Finding El-Dorado in the Zombie Apocalypse
Alfryd:
Quote from: Roger on March 25, 2011, 09:29:57 AM
Nope, no traps here. "Fun" isn't anything worth talking about in this context, but that again is a whole other thread.
I didn't mean to impugn your motives, but the thing is that- while I agree there needs to be an 'emotional connection' in the sense that the players do care about how the characters feel, that doesn't mean player feelings equate with character feelings. (To my understanding, that can be disastrous, especially in Nar play.) So, in that sense, focusing on player responses as opposed to character reponses could be misleading.
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In a Right to Dream game, answering the Premise is essentially an exercise in the scientific method. You've got characters who require a certain amount of food each day and who can grow a certain amount of food in a month. What are the minimum and maximum size of a viable group? It's simply a matter of crunching the numbers, rolling the dice, and finding out what the System tells you. The answer to the Premise is already in there, within the parameters and models of the System, waiting to be discovered. It becomes a matter of objective fact.
Again, I would say this is predicated on the assumption that (A) the player-characters are all perfectly rational and (B) that large-scale outcomes are deterministic (which is to say, you can forecast in advance what the 'optimal' outcome would be without, as it were, 'experimenting' with different courses of action.) I don't think either of those assumptions actually accords with observations of reality. Which means it is, at best, a rather selective application of Sim principles.
I mean, in our situation, a lot of the parameters involved in the calculation were fairly 'elastic'- we could increase the amount of food available by ranging farther afield (as we might need to do regardless if the crops failed, an outcome partly dependant on random factors)- but that increases exposure to roving zombies. Whether we chose to band with other survivor groups to clear out the undead could, in principle, also lower the risk of those encounters substantially- but that involves a decision to trust.
At some point, the range of potential outcomes and knock-on-ramifications of choices grows too large for reliable, exhaustive, logical analysis, and you just have to nut up and go with your instincts. Which, arguably, is what instincts are for. They're generalised, rule-of-thumb heuristics for navigation within the space of possible sequences of choice.
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In my own experience, I think I've seen this come to light most obviously with Vampire: the Masquerade. When I was a bright-eyed naïve new player, I thought, wow, this'll be great -- let's address what it means to be a monster, what it means to be driven by an insatiable hunger. Then I discovered it means that you get three extra dots in Stamina and you need to test versus Willpower to not bite some dude. The theme that I was hoping to personally address was already sitting there, fixed and naked, in the Simulation.
Again, from my POV, I don't think really accords with how believable, fleshed-out characters should make decisions. Test-versus-willpower regardless of whether and how much you care about the person, whether they're vital to your long-range goals, whether it risks your discovery, etc.?
The classic example is the D&D paladin, who is not allowed under any circumstances to violate their code of conduct. The problem is that their code of conduct specifies multiple clauses which are only tenuously casually related- so what does the character do when defending the innocent requires telling a lie? Do they short-circuit, or reassess their priorities in light of accumulated experience? The system-imposed-straitjacket here not only doesn't handle decision-making very well, it eventually self-destructs unless characters are kept in the storytelling-equivalent of a padded cell.
The only feasible method of weighting all these factors into consideration is to get a genuine human brain in on the action. I'm not saying that numbers on a sheet shouldn't have a significant influence- but you can't wholly exclude human agency from characters' large-scale decision-making and expect to reproduce human behaviour.
Quote from: stefoid on March 25, 2011, 05:33:00 AM
Not that it really matters so much the label you stick on your gaming, but isnt it about the agenda of the players rather than what happens? Two groups playing a survival horror game with different agendas might produce the same scenarios occasionally, by different means. The first group is trying to be as true to in-game cause and effect as possible, whilst the second group is actively pursuing opportunities to confront the characters with interesting decisions -- they both end up barricaded in a stronghold with a hungry person outside.
The point I'm making is that, under these circumstances, "trying to be as true to in-game cause and effect as possible" becomes "actively pursuing opportunities to confront the characters with interesting decisions." There's no way to do the former without effecting the latter.
I consider the situation analagous to preparing a town in DitV. All the essential premise-elements are built into the relationship-map of the town beforehand (e.g, love vs. duty, faith vs. reason, individual vs. group) and because the PCs' motives imply ferreting out the town's dirty little secrets, there's an inevitable collision between player agency as expressed through characters' decision-making and certain underlying moral dilemmas. (Now, sure, DitV includes plenty of other techniques/emphases that aren't remotely Simulationist, but heck, by my admittedly esoteric standards, so does GURPS.)
Alfryd:
Quote from: Frank Tarcikowski on March 25, 2011, 05:31:15 AM
Alfryd, I totally get this. When I was in the thick of trying to figure out GNS, looking at some of my favourite game sessions, one day I thought they were Sim and the next day I thought they were Nar. One day I read some comments about Nar that seemed just alien to me, considerations on a seamingly abstract level of “statements” and “meaning” and, worst of all, “premise” that I never could relate to, and I thought, these guys are playing a totally different game than me. Another day, I read some account of a supposedly Nar game and I thought, hey, that sounds fun, that’s the kind of thing I like to play, too.
...At some point I decided I just don’t need to know.
Frank- thanks for sharing. I mean, personally speaking I feel that this style of play is still focused on 'saying something', it's just that group wants a relatively strong guarantee that what wounds up being said is... I guess you could say 'accurate'. I just get this sense that if you have improvise things in order to prove a point, then the point isn't genuinely reflective of life.
I've been giving some thought myself to creating a solidly Simulationist system that would sort of 'push the envelope' as far toward Nar as I think it's possible to get without violating what I'd consider to be basic Sim principles (minimal improvisation, IC/OOC separation, fidelity to source material, etc.) I'm a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, for example, along with Dune and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, so I thought that a terraforming-simulation overlaid with faction politics/philosophies and influential leaders would be an interesting way to approach the 'closed system' ideal of Sim design (after all, systems don't get much more 'closed' than an entire frickin' planet.)
stefoid:
Whats improv got to do with GNS?
Alfryd:
Quote from: stefoid on March 26, 2011, 11:38:17 AM
Whats improv got to do with GNS?
Nothing in itself- it's just that a lot of Simulationist design (and I definitely get this feeling myself) seems to emphasise this idea that 'the world exists, we're not just making it up'. I mean, in one sense it's obviously false- the whole proceedings are imaginary- but I think the ideal is that you have (A) certain starting assumptions and (B) everything else should follow logically from that within the framework of the laws governing the imagined world (including the oft-unarticulated laws that operate within the characters' simulated psyches.)
When I say 'minimal improvisation', what I mean is that, if Law X states that 'A + B implies C', and A, B and C all refer to potential events or properties of the world, and A and B are presently true within the world, then C happens, and that's fine from a Sim perspective. However, C popping into reality spontaneously is not cool, and if the GM just decides that C has 'popped', for whatever other reasons, you have 'improvisation'.
Of course, this ideal raises all kinds of practical difficulties, and gets even uglier when you toss in the insistence that players must know, and have control over, nothing the characters wouldn't. Because then the GM has to keep the machinery of an entire universe in their head, and the players have to essentially take it on trust that he or she is some kind of Mentat paragon always capable of maintaining a perfect separation between (A) what would genuinely seem most likely to happen on the basis of pre-established knowledge of the world, and (B) what he or she would personally like to happen as a real human being. (I would personally contend there is such a distinction, but the temptation to mix the two is perfectly real. And of course, depending on your overarching goal, may not be a bad thing. But it ain't Sim.)
Anyways, I didn't initially mean to go at such length, so I'll wrap it up there. I guess that's my personal take on the matter.
stefoid:
I think the general understanding of improv is that the GM reacts to the players during play, and the 'plot' arises from that interaction on the fly, as opposed to preconceiving a plot before play and walking the players through it. (to some degree or other).
Your definition of improv seems to me to be : introducing a situation into the fiction for reasons other than in-game causality. Is that a fair understanding?
If so, I would use another term for it. It seems to me that using 'improv' as I define it is going to help simulation play because you are reacting (with 100% causality) to what the players are doing, rather than trying to direct them back to the pre-conceived plot which may result in you ignoring/lessening causality of player actions because it would take the game away from the preconceived idea of where it should go.
Your version of 'improv' is better described as 'agenda' , as everybody has been saying. If your agenda is causality then you are playing a simulist game, regardless of the situations that arise during play sometimes being the same as what might arise with a narativist agenda.
However, to have a narrative agenda you cant railroad, because that wouldnt allow the players to explore the situations as they see fit. So narativist agenda and improv go hand in hand. Which is probably why you are saying that imrpov is about narativist play and should be avoided for simulist agendas, but that isnt the case. Two seperate issues.
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