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.

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.

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.

Synchronicity strikes the blogosphere.

Just when I finished discussing with Mo how I have to adjust, as a player, to the "Say yes or roll dice" philosophy in Dogs in the Vineyard--I see it as pretty anti-immersive--Jere Genest puts up a piece on saying no to your players.

So isn't that funny?

Going back to my functional analysis of immersion, note that this falls under the perception category.

Also note that, for (some) people who value immersion, the concept of GM Force is a non-issue. It just doesn't compute. If the immersionist's character wants to find the lost gold mine on the other side of the mountain, the immersionist himself will be equally happy if the GM tells him it's there or it isn't there. On the other hand, it's going to reduce his enjoyment of the game if the GM says (or implies), "You want to find it? Okay, you found it."

I made a rather long comment in Merten's blog so rather than reproduce it here, I'm just going to give a link to his entry. Here it is. (May take a little while to show up as Merten moderates his comments.)

I get a little polemical. But actually I think we may be approaching a new level of understanding across the RPG theory world, with at least some acknowledgment of immersion as a genuine, worthwhile aesthetic goal--not just a form of design conservatism--albeit not one that everyone shares.

Things seem to happen in waves in the RPG blabosphere.

Anyway, Chris Chinn has been putting up some practical advice on how to develop scenarios which I find interesting and potentially useful. Find it here.

Meanwhile both RPG.net and Harnforum (free registration required) have been getting into the same practical issues of how to create scenarios that involve the characters. (Another RPG.net thread, started by Levi Kornelsen is here.) The most interesting element of these discussions, for me, is the paradigm clash between the idea of "adventure hooks" and the idea of "flags" or "player-driven" scenarios. The most depressing element is the way that "player-driven" scenario-building is repeatedly caught up in the ideology of "story", such that if you don't have a "player-driven story", then either the GM must be leading the players around by the nose, or nothing particularly interesting happens.

I find this ironic and to illustrate why, I'll offer a completely unfair analysis of Dogs in the Vineyard as a game where the players are forced into taking cowboy defenders of the faith as their PCs, because, you know, if your friend purchases the book and gets you to play the game, that's your only choice. Player empowerment is not absolute; once you buy into playing the game with other people, you're always giving up some of your power to control the scope and expression of game elements, including your own character. At the same time, everyone else including the GM is giving up some of their power to you. It's your job to make the most of this arrangement, and exactly how you do it has a highly complex, non-isomorphic relationship to whether you're "authoring a story" or doing something entirely different.

I think for a certain class of roleplayers ("immersionists", "simulationists", or anyone whose primary goal is to "experience the fictional world" without regard to "theme" or "Premise" but certainly with regard to "interest"), it's probably useful to take up an alternative to Forge-inspired "protagonism", in a combination of "PC proactivity" and "PC magnetism". By the latter I mean construction of PCs such that, even if they don't go looking for interesting things to do, the nature of their role in life means that interesting things will happen to them. And by interesting, I mean no more or less than things which the player of the PC will enjoy dealing with, and which the other people around the table will enjoy interacting with either actively or as audience. A prime example of a proactive character is the entrepreneurial rogue or the seeker of arcane mysteries. "Magnetic" characters are often what I think of as "static responsibles"--a sheriff, for example, or a land owner. However, troubleshooters like superhero teams and superspies are also largely "magnetic" in that their presumed responsibilities tend to result in missions and crises being thrust on them.

For my purposes it's important to note where player-character interests converge and where they diverge. The player always wants interesting things, while the character perhaps not so much, unless he's proactively creating them. By definition, a problem is something that the character would just as soon avoid, or certainly something that he didn't deliberately bring on himself. It's still something the player craves, but for the sake of player-character identification, it's not something the player wants to generate himself.

(I really need a better term than "PC magnetism" since it's a bit on the whimsical and idiosyncratic side, and I prefer to use jargon that's easily grasped on the first pass. I am tempted to say "PC fitness"--but that's too close to Vincent's terminology.)

Some might see this paradigm as no more than an expression of Narrativist campaign/scenario construction. That may be, but where I think it differs from the outlook that inspires common Narrativist techniques, and indeed rejects the common GNS concept of Incoherence, is that it takes player interest, flexibly defined, as the central value instead of the literary/dramaturgical concept of Premise. For game systems, this paradigm also offers as a benchmark the ability to engage the interest of the players by providing mechanics that are actually enjoyable ways of negotiating/resolving the events of the imagined world. That is, if the combat mechanics of a given game are enjoyable in themselves, then the players' interests might well focus on situations that allow them to exercise those mechanics. Yet those players may have no special interest in combat per se--give them an enjoyable system of social conflict resolution, and they may gravitate toward political or social scenarios.

Hm, while searching for another thread I came across this one on the Forge, where it looks like some of the same issues are hashed out. Just including it here for future reference; I haven't read it closely yet.

Lee Short also covers some related ground in his work-in-progress Star Moon Cross, particularly in the campaign prep discussion of "what kinds of activities do you envision your character engaging in"?

I just came across this on RPG.net. Battlefield Press has opened a forum devoted to the discussion of immersive play. You can find it here.

eyebeams has also been talking more about immersion lately and I think he and his commenters have some very interesting things to say (in fact, I found the above link indirectly from there, via RPG.net). There are two entries: Reinventing the Method and Immersion-Fu!

Some discussions going on about Immersion these days. See previous entry for links.

I'd just like to raise one point which I think people need to be careful about. "Immersion" is often connected in theory and practice with lack of "out of character" communication. Both here and in Mo's LJ there's been some discussion about the need to maintain interpersonal communication channels to ensure game focus. (I agree.)

What needs to be differentiated are at least three practices, all of which might be called "immersionist":

1) Discouraging or refusing to engage in out of character communication at all times, including between sessions.

2) Similar to (1), but being receptive to out of character communication between game sessions.

3) Thinking and responding to the game "in character" during a game session, but being receptive to out of character communication at any time.

This last is basically saying, "I know my character so well that in any situation, the way I have my character act is the only way that s/he can act, as far as I'm concerned. But if necessary I can also explain what my character's thinking, at least as well as I could explain my own thoughts. And I can also talk about what I'm thinking, and what I want out of the game, as distinct from what my character wants."

Now that I think about it, we can add three similar distinctions having to do with perception:

A) Preferring to perceive the game experience at all times through the eyes of the character. (Thus, you never want to hear about, or even suspect, that the GM is manipulating things behind the curtain, and you don't want to have to deal with "metagame" concerns such as party unity or telling a good story.)

B) Accepting metagame awareness of the game, when not actually playing the game. (You know the GM is presenting a scenario that was written up last night. You're willing to position your character before play in such a way as to achieve certain metagame goals.)

C) Accepting metagame awareness of the game during the game. (As a player, you accept that the GM is fudging dice to keep you alive, but you can separate that from the character's awareness. Yet you can still "slip into" the character's mindset and "know" what s/he's thinking and what s/he'll do in a given circumstance.)

I think it's possible to be "immersionist" to different degrees at the communication level vs. perception level, by the way. For example, unless I explicitly agree otherwise, I'm not very keen on Illusionism and in-game Dramatism, but I wouldn't object to explaining my character during a game. So my lower Immersion tolerance might be categorized as 3B.

Note that "absolutely no Immersionism" wouldn't be 3C. As long as you have the baseline level of "being able to see things entirely from your character's P.O.V., so that your decisions are exactly what you 'know' your character would decide", you're immersing. Maybe this baseline characteristic is what should be dubbed "channeling".

Sin Aesthetics introduces a series of posts on Immersion with some issues that are closely related to the discussion we just had in Notes on Correlation.