The Social Mandate
jburneko:
There's a phrase I want to push into the gaming lexicon: The Social Mandate. I can't remember if Ron uses this phrase in the text of Spione or not. The phrase has been rattling in my head for a bit now and I don't remember if I made it up or if I read it somewhere. In another thread Ron wrote: "A book, or a set of rules, is not enough. The actual people have to be into playing this game, with one another, and with a certain degree of obligation to play well." To which I thought, "Yes, everyone must adhere to the social mandate."
Here's my working definition of a social mandate: "The minimum social or creative behavior the players must bring to the table before the game procedures will work as intended."
In my opinion the greatest weakness in current RPG texts is the lack of clearly articulated social mandates. The reason they're lacking is obvious however. The designer is already excited about and pumped to do the very thing his game is designed to do, so of course he might overlook that he needs to be explicit about this energy in order to get others, absent of his presence, to do the same thing.
Among my circle a big casualty of the lack of a social mandate was Capes. When we first started playing Capes here's what everyone did: Everyone created characters. Then in the first scene everyone wrote down Goals they wanted their character's to achieve.... then nothing really happened. Several scenes and indeed several sessions went by like this. It got absurd such as people writing down: I order Pizza as a Goal. Then I had an idea. I grabbed a character Meghann had created (the older non-super father of her gadgeteer). I knew why Meghann had created this character and I threw down this Goal: Prove that the gadgeteer's robot son isn't a REAL grandchild.
Holy fuck! The system suddenly worked like a charm and the results of that conflict are one of the most memorable moments in all of my gaming. It also demonstrates the unarticulated social mandate of Capes: When you propose a Conflict (Event or Goal) make sure it threatens something someone else at the table cares about. To which I'm sure Capes fans and Tony are all going, "Well Duh." Except for the fact that almost everyone I've talked to who has played Capes and didn't like it failed to do that one simple thing. Almost all of them do what we tried to do which is throw down a Goal they want their character to achieve and hope someone opposes it.
It should be noted that The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach has a very similar unarticulated social mandate. My con games also demonstrate that it's pretty easy to communicate the social mandate via example. When playing The Roach with new players I always grab the first scene and viciously attack another player (socially or emotionally usually) in front of a Pembertonian. This is usually enough to set the tone of the game and the next thing I know everyone is at each other's throats (often mine!).
Now there ARE games that very clearly express their social mandate. I think Dogs in the Vineyard is to be commended in this regard. Everyone shows up to a Dogs game knowing they're there to solve the town's problems by any means necessary and every Dogs GM knows their job is to reveal the town and escalate conflicts. Plain and simple, almost board game like.
Spione's discussion of The Cold (driving a wedge between the spy's personal connections and his job as a spy) is crystal clear. Without this I could easily imagine a group of people getting together and trying to do a bunch of "spy stuff" and wondering why nothing was happening.
Dirty Secrets' Handbook is half a book dedicated to nothing but the social mandate. This is another game that for my group wasn't really working until I said, "The book recommends that everyone have a working theory and try to push that into play." Bam. Problem solved. Up until that point everyone had sort of resigned themselves to the idea that the solution was "random" and therefore wasn't trying to achieve anything and sort-of expecting the game mechanics to reveal the story to them.
I think the Social Mandate is different from Creative Agenda. I think it's different than the larger Social Context. I even think it's slightly different than just, "What is it your game is about?" I think it's related to, "What do the players do?" but I think it's more specific than that.
How does this sit with you?
Jesse
Callan S.:
Hi Jesse,
I think it's kind of redundant and perhaps a little defensive. Take non roleplayers playing a boardgame - if their a bunch of flightly, no concentration people, they just aren't going to really follow and play those rules. That's just the way it is, there's no point putting something in the rules to tell these people to sit down and concentrate.
But in roleplay games, well, weve had basically very shit rules for a number of years and it's engendered a culture of 'ignore the rules' in people who actually are the concentrating, non flighty type. Indeed this culture promotes ignoring the rules, then judging the game - and passing around that judgement through word of mouth. You just have to deal with that from the flighty air heads, but from people who could have used it properly it's a real concern.
I don't think a text can instruct a person how to not fail at effectively using the text - if the persons gunna fail at it, they'll fail at using the part that tells them how not to fail to begin with. They'll ignore that advice as much as they ignore any other bit.
But discussion about the gaming culture, like on this forum and on others, that could change the culture. Make it a bit closer to that mandate. You know, one could start suggesting that gamer chicks dig gamer guys who do stuff like in that mandate...err, perhaps a sexier word than mandate could be used. Anyway, it's true...to some extent, I bet!
Moreno R.:
Hi Jesse!
There one thing that I am not sure I understand abot this: you see this "social mandate" as a specific kind of omission in the rules text, or it's something more? Because in your examples I only see game text that miss talking about very important aspects of the GAME, not of the social understanding of the players, and I am not sure I am not missing something here.
For example, I see the description of "the cold" in Spione, associate with the indication about using the maneuvers to put the principals more and more in the cold, as a very clear and explicit game rule, like "say yes or roll the dice" in DitV. I never played Capes, But I have encountered rpgs that didn't explain "how to play" to the players, and I consider that a fault of the game rules, not some sort of addendum that the designer should have put in the book as an help...
Filip Luszczyk:
Jesse,
I like the term. More specifically, I like the idea of having a concrete term to describe this thing. Normally, I've been talking about "driving instructions" when it came to communicating this thing in the book, and indeed, I feel multiple games fail to express it correctly and/or fully. You can't assume everyone will automatically know how to use your mechanical procedures, if only because people tend to come to the table with their own assumptions, sometimes grounded in the years of playing different games. The procedures are half of the system - what exactly you do with them and even how you think about them is the other part. You can have that little rule on p. 29 that's crucial to the game producing the experience it should, and the game will break unless you stress its importance enough.
For example, I've been preparing to run Panty Explosion recently. I know the authors have a clear picture of how to play the game in their heads, but I can read the text on and on and I still can't figure out what exactly I should do with the game - not on the basis of the text itself, anyway. Page after page, I need to work out what the people who wrote it had in mind - either using outside information, or filling in the blanks with my own assumptions, if there's nothing to base my guesses on. Oddly, it didn't read that way back in 2006 - but then, I think I wasn't as careful about projecting my own assumptions on the text back then as I am now.
Or, the Pool. A friend of mine discussed it pretty intensively on a Polish forum this week. The text tells him how to roll the dice and stuff. However, he had to learn how to play the thing by reading Ron's posts here on the Forge.
Also, I don't agree with the notion that DitV perfectly communicates all the essentials. It's well written for sure, but it still leaves space for injecting one's previously acquired assumptions. I didn't learn how to play DitV so that it doesn't break from the book. I learned how to play it effectively by reading pages of threads on the forums (and yeah, I decided to ignore some of these later on, but that's another thing). Whenever I hear about DitV being a Golden Standard of Clarity, something in me screams. Somehow, I didn't have to read fourty pages of threads to learn D&D. Seriously, was it my failure to understand the text, or were the people who didn't have problems with it playing with the author, or with someone who played with the author?
However, maybe the problem is in the complexity. A role-playing session can be strikingly complex when you get into the details. "The minimum" might be hard to accurately describe, especially if you take into account the possible differences in the range of natural behavior of potential readers. That is, you might do a good job defining it, but still fail to communicate it due to the reader's assumptions.
Now. I'd really like to know how to communicate the social mandate effecively in the text. I know it might be quite difficult in the game I'm currently developing, and at the same time I'll have to express it very effectively in order for it to work without me at the table. But it's something different than just providing the procedures.
It's about passing a certain paradigm of having fun with the game in the text. And this is... tricky.
Ron Edwards:
Hi there,
The reason I've always avoided terminology for this stuff is that its lack is, as I see it, a specific flaw or pathology in the culture of role-playing. Because all that stuff you're describing is expected and normal in the pursuit of any other social, leisure activity. You don't find it in the text describing rules for card games, for instance. But without it, any card game is impossible.
As it happens, I've outlined the principles, as I see them, for what you're talking about. It's in the first post of the scary awful brain-damage thread from nearly two years ago. No surprise that nobody paid attention, eh? However bezillions of views that thread got, and I doubt if more than a dozen people actually read the portion I'm talking about, in the first section of the first post, all in fucking bold text too.
Best, Ron
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