"Losing!? No, my imagination will have me win!"...over the other player...
Callan S.:
Play by post rifts-like game. So, a character who'd had a bad past and then shouted the wrong thing to an NPC with a hard past and had some fisticuffs. Eventually the PC goes gets a modification and comes back for revenge, but another players PC fights him.
That's not really important, but is the fun context.
Anyway, one players PC fighting another players PC, and it's pretty slanted against one of them as we go through the blow by blow of attack rolls, over the days.
What's up is that the player who's character is pretty much losing the battle because his knife can't get around the others armour, private messsages me asking what'd it take to get an arm around the other PC's neck instead, and choke him out?
It's funny, it looks innoculous at first.
I mean, as clumsy and slow as the 'I hit you, you hit me' thing is, it is a resolving system for the fight. There are no pre-existing grappling rules.
To me it sort of starkly shows something which is pretty much hidden when fighting goblins or other NPC stuff. Here it seems obvious - the player thinks their imagination comes first, so very, very much, that it comes ahead of the other persons imagination. A supposed dominant imagination. I mean, what's the other player going to imagine? Him blocking it off, of course! So who's imagination comes first? Well we had this blow by blow thing...but...
It's seemingly a recurring thing with gamers, where they genuinely believe that if they imagine X could happen and X would have them win, then they should win. It's not so starkly obvious against NPC's, but with PC Vs PC it is obvious. The player would imagine his PC chocking the other PC - well, the other players gunna imagine him not choking, isn't he?
To me, for this very reason, imagination as a resolution process is UTTERLY BOGUS. Who's freakin imagination do you pick out of the two? Heck, even if the other side goes 'oh wow, your choke would totally work', it's not resolving how anything in reality would work out - I've tried to resign at chess, imagining I was going to lose, only for the other person to push me on to continue - and I won. My imagination was no method of definately determining the future result. But alot of gamers sort of think engaging their imagination is like engaging the physical world, and their imagination can be used in this way as a resolution system in itself.
Actually if 'Okay, I'll throw the fight' is a resolution system, then it can work that way. I'll pay that. I'm not against it, either, as long as it's not dressed up as more than it actually is.
Anyway, back directly to the AP - the player is losing, and losing slowly I'll grant (which in my experience isn't fun). And here I am with the great news that...I think his desire to do a choke now, where we'd change the rules after his PC started losing, is bogus? And I have a complicated way of describing that, that anyone under pressure is unlikely to really ponder?
Note: I've said prior to this that even though each character might end up wanting to kill the other, as GM I'd likely (read: I will but humouring the idea I might not) set off a series of miraculous events that lets the losing character get away to fight another day (which lets us see them clash latter and see more of the ways in which they clash and over what, than if one just killed the other from the get go).
But here I am - I'm stuck with no pleasant way of dealing with this. And by that I mean, with no way that I'd call 'a game'. Games are fun. When someone pushes to change or ignore the rules because they've been encouraged to think their imagination comes first regardless, it's not fun dealing with that.
Maybe I'm reading it into his PM, but there's just this zealous certainty that he doesn't have to just face, like, losing. No, he can 'use his imagination and find a way out' like perhaps he's been told a million times by gamers in RL and on forums. There no sort of social nod from him to me that it could be any other way. And so it's not even within a societal structure between us, so it's a with me or against me setup. Maybe nothing ugly will happen, but that's what I see at it's core - nothing better than with me or against me. And not because he wants to be that way to me - just because he believes so very much that he can imagine his way out of losing. Except in PC Vs PC, someone has to lose (even if it's of the 'escapes to fight another day' variety). Thinking you can imagine your way out of it is thinking somehow it's only the other player who can lose, not you.
I dunno.
contracycle:
Meh. I think you're getting totally carried away with those whole thing.
There is a difference between "there isn't a rule that covers grappling" and "there is a rule that prevents grappling". To me it is tendentious to say that this request is "against the rules"; it's not, it's merely improvisational and innovative. Which, incidentally, many would cite as the primary purpose for playing an RPG over another sort of game - the ability of a human ref to apply human judgement, unlike a computer game which frex won't let you climb trees, ever.
In addition, you seem to be assuming a state of mind - the refusal to accept losing. That might be true, I'm not privy to the exchanges, so I can't say; but from the actions described, maybe the player is not denying defeat so much as being caught up in the struggle and reaching for any tool that comes to hand. That would be real positive engagement, excited enjoyment, rather than bitter rejectiopn of the outcome.
So, whatever. You;re perfectly within your rights to say that there are not rules for the eventuality and that it would be unfair on the other player to make some up. That would of course be totally legitimate. But I'm not buying the idea that this is either necessarily symptomatic of a refusal to accept defeat, or that total rule strictness to the point of inflexibility is an unalloyed virtue.
Erik Weissengruber:
What about the Nomic idea: you have a number of rules permitting participants to make rules that cover cases not covered in the original set of rules?
The adjudication or judgment made now gets fixed into the set of acceptable behaviours and you move into the future with solid jurisprudence behind you.
Callan S.:
I'll clarify what I mean when I said 'can't he just face, like, losing'. I don't think he's trying to refuse to accept losing - he genuinely thinks the 'imagination get out' is a physical, emperical move, like say using a pawn to take a rook in chess that was putting your king in check, to get your king out of check, is valid. Because he's been encouraged to think this way and because he can really clearly imagine the neck grapple in his mind, that neck grapple, to him, exists as much as the pawn from the chess example. Except it doesn't exist. Or more importantly, in terms of the game I've communicated (communicated in the way I'd describe chess's rules, where I can), it has nothing to do with it. He's just used to this idea that if he can imagine something, it's part of the game. So of course when he seems to be losing, he grasps for a way out of that that appears, to him, to be part of the game.
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it's not, it's merely improvisational and innovative. Which, incidentally, many would cite as the primary purpose for playing an RPG over another sort of game - the ability of a human ref to apply human judgement, unlike a computer game which frex won't let you climb trees, ever.
I'm just not seeing any nod from him toward the notion that hey, perhaps the game I'm running is run by some other set of standards other than that.
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or that total rule strictness to the point of inflexibility is an unalloyed virtue.
I'm not trying to sell what I've done as a virtue? I'm talking about dealing with someone who seems to be pell mell in one direction, even though I'm in the other direction. Indeed, so pell mell, there is no nod to any other direction being a possibility.
Hi Erik, well, there is no case. Try stripping out the fictional descriptor and what your left with is 'So, I'm losing - can you add a rule for me that makes me win, or makes it quite likely I win?'. The whole 'special case' is a red herring from the starting days of roleplay. There is no special case here. I can strongly imagine my guy in monopoly is an escape artist - that doesn't mean a special case suddenly exists. I know, you might say roleplay isn't about that or such. That's probably the key problem here - an intense certainty that the activity is about X, so much so that the certain individual has entirely not considered that the host might be going for Y or Z.
contracycle:
Quote from: Callan S. on December 07, 2010, 08:58:09 PM
I'm not trying to sell what I've done as a virtue? I'm talking about dealing with someone who seems to be pell mell in one direction, even though I'm in the other direction. Indeed, so pell mell, there is no nod to any other direction being a possibility.
Well, under some circumstances I'll grant your argument; if you had made your view sufficiently clear, you'd be entitlted to a claim a violation of the social contract.
But. I think your analogy with chess is misleading. If you sit down to play chess, you know the components of which it is composed: board and pieces. An appeal to anything beyond these known components would be invalid. However, I would suggest that one of the known components of RPG is the imaginary space, and that appealing to it is not automatically invalid.
Now you may well be correct that this is an assumption, into which he has been "trained". But I would then say that your position is so radical and unusual he could easily be forgiven for this "error". Because I would myself assume that this was implicit in suggesting that we play an RPG in the first place as opposed to other sorts of games.
You say that nothing exists outside of the rules, but can that really be true? The characters walk into town, must you have rules to define everything they see, every person they might encounter, every building and vehicle, without exception? Because if not, surely, they don't exist, being not defined by rules. I have difficulty understanding what playing such a game would really be like; even saying something like "strict and absolute adherence to the rules is required" would not cover it. Maybe even describing your game as an RPG implicitly communicates something that you don't mean?
I once played/refereed a space battle game from 2300AD, according to their wargame rules. In this battle, one particular fighter craft (among the carnage of a capship battle) had a lot of luck on its side and performed heroically, and was noted by the players. It was however crippled by losing its main drive, which meant it was lost as stranded in space. But this didn't sit well with us, and we discussed its possible fate. It occurred to us that given it had an MHD turbine as a powerplant, it could theoretically use this as a conventional reaction drive, and after running some numbers we "ruled" that its fuel was sufficient for it to limp back to friendly space and for the crew to be rescued.
There was, obviously, no rules of any sort covering this sort of event. The caluclations on its reaction mass required my making assumptions and erring on the side of generosity. There was also no significance or consequence to this decision, other than it made us, the players, feel a little happy. And probably, if we were not roleaplayers, with a sense of ownership over and interest in the imaginary space, we would never have bothered. Without a referenceable IS, what is there to be an RPG?
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