Traits and the darkness that comes before
Callan S.:
The title is a reference to the prince of nothing fantasy trilogy and in itself refers to discovering not what is happening now, but discovering what made 'now' exist to begin with. This thread is a split off from Can someone explain the true reason behind "traits" (PtA style) to me?
The question there was about traits and how they are functionally employed. But before that, in what way did the author intend to present them? I'm going to focus on a post from Ron in that thread,
Quote
Callan, the question you keep coming back to is how text is involved in the process. I think that it must be said: text alone cannot do it, at least not yet. For one thing, I can count the number of times that everyone at the RPG table has read the actual text on the fingers of one hand. For another, the state of the hobby is such that one-on-one, or one-on-group teaching is the standard expectation. A person who GMs a game is supposed to teach it to everyone else; if there's no formal GM, then the person who teaches it to everyone else actually becomes something of a formal GM anyway.
So the problem is not really with the text in relation to play, it's with the text in relation to whatever real-person teaching process is at work and only then in relation to play. Believe me, speaking as a struggling author in this hobby, the capacity of readers and role-players to read exactly what they expect, in full defiance of the words on the page, is astonishing. And unfortunately, since only one or at most two people are reading it, there is no corrective mechanism among the group as a whole for whatever they think they've read. We do not know yet, as a subculture, how to make text and learning and subsequent play actually work together. "Write more clearly" is a fine thing, I struggle with it constantly, but it's only one nail, and hammering it ever harder isn't the sole aspect of the solution. This is a work in progress at the largest scale, across many games and certainly across many years to come.
This isn't to shut you down - far from it. You are asking yet another excellent question from the guts of this thread: what should text fairly present about using a technique of this kind? I think it's fair and even right for you to claim this particular question as yours, the thing you're really seizing upon in this thread. It would be absolutely excellent to make a whole thread on just that one thing.
Because, I tell ya, I can't keep up with the convolutions and ins and outs of this thread. It's too big. It's had too many questions raised and too many (although few) settled. More stuff in it is too much for me to manage at the same time as working with parallel dialogue in new threads.
I think you're the best person to start a new thread about your question, most especially maintaining the pointed observation, perhaps even accusation, that I entered into the "teach this system" mode rather than "discuss this text's actual written rules" mode in order to talk about using Traits in playing The Pool. That was absolutely right. I want to get at that and we need a thread to do it.
Starting at the top again, because right here in the words 'at least not yet' seems to be a goal I haven't really seen expressed in the gaming community at large. Usually what I see is some variant on 'Text alone cannot do it' and it stops dead, right there. But for anyone else reading, if you feel you already add 'at least not yet' or just want to try the idea to see what it's like, by all means swing into the thread and show me wrong! :) ....please....
Quote from: Ron
Callan, the question you keep coming back to is how text is involved in the process. I think that it must be said: text alone cannot do it, at least not yet.
If it's a goal for text alone to at some point be sufficient, where is the corrective process that might eventually achieve it?
The way I see "teach this system", the process of teaching leaves no room to recognise that that the system itself may have failed to achieve the 'text alone is sufficient' goal. When we teach, we assume the student is the one which is lacking (in knowledge), rather than the text taught as being lacking.
The concern for productivity I'll express is, as system is never seen to be lacking (only the student is), I cannot see any corrective measure in place. When that is the case, the 'text is sufficient' goal will never be achieved.
That's one problem with trait usage (or even skill usage). Not so much their direct usage at the table, but what came before them (begat them), and whether that prior thing is self corrective or not.
But as said, this problem rests on whether 'text alone is sufficient' is actually a goal for the designer.
Going the other way, I think it is valid for a designer to decide their game involves a master & apprentice tutorage. However, if the game is sold on bookshelves, or downloaded, where is the master to learn from? To me, selling or downloading in this format says it is a 'text alone is sufficient' game (or an attempt at that). Again, I think even here with a master & apprentice goal, an author will have failed to meet his or her goal.
It's hard to give an actual play account for this, as it's about multiple plays and not the actual play part, but reflecting on it and considering whether it meets ones goals or not.
I'll refer to a recent throw together thing I made and played with my 9yo son. It canabalised components from D&D 4e (I wont indulge the notion I played 4e, though) and used the neat figures we had bought. I was investigating something else with its design, but the upshot was that we have run the same dungeon about six times so far and its intended for further plays until a target number. The dungeon is essentially static - some small components change, but it's essentially static. I sense (yes, just sense) that this is anathema to most roleplayers ("My god, the SAME (enjoyable) thing over and over?") and if it does serve as a distraction here, then I do feel somewhat shut down in having to start my own thread and include an actual play account in it that might result in such distraction.
Onto play. One key component is that there is a dungeon strength score and a good guys/heroes/the players strength. At the end of each dungeon run you are to roll a D6 for each (if the heroes lose the dungeon, they don't get to roll at all - when the centipedes got us once, that happened). Whichever gets to 100 first (yeah, that's a few dungeons) wins the whole thing/campaign. Okay, after running the dungeon for about the third time, I forgot to do this after the dungeon was completed - I had just gone onto packing up. This is terrible of me - this is the spine of the whole step on up (with each dungeon being a series of smaller step on up inside it). And my son said 'Shouldn't we be rolling for the strength thingie?' and he was right! I was not teaching him - indeed, on a pivotal component of the game he retaught me. He didn't teach me some new insight. It wasn't some new wiz bang concept to explore. He just taught me what I had forgotten but was vital. As much as I knew it was vital, I had forgotten it. Importantly, he invoked pure text to reteach me...okay, he said 'strength thingie', but he refered to exactly the procedure we had used with the d6's.
Another thing is that if you stop at a certain point in the dungeon, you get to roll a d6 for heroes strength. If you risk going further to a second check point, you get a d6+1 (this was written down). He did charge up here when...I hadn't fully prepped it, and more had an outline in mind (though I would only work within that outline). I had been thinking there should be a treasure once the vampire spawn (with the minature rules, not the minion rules) was defeated and spoke this aloud. He said that the +1 on the d6 was enough of a treasure! He grasped the larger step on up spine to realise it was a considerable treasure in itself! I didn't add any treasure. I feel he corrected me, or to be more exact, I reflected on play and it's talk, and I realised that putting (any more) treasure here didn't meet my goal. And again, he refered only to pure text - the +1 had been established in text (okay, scratched on a page in pencil, but text none the less).
Finally in the first parts of the dungeon the player can describe how some aspect of the dungeon helps the enemy and the player gets a resource (it's not policed, any statement will do), or nothing if they stay silent. The prob is (or starts with) that the first three rooms are the same winding corridor...and after playing it several times, its started to grate on me having this imagination applied to the same damn corridors over and over. I don't even have a prob with what he says, there's just something...askew, that I can't name. I want to change it - I even say to him when he's pausing to think one up 'you don't have to make one up' but he does (and yes I've even forgotten to do this once or twice (not deliberate!) and he's reminded me about it. Instead of drifting away from this thing that bugs me, yet not actually removing it from the rules, I have to face the rules aren't quite making me happy. Which makes me concentrate on not ignoring my own rules, but changing them to meet my goal, in future.
In terms of drifting, I'm not refering to agenda drift, but I am refering to part of what agenda drift involves - it ignores certain options that the player has. You can see in many forum posts (one to three a week on the D&D forums) where the group has been ignoring that the combat rules (for pretty much any older game) actually have the option of targeting other players...until that new (or troublesome old) player comes along. Then they say that player is bad, when the group has been in denial all this time, denying the option existed. They either don't self correct at all, throwing the player out, or call him bad and declare a no PVP rule. They never seem to admit they fucked up in 'forgetting' about the option/denying to themselves it exists, and then after admitting that, declare a no PVP rule. There's never that honesty, it seems - it's always someone elses fault or that someone else 'should' know better.
But it doesn't really stop there. This thread talks about what came before - why are the authors of the game observing that they have left the option to PVP in, yet so many end user gnash their teeth over this? Does this meet the authors goals? Or does he see it the same - the player used what he wrote in, but the author himself drifts away from it in his own play. And so the author denies that it exists to stop the design from meeting his own goals?
That's more of a broad, throw away question. It's good to mull on, but I don't want answers about something that broad from anyone. Really I don't want to ask any questions - no more than the ones I've asked in the past decade or so. Most RP folk don't seem to be interested in a 'text alone is sufficient' goal, not even out of mild curiosity, even as they insist important things are in the text. Basically I'm surprised the traits thread came up. Mostly, apart from the occasional post from me to test the waters (a recent one was on 'The GM can change any rule' in storygames...my god, the options denied), I'd just given up and beetled along, gathering what scraps I could.
That is to say, I'm not trying to prove anything and wont really bother to (I attracted a stalker on RPG.net and a zealot on storygames...I feel kind of done with working with the general public on it). It's just one of occasional pings to see if anyone else pings back.
Markus:
Hi Callan, "ping". :-)
Here's my 2c on the subject. Hmmm, let's see how to put it: I'm fully convinced that text can do "it" alone, but the real, functional, achievable goal is understanding what "it" is exactly. Right now, I can only offer a sports analogy, let me know if it's helpful or not.
Let's consider, hmm, basketball for instance. Consider the following two sentences:
(1) I'm pretty sure that you can stuff all the rules and procedures called "a basketball game" in a few pages of plain text with a couple of diagrams.
(2) I'm absolutely sure that no encyclopedia will ever teach you to play basketball as a NBA pro.
Do you find the sentences above in contrast? I doubt so. But I feel that in the RPG community, something similar is silently at work. I mean, *of course* an rpg text will NOT teach you to play *in a satisfactory way*, or *in accord to an aesthetic canon*. Communicating aesthetic canons is what Art does, and we cannot realistically expect game designers to be *also* great artists.
However, and that's an important however, I think that a lot of rpg texts are vague about absolutely, 100% quantifiable stuff such as rules and procedures, and I don't find a plausible excuse for that. Curiously, this vagueness never comes out regarding *numerical* stuff: rules that imply the use of numbers. But when it comes to rules that regulate dialogue or interpersonal dynamics, a huge blur appears usually (yes, there are few notable exceptions!).
That's it for me as I currently understand it. Simply, a lot of this "qualitative" aspect is included in the "it" we discussed above (can text alone do "it"?). And, following this wrong assumption, a lot of the perfectly describable stuff gets dumped along in the blurry region.
Ideas? Comments?
M
Callan S.:
Thanks Marcus!
I think I get what you mean. I was thinking along these sorts of lines before and it makes me think about art. To use paintings as an example, the artist or a viewer can look at it and 'see' something there. For example, in this one I see...feel...great, unknown loss of real lives.
The thing is with art, you can't really tell someone they are wrong in what they see. You can say what the author has said he sees in it, and that has some weight if the person wants to know what the author wanted to convey. But you still can't really be wrong.
Okay, with a roleplay game I think it's fair for the author or other readers to see something moving in the texts of the book, like with my example above in regards to the painting. And I think here as well, you can't be wrong.
BUT in terms of mechanics, yes, you can be utterly, utterly wrong!!! What you see in the book, yeah, it's there in the art of the books creation, but no, that doesn't mean its in the mechanics as well. A good painting of a horse doesn't mean you can ride that horse, and a book about themes doesn't mean you can actually ride those themes in actual play. Mechanics use is a REAL event, its not what you see in the art - just like the painting of the horse, just because you can see something in the art of the text doesn't mean the actual, real event will have anything to do with the art you see.
So I'm wondering if amongst designers right now theres a bit of seeing something in the art, then assuming that thing is in the mechanics as well.
I take your point about the quatifyable stuff and yes, why don't they just code it down into pure, hard mechanical procedure? The above is perhaps one reason why - because it (again) disrupts the corrective process. The designer thinks what they see in the art is also in the mechanics, so they stop designing because 'it's there' and it never gets any better than blury design, as you put it. It can even degrade.
On a side note, I would like to say that I'm glad so many designers have had the guts to write something instead of being stuck in analysis paralysis. But if there is no corrective procedure there, it doesn't matter how much you put out, it'll never get better.
Markus:
Hi Callan,
just a quick note - I think you are slighlty misreading what I wrote (aaarggh, I don't know really, since english is not my 1st language, bu anyway):
What I tried to say is something way simpler than the (fascinating!) considerations in your last post. I'm not saying that mechanics cannot facilitate or even contain the 'seed' of a certain type of play: quite the contrary, in fact. I'm saying that mechanics will never contain the information needed to use them well, *according to one aesthetic canon*... BUT, this is not related in any way with the issue of not describing certain *rules*, such as those I mentioned above, and whether they are recognized as "rules" or not.
Practical examples: what on earth is a "trait"? what does it mean to "frame a scene"? what does it mean to "set stakes"? I could name a few games in which you find exactly the words above to describe game procedures, just as if those described above were as definite and understandable as "roll 1d8 and read the result". Maybe I'm a bit dumb, but to me, "frame a scene" without further guidance is as descriptive of a mechanic as "roll a die".
Last point: perfectly described mechanics are *not* in contrast with the creative use of them during play! Want an outstanding example? I might be repeating myself, but: Trollbabe.
bye
M
Marshall Burns:
There's a thing I've been thinking about. RPG texts are written to communicate the shape of the game's design. It tells you the names of all the pieces, and what their functions are, and it (maybe) gives you an operating procedure. And, if games were machines that you operated to yield a product, this would be perfect. But they aren't machines, they're instruments.
Game texts need to go beyond communicating the shape of the design (it's still important). They need to go beyond a book that tells you what all the pieces of a guitar are called, and how the concept of fretting the strings for different pitches works (and maybe there's a sidebar with the Law of Strings in it), and lots of techniques like pizzicato and the golpe and so forth. A game text should be like a book that instructs you how to play the guitar. It would have to include all of the technical stuff, but it should also tell you what it's for. It should discuss the effect of various techniques -- not just how to use them, but what happens when you do, and what that effect is good for.
My Rustbelt ashcan doesn't do that. It tells you the techniques and expects you to realize what the effects are. And there's been some people who didn't get it. I think I wrote it that way because I taught myself how to play it, and I taught myself how to play guitar, piano, banjo, mandolin, bass, and drums (figuratively & literally), and I expected everyone else to have the time, focus, and ability to do the same. Which isn't a reasonable expectation, is it?
-Marshall
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