Two articles have recently come to my attention:

The Play of Simulation (excerpt from Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals). This article is the ultimate source for "the immersive fallacy", a term that's started to pop up in some RPG discussions.

Immersion and Presence (presentation from a computer game theory class at IT University of Copenhagen).

The latter is a critique of the former, and it gets into the difficulties that arise from equivocation in the use of the term "immersion"--a topic I've touched on in an earlier entry.

I was thinking today that for people like me, who don't have a regular gaming group, published games and published settings have an important role as proxies for a style of play and overall ethos. I've said it before, mainly as a critique of the idea that designs (esp. design narrowly construed as "mechanics") play a particularly strong role in getting people to play in a certain way. Instead, I've suggested that the success of many Forge games has owed a great deal to the fact that the people who buy and play them are self-selected not only to like the games themselves, but also to want to game in a certain way. So the games are like the handkerchief code that (allegedly?) exists in some gay subcultures--"arbitrary signs", to borrow a term from linguistics & semiotics, whose meaning, or coordinating function, is unrelated to inherent qualities of the signs (games) themselves.

Frankly, I think it's possible to overplay this argument, just as it would be rather silly to claim that the use of the image of a human skull as a symbol of death is utterly arbitrary. But in everyday terms, I think that games and settings have reputations and practices associated with them. You don't have to play Game X differently from Game Y, but if you're invited to play a game and you've never gamed with the people involved, the choice of rules and setting are going to condition your expectations. I even think the expectations of different games will be positively correlated across the population. And it doesn't matter if this more a matter of "pure reputation" or if it's actually connected to the mechanics.

When it comes to settings, I think the connection to expectations is at least as strong. Announce a campaign set in Hârn and people will generally expect a fairly naturalistic kind of low fantasy. Set a campaign in Mystara, Greyhawk, or Forgotten Realms, and I think people will expect a more high fantasy game, and they'll be more in tune with a kitchen sink style, up to and including things like extraplanar adventures.

The upshot of all this is that if you're casting a wide net looking for players among existing RPGers, a known setting could be a good way of attracting people with common interests. But if you really want to GM your homebrew setting, and it's out of the mainstream and a little idiosyncratic, then maybe publishing it is a good way of advertising it. The world may not need your POD or PDF, but you need players, right?

So now I've ordered my priorities. There are already a number of published settings I'd be glad to GM. Some off the top of my head: Talislanta, Chronicles of Future Earth, the medieval Baltic as portrayed in Crusaders of the Amber Coast, Jorune. Still, there's a homebrew I've had in mind for a long time, and getting it out there could have utility beyond pure vanity.

At least, these are the thoughts motivated me to look into ways to organize and present a setting, both as an end product and as a process.

I've noticed that a lot of people use wikis to manage their campaigns, so to start with I've found some free wiki services. These are general-purpose wikis that are also popular with RPGers:

http://www.wikidot.com/
http://www.pmwiki.org/
http://www.wikispaces.com/
http://pbworks.com/


Next come wikis, or wiki-like sites, that are expressly provided for RPGs:

http://www.obsidianportal.com/
http://www.thecbg.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.epicwords.com/

Then a general-purpose service that lets you create websites:

https://sites.google.com/

A couple pieces of software that use a wiki-like structures for local organization of information (but not, apparently, for publishing)

http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/
http://www.tiddlywiki.com/

A website devoted to online roleplaying, which includes tools for displaying campaign information:

http://rpol.net/

And finally, a thread and an article related to this topic, from which I gathered much of the information above:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/274026-electronic-support-wikis.html
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2008/09/how-to-build-1/

Feedback on any of these tools would be welcome. (We'll see if anything comes of it for me, personally.)

Just jotting down a quick thought before I lose it.

The Forge definition is faulty and/or useful only in a specific play paradigm, i.e., shared improv and issues of power over the narrative.

For my purposes, it's much more useful to look at resolution systems thus:

1. Does the player have any doubt as to what will happen? That is, is there risk from the player's perspective?

2. If so, then is the thing-in-doubt resolved by mechanics, or by GM judgment? (There may be some fuzzy areas that include both, but let's consider them as separate ingredients.)

3. If mechanics, we can subdivide as we like. The most important categories, I think, are:

a) Stochastic--a straight diceroll or cardflip for example. Rock Scissors Paper is basically indistinguishable.

b) Deterministic with hidden information. I have Strength 10 and I decide to try to hold the door shut against the creature on the other side. I don't know how strong the creature is, but this has been determined in advance. If its Strength is greater than mine, it will force the door open, otherwise not.

c) Competitive resource expenditure with hidden information. This is basically a form of sealed bid auction. Card play in Castle Falkenstein has some of this characteristic, but I don't have the game anymore to say for sure. And I don't think it actually looked like it would work very well.

d) Mixed or subgame. While any series of resolutions could be seen as a subgame (e.g., a melee in D&D), this category applies most clearly to cases where the subgame steps leading to final resolution are strongly formalized; at the extreme, this would take us to the point of being impossible to interpret as "representing" something in the fiction. E.g., Dogs in the Vineyard, extended conflicts in Burning Wheel, The Shadow of Yesterday, Hero Wars, Heroquest 1e.

For each of a-c it may be helpful to show what they look like WITHOUT risk.

a) This is where the PC simply does something and there's no question whether it can be done.

b) This is where the PC might or might not be able to do something, but is informed somehow before trying it that yes, it can be done, or no, it can't. E.g., the player knows the strength of the creature on the other side of the door. Or the player is informed beforehand by the GM that a knife held to his character's throat will absolutely kill him if he struggles.

c) The player is told that holding the door shut will work if and only if he spends a token.

For (d), obviously we'd be talking about some combination of a-c, but in practice I suspect it would either be so trivial as to default to one of them, or so complex that it would resemble Go, Chess, or Checkers. In the latter case, doubt would be reintroduced by the fact that none of these games has been "solved".

Recently I've had a couple offers to do some wargaming over the net. This led to a quick bit of research on what's out there to assist. Here's what I've found so far:

VASSAL: cross-platform (at least Mac & Windows). VASL is a specialized version for ASL. Free.
Cyberboard: Windows only. Free. Popular.
Aide de Camp: Windows only. Pay only.
ZunTsu: Windows only. Free.
ACTS: Focuses on card-driven games like Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage and We the People. Also supports Republic of Rome, which although it uses cards, isn't really in the same "family". Web based, so it seems to be completely platform independent.

By the way, there are also RPG equivalents. The main ones of which I'm aware are Obsidian Portal and RPoL.

If you go back through this livejournal and click the links to web pages I've cited, you'll probably run across a number of dead links. Sometimes I've gone back and fixed them to refer to The Internet Archive, but that doesn't always work.

I've found something else that may be even better: WebCite. It allows you to trigger archiving of a web page at the time you cite it.

Note that WebCite "honors robot exclusion standards, as well as no-cache and no-archive tags", so if someone doesn't want their page archived for any reason, it will be excluded. It looks like they'll also remove a page from their archive upon request. (See their FAQ.) But I think most dead links are just because someone stopped maintaining their page.

In other words, yes, I'm looking for players for some gaming in April & May, on Tuesday evenings at Endgame in Oakland, California.

Further Details: Look here.

More generally, if you're looking for players, what do you do? Is the actual, physical bulletin board a good idea?

So far, I've posted on the Endgame forums (above), Nearby Gamers, RPGnet, PenAndPaperGames, and a local Google group that I'd set up a few years ago.

All of these are ways to advertise a campaign in need of players, and strike me as somewhat more useful than either RPGGeek or Access Denied. As far as I can tell, those only let you find people, and I'm not interested in contacting people out of the blue.

I'm going to keep going down the list of player finders at RPGnet and Treasure Tables to see if any others look useful. If they are, I'll edit them into this list.

Update: ENWorld's Gamers Seeking Gamers forum appears to be useful. There's also an interactive map-based system but it only functions at all if you've already logged into the forum.

Update: RPGGameFind is set up well.

Update: Dragonfoot's Looking for Games/Gamers forum seems useful.

Is there a Twitter or Facebook channel for this?

Malcolm's series of posts on his "Toy Dogma" approach to RPGs are good stuff, although one might wonder how much effort needs to be put into clearing out the underbrush before building up his own ideas. I suppose part of the point is, as he says, to send a message, and by taking on Forge theory head-on, he's ensuring that the message gets sent to the right people.

Actually, I'm more interested in the parts that challenge an ideology that's much closer to my heart: the idea of immersion. In the history of RPG theory, immersion was fairly closely tied to "Simulationism" (especially on rec.games.frp.advocacy). See for example Threefold Simulationism Explained. Even more important though was the concept of "stances", which I think was originally developed to provide a clearer account of the moment-to-moment experience of a player in a game.

While I don't think I was ever entirely happy with any of the categorizations of "stance" that were proposed in RGFA or later, I've still generally worked from the similar idea of "perspective" in connection with "immersion", as a fundamental element of RPGs at their inception, and actually something that was largely inherited from wargames. You could even say that RPGs were an attempt to refine and elevate the sense of "in-character perspective", which wargames had developed by introducing methods of simulating a situation and putting the player into the shoes of an identifiable actor within the situation. (For example, some wargames attempt to use hidden movement or umpires to present players with actual "limited intelligence" as commanders would have. They may also constrain player control over units, effectively "situating the player" in headquarters, with unreliable communications channels.) Braunstein was a direct outgrowth.

However, lately I've had to admit that "In-character POV (IC POV)" isn't precisely or entirely what goes on when I play an RPG (or a wargame). That is, as much as I enjoy the fantasy of "being" an adventurer or a general, my enjoyment is coming from a very different perspective than the characters themselves. (Playing Stalingrad is fun. I don't think the soldiers or even the generals in Stalingrad enjoyed it quite so much.) So I was interested in the discussion that sprung up in the wake of Malcolm's critique of "stance". (I think he also had some choice words for people who "just want to play my character", but I can't find the link at the moment.) I had a few comments there, which you can read if you like--mainly I refer back to posts I've made here, in which I talked about Chris Lehrich's ideas of RPGs as a form of ritual discourse.

But here, all I want to do is link a couple of other essays which I seem to recall touching on multileveled appreciation of RPGs: Brian Gleichman's Elements of Design, and a schema laid out on the Forge (originally ENWorld) by "fusangite" (Stuart Parker, if I'm not mistaken).

Of the two, Gleichman's approach is probably more up my alley at the moment. Either way, I think there are ways to reconcile "immersion" or IC POV with the more nuanced multilayered approaches--generally, by acknowledging that there are plenty of out-of-character interactions and decisions in games, but noting that many of them are fundamentally social. Therefore, it's natural to handle them via ordinary social means, while using mechanics for them is not only intrusive/unnatural, but misleading. What I mean is that when you claim to have rules governing interpersonal interactions (such as "distribution of authority", explicit "narration trading", abstracted "conflict resolution" and negotiated "stakes"), you create an expectation that the social element can somehow be circumscribed. The result is to put rules and social interactions into conflict with one another: if one wins, the other loses. As I note here and here (regarding formalization and fixation of social processes).

I don't think I've seen this revision of Markus Montola's article, before: The Invisible Rules of Role-playing".

Looking over it again, this jumped out at me:

It is important to understand that a diegetic identity and a movie character are fundamentally different structures. The movie character is an external entity interpreted by the spectator, and thus it can have properties that the watcher could not have invented herself. A movie character may have quicker wits and broader vocabulary than the spectator has. Role-players need to use rule systems and distanced, descriptive playing styles to portray such characters: instead of telling a good joke, a tabletop role-player might just describe that her character tells a good joke, and perhaps even roll a die to justify the goodness of the joke in the game frame.

Another difference is that while characters of the static media are presented in the context of a story world, role-playing characters are presented in the context of a game world. Goldilocks is defined by her adventure: It is difficult to imagine her in another story. The context of the narrative provides Goldilocks with her Goldilocks-like qualities. For the players of role-playing characters, the world full of opportunities and potentials is the significant context, and much more central than the story.

Compare:

EW: I find a lot of Hollywood movies [take great characters and put them into situations of conflict], but they fail in ways that I find very similar to the operation of a heavy-handed GM or an excessively "thespy" player endowed with shared narrative authority. Dumb, inexplicable motivations, illogical plot twists, hammered theme.

Clash Bowley: If the characters have dumb, inexplicable motivations, that's not great characters there, Elliot. Great characters have clear, understandable motivations.

EW: True, it's a tautology. The thing is though that characters can start out great only to be betrayed by the exigencies of plot and stereotyped expectations. Whether that means they were never really great, or that they didn't have any greatness until fully revealed in the course of the story is perhaps a philosophical question when it comes to static fictions that can be revised before release. With RPGs, character has to precede plot IMO.

In short, while the old saying "Character is plot, plot is character" (F. Scott Fitzgerald) is arguably true for static fiction (though perhaps not, when we consider intertextuality and other elements of reader reaction), the identity doesn't hold for RPGs, except possibly if the participants decide to import the concept.

I just came across a series of posts by Alexander Macris where he lays out his GMing philosophy, and I find that my views are very similar to his. Possibly the best way to locate all his "Check for Traps" posts would be through the section at the bottom of this page.

So far I've found at least one useful nugget. In "It's not your story", Macris begins by talking about the history and problems with the use of "story" in RPGs, then (in the page linked) he goes into sandbox design with an eye to enabling "emergent story". The key insight here is a way around a creativity-blocker that I suffer from--a sort of "blank page syndrome" and perfectionism. When I think about designing a setting, I worry about making it all fit together from the start, so I'm naturally tempted to use a "top-down" method. What Macris suggests instead is, basically: make up a bunch of cool stuff, scatter it around the map, and then let your mind wander in creating however much interlinkage you want between them. Obviously there's room for revision as well.

There's some similarity between this approach and others that I've seen, but this is at least a reminder that creativity is an iterative process. For reference: The Conflict Web, by Chris Chinn (possibly hard to locate these days); Microcosm, by Levi Kornelsen; the Adventure Funnel, by Dr. Rotwang!

Also compare Rob Conley's excellent sandbox construction articles from Bat In the Attic.

I haven't listened to it yet, but since I've collected a lot of links about Braunstein already, I'll add this one.

http://theoryfromthecloset.com/2010/08/30/show060-interview-with-david-wesely/