Trope Talk: Macguffins
Added 2020-03-06 16:05:01 +0000 UTCmaybe the real video was the friends we made along the way?
Comments
A few question about the characters themselves: 1) TDDC-Krillidin appears to be playing a role halfway between Captain Obvious and the nicer side of Deadpan Snarker (if you get the TvTropes lingo). Is that the way the player saw real-Krillidin or an artifact of the player not being completely integrated in the flow of the game? (Or maybe just the player having shades of this) 2) Rewatching the Polaron arc, I noticed the phrase "Mora casts Haste" is a running gag in TDDC at this point. Was Angel's player using her so much as a Haste-bot that it became a gag or is that one of your addition. 3) Good job on the french at the end. My quebecer heart was happy to actually understand it easily.
3C273
2020-03-08 15:50:00 +0000 UTCThis is _extremely_ different from other definitions of MacGuffin that I've seen. I first learned the term "MacGuffin" from the Doctor Who role-playing game published as "Timelord" back in the day, which you can look up. According to the rulebook (page 44), "MacGuffin" is a skill which a character may or may not have to construct a device to do _blah_ out of whatever they find lying around. The device so constructed is also called a MacGuffin. Notice that by this definition the purpose of the device is absolutely crucial, although how it works and whether it could plausibly exist are utterly irrelevant. You simply tell the game master that your character will spend the next 45 minutes building a device to repel an an alien invasion fleet out of sand, cococuts, fish guts, and whatever else is to hand on a desert island, the game master assigns a difficulty to the task depending on how generous they're feeling and exactly what the local fish have been eating lately, and you pit your MacGuffin skill against that difficulty by rolling the dice to find out if you succeed in building a functioning model. This definition also makes MacGyver the archetypical MacGuffin builder. Ever since I learned the term I have wondered if that is a coincidence. In this video you've stuck very much to the original hitchcockian definition and not explored the diversity of ways in which the term has been employed. There's bound to be a bigger story waiting to be told.
Veronica C. Morgan
2020-03-07 06:15:06 +0000 UTCIt's still a mcguffin, just a spicy one... 🤣
Billius Bilarbre
2020-03-06 17:38:46 +0000 UTCThank goodness, I've needed proper clarification on this for a while.
Signs
2020-03-06 17:14:36 +0000 UTC
