The Forge Forums

Hi, this is my first post to the Forge forums.

I'm a relative role-playing neophyte, but am vastly interested in the theory of it and the like.  While reading through the articles on GNS theory, I was surprised to not recognize myself in any of the three reasons for role-playing.  Some Simulationist ideas are close, but the reason I role-play is fundamentally different at the core.  I considered writing a full article, but thought I would post a preliminary post to see what the community thinks, in case this has been covered somewhere already.  So, for that reason, I will keep it brief.

I present, for consideration, the idea of Emergentism.  I role-play to discover what emergent content will arise from the combination of a set of rules, player ideas and reactions, and GM ideas and reactions.  This sort of play shuns the idea of the GM as storyteller, and lets events occur organically.  The real reward of this type of play is the true surprise.  The events and story of the game are unpredictable (even by the GM), and therefore strive towards a kind of ephemeral state, working similarly to many other decentralized systems, such as evolution or ant colonies.  I would love to take it further than this if anyone has any interest.

Ron Edwards touched on this a bit in his Simulationism article, but it seems to me that it is a different subject altogether, not relying on any sort of Simulationist play.

I hope this post is in the right forum; I would have posted it in GNS Theory if it was still open.  Thanks, and I anticipate any and all feedback!

-Morgan

I'm not a moderator but I'd say this is probably in the wrong forum.  Your best bet is to try and showcase your idea of Emergentism through an example of play you've had.  Try and show how all the participants, players and gm alike were trying to persue this goal of emergentism.  Tell us what you mean by a 'set of rules'; is this a physics engine, a way to moderate player input, or what specifically?  What types of ideas do the players bring to the game, how does that compare to the ideas the gm brings?

If you can do this I believe the discussion can be fruitful and will likely be moved to the Actual Play forum.  My initial reaction to the idea is that you are confusing Exploration, the base activity of all roleplaying, for Creative Agenda (GNS).  You may want to look over the glossary in the articles section and see if you can highlight how your version is more related to a CA.

Hi there, and welcome.

I'm happy to discuss your idea, but it will have to be positioned differently to be an eligible topic at the Forge. As Caldis said, you should demonstrate what you mean by describing play. It can be at any scope or scale, it can be from long ago in the past or yesterday, it can be anything, as long as it really happened and you can explain it to us.

That's absolutely required for this topic to be continued. If you like, state that you'd like to do that, and I'll move this thread to the Actual Play forum.

Best, Ron

Great, thanks for the guidance.  Here is an actual play example of how I view what I am calling Emergentism:

(The game is D&D, and I was GMing)

Two players are being held in a castle.  The King leads them to a room that contains a portal (to a location unknown by the players) and two centaur guards.  As the players are being pushed towards the portal, they decide that they are going to do everything in their power not to go through the portal.  So when they get close, they grab one of the centaur guards.  After a series of strength and grapple checks, they end up pulling the centaur through the portal with them.  They end up in a place they know nothing about, and through a tense conversation, the players and the NPC centaur decide to work together to get out of their predicament.  The centaur ended up becoming a major NPC in the campaign.

As the GM of this campaign, I had no idea that the centaur I haphazardly placed into the room would become such a major NPC, with a back story and stats to boot.  It was the emergent result of the situation I presented, the players motivations, and a few dice rolls.  A different GM more concerned with the story as he had it laid out might have neutralized the centaur by making him aggressive and necessary to be killed by the players, hence bringing the campaign back to how the GM intended it to go.  This isn't a bad thing, but it isn't as interesting to me.

I'm sure these sort of events happen all the time in different games, but it's things like this that make role-playing fun and interesting to me, and I see it as different than Gamism, Narritavism, or Simulationism.

Does that make any sense?

Totally, to me anyway. It's been suggested that that angle corresponds to "let's see", when compared to "step on up", "story now" and "right to dream". It's also one of my favourite things. Seeing the difference between that and right to dream has helped me understand why when plot events totally shift a character, my brother gets a little sad at the loss of his concepted character, and I go "cool, I wonder where this will lead?". An exaggeration, but one of the dividing lines in how we play.

In the past few weeks I've been trying out the definition and it seems pretty legit as a fourth agenda, but one that conventionally shares a lot of mechanical elements with right to dream. If you want things to go "the right way" then you need to specify what changes keep it within "the right way". If you want to have it go off somewhere unexpected but reasonable based on the current situation, then you need rules that can respond flexibly to players decisions and to lots of elements in them. Now both of these can work well off of detailed cause and effect based systems (very crunchy systems), sometimes even the same system, depending on whether the GM feels compelled to add in extra story elements to get things "back on track". But they can go in very different ways; for example, a GM who doesn't try to restore the "original" path will need new advice relating to how to respond flexibly to players and keep giving them surprises of their own, and games can presumably be focused into charting out a particular area of possibility, by being more sensitive certain elements of what the players decide.

Now I may be wrong and this may just slide streight into "story now", but as I've currently understood it that doesn't have the same chaotic experimental feel as what I'm talking about; where one player makes an off hand comment and we expand on it to produce a larger plot or take previous elements out of context and reintroduce them elsewhere provoking new and interesting interactions, like long lost magic items turning up in the modern day.

I've heard Shock does this a bit, by twisting the world we know and exploring the ripples, but if I remember it focuses on asking specific questions, rather than just going off into that place and seeing what it turns into, by focusing on how things can change.

Yeah that makes sense to me and it is different than GNS.  I dont see it as an agenda that is guiding your entire groups play however rather it is a momentary reward that has come about because your group had a smoothly functioning agenda.

Let me give you a quote from Ron's Narrativism:Story Now essay. "Creative Agenda is the blanket term for people's demonstrated goals and desired feedback during play. In the past, I called it "GNS." Since all of this is enclosed in Social Contract, GNS-stuff is not only "what I want" but also "what I want from role-playing with this group of people."

So when we're looking for an agenda we're not just looking for that "Emergent" moment you described in your example but how with this group of people you are able to get to that moment.  I believe there are a lot of different ways to get to those moments and you can get to them, though they may look different, with each CA.   You've mentioned a few things that helped you get to this moment, things like grapple and strength checks but really those are only small parts of the whole.  There's a king and centaur guards and a situation where the characters being pushed towards a portal.  What decisions or actions did you as GM or the players involved take to get you to that point?

To me, your centaur is a fun example of going with the flow and responding to player input. Personally, I do all that all the time, regardless whichever CA might be at work.

I guess this is Emphemera and Technique stuff. They might facilitate a certain CA well, but they aren't CA themselves.

So either this thread will become "What is CA anyway?" all over again. Or it might deal with the presence of "Emergentism", not as a CA, but as a Technique, versus the lack thereof. Or I failed to grasp the issue.

Gamism and Narrativism: Mutually Exclusive (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=28247.0) is the latest topic with the ubiquitous CA troubles, where Ron gives a nice pig-lover example and links to the Frostfolk threads. Higly recommended!

I can't recommend the Frostfolk threads enough. They helped me to understand Narrativism extremely well(at least I think they did).

Also, the aha moment you are referring to with the centaurs seems to parallel the frostfolk thread very well.

I just have one question for you about this idea that the story emerges without people being aware of how it will go ahead of time: You were the GM, and you obviously knew what was beyond the portal. You weren't in the dark at all about what challenges were upcoming, the only thing you didn't expect was that the players would co-opt one of your NPCs for not just the session, but the rest of the campaign. Surely you had knowledge (at the very least a glimmer of an outline) of the vague directions you wanted the story to progress in. Unless you are speaking of everyone not knowing where the story is going, it seems like what you did would be better termed Intergrationism, by which players integrate each other's ideas constantly, never knowing the end result. But it sounds to me very narrativist. Then again, I'm new to all of this, so take it with a BIG grain of salt.

Cheers,

--Norm

This is touchy. All roleplaying is about "let's see what happens." The distinction between Creative Agendas is why we care what happens.

But there's a little more to it than that, because sometimes the reason we care what happens is just because it's fascinating (or funny or cool or whatever) in itself. We just celebrate the happening, for itself, because it's neat. Kinda like model trains. For example, look at this (fairly brief and funny) playtest report: [Super Action Now!] Bubba Bad's bad day (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=25515.0). Is this the sort of thing you're getting at, Morgan?

I'd like to say more, but I need the answer to that question first, otherwise I'll just be going off on something irrelevant.

-Marshall

Hi Nexus,

Check out Ron's post to another recent thread
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=28247.msg265990#msg265990 (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=28247.msg265990#msg265990) where describes Exploration as the platform that supports a second construction of Creative Agenda.

I think your example of the centaur NPC being promoted by events from spearcarrier to companion is an example of imagination at play, which is essentially Exploration. What do you think?

Hi,

Quote from: Marshall Burns on July 07, 2009, 07:19:47 PM
This is touchy. All roleplaying is about "let's see what happens."

I think that roleplaying (especially tabletop with human players) is "let's decide what happens."
The way how things to happen are decided vary according to system used.
Getting back in my corner... ;)
Rob

I think the fact that something can exist fleetingly in another CA doesn't stop it having it's own "place" where it gets centre stage. I remember playing this game with a friend of mine in primary school, which was basically setting up random sentence generators and having a chat to them. Really funny, and so much easier now we have easily available computing. We didn't decide anything, we just enjoyed poking things and seeing what happened.

The randomness sounds pretty like your example Marshal, (which is really funny in an absurdist kind of way) only I'm a bit older now and I want to upscale the principle to bigger, more adult things. I like guessing and being proved wrong, in a way that turns red herrings into the main plot and obvious next steps into nothing at all, but in a way that makes sense with hindsight.

So what's the bit that gets centre stage? Well Ron posted this before:

QuoteFor a given instance of play, the three modes are exclusive in application. When someone tells me that their role-playing is "all three," what I see from them is this: features of (say) two of the goals appear in concert with, or in service to, the main one, but two or more fully-prioritized goals are not present at the same time. So in the course of Narrativist or Simulationist play, moments or aspects of competition that contribute to the main goal are not Gamism. In the course of Gamist or Simulationist play, moments of thematic commentary that contribute to the main goal are not Narrativism. In the course of Narrativist or Gamist play, moments of attention to plausibility that contribute to the main goal are not Simulationism. The primary and not to be compromised goal is what it is for a given instance of play.

What if the main goal is surprise? Surprise that expands the predictive imagination? It can be absurd, but it doesn't have to be.

Now what do I mean about expanding predictive imagination? Well when we look ahead in a game and try to work out what happens next, we may only see so many paths. The fact that "anything could happen" because we are making it up is not strictly true; despite the fact that we could in theory say anything, we can get stuck and not be able to think of any, or maybe only three or four. So what if the game encourages you to look in more different directions, and subverts and expands your expectation? Well if your anything like me, then you get this wonderful feeling of the world opening up, of freedom, because now there are more ways to go than there were before. Now with that I can laugh or go ooh or aha or all kinds of other responses, but that's why for me it hits home; it expresses the openness of the future, and gets you more creative and open to meet it.

Maybe people can pack that into another creative agenda in a smooth and harmonious way, but beware of the temptation to say, "we just do that as a side effect, therefore it is always a side effect".

Hey all!  Thanks for the thoughtful responses.  I've been sifting through all the various forums and trying to figure out how to respond to everyone.  That being said, I don't think this will respond to everyone, but there are a few important things I want to respond to:

-I think JoyWriter understands what I'm getting at, and their last post is a spot on.  These sort of moments can exist within any CA, just as an overwhelmingly Gamist event can occur in a primarily Narritavist campaign and so on.  But why can't the idea of events forming themselves inform the entire campaign?

Quote from: JoyWriter on July 08, 2009, 11:15:33 AM
What if the main goal is surprise? Surprise that expands the predictive imagination? It can be absurd, but it doesn't have to be.

Now what do I mean about expanding predictive imagination? Well when we look ahead in a game and try to work out what happens next, we may only see so many paths. The fact that "anything could happen" because we are making it up is not strictly true; despite the fact that we could in theory say anything, we can get stuck and not be able to think of any, or maybe only three or four. So what if the game encourages you to look in more different directions, and subverts and expands your expectation? Well if your anything like me, then you get this wonderful feeling of the world opening up, of freedom, because now there are more ways to go than there were before. Now with that I can laugh or go ooh or aha or all kinds of other responses, but that's why for me it hits home; it expresses the openness of the future, and gets you more creative and open to meet it.

Nail on the head.  Surprise is the real key to this idea.  And not just for the players, for the GM as well.

-rgrassi said something that I really like.  Most roleplaying does seem to be, "let's decide what happens."  "Let's SEE what happens" just brings a whole new sense of wonder and possibility to the idea.

-Marshall Burns posted a (very funny) example of some actual play he thought was relevant to this topic.  I'm not sure it is, but I can't tell by the description.  Marshall, how did those events arise?  Did the GM know the temple of rats was there?  Was there anything surprising to all parties?  A random element is key in the idea of Emergentism that I'm talking about.  But random in the sense of a dice roll, not "I just thought of this random thing" so much.  But that's a sticky area, because too many random rolls and you take away all choice.  There has to be a balance.

Anyway, I still think that this idea is worthy of constituting a different CA, though I can see how people are relating it to Exploration and such.  Maybe I'll clear my head a bit and post something else on that, but for the time being, like I said, JoyWriter seems to be spot on.

-Morgan

Perhaps it's the Fruitful Void (http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=119) of that groups' particular Story Now agenda.

Quote from: JoyWriter on July 08, 2009, 11:15:33 AM
I think the fact that something can exist fleetingly in another CA doesn't stop it having it's own "place" where it gets centre stage. I remember playing this game with a friend of mine in primary school, which was basically setting up random sentence generators and having a chat to them. Really funny, and so much easier now we have easily available computing. We didn't decide anything, we just enjoyed poking things and seeing what happened.

This little example may or may not meet the criteria for a seperate agenda but I dont see how it matches the op's example.  His game didnt contain randomly created nonsense that you try and jumble together to create something interesting.  Instead there was a specific setting, situation and characters whose interaction brought about new and unexpected results.  I think this is the heart of exploration or shared imagined space and why we play with other people rather than just sit around imaging things on our own.  We dont necessarily know how things will turn out or what others will do, which is both a challenge and an opportunity.  When you can take that opportunity and run with it it's a pretty amazing thing but it can also be tough when someone comes up with something totally unexpected.

Take this thread as an example. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=12467.0

The players are suprising or maybe emergent content is coming about from each participants input but it's clearly not just surprise they are playing for or rather they have a focus to how they are bringing about those surprises.   There isnt enough in your example to say what the focus was for your game but I dont see any action taken on the part of the participants to bring about those surprises.  I do see a commitment to the situation, setting and system used and that combination brought about the surprise.

Ahey, :)

I keep waiting to see Ron jump in with more insightful questions and all... :)

Anyway, to get back to your example of play, I fail to see how this whole thing isn't simply squarely inside the Simulationist agenda.

The whole "I wonder what'll happen if I do this", "wow, really? The centaur makes friends with us? Cool.", "Hey, I wonder how the world will work when I poke it like this... How bout this... and this..." All of that is right at the ehart of Right To Dream.

Cheers,
J.

You guys are all doing fine without me. It's been a very good thread. Everyone, please remember that threads here cannot be aimed at making someone else agree or concede or in fact to react in any specified way, but rather, and only, about whether you think you've made your case and/or critiqued someone else's as well as you can.

Morgan, if you want to do a whole Ron-Big-Model interaction about how you played, let me know, but as far as I could tell, that wasn't the goal of the thread, and in any event, it'd have to wait a bit. I'm in the middle of at least one other such thread right now.

Best, Ron

Quote from: Nexus6 on July 08, 2009, 02:04:28 PMBut why can't the idea of events forming themselves inform the entire campaign?

If you consider "events not forming themselves" does not define any of the CA's -- though it does define a technique (Illusionism) -- "events forming themselves" would similarly appear to be technique rather than CA. Events that form themselves are events that can and do occur in any of the three agendas as part of the expression of a given CA (unlike a CA, which can not occur simultaneously with another CA), so it simply can not be an agenda by itself.

Quite frankly, I can't imagine an alternative to the situation the OP posed, without straining credulity. "The centaur suddenly whips out a magic wand and teleports himself out of the PCs grasp, reappearing five feet away to shut the portal!" I think must simply be a prerequisite to good gaming, of any CA.

Daniel

Daniel, I think that's a highly subjective boundary, depending on a lot of factors. In some games I would balk at it, in others I would expect it.

But the heart of the matter is that people playing a game should be on the same page about that boundary, lest it brakes down. As such, in general I totally agree with you.

Quote from: Jasper Flick on July 09, 2009, 01:56:11 PM
Daniel, I think that's a highly subjective boundary, depending on a lot of factors. In some games I would balk at it, in others I would expect it.

Hmm.. good point X-)

I've just reread the whole thread and I'm having trouble understanding what Nexus and Joywriter are getting at.

The phenomenon discussed seems to be about how the system brought the contributions of the participants into collision and sparked a creative response that was then reincorporated into the fiction of the game. I can see that different game designs will have different ways of guiding these moments and different ways of gatekeeping input from different players, but how is this different from plain old Exploration, the basis of all roleplay?

Can someone summarize for me how "emergentism" is distinct from Exploration?

Quote from: Alan on July 10, 2009, 01:09:49 AMCan someone summarize for me how "emergentism" is distinct from Exploration?

I dont think it is but I do think it's an interesting form of exploration brought about by a series of techniques.  That could be an interesting discussion in it's own right, probably one that's been done before but worthwhile.  If anyone has links to previous discussions they would be appreciated.

The biggest requirement to pull this off is to be open to possibilities, not preplanning and forcing things along one route.  Steer away from the plot point railroad and move to a more open reactive style.

Yeah, after a bunch more reading, I can see how this can be a technique and not a CA.  I do believe that an argument can be made further about it being a CA, but I'm already starting to get tired of thinking about labels and classifications.  I DO think it is different than exploration, but I'm too tired at the moment to write up a full post about it.  Maybe later...

As someone mentioned, this idea is helped out by having a system that's capable of some random generation.  I'm interested in systems that do this well (and with a good deal of possibilities for a random outcome).  So far I'm looking at After the Bomb for random character creation (which I am really enjoying), and Traveller for random setting creation.  Anyone know any more games that have good random generation?  And is there any game that randomly generates events?  Not just creatures for events, but complex, even non-combat events?

Quote from: Nexus6 on July 08, 2009, 02:04:28 PM
-Marshall Burns posted a (very funny) example of some actual play he thought was relevant to this topic.  I'm not sure it is, but I can't tell by the description.  Marshall, how did those events arise?  Did the GM know the temple of rats was there?  Was there anything surprising to all parties?  A random element is key in the idea of Emergentism that I'm talking about.  But random in the sense of a dice roll, not "I just thought of this random thing" so much.  But that's a sticky area, because too many random rolls and you take away all choice.  There has to be a balance.

I am glad to elaborate!

In Super Action Now!, there is no GM. Authority is portioned out to all participants in particular areas (at specific times of play, or, in specific ways, upon spending TILT! points – which are gained by making people laugh). For instance, we found out that a temple to the rat god was there because Stephen (I think) said so, at a point where he was empowered by the system to say so.

Most often, in SAN!, it is random because "I just thought of this random thing." The dice are relatively minor in this game, limited to a Fortune-at-the-End conflict resolution mechanic, which is itself subject to the TILT! economy. But we also put such random things into a hat, and draw from them whenever someone needs an idea; this is essentially the same thing as rolling on a table.

However, allow me to point out that "random in the sense of a dice roll" and "random because I just thought of this random thing" are different only on the Technique and Ephemera levels. They accomplish the same things by different means, and thus the distinction is utterly one of style and taste.

If you're unconvinced, look at it this way: in SAN!, when I introduce a random thing, it goes on to have repercussions that I could have no way imagined. For instance, I once introduced a pirate ship in order to give Stephen's character some trouble. Imagine my surprise when his character bought the pirates' loyalty and sent them after my guy, prompting a small adventure all on its own.

From the hat, we once drew a burning bush. My character, Jimbo the Barbarian, who was under a curse, immediately understood it to be an oracular bush, and so asked it how to remove the curse he was under. It was Stephen's turn, so we all looked at him to decide what the bush said; he was stumped. Courtney said something like, "Come on, just think of something. Like, he has to drink a goat's blood while jumping off the Grand Canyon." And Stephen said to me, "Hey, you heard the bush!" And this little thing prompted a huge and ridiculous adventure, the first (and only) SAN! scenario to be played out in more than one session.

QuoteThe randomness sounds pretty like your example Marshal, (which is really funny in an absurdist kind of way) only I'm a bit older now and I want to upscale the principle to bigger, more adult things. I like guessing and being proved wrong, in a way that turns red herrings into the main plot and obvious next steps into nothing at all, but in a way that makes sense with hindsight.

JoyWriter, I want to point out here that the absurd craziness of SAN! is purely a matter of Color. You can use the same principles for something far more urbane and mature, and even thematic. (For that matter, SAN! does have theme. It's the same theme everytime, frontloaded by the System, and I summarise it thus: "Life's a bitch, then you get hit by a flying ice cream truck driven by a beat-boxing gorilla who is dating your mother.") You could even, with players dedicated to doing so, do that very thing using SAN!.

Hi guys,

Great discussion. I think the topic itself has been worked through well enough for the original purposes of the thread. Nexus6, send me a message if you think this is premature, but it's probably time to close the thread. Everyone else, please treat it as closed unless otherwise notified, and just as Caldis suggested, please feel free to spawn new threads about the issues raised here.

Best, Ron