[Werewolf] Simulationism: Dreaming is cool, but what's with "The Right"?
David Berg:
Ron,
You've clarified that the act of dreaming which the "right to dream" fortifies is not passive observation, but active probing. I have this lightbulb going on that tells me that the right to dream is largely the right to contribute to the creation of Situation. The "inviolable package" is a statement of what kind of Situations* you will create and Explore. The package covers Setting (what "Lovecraft on a Starship" looks like to a player character, and how it functions when they interact with it) and Character (what the players will use their characters for in the context of this Setting). Setting + Character = Situation.
So what do the players use their characters for? The players pose questions ("What would happen if I tried to form an acid cult on this Lovecraftian Starship?") to the Setting**, using their characters to perform actions ("I try to form the cult!") that create the kind of Situation ("Let's find out what happens!") that pressures the System ("Geez, will we be able to find out what happens?") used for keeping the "inviolable package" safe ("Yep, we were able to find out! This type of Situation seems viable, let's do another one next week!") instead of broken ("We couldn't find out. This type of Situation is not guaranteed to be viable using this System. We need to either change the System, give up, or accept that our fun will be intermittent.").
Yes? No? I have a ton of questions brewing in response to your last post, and I think it'll help me shape them if I'm actually on the money with this formulation.
* I'm dividing up the "Situation" component of Exploration (which is present continuously during play) into individual "Situations". These correspond roughly to individual "interests the group is pursuing". If that fits with Big Model usage, good. If not, I should re-word this whole post.
** by this I mean a Situation in which the player characters aren't yet doing anything.
Ron Edwards:
Hi David,
Well, you’re right about nearly everything, but some of it applies to all of role-playing, and some of it applies only to a subset of Simulationist play.
I’ll start with the small bit that needs revision. I think the “inviolable package” concept applies to the outcomes of situations, not to the posed situations themselves. That’s what makes them especially tricky, if the System in question isn’t robust and if the “social mandate” (Jesse’s term) isn’t either.
A lot of what you say about Situation, pretty much that whole first paragraph, is definitional, for any mode of play with any Creative Agenda. Your use is correct, by the way, because the term Situation in the model is actually referring to any given Situation (what you’re thinking of as “smaller”) during the course of play. By using it in the singular in the model, I do not mean that only one situation actually occurs during play.
In your second paragraph, the one with parentheses and blue text, it’s all good and strong stuff. However, it is not necessary for the players actually to be saying those phrases, or even knowing that this is what they’re doing. If you ask them, they’ll say they are “just” playing their characters, or “just” making a story, or whatever.
Also, since System is such a phenomenally diverse concept, two different groups who do represent what you describe in this paragraph may be utterly different from one another in the details of what gets tweaked or challenged, and what is held as a given. I bring this up because when queried, each group might point to the other as “those crazies” who play in a funky way. Your reaction to Dead of Night might be a good example of this. That reaction is based on your comfort zone regarding authority during play, as well as Stance, and I think you might be missing that playing Dead of Night would fit what you’re talking about just as well as (say) Pendragon, despite the phenomenal procedural difference in how each player relates to the SIS.
I also think you might be overlooking the sheer joy that occurs when the System proves robust, and therefore one’s full Right is now freed to be exerted upon the SIS, with everyone else excited to see what you’ll do. So it’s not just a series of endless poking; we should perhaps focus a bit more on what is done with the robust SIS, rather than the potential breakpoints. Particularly because it relates to the basic issue of the thread title, which is to say, the Right.
Best, Ron
Callan S.:
Quote
using their characters to perform actions ("I try to form the cult!") that create the kind of Situation ("Let's find out what happens!") that pressures the System ("Geez, will we be able to find out what happens?") used for keeping the "inviolable package" safe ("Yep, we were able to find out!
I'm not certain, so this is partially a question. But I'd think question of whether they will be able to find out what happens, is not acknowledged. If everyones devoted to not breaking the dream, it's creatively denied that such a difficulty exists 'since everyones commited'. The difficulty exists, it's just not acknowledged. Overcoming that difficulty (usually not that hard for imaginative gamer guys) gives oomph to the game, but no one admits it and instead describes the world as 'alive', as you see here.
It denies their own work and effort - just as when you sleep and dream, you don't think about how the night time dream is actually a construct/effort of your own mind. I once had a sleeping dream (forgive me saying 'sleeping dream' to seperate it from the forge term), where I was driving a car and crashed it - I then loudly announced inside the dream (to those imaginary people in it), for no one to worry, cause it was just a dream. As soon as I realised what I said, I woke up. I think it was a really interesting example of how I could be aware I was dreaming, but unaware. And also how important I found the people in the dream, to speak to them in such fourth wall terms. I guess those people were my own emotions, but I wasn't talking to them as such at the time.
That said: Since I think there's no recognition of work, what I'm seeing in the your quote is a distinct hint of looking for recognition of adversity existing, and explicit recognition of adversity overcome. As Ron said, he's not trying to sell you on sim. While you say yourself you've enjoyed sim, just because you've enjoyed something doesn't mean that's what you want to chose. I think most people are capable of enjoying all three agendas. But while considering the questions, look at yourself considering and see if your looking for recognition of adversity overcome. There might be something your putting ahead of other things - in that it has to be there.
David Berg:
Ron,
Let me start with the parts of your last post that I do understand, just to confirm and move on:
1) Player awareness of the process in my big paragraph with all the blue. The process is vital, the awareness of it is not. Callan, I hear you too on this. (However, your "overcoming adversity" characterization doesn't match with what's in my mind; I see more of a "find out what happens" with a little suspense thrown in, as per Ron's "Can we play the A-Team with decidedly non-clean-cut heroes?". As for how much I really like Sim, hopefully I'll have a better handle on that by the end of this thread.)
2) Diversity of System. Yep, all sorts of different-looking play styles utilize the process I referred to in my big blue paragraph. That even includes Dead of Night. (That game doesn't seem like my kind of game because its package doesn't seem like my kind of package. Plus, yes, I do have my authority and stance preferences.)
3) "Free to contribute creatively to the SIS" = "fun." ("We can play the A-Team with decidedly non-clean-cut heroes! It's cool, even if it never occurred to us to doubt that we could do it!") I am clear on how this is true of Exploration in general, and I am making progress in this thread toward seeing how this is especially (differently?) true in the case of Simulationism. I'll get back to this as soon as I can clear a few things up.
Okay, now the parts I don't understand:
Which parts of my post with all the blue apply to what (all roleplaying, all Sim, some Sim)? How could my use of Situation in my first paragraph be true of all roleplaying when my point was about how Situation creation relates to Sim's "package"? How could the post have any friggin' value at all if the "package" is not about Situation creation, but rather about Situation resolution?
See, the "lightbulb" I alluded to was the idea that the "package" is not passive reference material, but rather something of a mission statement. That's a huge shift from the way I've been viewing Simulationism to date.
I understood this mission statement as an expectation of what the player characters do, in terms of general types of behavior; so Wolverine-clone just doesn't gut Cyclops-clone. Wolverine doesn't gut teammates in X-Men, so it's unacceptable in a Sim game with an X-Men package.
As I understand your last post, however, you're saying that the mission statement is an expectation of what'll happen, in terms of general types of outcomes. Wolverine-clone isn't allowed to gut Cyclops-clone because in X-Men, teammates don't wind up dead at each other's hands.
This is a huge difference!
In the first case, the part of the package that is "inviolable" structures intent, and tells the players, "Initiate these kind of Situations! You like them! They're fun!" In the Werewolf game, this is Matt saying "(1) You all reliably want to help re: the common cause; (2) you all differ greatly in your personal styles and reasons for helping. Add a dose of monstrous bad-assery for spice and the enjoyment of power." And we players saying, "Sure, we'll play that!" We then proceed to go on world-saving missions together and argue a lot; when there's nothing fun going on, a player knows that his job is to create a Situation that is about world-saving or arguing.
In the second case, the part of the package that is "inviolable" doesn't tell players what to do in the same sense; rather, it tells them to not do anything that'll produce "bad results". If Matt had said, "Okay, guys, don't go off and selfishly pursue personal ends, I don't want PCs getting separated. And don't be monolithic and boring in your motives, I don't want y'all to have easy agreements on what to do," I don't know if we would have said, "Sure." But let's say we did, cuz we liked the Color or something. When nothing fun is going on, what's my job as a player? Do whatever I feel like... but with a sort of vigilant wariness, saying, "Oops, can't do that, it'll lead my character off on his own," or, "Oops, can't say that, that's too compatible with John's character."
I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, I'm just trying to illustrate what needs explication as clearly as I can.
I'm afraid Frank's description of Constructive Denial won't make any sense to me until I have a firm grasp of how the "package" influences player decisions.
-David
Ron Edwards:
Hi David,
I think you’re making it harder than it is. I think that both “ways” you’re describing are probably exerted, in whatever proportion to one another and however often, to reinforce the constructive denial in action.
Remember, as Jim Henley and I discussed in one of the original threads, we are totally talking about process of play, and that process is composed of many, many parts. Some parts involve what sort of scenes arise, some parts involve what sort of decisions are made in the scenes, and some parts involve how the scenes ultimately turn out.
I know I emphasized outcomes in that previous post, and it looks as if it’s thrown you. I did so because I was trying to counterweight your stated emphasis on initiating scenes. Now I realize that my counterweight was a bad discussion choice; instead, I’ll say it this way: “Don’t forget that within-scene stuff and outcome-of-scene stuff are also subject to consideration from the perspective of the constructive denial going on for that group.”
Does that help?
Let’s remember the topic of the thread: the Right to Dream. At the risk of getting into metaphysics and politics simultaneously (geez …), I suggest that rights are always recognized, exerted, and preserved in the context of a set of historical agreements which everyone pretends don’t exist, instead referencing things like “natural” or “inalienable” or “human.”
So let’s look at rights in action: they can be invoked to permit someone to do something without being blocked, to provide force and convincing power to something that is being done at the moment, and to seek redress for someone who tried to do something but was prevented or punished for it. In all cases, in order for the concept of “right” to function in any of these ways, the set of agreements I just wrote about must be operating among the members of the larger society. Otherwise the talk of rights will be squashed, and the actions prevented, disrupted, or punished – the right by itself has no actual power; the agreements within which they operate is where the power is.
As we are talking about Simulationist play, the constructive denial is the context that applies at any stage of dealing with the SIS, in whatever way works for that particular stage. It seems to me as if you’re quite enthused about the “going into what sort of scene” stage, and less enthused about the “coping with tricky material in the midst or aftermath of scene” stage. That’s fine, but I think it’s a personal preference (or perhaps scarring from the past) that doesn’t need to be important in the discussion.
I think that instead of trying to pick apart every sentence in your post and in my reply to it, we can do better to examine this one (as well as the original constructive denial threads, which I just reviewed) and not get tied up in frustration.
Best, Ron
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