Elliot Wilen's RPG theory/design/philosophy journal

Immersion--how did we get here?

2009-11-29T07:44:02Z

I've been working up a discussion of several current threads on "immersion" but I have a thought I want to share immediately, partly in hopes that someone else might be able to give pointers for some research.

If you'd like some more background it might help to link to a couple PDF articles:

Immersion, Flow And The Experiences Of Game Players (241k)
stop saying "immersion"! (184k)

Both articles discuss the difficulties of the term "immersion" due to different meanings ascribed to it. I agree with the general thrust of the articles even though I wouldn't necessarily say that either one presents an exhaustive list of observed usages and meanings. What is interesting, though, is that one article concerns video games, while the other concerns RPGs (presumably both LARP and tabletop). I had expected that, due to more attention and peer review in academia, video game articles would actually have a fairly well-established definition of "immersion" even if it didn't correspond well with ideas found in RPG discussion.

From the RPG side, I believe I have a fairly good picture of the sequence of events--although I'd be interested in evidence contrary to my account. Essentially, "immersion" was a well-established and fairly stable term in discussion on rec.games.frp.advocacy in the 1990's, as summarized by John H. Kim here. In fact due to the history of rgfa discourse, as a reaction to the aggressive advocacy of Theatrix by one of the participants, "immersion" was almost certainly conceived, in part, to explain some people's sense that minimizing both "drama-based GMing" and the use of "metagame" knowledge/resources tended to produce a certain experience that was distinct from playing a game that did have those characteristics.

Unfortunately I don't have much first-hand knowledge of roleplaying theory discussion after the mid-90's, especially outside of Usenet. But I believe that what happened was that the term was imported into an entirely new context in rpg.net and other places, but without the rather strong policing from which it had earlier benefitted. (There were both social and technological factors at play, notably the difficulty of participating in Usenet compared to web forums. Also simply the relative age and institutional memories of the two media.) As a result, I speculate that a lot of people heard others talking about "immersion" and without access to the history of the term, they cast about for meanings. From this came multiple hypotheses about what immersion "is", instead of "what are those people talking about?" It's likely that some people picked up the term and made it their own, further confusing things as even nominal "immersionists" couldn't agree with other.

But where did the new meanings come from? My thought was that they came from video game theory, and indeed I'll bet that "Flow" first made its appearance there and was then picked up by tabletop theorists rather than being directly imported from the original source (that is, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).

However, based on the article by Steven Pace that I linked above, it's clear that the video game field itself suffers from lack of clarity over the meaning of "immersion". This raises several questions:

1. How sure can I be that video game theory is the vector through which "Flow" passed into rpg theory?
2. How many other notions of "immersion" traveled the same route?
3. How did video game theory reach its muddle over "immersion"? I suspect it was a similar process. It's even possible that the rgfa definition filtered into video games. In any case it would be illuminating to trace the agglomeration of meanings over time.

Ultimately what I hope to demonstrate is that none of the meanings of "immersion" is especially difficult or mysterious--they've just been confounded with each other. And second, I suspect that a number of the meanings are actually stabs in the dark by people for whom "immersion" wasn't really a concern.

"Reign" core rules (Enchiridion)

2009-11-25T01:20:17Z

This post is basically a self-interested ad, but it may also serve your interests if you're curious about Reign but would prefer to get just the system without the setting. If so, and you like hardcopy, have a look at this. $15 gets you a book (assuming the project is funded), and you can get additional copies for $12 each. Each copy comes with a free PDF version. (Prices are a bit higher outside the US--$25 for the first book, still $12 for each additional--but all prices include shipping.)

Full disclosure: I'm not buying. I've got too many books & games taking up space. But here's the self-interest: I do want to buy the PDF, which will be available for $5 separately once the project is funded.

So my conclusion is: Greg Stolze is a smart marketer.

Interview with the Great Svenny

2009-11-10T23:55:46Z

http://shamsgrog.blogspot.com/2009/05/q-with-greg-svenson.html

Noted

2009-11-09T19:53:28Z

http://www.amazon.com/Third-Person-Authoring-Exploring-Narratives/dp/0262232634

A book on interactive fiction/RPGs/MMOs, with contributions from many leading lights of RPGdom including Greg Stafford and Monty Cook.

Free speech RPG forum

2009-06-19T07:34:45Z

If anyone's reading this, you might have a look at Settembrini's new English-language forum. Yours truly has been made a mod, though I emphasize, with the most limited of duties--just killing spam.

Read Sett's rationale here.

In a nutshell, Sett felt that there weren't any other Anglophone forums that had an absolute free-speech policy, so he created one. How will it work out? Idunno, but I hope it gathers some interesting folks. Just be aware that anything goes within the limits of the forum's host country's laws.

Quality in RPGs

2009-05-21T08:04:02Z

An example from board games (which are easier to pin down since the rules define play much more completely than do RPGs in general)...Everybody knows Battleship, right? I found a game at a yard sale called Impact Zone which seemed kinda cool based on the components, and the price was minimal. So I got it home and what do I see, a battleship clone with some electronic enhancements. But unlike Battleship, the bits that you're trying to hit occupy exactly one square each; there's zero strategy either in positioning the pieces or calling shots, and no suspense as a player tries to zero in on the orientation of a target. I feel comfortable saying that except for the very, very young, who will enjoy the illusion of interacting with the pretty components, the game is objectively worse than Battleship. It fails the quality test. But Battleship vs. Mouse Trap is IMO a different matter. Not that Mouse Trap has much strategy--though actually as far as I can tell it does very slightly reward dexterity and basic calculation. However Mouse Trap doesn't really pretend to be much more than a race game with an awesome gadget attached and in that respect it succeeds. By contrast, Impact Zone contains elements that really only make sense as strategy-facilitating, that is, it requires the players to make decisions about setting up their boards and calling their shots--but none of those decisions matter at all.

So what I'm saying is, by a metric that would be almost universally accepted as appropriate to the game in question, Impact Zone is a bad game. OTOH, saying you like Mouse Trap more than Battleship, or that you prefer Stratego and hate Tiddlywinks--well, these say more about you than they do about the games themselves.

Oh, yeah, the point: nevertheless I think once you recognize this, you can go ahead and decry, bemoan, rue, regret, and lament the prevalence of one taste over another in the gaming population, especially if (as described here) the people who have that taste are themselves guilty of thinking it's the only thing that counts or that the game they like, because it satisfies their taste, automatically works just as well for any other taste that matters.

(Originally posted here.)

Practical printing tip: two-up manual duplexing with Mac OS

2009-02-22T02:07:23Z

Although iPod/iPhone Apps that let you transfer files from your computer and/or the Internet have finally made it practical for me to carry RPG documents around for casual reading, I still want to print them out from time to time. One blessing of being near-sighted is that I'm comfortable reading fairly small type — and this dovetails nicely with two of my other qualities, namely being a cheapskate and not wanting to waste natural resources.

Where am I going with this? When I print stuff, I like to do it as two-up, double-sided. This is really easy if you have an automatic duplexer on your printer. With Adobe Reader, you can specify the page layout, and then you just tell the printer to use duplex. (On the Mac, and maybe Windows, you can also specify page layout in the generic print dialog box, about which more in a moment.)

But if you don't have a duplexer, manually printing double-sided can be a little confusing. Some printers help out here. For example, the Windows software that came with my Brother laser printer gives me a "manual duplex" option that steps me through the process. Last I checked, though, the Mac driver didn't have this, so I had to figure it out myself.

Admittedly this isn't rocket science, but although the concept is simple, it's easy to get yourself tangled up if you don't start out right. I hope that by providing these steps I can help some people to save a little money and waste less paper.

I'm assuming you're using a laser printer with a manual feed tray that feeds the topmost sheet first. I'm also assuming that when you print, the pages come out face down with the first printed page on the bottom. Finally, these instructions are for documents that are sized for portrait mode on letter size paper.

So here's the procedure:

Open your PDF (or other document) in your program of choice and select Print. Although Adobe Reader has the aforementioned two-up printing option ("multiple pages per sheet", found under the Page Scaling popup menu in the Print dialog box) and can even print booklet-style, I'm going to give steps that will work with any Mac program.

1) If you're using Adobe Reader 9, start by setting the Subset to "All Pages in Range", Page Scaling to "None" or "Fit to Printable Area", make sure you have "Auto Rotate and Center" checked, and that you have the radio button checked to print "All" pages.

If you're using Preview to print a PDF, it's simpler: just go with "Automatically Rotate Each Page" and choose an appropriate scaling option if necessary. Other programs such as Word or Open Office are similar.

2) Now click the main popup menu in the Print dialog box. It might say "copies and pages" or have the same name as the program you're printing from. Within this menu, select "Layout" and then set the Pages per Sheet to "2".

3) Using the same menu, choose "Paper Handling". Set the Pages to Print to "Even Only" and the Page Order to "Reverse". This is the step that's least obvious.

4) Now click print and wait for your print job to complete.

5) When it's done, carefully take the stack of pages from the output and without changing their orientation, put them into the manual feed tray. They should be face down with the lowest-numbered page at the top of the stack.

6) Now go back to your computer, choose the Print command again, and repeat steps 1-4 — but this time in "Paper Handling" select "Odd Only" and "Normal" Page Order.

By the way, don't worry if the number of pages in your document isn't a multiple of four--any "extra" pages will be printed on a final sheet from the main paper tray.

Once the pages come out, they'll be in order, printed back & front.

To make your life even easier, you can use the Presets menu of your Print dialog box to save the two sets of print options. I called them "two-up duplex part one" and "two-up duplex part two".

Making D&D combat realistic

2008-11-05T08:41:21Z

This post comes out of thoughts in this thread over on theRPGsite. Basically, the question was which RPGs offer a realistic model of combat, and based on the way the question was phrased, I took this to mean that the model produces results which, when interpreted at the level of abstraction of the system, are commensurate with the inputs.

I wrote,

Well, in combat between humans, without magic [...] if you take the relative experience, armor, and weaponry of combatants into account as inputs, D&D will yield a result that's roughly commensurate given the abstract nature of hit points. In a melee you will end up with one man dead, surrendered, or fled, and the other victorious although possibly weakened somewhat. There are some areas I would call into question:

• Shields are relatively undervalued in terms of their overall contribution to survival. The relative significance of other types of armor compared to each other could also be questioned, but it's not egregious.

• The value of experience also seems to be distorted. At the low end, the likelihood that a trained but "inexperienced" (1st-level) warrior will die in a stand-up fight with an untrained civilian seems rather high. At the high end, it is possible for a fighter to outclass even an experienced opponent to such a degree that there's effectively no doubt as to the outcome.

[...]

Another quibble that's not in quite the same class is the handling of missile weapons. While it's easy to rationalize the loss of hit points by the victor in melee, it's pretty hard to explain the ablative "weakening" of a combatant by arrows that narrowly miss or glance off armor (i.e., cause HP loss but don't kill). And this has another significant effect on the outcome in that archers expend arrows as they attack.

Nevertheless you could still argue that D&D is more realistic than many other games, since those are far more likely to produce outcomes where combatants unambiguously suffer major wounds yet keep fighting and defeat their opponents. [...] I think that most actual wounds inflicted by melee weapons will either be fairly insignificant or will effectively take you out of the fight altogether.

Later I wrote that the main obstacle to achieving "verisimilitude" in D&D was the use of abstract hit points to represent "survivability".

So this has me thinking what might be the minimum changes I could apply to the basic D&D combat system (I mean pre-AD&D 2e) to improve its verisimilitude and realism. These are just some ideas, written up in the spirit of keeping the game simple, and also without too much concern for "fun". What I mean by that is, I think most RPG players dislike high lethality, especially for "high level" characters. These rules changes by contrast make the game a lot less safe; they might be more acceptable as a set of skirmish rules than as an RPG module.

#1: Instead of lowering AC by 1, shields lower AC by 5. This is a rough value, and can also be modified to represent large vs. small shields.

#2: Characters start at 2nd level and cap out at 5th level. Again, this is a rough limit. Furthermore, if you also follow my recommendation of doing away with escalating hit dice/level, it may not be necessary to implement this change. If you do still use hit dice/level, I'd recommend giving max HP (+ Con bonus) for the first die, then average HP for each subsequent die (with or without Con bonus). Otherwise, if you want some randomness, then consider a method that has a lower variance than just rolling a single die. However, if you want to be really hardcore, go ahead--the fact a some fifth-level fighter could end up with 7 HP simply reflects the fact that life is unfair and "living up to your potential" might still mean you suck.

#3: Probably not necessary if you use #4, but an alternative missile weapon system is needed. I can't be bothered to develop the details right now; the basic idea is that if you are hit by a missile, you will be at least significantly wounded regardless of your hit points. It could be a chart per weapon, or some kind of saving throw after you compare rolled damage vs. Constitution, and results could be expressed in terms of % of starting HP lost, or direct description ("no effect", "incapacitated", "dead").

#4: This is really the most interesting bit...it may also be stolen from somewhere (Pendragon?). The basic idea is that survival is achieved by not being hit, and in a normal combat, one maneuvers to an opponent's disadvantage such that, when all is said and done, striking your opponent generally means that you are not struck back. Mechanically, we do it this way: do not add hit dice when going up levels. Then, when in combat, declare a target and roll a d20. This die is both your attack and defense. In order to hit, you must roll greater than the number needed to hit the target's AC (as in the standard combat tables, or via THAC0 calculation for you newfangled types). But if two people are facing each other and both hit, only the one who rolls lower actually hits. (If they roll equal, both hit.)

("Rolls lower" seems right, but "rolls higher" might also work.)

Note that if you don't want to attack, you don't have to; your die is just your defense in that case; your opponent must "beat" your die (roll lower--or higher) while also beating your AC. I haven't given much thought as to whether an "all out dodge/parry/block" needs to added; in principle, under the model I propose, you could argue that if you aren't threatening your opponent, he will have an easier time striking you. But conversely you could argue that people sometimes fight without regard to preserving themselves, and if you're up against someone like that, you'll be less likely to be hit if you go into full defense rather than threatening them.

It could even be that you might get a useful effect from allowing players to declare before rolling that they're taking "high hits" or "low hits"--meaning that they'll hit when rolling higher than the opponent (provided they also hit on the combat table), or they'll hit when rolling lower than the opponent (provided they also hit on the combat table). I haven't thought much about this.

Another possible improvement would be to implement a 3e-like concept of "base combat bonus" in lieu of the columns in the combat tables or increasing THAC0 as you go up levels. The main benefit here would be that you'd apply the bonus to your combat die (as a subtraction on defense, if the opponent is trying to roll under, but as an addition for all other cases including attack). The purpose of this wouldn't be so much to move to a 3e-like system of target numbers and "better armor means higher AC"--although you could rejigger the math in that direction, to make things simpler--but mainly to give a defensive boost to more experienced combatants.

Obviously this is very raw, and I'm not sure I'll ever do the calculations/testing to hammer it into shape. But I wanted to get these ideas down before I forget them, and anyone else who wants to play with them might get something out of them.

Superdan's great D&D essay

2008-10-10T08:11:29Z

Here's a nice essay, dating back to the 90's, What Made Original D&D Great which covers a number of things which I also touched on in an earlier post here, especially the dungeon that I wrote up and linked off that post.

the design of dungeons (static locations) is important in order to (1) make PCs proactive, making the decision to move and adventure wholly theirs and (2) at the same time make the world manageable for DMs (as it is unreasonable to expect DMs to plan out continuing movements, migrations, and gained experience all the time over a whole world -- setting up static areas at least reduces the DMs work necessary to a finite, if large, amount). To a certain extent, one must be willing to "waste" effort in the sense of designing sufficient areas that PCs will probably not explore them all.

Consider the difference between modules X1 and X4. X1 features a fairly large tropical island, with many set location encounters scattered all over the place: because of this, it is most unlikely that any party will confront all of them. In seeming reaction to this, the author of X4 (David Cook) writes on page 2,

"With the exception of the first few encounters and the last one, none of these encounters are set. Instead, they are organized by the type of terrain in which they occur... The DM controls the timing of all the encounters. He does not have to worry about the characters missing an important encounter by not going in the right direction."

In other words, for this adventure, it doesn't matter where the players go. On the one hand, the designer's job is easier, because every encounter is guaranteed to take place: no excess scenes are written. On the other hand, it makes no difference where the players decide to proceed unless they (possibly sensing this and feeling ornery, as has happened to this DM) decide precisely to turn as far away from the set adventure as possible. Again this designer's motivating idea was to plot out a particular story and needed and expected to be able to manipulate PCs and events so as to facilitate it.

Superdan, the author, also has what looks like a good collection of resources for AD&D.

(Thanks to Grognardia for linking the essay.)

On the fly chargen and "laying pipe"

2008-09-17T14:52:39Z

(Grabbing a post out of my private drafts and posting it now in response to a request that I update my journal...)

Robin Laws has a column which discusses "on the fly chargen" vs. the need to "lay pipe", that is, establish character elements prior to their use, for the sake of credibility in a story. It might help to read the column before proceeding.

There are interesting dimensions of this. First I think Laws underestimates the value both of having pre-established characteristics and of realism--not for all games, but for some. Second, I notice that some reactions to the article e.g. at theRPGsite talk about how the introduction of unlikely "on the fly traits" can strain credibility or lead to a "pulpy" feel. The first is clearly a negative result, the second a matter of taste. I'd add that, in some situations, the introduction of an unlikely trait, at least in a story, can have a positive, often comical effect. That is, in stories, surprising elements of character aren't necessarily something to be avoided or tolerated--and I think they can be exploited in RPGs as well. For example, in some, not all, games, the mousy librarian who's revealed to be a crack shot, or the television repairman who just happens to know Ugaritic--these could be desired comical elements.

(For that matter, in a more storytelling type of game, they could be used as points of digression into flashbacks--a technique found in movies, for example.)

But the reason I'm jotting things down here is that the discussion, particularly this post, jogged an insight loose. Kyle writes

If I put down lockpick, stealth, and brawling, then I have a certain idea of what the character will be like in play. If during play the character never uses lockpick, then my character's turned out differently to what I expected; likewise if they never use stealth, or never use brawling. The player can - does not always, but may - feel dissatisfied. "I made the guy to do X, but never got to do it!"

This is a variation on the concept of "character traits as Flags"--the idea of creating scenarios to deliberately highlight one or more traits of each character.

But the idea of Flags is problematic. How reliably do traits "signal" what we want to have happen to a character? In my opinion, this may be an effective approach to scenario construction, or to intra-scenario improv: a solution to "blank page syndrome". Polaris, a completely improv-type game, is pretty upfront about encouraging this approach, since each sample trait comes with a list of suggested ways that players can introduce them into play. (The "thematic batteries" of Full Light, Full Speed also come to mind, at least as they've been described to me by the author of the game.)

But as a general purpose approach I don't think that traits can be seen as signaling anything unless the group agrees that they do. In which case, you might as well work it this way:

Player: I want to have X happen at some point.

OR

Player: This is the issue I want my character to grapple with.

In other words, traits-as-flags creates an unnecessary overlap; if you want to have mechanical Flags, then you can (and perhaps should) create a Flag metagame mechanic instead of having traits do double-duty. (What I'm recommending here is parallel, in a way, to my general preference that "hero points" be treated as an add-on/capstone mechanic instead of being integrated into the basic resolution system)

Traits-as-Flags does work IMO if (and only if) the goal of play is to highlight all aspects of character--assuming the aspects can be sussed out mechanically. The problem, though, is that for example both a high Strength and a low Strength can be a Flag. Having a skill and not having skill can be a Flag, particularly when that skill has some sort of special relationship to the genre.

I'm afraid this post is going to end a bit roughly. It is perhaps not a coincidence, though, that two games by Robin Laws basically take the approach that any element of a character can be turned into a mechanical trait: Over the Edge and Heroquest. For some reason I've never really read all the way through either one even though I own them. I do not think, though, that either game implements a way in which negative traits (disadvantages) can also be Flags.

Meta-enjoyment (or Deep Thoughts)

2008-08-18T21:02:42Z

Hopefully briefer than the previous, and more directly influenced by the inevitable reaction to Grey Ranks winning the Indie RPG Awards.

So I will take part in that inevitable reaction, by asking: between the "high mindedness" of the game's theme, and the intricate interlocking rules structures, is this really a game that is played to be played, or a game that's played by jaded designers and critics because they're curious about said mechanics and/or how one might attempt to address a subject like this in game form? What's the difference?

I've never seen the game; I don't know the answer. A friend who participated in playtesting (and will remain anonymous) told me that the game wasn't really fully-baked rules-wise and the designer didn't seem receptive to problem reports--but that was quite a while ago, and whatever problems there were could well have been ironed out before release. I do have a general experience with the supposed clarity of Forge-y games, which forms part of my bias.

Anyway, I feel this must be a subject that's been dealt with in art criticism, but I wouldn't even know where to start. For me, it boils down to this: is there a point, particularly as a creator or critic, that you start to get equal or more enjoyment by analyzing "how" something works, compared to enjoying it for itself?

I have several caveats for those (including myself) who wish to pursue this line of thought:

• Enjoying exploring "how" something works almost requires that it works to begin with--to an extent. E.g., we get more enjoyment tracing the artifice and references in Shakespeare, notwithstanding anecdotes about deconstructing the backs of cereal boxes. On the other hand, this applies only "to an extent" with RPGs because "how" an RPG works always involves the participants; this turns the question from "how it works" (appreciation) to a "how can we make it work?" (interpretive praxis). If you enjoy figuring out how to make a game work, does that take you yet a further step away from enjoying the game itself?

• And even so, if "how can we make it work?" is the level of enjoyment you get, is that any less of a valid criterion for enjoying a game? I.e., isn't being thought-provoking a value in itself? Where does it stand in the hierarchy of enjoyment?

• Finally, how great of a distinction is there, really, between enjoying the thing in itself, and enjoying the process of its creation and interpretation?

I don't think I will be finding conclusive answers to these questions any time soon.

Besides, maybe Grey Ranks is just plain fun and ought to be on the shelf of Toys 'R Us next to Risk and Battleship.

Private pretense and BadWrongFun, or the power of art to offend

2008-08-18T19:54:31Z

This post and the next are just me quickly jotting down a couple of thoughts before they disappear into the mists.

Here we talk about "BadWrongFun", a term coined in RPG circles but familiar in many areas. Basically, at least since the 19th century (based on a smattering of recollected anecdotes), there's been a cultural phenomenon where people are offended, angry at things that other people enjoy or present for enjoyment. I am not talking about mere vulgarity or obscenity: it's very easy to understand why people would be offended at the public dissemination of images or words which are considered rude or unsuitable for children. I'm not even talking about puritanical offense at private enjoyment of smut or gore.

Rather, I'm pointing to a widespread sense that each individual has a right and responsibility to uphold standards of taste, whether it be against base philistinism or over-reaching pretense. Consider that ballets and symphonies have caused riots.

What lies behind this? I can only list some ideas here.

• Identity and anxiety, perhaps including fear that one's values are being mocked
• Culture formation and defense, i.e., fear that one's values will actually be threatened if "this sort of stuff" is allowed to thrive and drive out "the good stuff"
• A perception that the "artist" has violated some sort of contract with the audience, exploiting the indulgence given to "art" for selfish reasons (egoism or self-promotion)
• Anti-proselytization, not quite the same as the above, but anger at the pervasiveness or "pushiness" of a work of art (and discussion thereof)

I think these reasons (and perhaps others) have some legitimacy, but whether you agree or not, there's something more that's particular to RPGs, which is even more puzzling. A book, film, music, painting, sculpture, etc. is an object created by an artist that is then "appreciated" (in the broadest sense) by an audience. In each of the four cases I've listed, the fact that the artist is (in a sense) claiming the right to the audience's attention is what gives the audience the right to pass judgment.

However, with an RPG, the "creation" blurs the distinction between artist (or creator if you prefer) and audience. Therefore, who is there to be offended? I maintain that, in principle, the answer is "no one". But there are exceptions in fact--that is, people do get offended, regardless of whether you or I consider it legitimate.

Again, why? Ideas:

• When actual play becomes Actual Play report, particularly when the AP report has a subtext of showing off, seeking approval, or promoting a given game, or even when it gathers comments along those lines, it becomes a public act.
• The more that the rules text of a game itself promotes or promises a particular experience, regardless of whether it reliably does so, the more it will be judged on this notional experience as if the author is transmitting it to a public audience.

Again, I think these reasons have some legitimacy.

Where I draw the line, I suppose, is when the game is completely private, or the AP report has a purely clinical nature. I'm not offended, nor do I really think anyone has the "right" to be offended, at whatever stupid, pretentious, precious, infantile, or gross stuff happens in your game. And if you're not looking for approval or shared enthusiasm via posting an AP, then I have none to withhold.

Nevertheless, RPG discourse, and for that matter all discussion of art and culture might benefit from re-examining the way that so-called "haters" are treated, often uncritically and dismissively. In fact I would say that refusing to engage in such an examination brings "RPG theory" closer to "RPG polemics", no more no less.

RPG Bloggers Network

2008-08-12T05:00:32Z

I'm pleased to say that my blog is now included in the feed of RPG Bloggers Network, a collection of (what else) RPG-related blogging feeds. Check it out!

Also, note, in order to further focus my RSS/Atom feed on RPGs, I've started marking non-RPG-related posts as "Friends only". So if for some reason you'd like to read the rare political observation or consumer rant, let me know and I'll add you to my Livejournal friends.

That said I've also taken a look at WordPress recently and I'm thinking of switching either to it or going back to Blogger. The main reasons: free LJ is ugly to look at, and I've become disenchanted with nested comment threads--partly because they encourage disjointed discussion, and partly because LJ truncates comments that are nested too many levels down.

Sandboxin'

2008-08-08T17:00:52Z

It's an interesting phenomenon in RPG discussions, that when people talk about some style of game, in a positive light, others who feel "left out" try to redefine that style to match the way that they're used to playing. Classic example: immersion.

Result: muddying of definitions, perhaps not intentional, followed by a horrible tendency to spend pages and pages nailing down a canonical vocabulary instead of discussing actual gaming.

Another word that's been subjected to this is "sandbox". Over on theRPGsite we've got one of those threads but I think it's been nipped in the bud, thank goodness. A couple positive things came out of it from my perspective, though. First, someone quickly linked to an earlier excellent thread on the subject. Second, there was also a link to a series of posts at ars ludi, on a game/campaign called West Marches.

The more I read ars ludi, the more I see Ben Robbins, the author, doing a great job of finally bringing an understanding of pre-90's traditional gaming to the post-Vampire Story-Games set. (He may lean a bit in the "gamist" direction, but that's a minor issue.)

I think I have a minor contribution to offer, that ties in a bit with what Ben has to say about dungeons in West Marches (mainly parts 2 and 3 of his series), as well as his description of GMing the game in a neutral, fairly reactive manner. It's a dungeon writeup and after-action report I posted at theRPGsite. Here it is: Bring me the head of Esamur the Hawk!".

More on Braunstein

2008-08-07T08:20:01Z

Braunstein: the Roots of Roleplaying Games

Comment: I find it frustrating, but not altogether surprising, to see Braunstein claimed as the spiritual ancestor of "avant garde indie gaming". I mean, it's acknowledged in the ars ludi article that the original RPGers were already doing stuff that today's Young Turks have hypnotized themselves into thinking they invented. But what's not there is that the methods used back then demonstrated the natural aptitude that people involved had for roleplaying, once they were given a virtual world to play in. Which is the antithesis of much of the particular "avant-garde" referenced, where the trend has been to insist on the need for rules to guide roleplaying.

Sour grapes aside, it's good to see this stuff being recognized. Compare the sentiment (three years ago) regarding technical simulationist "agendas".

I also really like the sentiment expressed at the end.

Addendum: previous posts on Braunstein--

Braunstein, RPG roots, and the role of the GM
Update on Totten and "Dungeon Master Zero"

Old school renaissance

2008-07-28T06:33:58Z

It sure seems like there's been a quickening of the pace in development of "old school" consciousness. Basically what I see is more and more blogs and web forums that not only focus on older games (particularly White Box D&D, first edition AD&D, and the various editions of Basic D&D) but also engage in critical examination of "how to play". Often this entails some historical analysis of "generations of gamers". Frequently there's discussion of the way that the play of games by later "generations" is impacted by expectations derived from a very different set of influences compared to the earlier ones. I also often see the difference summed up in terms very similar to the way I prefer to see things, that is, that the role of the GM is to provide interesting situations for the players to explore, rather than to guide them through a story line. Not that that's the only element of "old school" which people point to; another characteristic you'll find cited, for example, is the way that groups embraced an improvisational approach to interpreting and extending the rules, or even not using rules at all, based on a shared commitment to engaging the fiction as something that's "really real".

Anyway, what I'd like to do here is collect a few links, which I think I'll add to my sidebar links sooner or later. Links and more discussion after the cut.

Dragonsfoot is probably one of the older "grognard" sites, devoted mainly to AD&D 1e. Notable for the participation of a number of real pioneers from the early days of the hobby, including the late Gary Gygax (Col. Pladoh).

The Knights & Knaves Alehouse is devoted mainly to the full spectrum of "old school" D&D though for some reason the only version of Basic that I see with a subforum of its own is Holmes.

OD&D Discussion is devoted mainly to White Box D&D and its supplements, with major subforums also covering Chainmail, Warriors of Mars, Empire of the Petal Throne, and Gamma World/Metamorphosis Alpha.

Jeff's Gameblog, by Jeff Rients. I should probably say more but in a way I'm overwhelmed by Jeff's enthusiasm and breadth of experience with Basic D&D, AD&D, Traveller, and other games of the early 80's.

Grognardia, by James Maliszewski. Opinionated. Very enjoyable read.

Kellri's Blog. Kellri's a dude who frequents many of the above sites and I like to read his stuff.

Retro-Roleplaying. Actually I don't have a strong impression of this site but it clearly fits into what I'm discussing.

Robert Fisher's blog, D&D tag. You will also find a great deal of interesting stuff off of his RPG web page.

Philotomy's OD&D Musings.

LotFP: RPG aka Lamentations of the Flame Princess. By the way, Jim posted a great 101 Days of AD&D thread on RPG.net a while back.

The Grognard's Tavern is a forum that I don't know very well.

Swords and Wizardry. Blog for the development of a White Box D&D clone.

Fight On!. Not a website, but a periodical (currently on issue #2) that focuses on the "old school renassaince". I haven't actually picked it up yet but it looks very cool.

I'm pretty sure I'm leaving out at least one site I came across not long ago. I'm sure I'm overlooking others, although in a few cases I wasn't sure how "focused" a site was.

I've got a couple brief things to say about this. One is that this isn't exactly a "renaissance"; after all, there's some active construction of "old school" going on in opposition to a perceived sense of contemporary fashion. It can be argued that contemporary modes of gaming also have roots going back to the 70's, meaning that (as Calithena wrote in a post I can't find right now) the current "movement" tends to caricature and exaggerate the differences between times and styles. But I do think the current "movement" is "correct" in the sense that it captures the spirit under which D&D and similar games "grew up", and under which they work best. (Here's an expression of the same feeling I have, by a poster on Story Games.)

My other comment is a bit of personal irony...I think D&D is "okay", but it's far from my favorite game. So the pleasure I derive at seeing this renaissance is tempered by a nagging feeling that for me it's partly "enemy of my enemy is my friend".

Nevertheless, the ferment is great...and it's helped me appreciate the old game, on which I used to be pretty negative.

the other adventure funnel

2008-07-24T00:53:53Z

I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with the right combination of search terms to locate a cool blog/forum post or comment from somebody, where he described a method of scenario design called something like the "inverse|reverse|inverted funnel".

Problem is that when I try any of those terms, I either get Doc Rotwang's excellent but different Adventure Funnel, or some idiotic marketing scam.

Does anybody, anybody remember this thing? I sort of remember the person talking about how they used it in a campaign involving bandits, or zombies, or a sorcerer, or a sorcerer who controlled a band of zombie bandits.

While I'm here, I might as well repost a couple things I've put up lately in different fora.

The first riffed off of something Calithena wrote:

Calithena: [Among other things, dungeons are important because] they free up the group to take the adventure in the way they want, and for surprises to happen.

I've had an interesting time writing up a dungeon adventure that I ran a while back. This is the first time I've tried to document "an adventure" in a manner suitable for others to use. At first, I wrote it up in terms of an introductory scene that clearly oriented the party toward the dungeon and a particular goal inside it, which is how I'd used it for an actual group.

But since I'd designed the dungeon (however humble it may be) as a multipath setting, with at least 2-3 other interesting things going on besides "the goal", I realized that it wasn't really necessary to have a fixed introduction. The dungeon should work fine as just "a place that the party stumbles across in the wilderness". Or the party could seek it out for reasons other than the maguffin I originally built into it. However they enter the dungeon, interacting with the "stuff" inside it can become threads for additional adventures outside the dungeon.

So I rewrote the thing, genericizing the descriptions a bit so as not to presume a particular motivation for exploring it. Then in my "designer's notes" I wrote up a few ways that the dungeon could be introduced, and ways that the "aftermath" of exploring it could impact an ongoing campaign.

A benefit of this exercise is that it gives me hope that I can "deconstruct" more linear adventures in ways that will make them useful, by locating other situational entry/exit points than those defined by the actual modules.

The second is inspired by some things Rob Conley's written regarding how he designs NERO LARP events.

The fundamental problem is limited resources and gamer expectations in terms of plotting. Basically, you want there to be more than just the climactic battle, but you don't want to railroad the players through a set sequence of scenes that have no real consequence.

[...]

I bring this up because I'm mainly a location/situation type guy, but a friend has expressed a desire for a game with more of a three-act structure per session. The only way I can think to do this, and still enjoy GMing, essentially, would be to create multiple paths that all lead to a climactic endpoint.

In reality I think it would be something like the old subquest setup, the one where you need to get all the parts of the artifact before you move on to the big confrontation. Except here, in addition to the order of subquests not mattering, only a subset would be necessary. In fact, to add further consequence to the structure, only a subset would be possible, because once a certain amount of time passes, the final battle will occur, ready or not. And the outcome of each sub-scene ("module" in Rob's lingo) would potentially offer a bonus for the endpoint.

Meanwhile the endpoint itself needn't necessarily be a do-or-die situation. Suppose the player(s) screw up entirely and fail to accomplish any of the sub-quests. They'll probably lose at crunch time, but the more interesting question will be how badly they lose, which just sets up the next arc of the game. This is similar to how Rob talks about building new LARP events on the results of past events.

"leading with the fiction" - a collection of links

2008-07-07T23:05:53Z

Sorry, this is somewhat polemical...but you might have to read between the lines to find any real heat.

Mainly, this is prompted by this thread over at the OD&D board, where there was an effort to somehow create a common cause between original D&D fans and the indie-Forge movement. And there are indeed a couple perspectives where they might seem similar. (But mostly--not.)

In the course of posting to the thread I recalled both a positive development in "theory discussion" circles and my frustration at the fact that it's only occurred as a result of brilliant observations by insiders...except that these are things which have been explained (sometimes shouted) again and again...just not by the right people, apparently.

Oh, well. If you "get it", you'll probably be just as piqued and don't need to have someone rile you up. Try to find humor, though.

Here are the links:

Brand Robins: An RPG is a game where the fiction is part of the rules
Jonathan Walton Are we ready to Lead with the fiction?"
Vincent Baker Respecting the Fiction

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.

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...