Let's See - Rethinking "Sim"
Simon C:
I've been following with interest Vincent's discussion of "Right to Dream" play on his blog. I agree with him that "Right to Dream" is a far more useful handle than "Sim" ever was. The only problem is that "Right to Dream" describes a play style that I've not really experienced, and it leaves me without a good name for the style of play that made up the bulk of my gaming for a number of years.
For about two years, my friends and I played two or three long-running games loosely inspired by Traveller, Blake's Seven, and later, Firefly. We'd play hard-living mercenaries, outlaws and entrepreneurs living aboard a run-down spaceship on the fringes of civilised space. Play usually revolved around pulling off some heist, getting into trouble with the law, or doing jobs for shady characters. We used a variety of rules sets, never really finding a good fit. We tried Space Master, d20 variants, Savage Worlds, homebrews, and unholy combinations of all three. That we had a coherant creative agenda seems likely - play was consistently fun, and there were few conflicts between players at the table. The rules-hopping was generally a product of trying to find a balance between two aesthetic preferences - that the system provide a consistent and coherant model of the imagined world, and that it be reasonably quick and easy to use.
What we desired from play was not exactly realism, but the appearance of realism. We wanted a system that would back up our understanding of the game's fiction, so if, for example, a character was billed as a legendary bad ass, the system would enable them to be effective in that role. We wanted the system to tell us the results of characters' actions, and for those results to roughly (but not exactly) match our expectations.
It's hard for me to express what the main rewards of play were. Personally I got a lot out of playing characters that were unusual and clearly non-human, but doing so in a way that made the character feel believable and part of a real world. My most memorable character was "Ook", an Orangutan-looking alien from a jungle planet, who piloted the ship with his prehensile feet, wore goggles, and slept in a hammok in his quarters, which were filled with a hydroponic dope-growing apparatus. I think I had most fun when Ook's foibles and oddities butted up against the "realities" of the game world. It was fun when "just playing my character" got us into trouble. I think all the players enjoyed these moments to some extent, and each character had their own traits that could be relied upon to cause trouble.
The majority of play though, was about getting out of trouble. We'd invest a lot of time in planning elaborate heists, working out the details of contingency plans, deceptions and ambushes. Inevitably, we'd end up in firefights (and this was the source of most of the rules tension) which we wanted to be just deadly enough to make them a serious proposition, but not so deadly that there was a high rate of character turn-over. We wanted PCs to survive gunfights much more than NPCs, but we didn't want any different rules. We had a strong "rules are the physics of the game-world" bent at the time, and wanted the rules to reflect a gritty, hard-jawed reality.
So what was out creative agenda. I'd always thought that it fit somewhere into "Sim". It's not a style of play that I'm particularly interested in revisiting, so I was never hugely concerned with pinning down the fundamentals that made it work. Vincen'ts discussion though has got me wondering. His "Right to Dream" sounds only partly like what I'm describing, and sometimes sounds like the opposite. On the other hand, I'm not comfortable calling this "Step on Up" or "Story Now" either.
"Step on Up" is the strongest contender, but it doesn't feel quite right. There were definitely elements of challenge in gameplay. When I was GMing, my usual practice was to present a situation to the players, and challenge them to "solve" the situation - "how do we get the diamonds back off the space-Yakuza?" or "how do we hide this stolen ship from the space-FBI?" A lot of the stories that got told about sessions later on were about times when the PCs survived enormous odds, or pulled off unlikely successes. So I can see how "Step on Up" could be a valid diagnosis. It feels off to me though, because what we were celebrating was not player success, it was PC success. Our play didn't have a lot of the hallmarks of Step on Up play. There was no rules manipulation, no optimization, and no real sense of winning or losing. One time all the PCs died when their ship ran into an asteroid, and we thought it was awesome. On the other hand, there was a great deal of revelling in the fact that our characters got no special breaks from the rules. There was no fudging, and no handwaving. The characters were treated just like everyone else in the setting, and if they did better than anyone else, it was because of luck and skill from the player. It could be described as Step on Up, but it was a weird kind where you intentionally hamstring yourself to make your success more impressive, and where failure is celebrated as affirming that PCs do not have special status. So I guess you could call it Step on Up play, with a large suite of "Sim" techniques, using the new (and incredibly useful) definition of Sim as a body of techniques, rather than an agenda.
But a lot of what we were doing was also about celebrating the setting, and the "rightness" of the characters. It was about enjoying the experiences of play, and about skillfully portraying the characters as a part of the setting. This goes back to my enjoyment of playing Ook coming from portraying something interesting in the fiction. It's also related to something that was a high priority as a GM - impressing the players. It wasn't enough just to present an interesting and challenging situation - the situation had to feel natural and logical as part of the setting. I think this is the stuff that would previously have been called a Simulationist agenda, that we now recognise as techniques.
Calling it Step on Up still kind of rankles with me though. At the time we would have rejected the idea out of hand. Competitive play was for those "other" roleplayers, the juvenile ones who hadn't figured out how to play properly yet. We knew that "real" roleplaying was about portraying a character accurately, about simulating a coherant world, about creating interesting ingredients and throwing them together to see what happened. That idea that what we were doing was "real" roleplaying makes me think that what we were doing was a distinct creative agenda. I think you recognise a different Creative Agenda when what people are doing seems like not really roleplaying.
What I keep coming back to is the idea of "throwing elements together and seeing what emerges". This looks a bit like Step on Up because it has a strong element of challenge, of testing, but the point is not to beat the challenge with your awesome skills, it's to have the system affirm or deny your vision - the point is not victory, it's exloration. You turn up with a character who you claim is a legendary badass, and we say "Let's See". You play your character to type, the GM plays the world in a logical fashion, and the system tells us if the character is a badass or not. We play a gang of space-misfits, and we see what happens to them. Not because we're trying to beat the world, but because we're curious to see what happens.
That's why I'm pretty sure this isn't "Right to Dream" as Vincent describes it, where the point is that your vision of your character is not challenged. If you play a badass, we all work together to show off what a badass you are. If there are challenges, they only serve to re-enforce the vision of the character. The way we played, nothing was sacrosanct.
So I guess I'm not sure what to call what we played. I'd be ok with it being called Step on Up, but it doesn't feel quite right. Right to Dream seems to capture some of what we were doing, but the more Vincent describes it, the more it seems wrong. Reading back over this, the phrase that stands out is "Let's see". That seems as best a summary of the agenda of play as any.
Caldis:
I think the following bits are the most relevant bits of what I see as a creative agenda.
Quote from: Simon C on May 12, 2009, 07:09:24 PM
It was fun when "just playing my character" got us into trouble. I think all the players enjoyed these moments to some extent, and each character had their own traits that could be relied upon to cause trouble.
The majority of play though, was about getting out of trouble. We'd invest a lot of time in planning elaborate heists, working out the details of contingency plans, deceptions and ambushes. Inevitably, we'd end up in firefights (and this was the source of most of the rules tension) which we wanted to be just deadly enough to make them a serious proposition, but not so deadly that there was a high rate of character turn-over. We wanted PCs to survive gunfights much more than NPCs, but we didn't want any different rules. We had a strong "rules are the physics of the game-world" bent at the time, and wanted the rules to reflect a gritty, hard-jawed reality.
This is a bit of guessing and reading in on my part so I may be totally out to lunch or just off on some of the details but let me know if it makes sense. If not give me some more details about where I'm off.
You are playing a band of characters who are freebooting, troublemakers trying to get ahead and usually getting into trouble. Even if you make an absolutely perfect plan it's very likely something will go wrong that gets you into a gunfight, heck you probably even planned most scenarios to get into gun fights. You dont have pc's suddenly deciding to settle down (or if you do it's a quick side thing that ends up as a chance for more trouble or the character is retired and replaced). Players arent judged based on how smart and tactical their actions are but rather how appropriate they are for the character, if he's an idiot that shoots anything that looks at him funny it's ok if he gets us into trouble. There's no questioning of a characters loyalty (or not serious questions anyways) and there's no way the characters quit the questionable jobs to settle down in a more civilized lifestyle. It's not badassery or goodness like Vincent was talking about that's not being challenged in the game it's something else, something more like the outsider/rogue agents fixer role. That positioning allows the gm to constantly come up with new ideas of missions for the characters and the players know how they should react to the circumstance.
That looks a lot like Right to Dream to me.
whiteknife:
I'm not sure what to say about that (other than that I like the sound of "Let's see") But I think this matches my preferred play style exactly.
contracycle:
Quote
So I guess you could call it Step on Up play, with a large suite of "Sim" techniques, using the new (and incredibly useful) definition of Sim as a body of techniques, rather than an agenda.
It is? This is news to me, and doesn't seem very convincing.
Quote
That's why I'm pretty sure this isn't "Right to Dream" as Vincent describes it, where the point is that your vision of your character is not challenged.
Well having now dug up and read the bulk of the thread, it seems to pretty weird IMO right there; Vincent seems to have leaped on a particular player activity as definitional of the CA, which makes little sense to me. I don't see that as being particularly valid - one particular person may have such a desire to dream their ideal PC, in fixed and determined way, but what this has to do with the kind of social contract that is negotiated among a group is not clear to me. It seems to me that a group seeking the right to dream of, say, a sort of Tolkienesque world, is agreeing right there to grant the right for that world, not for anything that any player might wish to dream about.
By your description it does sound like Sim to me, albeit with a side salad of semi-gamist action to liven things up. I don't think thats unusual, you could Sim a boring day at the office where nothing happens but it has little draw in terms of imaginary content. Similarly it is inevitable that unless you are simulating socially isolated characters they are going to encounter interpersonal problems and moral conundrums as a part of their simulated social experience, but the existence of this type of content does not convert it into Narr.
Simon C:
Quote from: Caldis on May 12, 2009, 08:33:24 PM
You are playing a band of characters who are freebooting, troublemakers trying to get ahead and usually getting into trouble. Even if you make an absolutely perfect plan it's very likely something will go wrong that gets you into a gunfight, heck you probably even planned most scenarios to get into gun fights. You dont have pc's suddenly deciding to settle down (or if you do it's a quick side thing that ends up as a chance for more trouble or the character is retired and replaced). Players arent judged based on how smart and tactical their actions are but rather how appropriate they are for the character, if he's an idiot that shoots anything that looks at him funny it's ok if he gets us into trouble. There's no questioning of a characters loyalty (or not serious questions anyways) and there's no way the characters quit the questionable jobs to settle down in a more civilized lifestyle. It's not badassery or goodness like Vincent was talking about that's not being challenged in the game it's something else, something more like the outsider/rogue agents fixer role. That positioning allows the gm to constantly come up with new ideas of missions for the characters and the players know how they should react to the circumstance.
That looks a lot like Right to Dream to me.
Right on! Yeah, your analysis is spot on in terms of the way things went down in play. Absolutely if someone made a character who was all "actually what you're doing is wrong - I'm outta here", that would have been totally against the spirit of the game. Even questioning the morality of the character's choices was not really acceptable - they're roguish outlaws, not desperate criminals. That aspect of it gels very nicely with Vincent's description of Right to Dream. But it seems to miss the "Let's see" aspect that we found important.
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