Ruminations on the Impossible Dream Before Breakfast
Adam Dray:
I suppose we should get on the same page about these definitions. Let's use these going forward. If Illusionism is GM Force behind the Black Curtain at every step, and Participationism is GM Force out in the open at every step, then we don't have a term for "up front disclaimers about GM Force, then keeping it covert," which is the model I'm proposing is fairly functional.
Most interesting, in that thread Ron characterizes illusionism as the functional one and participationism as the dysfunctional one. That doesn't really jive with my own experience.
For example, I recently played in an excellent D&D 4E game run by my friend Daniel. There were ten players in two teams of five, pitted against one another. This is Dark Sun, and half of us were Veiled Alliance, the other half Templars. I was on the Veiled Alliance side, whose mission was to kill some Templar dude. The mission of the Templars, obviously, was protecting him. First encounter is staged in a combat arena--not as gladiators, but as people in the stands. My halfling ardent character had a daily power that would let me make a "suggestion," and I used it on the Templars dude to try to keep him from running away. When my roll whiffed, Daniel told me that I should take the daily power back, that he should have told us up front that the guy was going to escape this encounter--full stop. In fact, the guy had a teleport power that Daniel had forgotten to use.
Now, if he'd told us before the encounter started how this had to go down, I'd have felt happier about it. If he'd used some kind of covert Force to cover his mistake ("uh, he has a power that lets him teleport as an interrupt"), and I found out about it, I'd have been annoyed. I think Daniel did the right thing under the circumstances, though, telling us his mistake and letting us know that the rest of the adventure he'd planned was predicated on chasing this dude, so he could die or he'd need to end the game (and this was a one-shot thing at a game store). But given the goal of the encounter had been "get the Templar dude" and now I knew my character could not do that, I used my next round to flee the scene. I was effectively out of the encounter. Sure, a five-on-five PC-vs-PC battle could have been fun but a) lots of PCs die that way and b) "my guy" wouldn't stick around for that. So I hopped.
My point is that there was this moment of "oh shit" at the table when everyone realized that Daniel "had planned" to make sure the bad guy got away. I suspect other people were annoyed. I was. And it was quickly fixed by Daniel's honesty with us.
Daniel B:
@contracycle:
Quote from: contracycle on September 21, 2010, 06:00:45 PM
I've been ranting for some time that "story" means too many things and serves only to cloud discussions rather than illuminate them. One salient question to ask in terms of this disuccion is "Why is story a good thing?" It's taken as read that a "story" is what we want to come out of play, or that "story" should be the result of player actions, but what does that MEAN?
It means something specific when we talk about Story Now. That is a clear and precise usage which can be used meaningfully and constructively. Story now is essentially the characters as protagonists addressing premise. The story which then emerges through the action of play is then NOT a sequence of events as such; it is specifically a moral or understanding derived from the answer to the premise which the players chose to give.
Yup, okay.
Quote from: contracycle on September 21, 2010, 06:00:45 PM
The unanswered questions are these: what is "story" FOR in Gamist or Simulationst play, if indeed it is for anything? Why should we ever talk about story when discussing non-Narr games? What kind of specific actions and behaviours would we call on to produce whatever kind of "story" this is?
;-)
Did I mention story in a Simulationist context? I never mentioned story, not even in the players-addressing-Premise sense you speak of. Given that I'm talking about neither Illusionism nor Players-addressing-Premise, we can just drop the confusing word "story" altogether and leave it with the Narrs.
So, what am I talking about? I mentioned "bite" earlier but that's probably too vague. I'll try to lead you to it with a question.
Contracycle, you mentioned being willing to concede control of the "story" if you're primarily there for exploration instead, but -- even in the cases you're supposedly there for exploration, is exploration really what you're looking for?
I mentioned the N64's Banjo-Kazooie as my own personal example. Let's examine each of the facets of exploration in detail and see if they're extraordinary:
Character - Bland characters. Face it. Banjo and Kazooie had somewhat interesting moves, but were otherwise boring (and even a tad obnoxious)Setting - Also bland. I (sincerely) kinda hoped to see Jinjos wandering around their village living their day-to-day Jinjo lives. No such luck. Blah.Situation - A witch steals a young girl's youth to enhance her beauty? Please! Done to death!System - The moves were decent. Something out of a Mario game. Nothing outrageously innovative though.Color - Okay, here I'll admit the colour was interesting, the mixing of theme lands. This helped. However, by itself, the colour couldn't have supported the game.
So, where does B-K get its magic? It combines the elements in a relatively unique combination to allow the player to learn the moves and grow with the characters, feeling the same sense of achievement that the characters themselves might feel if they weren't fictional. The emotions you feel when Grunty finally gets knocked off the tower .. it's like a tonic!
Contracycle, surely if this is as common a human experience as I think it is, you'll have a personal example of your own. Have there been any experiences you've had where you felt like you'd "won" or achieved a "victory", but not in the gamist sense? I'll leave it up to you to determine what it means to "win" in a non-gamist sense.
(Incidentally, I cut out quoting the rest of your post because I pretty much agree, so there's really no point in repeating.)
DB
contracycle:
Quote from: Daniel B on September 22, 2010, 09:07:29 PM
Did I mention story in a Simulationist context? I never mentioned story, not even in the players-addressing-Premise sense you speak of. Given that I'm talking about neither Illusionism nor Players-addressing-Premise, we can just drop the confusing word "story" altogether and leave it with the Narrs.
Cool. I was addressing myself to the thread as a whole.
Quote
Contracycle, you mentioned being willing to concede control of the "story" if you're primarily there for exploration instead, but -- even in the cases you're supposedly there for exploration, is exploration really what you're looking for?
I would say "yes", but also that it's not necessarily the only thing I'm there for. I also enjoy a bit of challenge etc. thrown into the mix.
I recently got to see Firefly, at last. There is one episode in which the action centres around the fact that the life support is off line because the engine is broken. Fine and all, this is all very dramatic and tense, except: the artificial gravity is working. The engine is DEAD, but the AG functions perfectly. This makes no sense to me, and I notice it. I know why it happens; it's because microgravity is hard to film, and thats really all there is to it. It's a common failing; TV has ships damaged by enemy fire, or natural disasters, burning broken and venting atmosphere, but the AG is fine. It's apparently indestructible, the most robust system on any ship, totally failsafe. And having noticed this, it would make it very difficult for me to play in an RPG of such a property, because my first question is going to be "how does the AG work?" And I'm going to use it, too: seeing as I know that nobody is set up for handling microgravity, you could virtually incapacitate a ship by turning it off (BSG has corridors full of loose crates). You could reverse it's direction again and again and bounce the crew from floor to ceiling until they were out of action. Which then begs the question, why is no one else in this setting looking at this question? In BSG, on several occassion they specifically target the FTL drives to prevent escape, but nobody targets the AG to leave the crew floating helpless.
So that is the kid of thing I'm interested in, and which attracts my attention. I'd happily trade a rather fixed plot for an AG that made sense, and which I can think about and interact with without throwing everything out of kilter.
Quote
Contracycle, surely if this is as common a human experience as I think it is, you'll have a personal example of your own. Have there been any experiences you've had where you felt like you'd "won" or achieved a "victory", but not in the gamist sense? I'll leave it up to you to determine what it means to "win" in a non-gamist sense.
Well, the example I';ve given most often - given that I have spent much more time as a GM than a player - is of a WoD vamp game in which I played the prince of a city. WoD establishes that on entering a city, incoming vamps have to report to the prince and request permission to feed, which makes sense. But as the prince, I found in play that I also needed to know who had left the city, becuase otherwise I had no idea what the total population actually was. I ended up communicating with neighbouring potentates to see if some of the people on my Missing list had recently passed through their turf. So in this sense, I discovered something that I had not known before, teased out a bit of implicit logic in the setting that was not overtly expressed.
Another example from WoD, this time from Mage. Realising that we really did have godlike power at our fingertips, and that the more you controlled society the easier it was to exercise that power, I sort of magic[k]ed up an island of uncontacted "primitves" ala King Kong; and then I showed up, healing the sick and creating food, your full on biblical display of divine largesse. Note that this was all on my own initiative, the GM had nothing to do with this except respoding to my questions and statements. All of this was fine, but a problem became clear quite soon; none of it mattered. What did I get out of being god-king? The locals had nothing they could give me that I couldn't produce myself. Food, treasures, a harem of maidens, none of this was significant to a real Mage. And I didn't respect them, because they were just mundanes, they didn't matter - so what did I care for their praise and worship? All in all, being god-king was a drag. And thus I discovered for myself an answer to the question of why even settings with wizards might not be totally dominated by them, might not be, erm, thaumocracies?
These are instances which I found particularly memorable, which felt like "succesful play" that fulfilled my aims. I went and turned over rocks and found out what was under them. This made me happy.
Ron Edwards:
Hi everyone,
As I'd hoped, this thread has become an Actual Play thread through multiple people's input, so I'm planning on moving it. I decided to announce it here instead of PMing Daniel so everyone knows.
Carry on!
Best, Ron
Daniel B:
@Ron Thank you for the heads up. Indeed, the genuine "case studies" seem to be enlightening.
Quote from: contracycle on September 23, 2010, 07:03:59 AM
Quote
Contracycle, you mentioned being willing to concede control of the "story" if you're primarily there for exploration instead, but -- even in the cases you're supposedly there for exploration, is exploration really what you're looking for?
I would say "yes", but also that it's not necessarily the only thing I'm there for. I also enjoy a bit of challenge etc. thrown into the mix.
I recently got to see Firefly, at last. There is one episode in which the action centres around the fact that the life support is off line because the engine is broken. Fine and all, this is all very dramatic and tense, except: the artificial gravity is working. The engine is DEAD, but the AG functions perfectly. This makes no sense to me, and I notice it.
<...>
So that is the kid of thing I'm interested in, and which attracts my attention. I'd happily trade a rather fixed plot for an AG that made sense, and which I can think about and interact with without throwing everything out of kilter.
I sympathize. I hate the logical inconsistencies that rip you out of the headspace of the fiction. A much smaller (and some would say downright anal) example of my own is when Pierce Brosnan (famous actor, played James Bond) was playing the character of some white guy raised as a Native American. I couldn't get past his hands and fingernails! A real man who lives off the land by the sweat of his brow does not have nicely manicured, scratchless hands, like he just walked out of a ladies beauty salon!
Anyway, I digress. I would claim that maybe you need things such as logical consistency, but you're not there expressly for them. It's like claiming you went to watch Firefly mostly to see if they would treat Anti-gravity engines with the respect they deserved. This makes little sense. In fact, you went to see Firefly just because it's a damned good movie.
You mentioned also being there for the challenge, which is on track to what I'm getting at.
Quote from: contracycle on September 23, 2010, 07:03:59 AM
Quote
Contracycle, surely if this is as common a human experience as I think it is, you'll have a personal example of your own. Have there been any experiences you've had where you felt like you'd "won" or achieved a "victory", but not in the gamist sense? I'll leave it up to you to determine what it means to "win" in a non-gamist sense.
Well, the example I';ve given most often - given that I have spent much more time as a GM than a player - is of a WoD vamp game in which I played the prince of a city. WoD establishes that on entering a city, incoming vamps have to report to the prince and request permission to feed, which makes sense. But as the prince, I found in play that I also needed to know who had left the city, becuase otherwise I had no idea what the total population actually was. I ended up communicating with neighbouring potentates to see if some of the people on my Missing list had recently passed through their turf. So in this sense, I discovered something that I had not known before, teased out a bit of implicit logic in the setting that was not overtly expressed.
Warmer .. keep walking .. okay, warmer. There's the hint of challenge in there. The challenge: maintaining a census of the vampires to keep control of your empire. In order to achieve that goal, you used logic and faced that challenge yourself.
I'm going to make several claims here: I feel like you're having to twist to fit the existing definition of Simulationism. This is not an example of it (or at least, I'm highly skeptical). You certainly did a lot of exploring here (in terms of the political setting), but what caught your interest was not the exploration itself. You could have easily "teased out a bit of implicit logic" and discovered that all female vampires spend Sundays eating nothing but cheese, but you wouldn't have gotten the same sense of accomplishment. Instead, what caught your interest was the challenge of having to deal with something that emerged as logical consequence of the setup of the setting. I expect you were likely very pleased if you were successful in your efforts, but still satisfied in that "dang, but that was fun!" type way if your efforts to control your empire had failed.
Admittedly this echoes gamism, but I believe gamism is fundamentally different from what I'm talking about, in the way that tackling a bear is different from building your own log cabin while surviving in the wild. Both are a challenge, but you'd be hard pressed to call the latter a competition.
Quote from: contracycle on September 23, 2010, 07:03:59 AM
Another example from WoD, this time from Mage. Realising that we really did have godlike power at our fingertips, and that the more you controlled society the easier it was to exercise that power, I sort of magic[k]ed up an island of uncontacted "primitves" ala King Kong; and then I showed up, healing the sick and creating food, your full on biblical display of divine largesse. Note that this was all on my own initiative, the GM had nothing to do with this except respoding to my questions and statements. All of this was fine, but a problem became clear quite soon; none of it mattered. What did I get out of being god-king? The locals had nothing they could give me that I couldn't produce myself. Food, treasures, a harem of maidens, none of this was significant to a real Mage. And I didn't respect them, because they were just mundanes, they didn't matter - so what did I care for their praise and worship? All in all, being god-king was a drag. And thus I discovered for myself an answer to the question of why even settings with wizards might not be totally dominated by them, might not be, erm, thaumocracies?
These are instances which I found particularly memorable, which felt like "succesful play" that fulfilled my aims. I went and turned over rocks and found out what was under them. This made me happy.
Dang, colder.
In this example, you're describing genuine Simulationism and I don't disagree that it is a fun way to play. You "looked under a rock" and found it interesting that being a god-king was a drag. Referring to my previous example, I too would have been interested to see at least families living in their little houses in the Jinjo Village, maybe doing work like cutting trees or raising sheep. I would have even been impressed to discover the female Jinjos eating cheese on Sunday! You were lucky that you found something under your rock, whereas I did not.
In any case, as valid as your example of "true Simulationism" is, it is off the mark from what I'm describing.
DB
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