Elliot Wilen's RPG theory/design/philosophy journal

Defining RPG (2nd draft)

2008-04-25T20:53:25Z

(This is a based on an earlier draft entry. I thought it'd be better to repost with edits than to edit the original.)

This goal of this post isn't to define RPGs. Rather it's to provide a categorical survey of defining characteristics, as suggested by various observers.

First note that all games except a very few have elements of freeform, and even those that don't still have a fiction; otherwise, they are merely (virtual) kinetic art. (By the first I mean, very few games tell you precisely what to do at every step. Chutes and Ladders does. Chess and Monopoly do not. By the second I mean that the game proposes a set of meanings--often the concept of "winning and losing"--that have no real impact outside the game.)

So what is an RPG? What distinguishes it from other games? Markus Montola has proposed some criteria for roleplaying. An earlier discussion on rec.games.frp.advocacy also comes to mind.

Lea Crowe wrote:

Specifically, I think, a wargame does not concern itself with "literary" issues: character, plot, mood, etc. In a wargame, the action is all. [1]

This may be a side point, but in the majority of (modern) wargames, action is delimited by the rules, rather than merely being guided by them. For example, you can only use the tactics of spying, seduction and assassination if there are rules for them -- you can't just come up with a "spy" unit, any more than you can arrange a Mafia hit on someone in Monopoly. [2]

Lea's first paragraph refers what I'll dub the thematic or aesthetic criterion. It's been a problem for RPGs for a long time. Arguably this criterion underlies GNS (in the sense that aesthetic goals are what GNS is about instead of formalism and procedures). It's also related to some of Markus Montola's criteria.

The second paragraph is the freeform procedure criterion. I think this is a weak criterion for RPGs but it's advanced frequently. Essentially it's the criterion which says that the vision of the world overrides formal rules, or rather the vision of the world and how it can be acted on by the players cannot be encapsulated in formal rules.

In response to Lea, I added:

--Wargames generally have unambiguously defined "victory conditions" as part of the rules. RPG's generally don't. [3]

--Wargames have well-defined conditions for when the game ends. RPG's generally don't. [4]

The third criterion, which I proposed, is the motivational criterion. The claim here is that RPGs do not provide clearcut purpose, within the game, to guide player "moves". Consider: tennis, within the game, is motivated by scoring points and winning the game/set/match. (The goal of winning the match might conceivably override the goal of winning the game. As e.g. if you make shots which your opponent can score on provided he or she exhausts herself. But there is a unitary goal guiding your strategy, tactics, and technique/skill.) Outside the game, tennis may be guided by things like trying to impress someone on the sidelines or not making your boss look bad. But the goal is in the fiction of the game and the metagame goals are achieved via the game fiction.

By this criterion, an RPG explicitly does not have a formal goal in the fiction. I think this is an essential criterion, but it is sometimes excluded (generally only provided freeform criterion is satisfied; otherwise you have a closed system that becomes boardgame-like).

The fourth criterion, above, is the endgame criterion, but I think it's been basically disproved. At most it's a special case of the third criterion. Nevertheless it's still expected by many that RPGs will either go on indefinitely, or end only when some non-formal condition is reached, such as general agreement that all the "story arcs" have been played out.

[The rest of this post remains highly sketchy. Sorry.]

Now compare: pictionary, charades, the imagine-a-journey game, etc.

added: note that I don't use the word role above. So let's read what Jonas Dagar has to say about "not an RPG" and Wittgenstein. I find it very exceedingly useful to imagine that "these games" are not being called "RPGs" or even "storytelling games". These terms imply motivation and may (1) constrict play and (2) give a designer an excuse not to really explain their game. Charades doesn't have that problem. Nor does Werewolf. So what are "these games"?

Also look at this rpg.net thread about Capes.

Disentangling "system" as it relates to design and play

2008-04-11T23:01:44Z

This is prompted by a current thread at theRPGsite, where I took Levi to task for bringing up "Lumpley Principle"-esque definitions.

Anyway, I'm going to make my own set of definitions, not as a bid to impose them on the rest of the world, nor as an attempt to "interpret" the essential meanings of terms as used in Forge/Story-Games circles. These definitions may be influenced by earlier ones but they're completely de novo. Also, they're just a stepping stone to talking about the underlying concepts as they relate to design and play, in less jargonistic fashion.

Here goes.

System: the formal rules governing the distribution of authority in an RPG, and the transformation of participant declarations into game-world "facts". Systems are concerned with explicit rights and procedures.

Paradigm or ethos: a collection of common or mutually-complementary understandings regarding the responsibilities of the participants and the purpose of play.

Even these definitions aren't so important in their particulars as they allow us to talk about these things separately in design and play. In design, they're fully distinguishable. A rule that says, "The GM may not declare a conflict without the agreement of the players" is formally the same as "the players may veto any conflict proposed by the GM". Both are part of the system. A "rule" that says "The GM should avoid killing player-characters unless they do something stupid" isn't a part of the system, because it doesn't formally address rights or procedures: it doesn't alter the fact that, presumably, the GM has ultimate say over life & death, or at least the right to over-rule the results of other procedures in the system. But it is an attempt to impart or explain a paradigm or ethos.

As a bit of an aside, an explicit paradigm or ethos may or may not be necessary. As I've argued in the past, many games do have a paradigm that guides play even though we tend not to be aware of it. Namely: winning and losing, concepts that are seemingly meaningless outside the "game-space", but which we allow ourselves to care about. The only exceptions to this are activities such as gambling and professional sports, which do have extrinsic outputs that clearly intrude on "real life". But most of the games we play are not of this nature.

Still other games operate on sub-cultural paradigms that barely need explaining to the initiated--and, in any case, can't be fully explained any more than other cultural activities, whose "purposes" and "language" are diverse, and constantly being transformed through use. For example, "going to a club to see a show" has so many possible functions, each understood in varying degrees by different subsets of the club attendees, that one ought to resort to a meta-paradigm of sociality, the idea of a "scene", if one wants to capture the "aboutness" of the activity. (I've never played a LARP, but I'm pretty sure this idea will ring a bell to those who have.) I think it's undeniable that tabletop can have the same quality. In fact most interactions between humans have this quality, but RPGs are one of those activities that can thrive on it. Furthermore there's a wide range between "using an RPG as a general excuse to hang out with friends" and "using an RPG as the focus for a particular mode of socializing". Even if one did seek a method to group the varies "modes" into categories, that would not in itself allow us to directly impart a specific mode.

Finally, some people wish to assert that certain paradigms are "natural" and don't need to be taught. Personally I think this is more likely to be true of "playing pretend" than various varieties of "telling a story", but that's neither here or there: I'm just including this possibility for the sake of completeness. If you can believe that dogs instinctively communicate with barks, growls, and whines--even if they've been separated from "dog culture" since weaning--then maybe it's possible that significant portions of human culture, or its "substrate", are innate and do not need to be taught.

Let's return from the digression. As I said, the distinction between system and paradigm as I define them is absolutely clear when it comes to the designer's job and the rules text itself. A system may be incomplete--for example, it may describe how to resolve combat, without instructing you how to tell if combat occurs: can anyone declare that it's started, or only the GM, or is there some set of objective conditions which automatically triggers combat? But that doesn't stop it from being a system. Implicitly the holes will have to be filled by a paradigm, such as "the group decides collectively based on common sense".

However, once we move to actual play, the system may or may not survive, but the paradigm goes through a complete transformation. It is no longer text, but action, and the difficulties I alluded to with regard to transmission of paradigms now applies much more widely (to virtually all RPGs, if not to all games), regardless of whether the designer made an effort in the "rules text" to impart a paradigm.

The importance of this observation can be seen by briefly returning to the concept of "System" that I've previously dubbed "LP maximalism". Under this concept, it's commonly been noted (usually as an epiphany) that "systemless" or "freeform" RPGs have infinitely complex "Systems" (LP sense) rather than simple ones. But the nature of paradigms in actual play reveals that this is a completely banal assertion: all RPGs work by means of, through, and indeed upon the paradigm, the web of social interactions and understandings, that guide play. A "systemless" game is only "complex" if it requires a drastic shift on the part of the observer: otherwise it's easy as pie.

Conversely, no matter how much or how little system (my sense) a game has, there are very few ways to avoid the complexity of social interaction. One is to sew up as much as possible under formal procedure, or to fall back on very well-worn paradigms like "win/lose". Either way, you impinge on the quality that distinguishes an RPG from a board game. (The effect varies from group to group: if you strongly buy into the notion that "you aren't really playing the game if you never roll the dice", to the point that you're always trying to hammer on the mechanics, then you're more likely to fall into this trap than if you take a light system as an invitation to apply it only when necessary, on top of your largely-freeform style of play. Viz.) Finally, you can pretend the complexity isn't there, either by appealing to naturalism (see "Brain Damage") or by culture-formation and identification.

See also Jim Henley's recent post about the different perspectives on rules, with a dash of polemic from Malcolm Sheppard (eyebeams) in the comments.

Ah, almost forgot: the next step should be to take all this and translate it back into English.

A slightly different account of D&D roots

2008-04-04T18:50:59Z

http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=136167

Note rmaker's post. I don't know what sources it's based on.

Notes toward future posts

2008-02-28T01:41:00Z

I've gotten a little encouragement to post more often, not sure I'll actually do so but I do have a couple of "meaty" topics in my head that I'd like to post about either here or on a forum. So these are just notes toward more expansive treatments.

1. Exogenous vs. endogenous fun in mechanics

Noting that what everyone nowadays sees as the "core" of D&D's mechanics, i.e., the hit tables and hit dice, was originally just something slotted in to replace Chainmail. And Chainmail was also just grabbed off the shelf by Arneson to fill a fairly small role in his Blackmoor game--the point of impact in combat. The full game (including OD&D) was actually one of exploration, puzzle solving, characterization, spells, mysteries, etc. blah blah blah. The combat rules by themselves were really pretty pathetic, not a very fun game, but they filled a necessary role and yielded output that enriched the game as a whole. This is exogenous fun.

Compare the combat mechanics in The Fantasy Trip, or (very likely) D&D 3.x and up: here the combat rules are inherently fun, a minigame. In fact TFT started as a couple of arena combat games. In games that swing this way, the module/campaign is in a way an adjunct to the central mechanic--it provides an excuse or framing mechanism for generating scenarios or skirmishes or what-have-you, and enhances it by adding some stakes to the outcomes. This is endogenous fun.

It may be worth constructing a third category, essentially encompassing the pure stakes+narration-trading style of many new games, where the core mechanic is neither inherently fun nor particularly "productive"--it doesn't by itself generate stuff to play around with, instead it just arbitrates between options proposed by the players. Personally I don't care for this style but it seems to exist, apparently has its fans, and I believe it's worth distinguishing from the other two. But perhaps you can see that I'm struggling to describe exactly how, and what it does.

2. Getting beyond System Doesn't Matter and System Does Matter

Really, the whole thing is silly, these are presented by the naive in maximalist fashion, and it's a mistake to take them seriously. What should be done is to examine a little more how system matters; this is related to point 1 above, and is nicely shown up by arguments over what people are concerned about with D&D 4e. There are issues both of formal mechanics, dress (i.e., hype), and informal guidelines. There's also a historical dimension here as it seems with many games there's been a natural progression from system mastery to transcending system--and I wonder why that can't happen with 4e.

3. Finally, why houseruling isn't the same as creating a new game--the point I made which generated the abovementioned encouragement. This is really a return to Chris Lehrich's talk about bricolage but it may need to be said again in a new way with different emphases.

A brief political observation

2008-02-12T02:54:51Z

People who are betting real money on the election appear to believe that Obama has a better chance than Hillary in the general election against McCain.

Note that movement in pricing for Hillary and Obama is inversely related--not surprising given that it's a two-person race. However, the betting also shows that Hillary's fortunes are positively correlated with McCain's, while Obama's are inversely correlated with McCain's. I.e., the more likely it is that Obama wins the Democratic nomination, the more likely it is that the Democrats will win in November--or so say the punters.

(Yes, the horizontal scales are off a bit, and the vertical scales are all different, but fixing them won't change anything. Obama up, McCain down.)

You might also want to look at this:

It shows the ongoing pricing for McCain to win the Republican nomination. While some of the movement in McCain's general election prospects is due to some weekend jitters over Huckabee, the Democratic nomination outcome seems to be the major influence.

This shows the trading in the overall Republican chances. Again, it seems to be correlated with the Democratic race, with only a hickup due to Huckabee over the weekend.

More D&D Roots

2007-10-26T05:13:30Z

Continuing a strain of research from my previous entry, I just came across another account of early pre-D&D roleplaying. Someone had pointed to this in a comment over on Rob MacDougal's site (down page here) but I'd overlooked it. What do we have? An account of the first "dungeon" adventure run by Dave Arneson, as told by one of the players, Greg Svenson. Another slightly different version can be found here. While similar to other accounts, in that it follows the story of how he ran a dungeon as a break from playing Napoleonics wargames, there's a tantalizing tidbit.

So, as a diversion for the group, one weekend Dave set up Blackmoor instead of Napoleonics on his ping pong table. The rules we used were based on "Chainmail", which is a set of medieval miniature rules with a fantasy supplement allowing for magic and various beings found in the "Lord of the Rings". I had never played any games like it before, although I had read "Lord of the Rings". Other members of the group had played the game before, but always doing adventures in and around the town of Blackmoor. By the end of the weekend I had fallen in love with the game.

On this particular weekend, Dave tried a new wrinkle for the game. He had been working all week to prepare a map of tunnels and catacombs under the town and especially under the castle.

(Emphasis mine.)

So before that first dungeon expedition, people were already playing fantasy adventures, presumably with 1 player = 1 character (or close to it)?

This bears additional digging, including looking up the other people whom Greg Svenson mentions as participants.

Update on Totten and "Dungeon Master Zero"

2007-09-24T21:34:54Z

This is a followup on my earlier notes on Braunstein and the roots of RPGs.

I had some sour comments about Rob MacDougal's article over at theRPGsite.

One thing that Rob probably gets wrong, and certainly doesn't demonstrate adequately, is the "specialness" of Totten in the RPG lineage. I.e., there's nothing there which shows Totten was much different from any other teacher of Kriegsspiel concepts, either "free" or "rigid". He may have been the first American to bring them over from the Prussians, and he may have been the direct source for other American military wargame developers (such as Farrand Sayre), but Rob doesn't make the case. Instead he talks up Totten's eccentricities and connects them tenuously to modern geek personality traits. In the process, the nature of the "referee" in wargaming--in terms of responsibilities and prerogatives--is relegated to a side-note that obscures both the nature of the game and the radical changes (in responsibilities and prerogatives) that only occurred after D&D hit a mass audience.

So in regard to the role of Totten in Kriegsspiel development and transmission, it was interesting to find this article.

In the United States, Army Major William R. Livermore introduced his The American Kriegsspiel, A Game for Practicing the Art of War on a Topographical Map in 1882. The game was complex and similar to Reisswitz' system, but did attempt to cut down on the paperwork involved by the introduction of several training aid type devices. At the same time Lieutenant Charles A. L. Totten introduced a game entitled Strategos: A Series of American Games of War. Totten's game was as complex as Livermore's, but he appealed to the amateur through the inclusion of a simplified, basic set of rules.

Neither was wargaming neglected by the US Navy, thanks to the efforts of William McCarty Little. [Goes on to talk about the development of wargaming at the Naval War College up to the turn of the century.]

Regarding Livermore, you can find more on Google by searching on his last name along with "Kriegsspiel". Perhaps most interesting is an overview of the history of American wargaming which he delivered in his own words at M.I.T. circa 1889.

BTW, I don't know what source gave Rob a date of 1871 for Totten's original publication; everywhere I look, including both antiquarian booksellers and university libraries, I see a date of 1880.

The message here is that while Weseley happened to use Totten as his vector for transmission of Kriegsspiel methods into a hobby context, I do not see anything to particularly distinguish Totten from Reisswitz or Livermore in terms of the nature of the game he developed, and thus Totten's personal eccentricities have, in my opinion, little bearing on the intellectual lineage of the practices that eventually produced RPGs. What should be emphasized, instead, is the nature of the referee or "umpire" who ran both the military games and Weseley's. In Livermore's words:

When the position of the blocks indicate that the hostile troops are within sight and range of each other, they are supposed to open fire, if the players desire it, and in this case it becomes the umpire's duty to decide the result upon the basis of experience. The rules of the game explain to him how to estimate the loss from this fire [...] Since the time of Von Reisswitz the game has been much modified ; and the different forms which it has assumed may be classeed in three groups. [...]

The third form is employed when an officer of much experience can be found to take the position of umpire ; one who from long familiarity with the Minor Kriegsspiel [the second type, essentially, a detailed skirmish wargame with rigid rules], and from practice in leading troops in action, can form a correct judgment of the possibility or results of any movement, without the necessity of making any calculations or referring to any rules.

In other words, the role of the umpire was to act as an "expert simulation" by guesstimating results from the interaction of the players' initiatives. To a wargamer this is probably obvious, but in the RPG context it seems it must be emphasized: the innovation of the umpire or referee was not that he could tell a story, but that he could substitute for complex rules in representing an external reality against and through which the players would act.

S&S in comics: a personal note

2007-08-10T07:29:18Z

Why is this depiction of the Battle of Agincourt (which I referenced under my previous post) "S&S" (to me)?

To begin with, there's the hunched, hulking, almost dripping quality of the way human figures are drawn. Beyond that, there's no beauty in a conventional sense: the most handsome face is that of Henry V in the first panel we see him, but he becomes grotesque in the next panel, as he orders his archers to fire. Next is the delight in violence, but not just violence: the horror of violence (this isn't Batman knocking out a few crooks) and a (masochistic?) focus on death, including a view of death from the perspective of the about-to-be-killed. This isn't the uplifting victory of Shakespeare & Branagh, it's a "massacre". A further element, consistent with the way that S&S combines horror with fantasy, is that the person whose death is depicted in seat-squirming detail is the protagonist through much of the story--but not a very likeable one; like the "bad teens" who die early in a splatter flick, he gets his because he's both morally defective and arrogantly incautious.

Maybe there's more...but batteries are low on this notebook and it's late, so...

Swords & Sorcery - the natural home of immersive player empowerment

2007-08-08T15:10:01Z

I honestly believe the title of this post. Way, way back when I first encountered D&D (white box edition), I wanted to try to edit it into a perfect representation of Middle Earth. No campaign developed from that. Instead, as I played and thought about the game, working on a setting, I realized that the basic idea of characters as adventurers trying to improve their lot in the face of a dangerous world was more Old West than Tolkien, and I embraced that. And really, Old West is only a short jump away from S&S.

Now I'm wondering (but only wondering) if efforts to impose story on the basic paradigm necessarily means either

(a) Epic via GM-led plotting
(b) Epic via Anti-immersive player empowerment via metagame
(c) Sturm und drang via focus on character "issues"

Eh, whatever.

The main reason for this post is really to link to two threads from theRPGsite and Dragonsfoot:

Sword & Sorcery in a Nutshell
Swords & Sensibility: the evolution of tone in D&D

I think it will be good read & reread them as inspiration, guidance, and corrective to both romanticized tropes and anti-immersive/disempowering setting and design.

For example, I'm realizing that a key to good setting design is: there are no good guys. In fact, most everyone is a bad guy. If you design a kingdom or empire, the dominant social system, government, and rulership should be neutral at best. Societal norms should offend modern sensibilities (e.g., slavery). If you make up an NPC, always remember Jeff Rients's dictum: Your NPCs suck and they are all going to die.

Giving up control

2007-07-02T01:43:28Z

I'm taking a break from participation in RPG forums; however I've indulged in reading theRPGsite over the past couple days. I've especialy enjoyed threads on Gonzo Gaming and Notes towards a critique of embedded themes in Forge narrativist games (which are ongoing).

But what I want to write about here, very briefly, goes back to an old thread entitled The need for Conflict Resolution?, which I still think is one of the clearest discussions of the topic if not definitive.

Nevertheless I think I got something wrong in that thread, here, where I wrote,

A[n] example [of a player's intentions being achieved without working through the character's actions] would be something like a character sneaking around the enemy camp, tasting the enemy captain's dinner, mistakenly pouring alum instead of salt onto the potatoes before running away to avoid a guard, and unintentionally causing an argument that results in the cook killing the captain.

To achieve something like this, either the GM has to exercise "narrative control" or the player does--there's basically no way to go from the character's intentions, whatever they were, as expressed via the tasks attempted/performed, to the outcome.

Basically, the bolded part is wrong. Nobody needs to "exercise narrative control". E.g., the shelf of ingredients/chemicals could have been prepared in advance by the GM (or via a random table); the character could have failed a roll to accurately choose/identify the vial of "salt"; the guard's appearance could have been via a random "encounter check" or a chart of the guard's patrol. The captain's reaction could be reasonably extrapolated, possibly based on a personality sketch; ditto for the cook. Reaction rolls & combat rolls could take care of the rest. There may be a stretch or two there but the point is that nobody has to take responsibility for whether the player's intentions are realized. There's no need for "intentions-based resolution". No need for "fiat". Basically the whole thing can be produced through subordination to the fiction in terms of rules & a common understanding of the fictional reality.

Hmm. "common understanding" is really the most problematic issue here. As clashes are possible.

But even if the GM has a different understanding from the player, that isn't the same as the GM imposing an outcome via "fiat". We're talking about disposition of responsibility as well as authority here, and as long as the GM is understood by all to be subject to the fictional reality, we have a very different situation from the GM who endeavors to "tell a story" in terms of selecting and/or resolving conflicts.

Why jargon matters

2007-05-12T02:07:16Z

Ref somewhere around here: http://www.story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=2977&page=3

I'm in a rush, though, so you might start some pages back. Though seriously, if you haven't already read that thread, this post probably isn't for you.

Okay, first of all, Fred gives exactly what I think are best practices.

Second, people keep talking about jargon being obscure and arcane; it's more than that, it's actually used (in the case of Forge jargon certainly) to paper over muddled thinking and/or to hide lack of intellectual consensus (and thus a basis for real communication) behind social consensus (which is just tribal solidarity).

Oh, third, discussion of games needs a critical vocabulary. Frankly this business about Forge jargon being the province of designers is a bunch of nonsense. It gets used as a critical vocabulary, not one I particularly like, but it's false to claim otherwise. So the retreat to "just for designers" really is elitist; if people really believed it, they wouldn't use it for critique. So the claim is just a way of cutting off meta-criticism of the ideology behind the jargon.

Social Context Matters

2007-04-09T22:06:12Z

Something I've been going on about, perhaps more at theRPGsite than here, was also touched on very strongly over at the Forge in this thread.

Essentially, the nature of RPGs is such that you can't really nail down all the procedures and goals of play without turning them into board games, and the "wiggle room" that's left as a result turns out to be a big gaping breach. Depending on how you fill it, you can end up with a functional game in a wide range of styles, without "breaking the rules"--or you may have a crappy game altogether no matter how closely you try to follow the designer's supposedly "ready to play out of the box" intent.

Mike Holmes also hits on a point that I first saw suggested by Jim Henley: that in many cases, the way a game achieves "focus" isn't through the action of the rules (which are indeterminate), but symbolically and socially, basically by attracting "the right sort of people" and pushing away others. In the extreme scenario, it may be sufficient to simply apply an extrinsic label to a game: call it "narrativist", say, and then only "narrativists" will want to play it...so they'll all be playing together...so they'll have fun due to their shared values.

Current gaming update

2007-04-08T06:12:46Z

Just thought I'd mention what I've been up to lately & what's on the playbill, as it were...

Via troupe_berkeley, I hooked up with Mike Montesa and a couple other 80's-style gaming enthusiasts to organize a short-run 2300 AD campaign. So far we've settled on a situation and gone through character creation, and we're looking forward to a first session in a few weeks. Kickoff has been delayed a bit due to one player's obligations, so to maintain momentum the three of us will meet in a week for some impromptu, unrelated gaming.

Meanwhile r_earley_clark (aka komeradebob), Caesar_X, and I met a few weeks ago at Endgame to chew the fat about RPGs; I brought along a couple items in which Robert had expressed interest: an old (pre-WWI) US Army manual on the use of a sort of wargame for training purposes, which included some very RPG-like scenarios and examples, and a game published in 1982, Men Against Fire. The latter is a sort of cross of D&D with a miniatures wargame, in which the players take the roles of US soldiers fighting in the Pacific. The salient features of the game are that (a) each player has a personal victory condition, reflecting individual psychology particularly in light of S.L.A. Marshall's claim that a minority of soldiers had the nerve to actually use their weapons, and (b) the "board" is completely invisible to the players, who depend on the GM to relay information based on what each individual can see. The latter depends on the stance of the character who furthermore can become "disoriented" by various game events (such as running full tilt, being pinned by enemy fire, or helping a wounded comerade). The intention of the game is to represent the chaos and isolation experienced by soldiers on the modern battlefield.

At Robert's prompting, I'm going to run a game of Men Against Fire this Tuesday at Endgame's Tactical Tuesday. I'm a bit apprehensive about some aspects of the rules, but I hope to run the first session at least mostly by the book and then if necessary look at ways to make the game run smoothly and enjoyably for all, while retaining the fundamental themes (i.e., without turning it into an antiseptic tactical problem or an anti-immersive drama).

Article Link: Communication Within the Gaming Group

2007-03-20T05:36:24Z

Nothing earth-shattering, just a really well-written article on the need to cooperate as participants in a shared endeavor.

Communication Within the Gaming Group

(Note that the use of social contract is completely independent of other usages in RPG theory, and actually a lot closer to the concept as used in political theory.)

This sentence however set off some bells, "There is usually very little debate on issues like the two examples given above: questions of procedure, rules application and rules interpretation are intimately related to the power structure created by the division of the group into the GM and the players, and gamers rarely disagree over who should be the one to make such decisions in a game."

I've been thinking a lot about power in RPGs lately.

What intrigues me is the connection between power and communication, and how "social contract" (in any sense) doesn't fully account for the way power works. Related to this is the fact that power is quite different from "authority" as that term is often used in RPG theory.

Where I'm going with this is that RPGs are...or can entail...power structures to which the participants subordinate themselves, or at least pretend to. This self-subordination to imaginary constructs is closely tied to what I think of as immersion. For my purposes it's worth noting that the power structures are trivially manipulable by the participants, yet nearly impossible to pin down completely. There may be consent, but "informed consent" is preferably held at arms length.

As often before, much of my thoughts are inspired by reading Chris Lehrich's writings on bricolage in RPGs, Markus Montola's invisible rules of role playing (warning: PDF; also here in a Forge thread), and Malcolm Sheppard (passim). Also worth thinking about is the concept of "agency" and its limits, as Jonathan Walton described on the 20x20 room a while ago.

The thing that connects all RPGs is or is not "roleplaying"

2007-03-02T21:08:01Z

I happened across this while playing around with http://www.ljseek.com/'

There's a followup here .

Basically a guy named Alec Austin gets into a discussion with Malcolm Sheppard over the nature of "roleplaying", of RPGs, and of the fundamental attractions of tabletop RPGs.

Interesting stuff. It's worth connecting both to Brand Robins's bringing genre theory into analysis of RPGs, and to Settembrini's assertion that the thing which unites all RPGs is "the method of roleplay", by which he means negotiated extrapolation of fictional events, and not the production/reception of a particular experience by means of that message. This explains why or rather articulates how some people find "being your character" essential to RPGs, where others see RPGs more generally as "making shit up with your friends".

(You could compare Markus Montola's definition of an RPG that he posted on the Forge. I don't have it handy, though.)

problems with theRPGsite

2007-02-13T20:10:55Z

theRPGsite is having some DNS problems due to a screwup in transferring the domain name. It looks to be temporary, though. Explanation at http://www.xanga.com/RPGpundit/570093678/item.html

RPGs: the competition

2006-12-31T13:09:58Z

[This entry was originally written on 12/31/06 but I thought it was coming off half-baked. Now that I look at it, I think it's reasonably coherent. Whether it actually says something of value is another question...]

Over on theRPGsite, I've been stimulated into two hypotheses:

1. Here and here I argued that "alternative RPGs" which challenge the standards of traditional design run the risk of failing to differentiate themselves enough from board games.

2. here I argued that the basic "explore a dungeon, fight monsters, get loot" scenario is one of the best formats for introducing people to roleplaying, precisely because it offers relatively clear procedures & goals, just a few steps removed from a boardgame.

There seems to be a contradiction. But in this post I resolve it as follows: even though the standard dungeon or mission-based scenario--stripped of deep character issues, thematic content, or even narrative context--is virtually a boardgame (actually very similar to a "refereed" wargame), the skeletal or "inside-out" nature of traditional games (design for cause, presenting tools without dictating or circumscribing their use) lures the participants into more and more involved application, and broader and broader application, of the fundamental procedures. That is: play a few dungeoncrawls, and then you realize nearly without prompting that the activity you're engaged in can be extended and built on with layers of context.

Contrast this with the "focused" style of design, which has become particularly popular in some circles these days. With these games, you have a core scenario and mechanics which have been carefully honed (one hopes) for that scenario: like a module or adventure that comes with exactly the rules and only the rules needed to play that module. However, the constraints imposed by the rules often come from "outside", more or less circumscribing the type of scenario allowed in the game.

Where the unfocused style of design allows a group to develop its own idiom of play through socialization (and to absorb new members in roughly the manner that social groups do, that is, through a period of adjustment and "learning the local language"), focused design often has the goal of standardizing play across groups, allowing interchangeability, but at a cost of "startup brittleness" and long-term rigidity. By "startup brittleness" I mean simply that a group which attempts a given game runs a fairly high risk of simply failing to find a way to play it in a manner that all the members enjoy--unless/until the group trains itself in games of a particular "type", and expels members who do not enjoy that "type". By "long-term rigidity" I mean that a game continues to be played in the same manner by the group (in theory this allows instant assimilation of new members who "grok" the type of play which is standardized in that game). The cost, though, is that the group can't evolve their local "idiom" within the game. A change of focus requires a different game.

Conceptual linkage: Brand Robins on genre theory, Jonathan Walton on Communities of Practice, JimBobOz (Kyle Shuant) on getting and keeping a group (this link will do), Chris Lehrich on how D&D and other early RPGs developed through "bricolage" (tinkering) with concepts, instead of engineering them. (Ironically JimBob has nothing but bile for Chris's writings.)

Braunstein, RPG roots, and the role of the GM

2006-11-07T06:56:14Z

Settembrini first pointed me to the fact that RPGs have as their earliest identifiable hobby roots, not Chainmail, but a multiplayer wargame designed/organized by David Wesely in the 1960's. Lately I've been referring people to THE PERFECT PLANET: Comics, Games and World-Building, by Dylan Horrocks, who summarizes some information from a print source, Heroic Worlds.

Even better is this recent thread from the Acaeum in which Wesely himself gives his account and answers a few questions. Some interesting tidbits:

• Wesely based his original Napoleonic miniatures games not on Prussian/German Kriegspiel but on an American equivalent (no doubt influenced by the Germans) found in a book entitled Strategos, The American Game of War.

• Wesely co-designed Source of the Nile, of which I own a copy. It's a board game of 19th-century exploration of Africa, in which the terrain is unknown (you generate it randomly as you go and draw it in with crayons) and the action is driven by random tables and paragraph lookups. (Similar games include Barbarian Prince and Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora.)

Weseley also says some interesting things about the role of the GM:

The idea of having an all-powerful Referee who would invent the scenario for the game (battle) of the evening, provide for hidden movement and deal with anything the players decided thatthey wanted to do was not taken from Kriegspeil but was mostly inspired by 'Strategos, The American Game of War', a training manual for US army wargames Lt. Charles Adiel Lewis Totten, USMA 1871, publshed by Doubleday in 1880.

Combined with what Dave Arneson had to say in an interview I linked some time ago, I think we can see that the initial role of the GM in the 60's and 70's was limited in terms of what might today be called "narrative prerogative"--that is, "telling a story" wasn't something the GM actively did in the course of a game, while players would interact with the games as a means of exploring the interaction of characters' motivation and information. Glenn Blacow's "Aspects of Adventure Gaming" is still the first written documentation--that I'm aware of--of a "storytelling style", circa 1980.

Thread to watch: Setting and Proactive/Reactive Players

2006-11-05T11:15:40Z

Especially (for me) in light of these earlier thoughts: Ramblings on El Dorado, Bangs, and Proactivity and Situations and Stories.

The thread, on rpg.net: Setting and Proactive/Reactive Players

(And something else to think about The Adventure Funnel. Although in this context it's a bit of a sidetrack, since it's about constructing a scenario where the goal is a given; proactivity is about letting the players formulate their own goals.)

So here's the good stuff, so far. The thread opens with:

[...]Even in relatively well-written or well-known gameworlds, there's rarely that something that makes me say, "Damn, wouldn't it be cool to go there" or "I TOTALLY want to kick that dude in the nuts," as Exalted is prone to doing. However, whilst Exalteds system does seem to encourage proactive gaming (limit break, Motivation) these don't quite account for how Exalted, in my experience, encourages proactive gaming.

So, here's my question- what elements in a SETTING tend to encourage proactive gaming?

One of the more interesting responses (though the thread is young):

Most settings only talk about the big guys, be it gods or kings. And the characters are at least starting as lowlevel nobodies. Exalted is one of the few games where you seem to be able to directly jump into getting involved in these circles and on the other hand not looking "wrong" by being that different to everything else in the world.

In the realms there are probably enough people who would like to kill Elminster or Drizzt, it just takes a lot of time to get at the power to have a chance. And the world at the typical character level is often lacking much in detail and inspiration to be similar interesting like the big stuff.

Some of the other posters are kind of missing the point, IMO, by suggesting players be motivated by putting a single obvious conflict into the campaign, that the PCs can align with.

Amber & GM Fiat

2006-11-02T02:46:13Z

What was a source of considerable acrimony a while ago recently resurfaced, though this time with a much more civil tone yet no loss of sincerity or passion. I'm just going to collect links; I think I've said pretty much what I have to say in the course of the third item below.

First there was a thread on ENWorld entitled Is DM Fiat Okay?

Then there was a brief discussion of Amber at Story-Games, An epiphany about ADRP resolution. A number of posters basically said that Amber works on pure "GM Fiat", with the implication that player input really doesn't matter in the game.

I followed up by posting What is GM Fiat? on Story-Games.

And at the same time, Arref Mak posted System Does Matter on his blog, with his theory as to why so many people have had bad experiences with Amber. One interesting point he raises is that Amber's mechanical system isn't flawed (so much), but the text needs to be revised to clarify the social expectations required for using that system.

Since I don't know Amber very well, I can't speak to it per se, but I do know that claims of "GM Fiat" being used in "traditional" games to nullify player input are pretty common in RPG theory discussion. And my answer to that, to quote from the Story Games thread, is that many people do not find that to be the case because they interpret "traditional task resolution rules" to include a presumption of GM fairness or impartiality.

This is the major reason why Conflict Resolution threads tend to founder. Though people also have varying ideas about the GM's prerogative to fudge or use discretionary power in order to lead the game in a particular direction. (E.g., the GM who has the cavalry arrive in the nick of time to save the PCs when they get into trouble.)

Another issue, I think--and one which I imagine is inevitable in Amber--is a tendency of modern roleplayers to distrust randomness. Basically, in any situation where a GM can't be sure of what will happen, because of the plethora of unprepped factors and unknown mechanisms that would influence the outcome of a given situation, arguably the "fair" thing to do is to resort to the dice and then interpret the result as a holistic representation of all the unknowns.

deprotagonization

2006-10-19T01:41:49Z

Why don't I post to more threads, instead preferring to just snipe from my LJ?

I think it's partly because forum discussions have a way of getting out of hand as multiple people line up on each side of an issue. There are people I'd just as soon ignore which I can't, because their inane comments get picked up by the thread at large. And then there are people whom I'd just as soon not have on my side but I'd rather not waste time disowning.

On top of that, I often feel like the comments I have are, in a way, a threadjack. Not really on topic, but not worth starting a new thread over.

Anway, "So, what's deprotagonization anyway?" is indeed worth a look, at least at this moment, mainly because of the contributions of Marco, Brand Robins, and walkerp.

What I find especially interesting is the connection between "genre" and the subjective experience of deprotagonization. Marco basically steps into the conversation with a set of descriptive definitions--what the word means as various people use it--while walkerp and Brand offer prescriptive or normative definitions. Marco's first and third defintions jibe with how walkerp and Brand use the term: deprotagonization is when you think you're the protagonist of one kind of story only to find that "what you can do as your character" is nothing to do with that kind of story.

E.g. (stolen from the thread), if you know you're in a zombie horror flick, it's not deprotagonizing to have your brain eaten. That's what you're there for, arguably, the sense of creeping doom. OTOH, if you expect to kick ass with a shotgun, cut off some heads with chainsaws, and then save the town, getting turned into a zombie halfway through the game is deprotagonizing.

That's basically the argument. I'm probably not doing it full justice and in any case it's easier to understand in terms of the cool super spy or muscle-y barbarian who fumbles (as Brand offers in his example).

But the funny thing is (yes, here's my gotcha), the concept here depends on supporting genre expectations instead of challenging them. In those terms, is demanding protagonization a form of insisting on safe play? Possibly, although one could equally say that it's a form of focus, a way to get to interesting questions instead of being bogged down. E.g., if you are interested in playing out a PC's efforts to rescue his girlfriend from the villain, you could be honestly interested in whether he succeeds or not. Like, if you compare the comic-book and film versions of Spider-Man's conflict with the Green Goblin (comic book: Gwen Stacy dies; film: Mary Jane lives): you can see that both work. Neither is "deprotagonizing". But it would be if it was a game where the player had no input into the outcome. Suppose the GM had already determined the result--here, really, there's no way the GM could legitimately argue about "realism" if the kidnapping was itself a result of GM discretion. Or if the kidnapping had been something that the player was given a fair chance to prevent, would it be "good GMing" to subsequently play out the bridge scene knowing that Gwen was dead (or going to die from whiplash)? Or would it just be jerking the player around? And furthermore how worthwhile would it be if the hero doesn't even make it to the big fight because of a traffic jam, a flat tire or something?

(Please don't tell me that Spidey wouldn't have to worry about traffic. Look beyond the crappiness of the example if you can. Thanks.)

Personally I do not know where I stand on all of this. I find the idea of the spy spilling a drink on himself while trying to be suave to be somewhat liberating, actually, because it means the game isn't bound to genre conventions. On the other hand, genre may often be necessary just to get the game off the ground. Not many people would engage in the endeavors of the typical PC, if they expected to encounter the sorts of things that the player of that PC actually wants to have happen, and then experience the realistic consequences of those things. Consciousness of genre is one thing that helps bridge the gap.

Possible breakthrough on Sim in GNS

2006-10-11T18:58:29Z

[Vampire 2E Sabbat] Of Evil and of Simulationism

Haven't looked at it closely yet.

troupe_berkeley

2006-10-06T20:48:16Z

I keep forgetting to post this.

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area (especially the East Bay) and you're interested in meeting other gamers and trying out different games, with an emphasis on short-form, low-commitment play, you might want to check out troupe_berkeley.

Here's our statement of purpose.

Here's our Google group, which can be accessed either online or as a mailing list.

So far the group has been used to organize games of Burning Wheel (Jihad), Primetime Adventures, The Mountain Witch, Polaris, Dogs in the Vineyard, and My Life with Master. Although there's an obvious tilt toward new, indie, and specifically "Forge"-influenced designs, I'm hoping the group can be a useful resource for anyone who'd like to try out stuff that's new to them--even if it's an old game from 1985 that they just never got a chance to play. I also hope it can help gamers meet other gamers face-to-face and develop actual friendships that, IMO, greatly enhance the enjoyment of RPGs (and for that matter, life).

Also, thanks again to Clinton R. Nixon for setting up FindPlay, through which I located the first few gamers in the group.

Story-Games & theorizing about Illusionism

2006-10-03T23:47:00Z

If you're hankering for a return to the Forge Theory forums, have I got a couple of threads for you. (No, I don't mean that in a good way.)

Explain to me how Bangs are not warmed-over Illusionism

What is a "reward mechanism"? And why have it?

The Forge Glossary: if a definition isn't self-contradictory, at least make it elliptical. If not elliptical, at least make it misleading. If not misleading, at least make it vague. If not vague, at least choose the word itself to have distracting connotations.

E.g. the definitions of Illusionism, Force, and Bangs. Turns out they all depend on the concept of Premise. Which in turn means that they're all relative to the subjective perceptions of the player.

Illusionism is hidden Force. Force is only Force if it impedes address of Premise. Bangs are only Bangs if they provide an opportunity for address of Premise. Premise is, well, something that the player really cares about.

So my character's a gangster and he gets an order to blow up a corrupt politician's car. He rigs everything up, only to see that on this day, unexpectedly, the politician is driving his 7-year-old daughter to school. "Bang", right? What if the character doesn't push the button on that occasion, only to see that the politician is now driving the kid to school every day?

What do you mean it's Force? The player's completely free to blow up the car or not. Of course if he doesn't, he's in big trouble with his boss. If he does, he's a child-killer.

The Forge does have a term for this, actually: Typhoid Mary. But there's no way to distinguish the Typhoid Mary from the "functional" Narrativist drive-with-Bangs GM, except by asking the players how they feel about the "bangs" they're being hit with.

The real problem is that the Glossary is filled with terms that only make sense in a "Narrativist" context, and furthermore only in a "high-impact" context of consensually zeroing-in on conflicts. For example, there is no word, in the glossary, for the general class of techniques in which the GM manipulates (the appearance of) cause-and-effect in order to bring about certain events, regardless of prior actions by the PCs. Even the term "Black Curtain" is dependent on "Force", and therefore tied up with "Premise".

John Kim had a hack at categorizing things a bit differently, most recently in his RPG Design Innovations, Part 2. Note that his definition of Illusionism is quite a bit different from the Forge's. However, since it implies GM-controlled pacing in terms of pre-planned encounters, it isn't as general as the concept I'm trying to pin down. The real problem with the latter is that, except for outright cheating when rolling dice, quite a few people are simply unable or unwilling to perceive a difference between "manipulation" and "GMing".

For those who do, it's possible to get closer to a generalized concept. For example, if the GM were to prepare a map before play, showing the locations of various monsters, it would be manipulation if the GM deviated from the map for any reason (typically, to either ramp up tension or maintain balance vis à vis the party). The reason is that deviation from the map negates the significance, in terms of cause-and-effect, of player decisions. The map is no longer an external object, with a reality independent of the PC-observer. Instead it reacts to the observer in an unreal fashion.

However, for any campaign, and even for most scenarios outside the basic "location crawl", it's rarely possible to keep track of all events and NPC's, running them "like clockwork", as it were. (I suppose the closest approach, in John's schema, would be a hybrid of location crawl, relationship mapping, timetabling and/or randomized events.) Some degree of improvisation is generally needed. So how does one distinguish "manipulative" improv? Is there a "non-manipulative" improv?

Well, I think there is, but in so saying I don't want to be misunderstood as implying that the "non-manipulative" is always desirable or even possible. Rather I'm saying that the cognitive distinction between "what should happen" and "what could happen" is a real one, as far as anything qualified by the term "cognitive" can be called "real". That is, the GM who improvises things into existence based on a perception of baseline plausibility is operating in a different mode from the GM who improvises based on various other goals--particularly goals which, as with the "morphing dungeoncrawl" described above, are prioritized over the importance of player-character decisions.

However this doesn't mean "non-manipulative" (or "neutral") GMing will always give the PCs a significant chance to sway events. Rather, it implies that, in response to the PC actions, events will not be revised or influenced in ways that aren't connected to those actions by a plausible chain of causation.

E.g., I am a private citizen, an industrial laborer, in a large nation teetering on the brink of war with a foreign power. Given my circumstances, would it be manipulative GMing to say that I'm going to have virtually no effect on whether war breaks out? No, not without some extraordinary actions on my part, combined with an astronomical degree of luck. On the other hand, if there is a war, and I try to avoid or resist the draft, we're in much trickier territory. By historical standards, avoiding military service is a plausible goal. A GM who precludes this possibility is either:

1. working from a different set of assumptions, or

2. "manipulating" outcomes

The upshot is that, cognitively, "neutral" GMing functions differently from the "manipulative" variety (perhaps "motivated" is better). A neutral GMing decision may entertain arguments about plausibility and the probabilistic modeling of causation. The motivated GMing decision will not concern itself with such issues beyond the baseline question of possibility: if X can conceivably happen, then it is acceptable for it to happen in service of some further GM motivation.

At this point both the terms Illusionism and Force can be repurposed for general use. "Illusionism" is motivated GMing which is hidden from the players. "Force" is motivated GMing in plain view. I won't kid myself about the likelihood of these redefinitions being accepted in the general theory community, though. Therefore I propose simply saying "motivated GMing" and subclassifying it as either "hidden" or "overt". On the other hand we have "neutral GMing".

How can this be used? Look at "Bangs". They are always "motivated" because they aren't in the least concerned with "what should happen" or "modeling"--rather, they're things that could happen, which are chosen by the GM on the basis of engaging the player's Kicker. So how do "Bangs" differ from "Railroading"? Railroading is also motivated GMing: the difference lies in the interaction between player interest and GM motive. (In Railroading, there is none.) That is, the difference isn't mechanical and has nothing to do with the internal causation of the game-world. It exists on the social level.

In fact, by focusing on the social level, my definition of Railroading is fairly close to the Forge Glossary ("Force" and "Railroading"), although there are still some important differences of detail.

Endgame Mini-con, 10/21

2006-09-29T23:21:27Z

http://endgameoakland.com/mini_con.html

I'm signed up for RQ in the morning, Cold City in the afternoon.

The last two minicons have been well worth the $3/event fee, both for the chance to try out games I'd never played before, and to meet some cool people.