What is Step on Up for?
Simon C:
I ignored D&D4E when it first came out. I know from experience that the kind of play it encourages isn't what I want from a roleplaying game. I didn't need to read the game to know that it wasn't for me.
But then a friend of mine came over and offered to leave the books for me to read. I thought "what's the harm?" and I was mildly curious about the game, so I thought I'd give it a look. So I read the books, and I became obsessed.
This was during the time I lived in Japan, when I had very few opportunities for gaming. I was also discovering a lot of new games online, and new ways of thinking about games. The tension between being really excitied about gaming, but having very little opportunity to play resulted in me spending a lot of time reading games, and a lot of time posting on the internet about them.
So I read D&D4 obsessively. Using images scanned from the books, I made a set of tokens for all the low-level monsters in the monster manual, and for a set of PCs. I was really excited about building encounters for play. One of the things I loved about the game was the mathematical precision of play. I liked working out character builds, prepping encounters, planning adventures. It was the same thing I liked about 3.5, in fact, the abilitiy to really master a complex set of rules, and to turn that mastery into exciting and fun play.
Finally I got a chance to actually play D&D4. It was a few people new to gaming, and some others who weren't particularly jazzed about D&D. We played, and it was reasonably fun. The combat was, as promised, tactical and challenging and engaging. A thing I noticed though is that one of the players, who hadn't roleplayed before, would basically shut down during all the sections of play that weren't combat, and then "come alive" for the combat part. Roleplaying was something he didn't know how to do, but combat made sense to him. It had concrete rules to follow, a clear objective, and no requirement for reference to a shared imagined space.
On the other hand, another of the players who liked roleplaying but wasn't so excited about D&D would basically shut down during the combats, doing whatever was appropriate for the turn but not really engaging in the outcome. But outside of combat, she came alive, talking to the NPCs, engaging with the "plot" of the adventure, and playing her character.
We played a couple of sessions over a long weekend, and there were moments of fun but a lot of disconnect and confusion. The most fun bit was when me and two of the guys just put the tokens down on a gridmap, and I improvised a dungeon for them using the tokens I had prepared. No story, no SIS, just tokens on the tabletop, dice, and tactics. I'd add tactical challenges like bridges over chasms, narrow corridors, traps and so on, and a small amount of colour, but there was essentially no SIS. Everything that affected anything people cared about was on the table, concrete, mechanical.
I wrote a little about this on my blog, here: http://simoncarryer.blogspot.com/2009/06/4e-and-fictional-causes.html
At the time I wrote that, my interest was how D&D4 related to the idea of "fictional causes" that Vincent had been talking about on his blog. My angle now is a little different.
D&D4 has no "fictional causes". Everything that matters to the rules of the game happens in the "real world", rather than in the fiction. What this does to play, I think is make it so people who care about beating challenges ignore the shared imagined space during combat, and that play outside of combat becomes an inconvenience. When a shared imagined space happens in 4E, I think it is due to the players caring about things other than beating challenges.
I want to posit that Shared Imagined Space is a pretty fundamental part of roleplaying. I think that what seperates games like D&D from games like "Descent" or "Warhammer Quest" or whatever is the degree to which play takes place in an imagined "space" - the degree to which we treat the events of the game as meaningful in and of themselves, rather than mattering just as a means to an end. If you wanted to play a game that was purely about beating challenges, or about competition, you wouldn't play a roleplaying game. The Shared Imagined Space is useless to you for beating challenges. What are people playing for then?
I think that people play roleplaying games to explore something meaningful to them, where "explore" means experience and produce fiction, and "meaningful" means references human concerns, addresses a theme, or presents ethical choices.
I want to suggest that "challenge" is a technique, a technique that's enjoyable in of itself, but also one that's useful for developing theme in roleplaying games. In the "right to dream" thread, I talked about games with phatic theme. I suggested a few of these: "Can good triumph over evil?" "Can a few heroes, working together, change the world?" "What does it take to defeat evil?"
Notice that in these themes, the question is about the abilitiy of the protagonists to achieve a goal. Play is not about questioning how the protagonists achieve their goal, or whether their goal is a worthwhile one. It focuses on the capability of the protagonists in their goal.
I think that Challenge is a technique that's very useful in addressing these themes. There is an obstacle to the characters' success, and we see, through play, whether and how they overcome it. In some games this is an empty question. We're not really interested in seeing the characters fail, so challenge is weakened, it's only the appearance of challenge. But in other games, the ability of the protagonists to achieve their goal is a meaningful question. Indeed, their success only has meaning to us if it's achieve against real opposition. Challenge then is a technique that helps us achieve theme, rather than a goal in and of itself.
Simon C:
You're thinking "what about games where there ARE fictional causes?" Doesn't the SIS become the arena in which players display their mastery?
I think kind of yes, kind of no.
After playing D&D4, I got a hankering for older D&D, the kind where manipulating the shared imagined space is vital to your character's survival. I played a lot of "Labyrinth Lord" which is a re-tooled Moldvay D&D.
I think that yes, in these games the shared imagined space is vital to character survival. But I also think that in these games challenge is less fundamentally the point of play. Another way of putting this is that I think that people are less accepting of fictional causes as they're more invested in beating challenges.
Callan S.:
Hi,
Quote
D&D4 has no "fictional causes". Everything that matters to the rules of the game happens in the "real world", rather than in the fiction. What this does to play, I think is make it so people who care about beating challenges ignore the shared imagined space during combat
Well no, what's happened is that you've prerendered the SIS - a bit like 'story before' is pre rendered. You made up a cave - it was an imaginative construct. But then you rendered it to hard details, and played with the hard details. The way you played, all of you, not just them, discarded the fictional element before play began. The model of play you worked from was one that discarded it in advance. Is there no point to step on up, or did you use a poor model?
Imagine this rule - on a square is a fire. How much fire does damage do? Well, the rules say the GM declares it, either D2, D4, D6, 2D6 or 3D6, or even zero!
Now say the players have stepped in fire before and the GM has called it at 2D6 damage.
So, what will happen if they step into the fire square this time?
It's not prerendered. There is no value written down. One can only refer to the previous fictional history. You don't know.
And what if in the fiction you'd just walked through a waterfall? The GM might declare it does zero damage because your drenched. You don't know. You can guess...you can imagine how it might turn out. And so imagining is a vital part of your tactical excercise. Mentioning the waterfall/drenching while at the table, ie contributing to the SIS, may very well affect the damage. And the damage, whether you can safely pass through that square or any other with fire in it, might very well mean the difference between winning and losing!
Of course it's not imagining because your just in luvvy wuvvy with imagining and it's just a wunderful mystical experience. Were out to win! (assuming there's a damn win condition)
It's imagining as a means to an end, rather than imagining for it's own sake. Quite the opposite of your idea 'we treat the events of the game as meaningful in and of themselves, rather than mattering just as a means to an end.'
So, here's a hard question, is there no point to step on up, or is it just a matter of what's holy to you (so to speak) is just a doormat to us (to put it bluntly), and you can't swollow that sort of treatment of the holy cow as being possible?
Don't get me wrong though - in having tactically imagined, one can latter treasure what one imagined as a fond and lovely memory. But it's just a nice memory.
Also some people might indulge in luvvy wuvvy imagining for it's own sake, at certain times in play. It's entirely possible to shift gears on that, as a group (entirely possible to fuck up on that too, but nm).
Simon C:
Callan,
Sorry, but I'm literally unable to discern a point in what you've written. Can you rephrase?
Jasper Flick:
I feel like this thread doesn't have any momentum right now, so I'll just throw in some AP, if you don't mind.
Currently, I'm playing in a weekly D&D4 game, through an online tool. If I'm prompted to describe it, I'd call it a miniature wargame, with some roleplaying elements.
We're playing some official adventure, which the GM customizes a bit. I'm playing for the challenge. I want to see if - and how well - we can beat encounters. I want to test how well the character I created can fulfill its party role. Considering the tactics during encounters, by default all that really matters is what's on the grid. No SIS if you will, just the game state.
The SIS comes into play when decision must be made "off the grid". For example, there's an infinite number of animated skeletons being summoned during an encounter. How do we stop that? Find an altar, pray to the correct god. Use clues to figure out which one. That's based on our understanding of the setting, what's in the books, what our characters know, what happened so far, what's been communicated... all components of Exploration. The SIS is like a distributed database in our heads that keeps expanding and synchronizing, just like our characters keep gaining levels. It's a tool, just like an attack modifier, both equally valid.
Outside of encounters, the SIS informs our decisions. Basically, what encounter to do next, and when, as well as a little "story". Personally I care very little about "story" here. It's totally predictable pulp, just window dressing for the encounters. And that's fine. We mostly use it to color what's happening. What our characters say, how they react to NPCs and monsters. It also colors our idle banter and what kind of jokes we make.
Here's a little anecdote.
I'm playing Piet, a dwarf fighter, who I decided is staunch and kills anything that threatens his civilization, period. Someone else plays Nallie, a halfling paladin. We're in the enemy keep, just slaughtered some goblins. We find a goblin stuck in a cell. Apparently, even other goblins didn't like this one. The goblin pleads to let him go, he'll be our slave and whatnot. Piet goes "it's a goblin, kill it". Nallie goes for talking, gets no useful info, then gives her word to protect the goblin and lets him out of the cell. Promptly, Piet kills the goblin, then gets smacked by Nallie. (Using the combat rules and stuff.)
The anecdote ends there, and didn't have any consequences for future events. It might've lead to some interesting theme, but we aren't in it for that theme, neither for intra-party conflict. It was just a little diversion, which was fun, as long as it didn't take too long.
(As an aside, I recognized the prisoner as a cliche comic foil planted in the adventure, and I hate those. Also, I like the GM for his challenges and not for his NPCs. All the more reason to kill it.)
Quote
I think that people play roleplaying games to explore something meaningful to them, where "explore" means experience and produce fiction, and "meaningful" means references human concerns, addresses a theme, or presents ethical choices.
Producing fiction? Don't really care about that.
Human concerns? I guess my personal concern is whether I created a viable character and can play him optimally.
Addressing a theme? Aside from little diversions, perhaps the human concern qualifies as a theme, otherwise none.
Ethical choices? Not the point of play. Once again perhaps as little short-lived diversions, but unwelcome as focus of play.
So, Simon, is what I described playing a roleplaying game, or something else?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page