Off game: I have to say that I was enjoying this game until it devolved into silliness and we just made up ways to get out of a situation without thinking about what we already had on hand. For example, when we were stuck in the cave with the sheep monsters, trying to get out through the hole in the roof, we had Golden Scissors and were dealing with itchy sheep monsters. It took a page of people suggesting crazy deus-ex-machina solutions before somebody decided to shear the sheep. Even then, nobody thought to use the wool to create a rope to get everybody out of the hole. Instead, we dug a trench or something and then there were ants and it was silly. Its good to think outside the box - that shows lateral intelligence - but there are limits to how far outside the box you can go before you're just making up a solution because you're too lazy to think about what we can do with what we already have.
I'm not saying that we should take it compeletely seriously - the point is to have fun - but I'd like to see us try to think a bit more about solving puzzles ala an adventure game rather than just making up a silly story.
There needs to be some sort of direction (a short-term goal for example) and somebody directing us there. They need to have a reasonable solution involving the objects that we already have in our possession at that time. If one of the players comes up with another reasonable solution based on our current inventory, the current game master should be free to accept that solution etc. It doesn't have to be the same person all the time. And I don't think its unreasonable for several people to play the part of the game master at once, chipping in to post witty outcomes, but the guideline should be that game-master posts shouldn't let us off the hook or advance the story without a interesting, plausible solution (I hate to use that word) based on what we already know.
Edit: lest that seem a little restrictive, commands like "
look at..."
or "
talk to ..."
could reasonably reveal some new object or some new idea that could then be used to solve the current problem. But there should be some challenge in seeing how that object could be used in the current situation or in conjunction with other objects that we have. For example, its fine for us to "
look"
while stuck in the sheep monster cave and find a set of shears since that doesn't directly solve the problem of getting out of the cave. Its kind of silly for us to "
look"
and find an elevator tucked under one of the sheepmonster's coats.
[Edited by stigant at
Local Time:04-21-2005 at 06:31 PM]
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>Use Tyrant-divining rod
