Finding El-Dorado in the Zombie Apocalypse
Caldis:
Quote from: Alfryd on March 28, 2011, 10:53:58 AM
I understand your point, but one of the points I'm making is that, by ensuring the PCs genuinely have a level of mechanical power/influence/information that's commensurate to the scale of the setting/situation, it's possible for their choices to have a dramatic impact on final outcomes without having to distort the strict modelling of in-world causality. An example I gave was influential nobility within a feudal setting- the idea that their decisions could have major historical ramifications doesn't hinge on some fluke perturbation of the odds, but is entirely expectable. (With that said, the result would quite possibly be a form of Blood Opera.)
This is exactly the point though. By setting the game up in such a manner and then following through on those expectations in play and also allowing the players to freely choose how to respond to those situations you are engaging in a narrativist creative agenda and not a simulationist one. I dont have a link handy but there was a fair bit of talk about technical agenda in play which would refer to preferences as to the techniques used in play. They differed from creative agenda because creative agenda extends beyond play, it's the reason for the game and what you hope to achieve with the game.
I think this reflects back on what you were talking about above with contra. You 'initial assumptions' are chosen to find characters who will get involved in 'interesting stuff' but not everyone is going to find the same stuff interesting. Feudal nobles could have a lot of influence in political situations but I dont find many games about feudal nobles. In my experience with fantasy games characters tend to be sword swingers or spell slingers, trouble shooters capable of certain actions but with little political power. Usually those political characters are npc's and they provide opportunities to the characters, engage them in activities where they can show off their abilities. What the players find to be 'interesting stuff' tends to be mission based play and gaining powers and abilities over time while a bigger plot plays out in the background that they slowly uncover. This is simulationist play, certainly not the only kind of such play but a definite valid form, it may have the appearance of gamist play at times but there is never a question of step on up, no challenges to face simply a question of how the characters will succeed. A strength of this form of play is that you keep your group united, working together and they can all be present and involved in most scenarios.
stefoid:
Quote from: Alfryd on March 28, 2011, 10:41:08 AM
If you want to phrase 'improvisation' in that way, sure, yeah I can agree with that. And, yes, being 100% faithful to in-world causality does not have to entail that PC choices are insignificant, because PC choices are an in-world event that should have some repercussions. The trouble with Sim is that everything else that happens in the world would also, logically, have repercussions, so in order for player choices to be significant, they would have to be expressed through control of characters who are powerful/influential enough to give the environment a run for it's money. Otherwise, you have to resort to metagame.
Players choices are significant if you focus on, and play out the consequences of those decisions to their full extent. the magnitude of those consequences doesn't really come into it. they could be earth shattering or purely personal for the character involved, depending on the game. If you rob the players of a chance to make a decision or modify the natural consequences of the decision, in order to drive the plot, then thats where player decisions become less significant.
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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.
I still incline toward the view that if it looks like address of premise, walks like address of premise, and quacks like address of premise, it's address of premise. I'll freely concede that premise-addressing moments-of-decision may arrive with somewhat lower frequency than dark-chocolate-with-cinnamon-sprinkles narrativism, but if stories are about (Moral Choices)X(Consequences), this simply strikes me as a question of tradeoffs between how strictly you model Consequences versus how reliably you hit with Moral Choices. But how, exactly, do you walk out of this game without player actions producing a theme? Quote
Where is the ostensible boundary condition between Sim and Nar
In the agenda of the people at the table. If your agenda is causality, you arent addressing a premise or producing a theme, you are addressing causality which might have a few themey moments. and it doesnt matter! Is it the right agenda for you and the rest of the people at the table? thats all that matters. Or do you want the chocolate and cinnamon sprinkle badge of narrativist superiority that is awarded to sim players of exceptional merit? :)
Alfryd:
Quote from: Roger on March 28, 2011, 10:15:54 AM
This look very interesting, but I'm finding too many ways to parse that to have a good sense of what you're saying. So far I'm between:
1. Focusing on a player's emotional response to the fiction, as opposed to a character's emotional response within the fiction, could be misleading.
2. Focusing on a player's response to a situation, where the response is deciding to leave someone outside to die, could be misleading as opposed to focusing on the character's response to do so.
Roger, I'll probably have to think about this and get back to you. For now, I'll just say that, to me, direct player input to characters' decision-making isn't so much the overall goal as an incidental (though strong) requirement of getting character responses that are actually convincing.
I still think that there is an expectation on the player to maintain a healthy respect for the character's internal motivations, whether established before or altered during play, but there also needs to be a kernel of choice in the equation if you're going to reproduce human behaviour.
However, I don't really think that bringing your personal, real-world beliefs to the characters you play, all of the time, or other fairly obvious breaches of IC/OOC motivation, is particularly healthy for Sim play. I think it's possible to play characters that hold beliefs that are radically different from your own as a real person and still get perfectly valid input to theme.
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That being said, is there any requirement for the Right to Dream player to be rational? Hmmm. Deep question, this. I would suggest that it is a fundamental feature of Right to Dream play. The enjoyment comes from Exploring the rational cause-and-effect System. As the Right to Dream essay proposes, "Internal Cause is King". I can't think of any examples of irrational play that would persist beyond a short-lived superstition, but I'm happy to hear suggestions.
That is an interesting question, but I don't think the subject is all that complex. I absolutely agree that Simulationist play has a deep emphasis on the rational analysis and modelling of internal cause-and-effect. But at the same time, the imagined world can contain not-perfectly-rational characters, and some or all of those might be PCs. And in order to rationally model their behaviour, you need to have them behave irrationally, at least on occasion. 1 times 0 == 0. (This is assuming you can even define perfectly rational behaviour under all circumstances, which, as I went over, I would contend is not always possible.)
All I'm sayin' is, in the real world, folks don't always see eye to eye. It seems out-of-character to insist that never happen in Sim, if you want to get outcomes that resemble reality.
Quote from: stefoid on March 28, 2011, 02:23:51 PM
In the agenda of the people at the table. If your agenda is causality, you arent addressing a premise or producing a theme, you are addressing causality which might have a few themey moments.
Quote from: Caldis on March 28, 2011, 12:58:37 PM
This is exactly the point though. By setting the game up in such a manner and then following through on those expectations in play and also allowing the players to freely choose how to respond to those situations you are engaging in a narrativist creative agenda and not a simulationist one.
Again, I would venture that this is defining Simulationism as "Internal Cause is King, except when that also produces Theme, in which case it is only Narrativist." There's nothing inconsistent about the definition, but it possibly sells Sim short, and leads to a fractured understanding of what it's really 'about'.
I entirely agree with your characterisation of PC roles in most FRPGs, but I would also point out that the great bulk of such systems are not especially Narrativist in emphasis. And I agree that combat-physics and skill-advancement is a perfectly valid and interesting aspect of in-world cause-and-consequence to explore, but so is exploring the ways in which PC choices can affect large-scale events, and any potential to create Theme as a side-effect would not, in my opinion, cause it's Sim qualities to suddenly evaporate.
Quote from: stefoid on March 28, 2011, 02:23:51 PM
Players choices are significant if you focus on, and play out the consequences of those decisions to their full extent. the magnitude of those consequences doesn't really come into it. they could be earth shattering or purely personal for the character involved, depending on the game. If you rob the players of a chance to make a decision or modify the natural consequences of the decision, in order to drive the plot, then thats where player decisions become less significant.
Well, strictly speaking, if the local environment consists of a ten-by-ten foot padded cell, then you can focus on and play out the consequences of the players' choices to their full extent and none of it will matter a damn. Because the full extent of your choices is ten feet.
Now, I entirely agree that choices with small-scale consequences can be very meaningful and potent when the 'arena of resolution' is similarly small. For example, a small-town drama, or heck, just a bunch of people in the same room with a lot of emotional baggage. But the harsh fact is that the bold company of plucky adventurers is actually hugely unlikely to topple the grave threat which besets all the realm unless you bend over backwards to rig the odds in their favour. Which has nothing to do with Sim.
contracycle:
If "internal cause is king" more or less accidentally goes ahead and creates theme, thats fine. It just won't do it consistently. So if you play according to "internal cause is king" consistently, MOST of your play won't produce theme.
See, this is what I was trying to get at by pointing to situational selection. I don't think it'sd limited to initial setup at all. Although the fundamental draw is exploration of causality in the imaginary world, you still need to contrive situaitons in which that is brought about, in which Interesting Stuff Happens. And when Interesting Stuff Happens, you have reasonable odds of stumbling into the same sort of fictional situations that might potentially produce address of premise and thence theme. But that is a side effect, and if the players at the table aren't actively trying to pursue that, it may well flop or just be incidental. But more often, you're going to find they more or less contradict each other. The thing that would be most thematically satisfying would require causality be rejected or vice versa.
And the only reason that this is worth mentioning, worth attaching a label to, is because you might have one player who lives for the thematic moments and another player who enjoys the exploration of causality, and one or the other is not going to be fully satisfied. I think you have overextended the definitions; the description of RTD does not say "and it never ever produces any kind of thematic play whatsoever", just as the Narr definition does not claim "and it never ever includes any kind of causality exploration". They are PRIORITIES, not absolute limits.
stefoid:
I guess I really just dont understand the point of what you are trying to resolve here? When you sit down to play a game, you prioritise the elements of play that are important to you and your group and you play that way. The resulting game might have gamist moments, it might have themey moments, it might have simmy moments. It doesnt matter what you label the resulting mishmash - what matters is a) are you getting what you expect and b) is that satisfying for everyone playing?
Are you engaging in a theoretical play-labelling discussion here, trying to understand the convolutions of forge theory, or are you having problems with a) and/or b) at the table?
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