great guy) can become quite easy to persuade. Ie, alot more variables will just happen to fall your way than usual. That 'easy' is a problem in gamism.


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