Reply To: Victory Points Suck!

[limburger 21775xp 2]

yikes … for someone who is supposed to be a writer type that guy sucks at explaining stuff or what his background is.

Games are games and not stories.
The problem isn’t victory points or objectives.
The problem is thinking one can force a game to behave like a story or that it becomes one if you remove the mechanical score methods.

It’s why boss fights suck in games that forget that there should be a reason for them to happen to begin with.

And you’re definitely not going to be having a fun game if both gamers don’t share the same mind set.

Story is the result of playing the game, not the mechanic that creates the game.
You might as well not roll the dice if you want a pure narrative ‘experience’ …

Consider the fact that there have been movies about sports like boxing, martial arts, football and tennis.
The events themselves are purely mechanical (‘kill’ your opponent or score more points …).
Except the result is told as a story instead of as a mechanical result.

As such the trick is to use things like objectives as a way to help you create a narrative.
This is where scenery pieces help.
It’s when you’re talking about ‘that fuel dump’ instead of ‘objective marker A’
Or ‘that bridge across the river’ instead of ‘objective marker B’.
The mechanics are the same, but it becomes easier to tell an interesting story afterwards.
And with a bit of luck it helps both players have more fun organising their strategy, because retrieving the secret briefcase from the destroyed tank is so much more fun than holding ‘objective C’