Finding El-Dorado in the Zombie Apocalypse
Alfryd:
This is gonna take a little while for me to go over, so bear with me.
A couple a' months back now, me and a few semi-regular players were playing a zombie-horror-survival game where the basic premise was that we played ourselves as our hometown was overrun by the undead, without a strong focus on 'realistic' outcomes and no deliberate effort to impose a predecided storyline. The game itself wasn't perfect by any stretch- the underlying system was some BRP-derived relic with plenty of support for combat, but not much else, and in the event we wound up doing chases, conversations, investigations and agriculture more often than direct combat, but the GMs' adjudications on the subject were reasonable, and it all seemed to mesh. Despite occasional lapses into illusionism, and a frank admission that he was improvising various bits and pieces as he went, the story took interesting twists over time and it definitely felt like our choices had genuine consequences. (One interesting scene involved me butchering, not once, but twice, what seemed to all appearances to be a totally non-hostile zombie-child, but that's a long story.) The campaign only lasted a couple of sessions, but it seemed to be a promising start.
Which all brings me back to an excerpt from Narrativism: Story Now-
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Jesse: I'm just still a little confused between Narrativism and Simulationism where the Situation has a lot of ethical/moral problems embedded in it and the GM uses no Force techniques to produce a specific outcome. I don't understand how Premise-expressing elements can be included and players not be considered addressing a Premise when they can't resolve the Situation without doing so.
Me: There is no such Simulationism. You're confused between Narrativism and Narrativism, looking for a difference when there isn't any.
Here's the thing- I don't see anything about this description which violates, to my mind, the core tenets of Simulationism. Let's pretend, for a moment, that you had a game which ran as follows:
[*] Beyond the 'initial setup', and the effects of in-world human agency, nothing (or as little as possible besides Colour) is improvised or invented ex nihilo.
[*] Once play starts, no deliberate effort is made to have scenes revolve around topics of primary emotional importance to the PCs (though such 'priming' may well be part of the 'starting conditions'. I distinguish this from episodic play such as DitV, where towns are improvised each session.)
[*] Once play starts, Internal Cause is King- that is, internal events are the primary or sole deciding factor behind events. (This is subject to the understanding that character decisions do constitute a form of 'internal event', and as such, have actual fucking consequences.)
[*] Moral/ethical problems are embedded in the character/situation/setting combo presented (i.e, the 'starting conditions',) such that the characters' decision-making cannot help reflecting on those problems.
[*] Because the characters' decisions have consequences, as long as their power to affect events is commensurate to the scale of the setting, then the premise necessarily produces a theme (in the sense of an Egri premise- '<insert moral quality> leads to <insert outcome>'.)
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I think that some of the confusion over defining what Simulationism's basic character is, then, can be understood as follows: There should be, in principle, a kind of Narrativist play that I would consider functionally indistinguishable from a kind of Simulationism. Note, here, that I am not saying that all Narrativism is a brand of Simulationism or vice-versa- only that there is a particular combination of 'initial prep' conditions and techniques/emphases in play that should, theoretically, fulfill the criteria of both. Taking this form of play and branding it as Nar-But-Not-Sim may lead to a fractured and inconsistent understanding of Sim's true character.
Does any of that make sense? I mean, I consider myself a Simulationist at heart, and I've always considered it's basic principles to be very intuitive- let things happen as they actually would happen, having seeded the world with certain starting assumptions, and with as little interference as possible thereafter. Do the results that come out match what you're trying to model? Does the theory make predictions that accord with known observations (of a particular subject matter)? (Note that 'unpredictability' could itself be a key prediction.) I personally feel that if you have to 'fudge' outcomes to get a desired result, then the simulation has failed, and then it's no longer a useful tool for investigation and understanding.
I possibly touched briefly on these concerns in a couple of previous threads, but, I thought it might be useful to go over some of the "things" that are commonly associated with Simulationist play, the degree to which they can reinforce/interfere with Narrativist goals, and whether they are, in fact, good for Sim play- in the sense that they allow events to unfold in a fashion such that (A) Internal Cause is King, and (B) produce large-scale outcomes that conform well with observations of... whatever it is they're based on. (I'll be taking 'realism' as the baseline template for this, well-aware that this only represents a fraction of all Simulationist design, but bear with me.)
Techniques/Emphases commonly associated with Simulationist design/play that often interfere with Narrativist play but do not, to my mind, have much or anything to do with the impartial and honest simulation of events.
[*] Illusionism or other ad-hoc Force techniques. The attempt to impose a predefined storyline behind the players' backs is neccesarily external cause trumping internal cause. It has nothing to do with the basically reductionist ethic that large-scale outcomes should be the natural emergent properties of small-scale interactions. It's absurd that interactions involving (A) free will and/or (B) randomness should regularly produce fixed outcomes.
[*] Rigid personality profiles. Rational human beings adjust their beliefs and goals over time in response to accumulated experience. (I appreciate that a system like Pendragon isn't so much 'rigid' as 'randomised', but that's not much more true-to-life.)
[*] A lack of embedded moral or ethical problems within the Situation that induce conflict within the PCs' motives. Deliberately distorting events so that they always reflect on topics that matter to the PCs is arguably an 'artificial' approach, but so is any effort to ensure that they never do. Anything resembling an honest presentation of a fleshed-out world or setting is going, statistically, to contain moral or ethical problems embedded within it.
[*] A lack of proficiency-boosting mechanics based on or feeding off of character motivations. Character psychology is a valid form of in-world cause-and-consequence, and working toward a clear goal or principle can, within reason, drive individuals to greater heights of endurance or concentration.
[*] Restriction of player knowledge to what their characters would know. Anyone trying to role-play a character different from themselves in real life is going to have to erect a partition in their heads between 'I would do X' and 'character would do Y' (though how permeable that membrane should be is another question.) Given you have to take this one on trust, hiding information perhaps has less to do with keeping players honest and more to do with letting the GM be dishonest.
[*]
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Techniques/Emphases commonly associated with Simulationist design/play that potentially interfere with Narrativist play, but do, to my mind, have something to do with the impartial and honest simulation of events.
[*] Time and space are generally held as binding constraints.
[*] Realism in general (to the degree that the setting resembles or borrows from reality.)
[*] Minimisation of need/openings for improvising facts about the world after 'initial setup'.
[*] More generally, restriction of openings for player/GM choice to human agency in the imagined world, (again, after initial setup.)
[*] In general, minimisation of openings for 'metagame', which I'm defining as factors without a clear correlate in the imagined world nonetheless having a strong impact on the resolution of events.
[*] In-world cause-and-consequence having primacy, such that player autonomy can be crushed between the gears of implacable large-scale forces. (However, in theory, this can be worked around if the PCs have positions of power and influence commensurate to the scale of the setting/situation.)
[*] No deliberate effort to distort probability so that experienced events always focus on issues of primary emotional importance to the PCs. (However, such 'targeting' may well be part of the initial setup, and it's not impossible that 'dull' intervals could be skipped past, provided some effort is made to account for the behaviour of the world at large in the interim.)
[*]
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From this perspective, artificial nudging to maintain a predecided storyline invalidates Sim to the same degree that artificial nudging to maintain an emergent theme or PC-centric spotlight would be in other Nar play. But if you can get premise on the base of pre-play preparation alone, and reflection on that premise simply by tracing the flow of events in an impartial fashion- and to the degree that PC choices' impacting events is entirely expectable- then at no point do I see how this violates basic Sim principles.
I feel, for example, that so many fantasy yarns gravitate toward feudal settings because it helps to satisfy these conditions: the nobility's decision-making has a disproportionate impact on events regardless of individual competency, while political stability is cemented by kinship ties that frequently conflict with large-scale social priorities. This combines to ensure that a privileged handful of characters- and only those handful- make really big choices with really big consequences. (It makes for, at one and the same time, a wonderful dramatic premise and a truly shitty system of government.)
So, I was wondering- have other folks experienced play of this type, and would they describe it's basic 'feel' as Sim, Nar, or whatever? Did I get my bullet points right? I'm not necessarily holding up my zombie campaign as the ideal example, but has anyone else been looking to visit El Dorado?
Roger:
This feels all a bit vague without some actual Actual Play to sink my teeth into, but I've come to realize that a request like "Please barf forth all the Actual Play you can physically recall" can be less than helpful. So I'll structure it like this:
Can you please provide a recap of a scene or scenes and point out:
- What the Premise is, and
- How the players are addressing the Premise within the scene.
I think that might be a fruitful place to start. It'd be just as fair to start from the other end and ask for the Simulationy bits first, and I think we'll get there eventually, but I suspect that's the sort of thing that we're better at recognizing at face value already (look, an encumbrance check mechanic.)
Cheers,
Roger
Alfryd:
Quote from: Roger on March 24, 2011, 01:20:17 PM
This feels all a bit vague without some actual Actual Play to sink my teeth into, but I've come to realize that a request like "Please barf forth all the Actual Play you can physically recall" can be less than helpful. So I'll structure it like this:
Can you please provide a recap of a scene or scenes and point out:
- What the Premise is, and
- How the players are addressing the Premise within the scene.
Like I said, this wasn't a particularly extended campaign, but here's a simple example: We were holed up in a local supermarket depot with enough dried food to last for about 3-4 months, and had constructed greenhouses on the roof so we could try growing food before our stores were exhausted. Another survivor came banging on our fortified entrance (heavily armed, and alone) and wanted us to let her in. One of the other PCs was in favour of admitting her, but I pointed out that our food reserves were stretched thin as things stood, and I wasn't entirely sure she could be trusted- for all I knew, she might kill us in her sleep or let in another gang of survivors in the night (I should mention my character had been getting increasingly paranoid.) I wanted her to give up her gun first or bring enough food to make keeping her worthwhile, and in the end, we wound up turning her away. After she left, we could hear gunfire and the screams of closing zombies off in the distance. That was the gist of things, in any case.
The premise- I'm guessing something to the tune of trust vs. self-interest, and I'm reasonably sure we couldn't avoid addressing it there. As for the Simulationist elements- we were doing things like measuring out distances on a map pretty strictly, referencing real landmarks, checking how much we could carry on a bike vs. a truck, etc.
Roger:
Thanks, Alfryd. That helps, although it's not quite enough to help us determine what's going on here.
That basic Situation -- someone is going to die if we don't let them in, what do we do? -- can be explored through any of the creative agendas.
From the Right to Dream essay: The point is that one can care about and enjoy complex issues, changing protagonists, and themes in both sorts of play, Narrativism and Simulationism. The difference lies in the point and contributions of literal instances of play; its operation and social feedback.
And here's a bit from the Story Now essay which I think might be helpful:
[...]
But Narrativist role-playing is defined by the people involved placing their direct creative attention toward Premise and toward birthing its child, theme. It sounds simple, and in many ways it is. The real variable is the emotional connection that everyone at the table makes when a player-character does something. If that emotional connection is identifiable as a Premise, and if that connection is nurtured and developed through the real-people interactions, then Narrativist play is under way.
[...]
Now, I'm personally not entirely sold on this whole "yeah, but what are you feeling, man?" vibe I sometimes get from this approach to Story Now, but that's probably a discussion for a different thread. As it stands as defined, Story Now deals a lot with the emotional connections of the players at the table.
So: what was your (you, the player) emotional connection to the woman outside the door? What was the other player's emotional connection to her, the one who wanted to let her in? How did you feel about condemning her to die? How did the other players around the table feel about you condemning her to die, and about their own decision to let you condemn her to die?
Cheers,
Roger
Alfryd:
Quote from: Roger on March 24, 2011, 02:25:12 PM
Now, I'm personally not entirely sold on this whole "yeah, but what are you feeling, man?" vibe I sometimes get from this approach to Story Now, but that's probably a discussion for a different thread. As it stands as defined, Story Now deals a lot with the emotional connections of the players at the table.
So: what was your (you, the player) emotional connection to the woman outside the door? What was the other player's emotional connection to her, the one who wanted to let her in? How did you feel about condemning her to die? How did the other players around the table feel about you condemning her to die, and about their own decision to let you condemn her to die?
Well... that strikes me as something of a trap. If I say the other players were uncomfortable with letting her die, this implies we weren't having fun. And if I say they were cool with it, that implies indifference to the premise. *shrugs* I think the characters' perspectives were clear enough, and we spent some time arguing it out in-character out without any real-world acrimony, so clearly that was an emotional investment of sorts. As it happens, I personally regarded it as hard but necessary measure and the other players came around to it reluctantly. (Strictly speaking, we don't actually know she died- she got off a lot of shots, and looked fairly tough, but it definitely increased the risks she took.) It didn't strike me as a purely tactical, cost/benefit consideration, nor was it a choice proscribed by our predefined personality descriptors (we didn't have any.)
The principle point I took away from that section of The Right To Dream you cited was that, in Simulationist play, character personalities are treated as a sort of formal guarantee of future behaviour, or otherwise left out of the player's active discretion. Which, again, I think either leads to outcome that don't actually accord with observations of how people behave in reality (i.e, not learning from experience,) and/or requires that the GM deliberately shield players from any situation that really challenges the characters' mindset.
The point I'm making is that situations like this were built into the setting/situation. They're inescapable. Something like 'the desperate survivor comes knocking' was essentially guaranteed to happen sooner or later, just on the basis of internal plausibility.
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