System Transforms Situation... And Situation Informs System?
jburneko:
We talk a lot about how System transforms Situation. What we don’t talk a lot about is how Situation limits or informs our choices about how to employ the System. This is a topic that is becoming increasingly important to me and I’ve tried to address it in various ways in various places never really to my satisfaction. Reading all the talk about Traits and Color/Reward buy in has inspired me to try again.
The most straightforward example of what I’m talking about from my own play is concerns a session of Dogs in the Vineyard, I was GMing. A Lieutenant of the Territorial Authority was investigating the rumors of a “vigilante organization” (i.e. The Dogs). He had a young girl, a member of the Faithful who had a grudge against The Dogs, housed in a Hotel guarded by armed men. The PC Dogs wanted the Lieutenant to turn the girl back over to them.
There are a couple of things you have to understand about my mindset going into this situation to understand the example. First of all, I was very committed to the idea of not playing the Lieutenant like a tyrannical military ideologue. Second of all, at the top of the scene I was highly committed to pushing things all the way to gun-fighting.
One of the two Dogs in the situation rolled very, very badly and Gave after just one or two exchanges. The tension at the table was so thick you could cut it with a knife. The second Dog held out and eventually came up with this raise, “I take hold of the Lieutenant’s gun, place the barrel in my mouth, and dare him to pull the trigger.”
I Gave. Here’s the important thing, mechanically I had the dice to keep going. I didn’t even need to escalate. However, from a situational stand point I felt emotionally trapped. Yes, I could have done other things as a See other than pull the trigger but nothing felt satisfying. Nothing felt, “true to how I wanted to play the Lieutenant” if that makes any sense.
I’ve told this story to various people and sometimes I’m met with a very interesting criticism. It’s been suggested that what I did reduces the game to being about pushing the GMs buttons rather than ridding the system out to its conclusion. The attitude seemed to be that a Dog’s GM should more or less operate like a black-jack dealer who has to push while under 17 and must stand over 17. Basically, that the GM should, no matter what, keep going until either the Dogs Give or it become mathematically clear that the GM can’t deliver any more fallout. That’s a baffling mindset to me because it seems to come from the viewpoint that the game is not a tool for expressing something but rather is a machine that creates something on its own.
Ron’s games seem to employ subtler, harder to define aspects of the same principles. I’ve played two games of “It Was a Mutual Decsion” one game that was awesome with aspects that I consider in the top moments of my entire play history (in the same category as the Lieutenant experience above). The other game was much, much weaker.
The reason for the second game I chalk up to the fact that I was playing with people who really didn’t buy into the “break up” aspect of the game and were only there because they wanted to see what this whole “wererat” thing was about. As a consequence, what they did was pretty much grab black dice at every turn with almost no regard for what was happening with the actual relationship in the fiction.
I even tried to discuss this at the time and was met with serious resistance revolving around the idea that if they were doing something wrong the game needed elements to counter-balance their behavior. They even went so far as to point to the sheet with the characters and their friendships on it and said something like, “this isn’t very interesting” and then pointed to the pile of black dice and said, “this is VERY interesting” then pointed back at the sheet and said, “if this is supposed to be the focus of the game there needs to be more to keep me focused on it.”
Spione takes the principle I’m getting at here to an even higher level. There’s wonderfully clear social mandate to “put the spies in the cold.” And then a wonderful tool is provided to do just that, namely, the Spy and the Guy sheets. All you have to “to do” is split the spy’s priorities between the elements on the Guy sheet and the elements on the Spy sheet. There’s even a built in throttle to make the story go faster or slower: how much pressure you put on the spy’s Supporting Cast.
But there are no mathematical meters for these things. There are no Cold Points like the Static in Lacuna or Tension in Dead of Night to measure how “deep into the cold” the spy is or to track or constrain individual player input. Supporting Cast do not carry any kind of “stress” determinate like Pain in Darkpages or even “checking them off” as in Trollbabe. These elements (when combined with the fun “wind up toy” resolution system) have a palpable systemic effect even though they are wholly fictional components.
What I’m trying to get at is that the emotional commitment of the players to the SIS can be relied upon as a limiter for engaging the more mechanical aspects of the game without having to fall back on Pavlovian rewards or over structuring the acceptable player input. In other words, the *designer* can lock down and position certain elements of the SIS as part of the nature of the game and the evocative nature of that positioning is, itself, part of the System that drives play in a meaningful manner. I want to talk about how to more deliberately harness this phenomenon.
Jesse
Marshall Burns:
This is something I've been thinking about a lot for the past few months. It came up because I was trying to write an article about constructing resolution mechanics to facilitate particular "shades" of action, so t'speak, and I realized I couldn't write that article until I tackled this issue.
It revolves around something that, in my head, I'm calling "Expression." It's a part of System, and it's specifically the system(s) by which we express things in the SIS in actionable terms. Statistics and numbers, from attributes to damage, are part of this, but most if it is done without numbers, in wholly qualitative terms.
This is just me getting a foot in the door here to say that I've got something I want to contribute to this discussion, but I've got to pry it out of my brain first. Hopefully, I'll be back.
-Marshall
Ron Edwards:
Hi Marshall,
The concept you're calling expression is already terminologically present in the term Shared Imagined Space - it's the "shared" part, meaning spoken, heard, and spoken again.
The new term seems like a good idea as a property of System in and of itself, though. The IIEE concept is definitely a part of it, although limited to resolution.
Best, Ron
Marshall Burns:
Yes, IIEE definitely is part of it. Effect is particularly important. And the whole issue of the application of Traits? That too. And using Psyche scores to guide your roleplaying in the Rustbelt, as well as applying Injuries, and deciding what stat to roll.
But I ain't quite buyin' this:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on December 05, 2008, 01:46:56 PM
The concept you're calling expression is already terminologically present in the term Shared Imagined Space - it's the "shared" part, meaning spoken, heard, and spoken again.
I'm talking about the way we share things, and how that has particular effects that can be assessed & gauged by the players, and prompted & reinforced by clever design.
As a quick example, something I discovered while playing kill puppies for satan:
Despite the book's explanation of the stats, Mean is NOT strength & dexterity, nor is Cold intelligence, and the same goes for the "correspondences" given for Fucked Up and Relentless. When Crypter brought that TV down on the pawnbroker's head from behind, her player didn't roll Mean because that required strength and dexterity. She rolled Mean because Crypter was being a mean motherfucker. The way she described the action, things like "is she strong enough to knock him out with it?" didn't matter; the question was, "is she mean enough?"
But that's just a small reflection of this thing that I've been grappling with for a long time now. (It won't come out of my head! Arrrg)
-Marshall
jburneko:
Marshall,
I sadly don't know Kill Puppies for Satan very well but your basic example brings up an interesting illustrative hypothetical. Assume for a second that a player makes his highest score Mean. I've seen two basic attitudes about that. One I call System First, the other I call Fiction First.
The System First approach looks at this and says I want my character to be Mean a lot so I will make his highest score Mean. In addition such a player usually puts a lot of effort into "jiggering" the fiction so as to justify being able to act Mean. They also tend to use a lot of language like, "Being Mean is what the system rewards me for doing."
The Fiction First approach looks at this and says when my character is Mean, I want him to be scary effective, but the score itself says NOTHING about how often or how much they desire the character to be Mean. Indeed they might want to try and play the character as cool as possible allowing their feelings about the fiction to dictate when they actually decide to be Mean up to and including never. Such a player is usually also asking the group to apply pressure in an effort to find the character's Mean boundary.
Does that line up with what you've been thinking about?
Jesse
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