Does that make sense?

Much better convo with Vincent than the last one I heard with him- that clouds and boxes shit was indecipherable. Sorry, Vincent. I still think you're the man.

I wanted to unpack Joel's “traction vs. randomness” thing a bit. That's definitely not about rules engagement, in my experience- it is its own thing. I usually come down solidly on the “traction” side- why bother making decisions if you can't reasonably expect your actions to weight the results sufficiently to achieve goals? I tend to break down into a puddle when in a situation where there is no course of action I can expect a reasonable chance of achieving with the mechanics. This is an independent issue from “points of contact” or “engagement with the mechanics”. The mechanics of Don't Rest Your Head, for example, are hella engaging. When you play that game, you are f*cking ENGAGED, 100% of the time. You can't really not be. AND, separate from that, you have a reasonable expectation that if you make a decision, you can make progress toward achieving that goal. The mechanics of the ORE have far more points of contact than DRYH, and arguably you can be just as engaged with them, but the expectation of reliable achievement depends entirely on where your character's requisite skill falls on the curve. When playing in an adventure-fantasy setting, I found this often frustrating. I was engaging the mechanics, but could not get traction. When playing in a medical drama setting, engaging equally with the mechanics as in the fantasy setting, I found myself coming down much more comfortably on the “randomness” side of the scales- abject failure in the face of best efforts being an understood core trope of medical drama as a genre.

I'm kind of babbling, so I'm not sure I'm getting my point across. I'm just trying to add weight to Joel's ideas about “traction vs. randomness” as a legitimate issue for further examination, aside from (but not necessarily separate from) issues of Creative Agenda… perhaps tied in more with Vincent's idea of “Technical Agenda”, which also makes sense to me, whether or not it can be teased out from CA or not.

Thanks for another good show, Clyde; keep 'em comin'!

I was wondering if you can point me in the direction of an article or blog post or something that is about Simulationism/Right to Dream but written by someone who really likes it. I have an inkling that RtD describes the play that I most enjoy, but I keep encountering descriptions from Forge-types who love Story Now and occasionally dip into Step on Up but seem to have this kind of masked contempt for RtD, making their descriptions of it almost impossible for me to identify with (or, frankly, really understand).

I don't know if this was the case for VB – he definitely didn't seem to see what the fun of RtD would actually be, and rightly identified himself as probably not the right person to talk about it…I'm wondering who is the right person. (I tried to read Ron Edwards' essay on RtD but being outside of the Big Model bubble I didn't really follow how what he was saying was meaningful, though clearly others find it to be).