Walking Eye interviews me
Callan S.:
I think you may be taking me the wrong way and I wont get into what I might seem to have been doing. Not directly, anyway.
My first point is that how we agree to fiction does matter that much, since we can dip to zero agreement and given a strong procedure, keep on ticking. If I were graphing the amount of agreement it'd drop to zero in my example '(though we are hitting the default then taking that on, making fiction, working something out - but in between were not agreeing?)', but then cause were all imaginative and we can take the ball the rules punt to us, we'll start to think of something individually and onward we all start to work on something...so the fiction agreement graph would steadily rise from zero (and yeah it bounces up and down - like your government work example - I get this!).
Indeed in saying this I aught to appear pretty laissez-faire in terms of your 1 & 2. A bouncing graph line, totally!
But given it can drop to zero and nothing catches on fire, 'how' we agree on fiction doesn't matter that much. Yes, it catches on fire in your party order example, but that's due to an absence of chess like procedure (beyond 'the GM puts his foot down'). How we agree will matter in terms of what creation comes out of our activity, but in the purely physical terms of whether the machine/instrument that were all operating (and are part of) and whether that machine is working, how we agree on fiction doesn't matter. Does it?
The stress on the how of the fictional agreement made me think of the smelly chamberlain thread. What I'm getting at is if someone (or everyone, even) breaks the chess likes rules, but then if they come to a fictional agreement they act as if that fictional agreement is all that matters. Like they don't even have to recognise they broke the chess like rules, as long as they agreed on fiction.
That's what I'm seeing with stressing the 'how' in how they agreed, particularly when connected to fiction alone. The 'how' isn't even the most important part - yes, they agreed - but if they are sitting there as a group acting like they didn't break rules that they originally set out to follow, when actually they did and they are acting like they are following those rules and always have been...I dunno? Intellectual dishonesty? Denial? Some sort of error!
That's what I saw with the smelly chamberlain thread - it may have written to show something else, but it involved people agreeing on fiction while breaking rules they intended to follow (the GM decides X, but then the players just decide it themselves...but since they agree on how the fiction turns out, no one notes this contradiction) and not acknowledging that in any way. Not that I read, anyway - I might have missed something.
Or alternatively I think the 'how' is not being used in a big enough sense - that if someone/several people make an agreement that breaks a prior one, and yet they never talk about breaking it, then they didn't agree to breaking it. But in that case there is no 'how' they agreed, since they didn't agree to break it. So I'm not sure 'how' is the right word.
Okay, that post went longer than expected. At least in terms of it's foundation, would we both agree it's physically possible a pair or group of people (doing any sort of activity, even outside RP) might agree to do something that contradicts/breaks their previous agreement on what they intend to do, yet not acknowledge that break?
Calithena:
Anecdotally checking in to help with history:
1) The design culture that produced Traveller, D&D, Chivalry and Sorcery, etc. was a design culture primarily of wargamers. Many RPGs started as man-to-man wargames, as interlude scenarios in wargaming campaigns (the origin of that word in our hobby, where it actually means more or less what it means), or as an alternative kind of thing to play set in the same imaginary worlds as the wargames. Furthermore, stuff like Chainmail (D&D) and Trillion Credit Squadron (Traveller) etc. shows the early existence of a kind of hybrid wargame-RPG mode of play that existed in the early days of the hobby. However,
2) This kind of play was in my experience very rare 'in the field' even by the late seventies. The people who played these games usually - again, not always, but usually, and OMMV - played them as RPGs or proto-RPGs without the same connection to wargames by and large. It did happen but it was not common - the party of adventurers doing its thing in fictional space (even if it was just killin' and lootin') was the dominant paradigm. But,
3) I'd love to see some self-conscious design that moved back and forth between an RPG level and a war/kingdom/campaign management level functionally. TSR tried it many times and it never really worked right IMO. I'm one of those 'good GMs' who occasionally pulled it off at the table, but unlike some of the things people try to formalize in gaming, this one could use more serious attention. It's fun.
Callan S.:
I was surprised to hear of an alternating sessions of wargame/fictional adventurings, even if it only lasted a short while. Or did it? I mean, what do we traditionally have now - usually quite formalised combat rules being played out, then some alot of fictional stuff, then a combat, then fictional stuff...that alternating is all just happening in the one session, nowadays, rather than being spread over game sessions.
Ron Edwards:
Documentation of the phenomenon actually happening is scarce. Some blend of assumption, ideal, or default that's evident in the game texts of the day, but that's all.
Best, Ron
Erik Weissengruber:
[Not enough of an AP to merit a posting there. Think of this as an empirical addendum to the play style discussed in this post]
Two (3?) years ago, year-long Burning Wheel game using the "Valley of the Mist" campaign pack for the FGU game Bushido as the setting. Players were deeply invested in their well-developed characters, webs of allies had been built up, lots of in-fiction detail had been built up.
Penultimate session was set up as 4-5 simultaneous Fights! One entire session was devoted to the PC's confronting the massed evils of the Valley of the Mists. The Fight! mechanics always involve some beliefs and instincts, but the inter-player or player-GM in-character dialogue was quite succinct. Most of the session involved scripting and determining results.
The players had done some tentative scouting of the Valley earlier. This was the showdown. Rather than play out fight after fight with the denizens of the Valley, we decided to play out the military campaign in one big session.
We knew that the following session would be devoted to detailed RP-ing of the consequences of that big dust up, with the future of the province at stake (would the warrior monk return to take his place at his ducal father's court?).
I found that, in this case, alternating a big all-fight evening with acting out the consequences to be highly satisfying.
The Circles and Relationship mechanics oblige you to link social interaction to stake setting and dice-governed resolution, so Role Playing is closely linked to conflict mechanics, character sheet details, etc. So the "war game" and the "role play" are rooted in the same procedures.
1st gen playgroups might have had informal procedures or written rules mechanics (XPs, gold to buy rumors and training and magic in RuneQuest) to allow quick switching between one part of the dyad to the other.
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