[Werewolf] Simulationism: Dreaming is cool, but what's with "The Right"?
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hi David,
Let me try a quick stab at your 2nd hang-up. These things tend to sound pretty abstract and complicated when you don’t relate them to a conrete experience of play where you saw them in action. I like to look at constructive denial this way: The source material has a life of its own. Well, of course it doesn’t, but that’s what it feels like. It’s a pretty intuitive thing. Someone does something that seems kind of inconsistent? But it can’t be, it simply can’t, because our source material is alive, it will not let the inconsistency pass. It will shake and rumble and then it will smooth down and whatever that something was will have become incorporated. That’s what constructive denial feels like… as long as it works.
I like your breakdown, especially about the safety issue. You are asking all the right questions. But the answers are only to be found in actual play. There is no fool-proof step by step instruction to this. Shared appreciation for whatever constitutes your “package” is key. You can build mechanics to facilitate that, but it has to be there in the first place (this is true for any Creative Agenda).
The scope of how the “starting package” is established at the beginning of play is vast. I kind of don’t know where to start. Even for a specific RPG setting as “package”, the scope is still vast. I don’t want to derail this discussion by going into too much detail right now (plus, I’m at work and I already spent way too much time writing this).
- Frank
Frank Tarcikowski:
P.S.: Don’t get hung up on the “steering clear” thing. It’s not a paraphrase for “actively looking for obstacles”. It’s rather just like, y’know, “keeping your boat in the water”. The trick is to know what water looks like, not what obstacles look like.
Ron Edwards:
Hello David,
I think Frank has tended to Hang-up 2 about as clearly and accurately as anyone could possibly do it. What he hasn't done, and what I'm not sure can be done in this venue, is explain and confirm that such an approach can work, effortlessly, to someone who hasn't experienced it and has in fact experienced a great deal of the converse. I'm not speaking of you specifically, but rather of someone whose coping-mechanisms (which result in consistent shallow, risky-in-the-bad-sense Simulationist-play, or conversely, substantial but boring and surprise-less Simulationist play) are so well-developed that they've practically taken on the definition of role-playing itself for that person. To such a person, Frank's posts will read like some kind of pop-culture feel-good reassurance, rather than the cogent and accurate descriptions they really are.
As I say, I think he did the job for that Hang-up, so I'll speak to Hang-up #1 in detail.
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Hang-up 1: "input-material"?
Two things to talk about here: (1) directly answering your questions about how delicate Simulationist play is or has been in some circumstances, and (2) doing a bit of a tutorial on how to understand and recognize the input-source material.
Part one
Pushing the boundaries is only a risk when everyone thinks they don't have to be mindful of them, that "play my character" is all one has to do. In practice, that means that the GM has to be a kind of weird control sub-God of the play-experience, constantly heading off or putting out small fires, as well as the source of all true plot developments.
What we're really talking about, David, is an entire subculture that's trying to do X without any real road-map or vocabulary for it. It'd be like trying to play card games by putting a a few unopened decks into the middle of the table. Do we use more than one? How do we pass out the cards? How are they utilized? What's the point? We look at the rules, and they say a bunch of stuff like, "Black ace beats all other black cards, but red ace is beaten by all red cards," and "Dealer states wild card for each round." H'mmm. Perfectly clear in isolation, but absent of context, completely opaque. Oh well, let's "just start" and see if we can hammer those things into shape as we go, especially since Bob here knows how it's supposed to work, and he'll show us. (This point applies to all role-playing, not just Simulationist play.)
So I absolutely must distinguish between Simulationist play as represented by most game design and practice until recently, and Simulationist play as an existing potential activity, in the context of System Does Matter and the Big Model. If you look at my posts so far, you'll see that I've been very careful to specify the former when I talk about all the delicacy and risks. If you look at Frank's posts, bear in mind that you're reading the thoughts of someone who was initially fairly hostile to the Big Model and the Forge, and who has come to agree (and to refine and to help articulate it) over several years' course of extensive, intelligent debate and extensive, thoughtful play. In other words, he's talking about the latter.
Here are my thoughts for this part:
1. It's easier to get on the same page prior to play than you think. All you have to do is to do it, especially by opening up a conversation among the group as a whole rather than merely GM-per-player. It also clinches the deal when you really do reference the source-input material, which is not the game text, as I try to explain in the next part.
2. Being on the same page is indeed developed further during play, and in fact, without it happening during play, any amount during pre-play was just blather anyway. This is supposed to be fun, not stressful or fraught with the risk of making it not-fun at any moment. It's fun when everyone has knowledge of one another's characters (especially how each provides a little "stretch") and the Right is truly present during play. Therefore the management, safety-net mode of GMing that I talk about above is actually counter-productive: like a set of braces that protect from breaking your legs by preventing you from walking.
3. Risking the fun of play by pushing the boundaries is not such a risk after all when #1 and #2 are taken into account. For one thing, the breakpoints are not just all lying around in profusion, and for another, the material is "live" in the way Frank describes and far more robust than in the circumstances that you're referencing.
Part two
As I briefly began to say above, the input-source material is not the game-book. When Matt waved the Werewolf material at everyone, and when he was talking all about "his world" and the setting for play, he was not giving you the information you needed. As with many White Wolf based games, all that stuff is kind of a signpost pointing at the real source-input material. Vampire and Mage do a better job than Werewolf in this feature, for all iterations of the games; therefore, it doesn't surprise me that Matt had to add this specific bit during the recruitment and preparation process:
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I want to run a game where the PCs have a reason to stay together as a group, and that reaosn is going to be that they all want to help, in the way that seems best to them. Helping humans and deities is nice, but the focus is on helping changers
and
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We all agreed that (a) our PCs were working together as a group, for some cause greater than individual self-interest, (b) our PCs would initially hold quite disparate metaphysical assumptions
There it is. Right there. The references are clear as day: The A-Team, plus Marvel Comics series with thrown-together and rather disparate heroes who yet have a common cause (X-Men obviously; one might also hark back to the old Defenders in the 1970s, and to a couple of the "bunch of monstrous heroes at once" stories from that time), plus Star Trek: The Next Generation after the series included some dissident or multi-faceted characters like Ensign Roe and the butched-up version of Lieutenant Worf after the first season or two. (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.
It sounds a bit Narrativist, right? Well, it's not, because #1 and #2 above are rock-solid and shall ne'er change, thank you very much. This is not what we use as a springboard for conflict, this is what we reliably do while we go through a bunch of missions.
I really want to hit this hard: look outside gaming and game-books when talking about the input-source material that is so central and special for Simulationist play. It often looks very little like the colorful trappings of Character and Setting in the upcoming game; its correspondences are found in Situation instead. Also, it is very likely that the person organizing the game does not, himself, necessarily reflect upon the input-source material at this level. However, in my experience (and I mean my direct experience with years and years of superhero and fantasy role-playing), he will ultimately cough up a values-oriented, do-it-this-way statement because he rightly feels he has to, and that statement can be directly referenced to a number of sources with little effort.
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How "safe" to play?
I'm fairly convinced that "no challenge" Simulationist play is not worth doing, because in many ways, such a game focuses so tightly on the specific game material that it loses the connection to the input-material. My perception of games oriented in that direction is that they tend to garner a small and rather clique-ish fan-base in the early stages (i.e. grassroots publishing, zine-heavy participation), which disappears when the Final Colorful Long-awaited Version is finally released and proves rather bland in its "perfection." Or it is so wedded to the source material that all of play is taped from the start.
As for whether it's still Simulationist play or merely a boring ol' Exploration platform with nothing on it, that would depend on a look at the actual play group in action. As I see it now, if there were truly absolutely no stretching of the boundaries, then one would not even be able to deviate from the source material in any way beyond complete trivialities. That source material might be a genre or body of work, or it might be a set of operative principles (physics, e.g.; or similar), and play would simply show it in action as we'd all seen it before and nothing else. It's sort of hard to imagine it being fun for any length of time.
The challenge to the material can be quite tiny and still sufficient, for instance many games I've played of Call of Cthulhu without any deviation from the Lovecraft/Derleth Mythos, in setting, permissible plot-outcomes, range of characters, or anything else, but even they had a touch of "extra" we brought to it - in fact, some class issues that are wholly absent in the source material. Would you like to play "The Matrix" by playing Neo's actions as already seen in the movie? I wouldn't, and as it happens, apparently most people prefer to play their own Neo-like character - that's a way to preserve the power of the source material but also have a chance to put a personal spin on it. Personally, I'd like to play such a character whose Matrix-artificial life history included a loving family. See the spin, the challenge, the stretch? (I'd have to be careful, though - my own proclivities would probably lead me to push toward Narrativism ...)
I betcha that in your stated examples of such play, that there was some spin/stretch to be found, even if it was fairly tiny. I hope my description of the Werewolf-game's source and input material helps you see where to look.
I hope you can see that your Werewolf game was already unable to be played as safely as you describe. The source-input material is the super-squad of bad-asses, an A-Team, basically, with oogly-scary trappings that are not entirely trivial (although not as consequential as you, one player, had hoped). The "stretch" is inherent in this basic idea: can we play the A-Team with decidedly non-clean-cut heroes, who represent a true diversity of outlooks, up to and including sympathy for at least one faction of bad guys? To so it totally safely, you would have played something like the A-Team, certain Marvel Comics, or certain Star Trek: Next Generation sequences literally, up to and including the source characters or total clones of them. So you were already off the no-stretch reservation, so to speak, and into the possibility of fruitful stretching, by definition. That's what Matt sold you guys on in the first place!
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What about pushing it 'til it does break?
That "gonna forget that ever happened" is a perfect example of the constructive denial concept, in the form of a coping mechanism rather than an integrated and fun aspect of play in the moment. After all, if it's not happening in the moment, then it's gotta happen sometime - or else, as you've said, the people involved will never want to play again. Chris Bankuei and I have both written extensively about play we've witnessed or participated in, in which the inter-session, collective "forget that part" step's material is arguably an order of magnitude bigger than the retained and remembered events of play, which are now retroactively elected to be "what really happened, and boy was that fun."
So you're absolutely right: there was no constructive denial occurring during play itself for that set of events. What you're really talking about is the Black Curtain as I've defined it, with the interesting twist that the GM told you that her decision was not as fraught with risk as he wanted her to believe. Why do you think he told you that at all? Based on my experience of doing precisely the same thing, I suggest that he was enlisting another person in establishing the Curtain, as well as reassuring that person that the overall input-source material (the super-team) was not actually at risk.
As for whether it's normal, well, it's certainly widespread. Again, I must distinguish between Simulationist play as we've all historically encountered it (mainly coping-mechanisms for multiple violations of the Right and the Dream), and Simulationist play as it can very well be done and for which games can very well be designed to facilitate. We do have both historical and current examples. {Hey, I just thought of one of the greatest and best exemplars of the "points measure reality" game designs: Pocket Universe, by Jeff Dee. It distills the principles pioneered messily by Champions and GURPS into a few pages of powerful, functional application, including situational and relationship-oriented mechanics. And again, let's not forget DC Superheroes, Pendragon, and others.} This isn't specific to Simulationist play; in the past few years, we have all seen Gamist play finally slough off the assumptions of old-school D&D (in part by satirizing them in Elfs and Hackmaster, in part by the resurgence of those assumptions in pure functional form as represented by Tunnels & Trolls, and in part by D&D itself being upgraded to the late 1980s), and we have all seen Narrativist play finally slough off its own crust of especially-nasty (non) coping-mechanisms, the Typhoid Mary and Prima Donna tactics. So Simulationist play is undergoing the same process.
All of which is a long-winded way to say that the lurching sense of "oh shit, that broke it," is not what one might necessarily have to accept as an ongoing feature of playing Simulationist. The positive version has a lot to do with what I just posted in reply to Nolan in the concurrent thread, about what the people bring to the situation, and how that empowers them to act in the SIS rather than tiptoe along or merely wait for cues and clues.
How does all of that sound? By the way, I'm enjoying the pace of the conversation, and the opportunity to reflect between posts. And also, if anyone is unsure whether to post in the midst of this dialogue, please feel free.
Best, Ron
David Berg:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on January 03, 2008, 10:22:39 AM
So I absolutely must distinguish between Simulationist play as represented by most game design and practice until recently, and Simulationist play as an existing potential activity, in the context of System Does Matter and the Big Model . . . If you look at Frank's posts, bear in mind that . . . he's talking about the latter.
Frank? Can you point me to any Actual Play threads that illustrate this?
I read Eero's recent thread on Dead of Night, and man, that is nowhere near the kind of relationship I like to have with the SIS.
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hi David,
My best write-up of such a game of my own is this one. I got a little bitchy with Adam Dray in the beginning, but Adam remained patient and did help me explain much better than I could have on my own. However, the stuff related to System (as per the Lumpley Principle) is mostly about unwritten System. The mechanical rules (Vampire 2E, as it were) only played a minor role in the context of Creative Agenda and Reward System. As for a report to illustrate how well-designed mechanics facilitate this style of Simulationist play, I fear I am of little help. Yet.
- Frank
P.S.: Danke für die Blumen, Ron!
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