What is *worldbuilding* for?

[pemerton]

The key difference between the styles isn't that the DM reads notes in one (you read your notes when you introduce prepared fictions in play, for instance), it's that the distribution of narrative control -- in DM facing games, the DM retains most narrative control

Hence, as I have said, the player have only modest agency in respect of the content of the shared fiction; and hence, as I have also said, a significant goal of play is for the players to make moves that will trigger the GM to narrate bits of his/her notes.

It baffles me that this is still regarded as contentious, given how many concrete examples (described at higher or lower levels of abstraction, and with more ore less metaphor involved) we have had in this thread:

* the goal of worldbuiding is to support exploration (= the players learn stuff about the GM-authored fiction by having the GM tell it to them);

* the solution to avoiding arrest is to learn whether any officials are able to be bribed, but that is not to be determined as the outcome of action declarations (and hence = the players declare moves that lead the GM to tell them stuff s/he has written up about the various NPCs);

* the players can't just declare "I search the study for the map" and hope to have some chance of success; it depends on where the map really is (= the players can't succeed in their goal of the map being found by their PCs until they make the right move to trigger the GM to tell them that bit of his/her notes which records the location of the map);

* etc, etc.​

This may be a fun way to play, or not, depending on taste. It's certainly very popular, as best I can tell. What is the objection to literal descriptions of it?

the scene is a 10'x10' (3m x 3m) room containing nothing but an orc with a pie.

In this case, the declaration of 'I kill the orc!' as an announced desire to author this fiction is allowable. The orc is established and we're assuming the character you're playing has the means and wherewithal to accomplish this feat. The ability to author this fiction is therefore either allowed via fiat (the GM allows it) or tested by mechanics.

However, if the player instead declares, "I find the map in the study!" we all look at him strangely, and re-iterate that we're not in a study, there's just this 10'x10' room containing nothing but an orc with a pie.

Clearly, then, these two acts of authorship are not the same thing

Your second act of authorship doesn't exhibit the same structure as the ones I described. It is not the addition of further detail about an already established character in an already established situation (that the character is the killer of an orc s/he encountered; that the character is the finder of a map in a study that s/he searched). It's a complete non-sequitur. It also involves an action declaration that would be impermissible in every RPG I'm familiar with, though I'm sure there are some less mainstream games which would permit it: but every RPG I know would only permit "I search the study for a map". (The sorts of details that OGL Conan and Fate permit players to stipulate don't extend to discovering (what I am presuming to be) a crucial item like a sought-after map.)

Of course, if the PC has powerful scrying and teleportation magic then it may not be: "I scry to locate a study with a map in it, and then teleport there and ransack the study for it." But I'm assuming that's not what you have in mind.

in player-facing games, the players have some to many rights regarding narrative control.

<snip>

the actual effect of player narrative control is not authorship of the narrative, but constraints on the DM's authorship of the narrative

This is a rather tortuous way of putting things, and again it puzzles me, as I and others have posted quite straightforwardly about this multiple times upthread.

There are some RPGs in which the players enjoy a straightforward power to stipulate elements of the shared fiction in the course of play. Fate is such a game; so is OGL Conan. But BW is not, by default, such a game (BW does permit this in the course of PC building, but not during play - of course the player can make suggestiosn that the GM goes along with, but that's true also for nearly any RPG). Neither is 4e (unless you count CaGI-style martial forced movement). And Cortex+ Heroic is not as straightforward on this matter as Fate (there are a whole lot of different ways that Cortex+ Heroic players can try and establish elements of the shared fiction, depending on the nature of the element in both story and mechanical terms).

Declaring "I search the study for the map" is not an exercise of narrative control in the manner that Fate and OGL Conan permit. It's utterly banal action declaration which goes back to D&D's origins. In a "player-facing" game, if it succeeds, then a map is found. But the player didn't exercise any direct "narrative control" - that's the whole point of having dice-based action resolution mechanics, as a tool for mediating between various expressed desires as to the content of the shared fiction, and the actual establishment of consensus as to what that content is.

(As an aside - Gygax wrote a "player-facing" mechanic for resolving checks for secret doors into the random dungeon rules in Appendix A. It's not as if this is wildly modern tech.)

Describing that consensus as a constraint on GM authorship is also odd - not because it's false, but because it seems to assume that it's constraint on the GM is more salient than its constraint on other participants. If the fiction is shared, then ipso facto everyone playing the game is constrained by whatever has been established.

If a player declares "I search for the map" and succeeds, the DM is constrained that the next bit of narration they provide must accommodate that success and not negate it. This is really, though, just a rules convention that enforces a manner of good play present in both styles: if a check succeeds, the DM should not act against that check and narrate failure. This is readily apparent in that most DMs will cite overriding check results with DM fiat to be bad play.

In BW, if a check succeeds then the PC succeeds at his/her task and the intention of the declaration is realised. Full stop. The GM has nothing to do with it, and the player enjoys the authority to veto GM embellishments if the player takes the view they are at odds with the intention.

And in the "hidden backstory" style, the GM declares action declaration's unsuccessful all the time - either allowing the dice to be rolled and saying "No, you find no map"; or just telling the players "You search and there's no map", or perhaps rolling the dice secretly him-/herself. In this thread, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] has consistently advocated for secret rolls that preclude the players from knowing how the action declaration was actually adjudicated.

The capacity to influence the sequence of narrations (and perhaps whether or not they occur at all) isn't agency over the content of what is narrated. That is, it's not agency over the content of the shared fiction.

Of course it is. If I control what's introduced into the shared fictions by my choices, then I have agency over the content of what is narrated.

Have you ever browsed a book? I have - reference books are especially good for this purpose. I choose, or perhaps by flipping pages randomly determine, which bit I read next. That is not exercising any agency over the content of the book.

If the agency of the players is confined to influencing which bits of the hidden backstory the GM tells to them; or which bits of the pre-authored storyline the GM reveals to them; that is about the same amount of agency as someone flipping through a reference book or working through a choose-your-own-adventure book. Ie relatively little.

In DM facing games, the players make many small choices over a longer period that lead up to the crux questions, and those crux questions can be repeated in multiple situations. The scene the DM frames here isn't the study, it's the building that contains the study among other challenges. How the players ultimately engage those challenges is up to them, and they still have the ability to go off map and introduce new states to the fiction that aren't in the DM's notes. They can set the building on fire as well.

Can the PCs set the building on fire? What if the GM decides that it's made of non-flammable materials; or under a magical ward; or that the rain is falling so heavily that no fire catches? (In a "player-facing" game, those could be elements of narrative that might be established to explain a failed arson check.)

And if the scene is the building, and the action declarations are, in effect "We enter this room and search; what do we find?", then where is the agency? This is just choose-your-own-adventure again, the players making moves that trigger the GM telling them stuff from his/her notes. It's true that we might spice things up a bit by having the players make decisions about how their PCs move from room to room (eg instead of going through the GM-authored doors, the cast Passwall) but I would describe that as, at best, rather modest agency.

And to say that the players are free to have their PCs leave the map is really just to acknowledge their lack of agency: they (I'm assuming) want to play a game that is about finding the map, but their access to that shared fiction is subordinated to GM pre-authorship. To say that they have the agency to give up on the focus of play that they want is not, in my view, to point to a substantial mode of agency.

The GM isn't even offering the ability to choose which hall to turn down to find the study, so claiming you increase agency because the GM forces situations onto players that go straight to those declarations that stake objectives is being myopic -- it's intentionally ignoring that agency is lessened by the fact that the players have no way to avoid or mitigate circumstances prior to the frame where the big question is thrust upon them.

This is odd for two reasons. First, you assert that choose-your-own-adventure style action declaration is a high degree of agency. Second, you assert that having the GM engage you with stuff that speaks to the character you built, and invites you to confront the issues you signalled you wanted to engage with in play, is a negation of agency!

i believe your actual argument is that unless the player can introduce entirely new elements of the fiction through action declaration, they lack agency over the shared narrative.

That's not my actual argument.

My claim is fairly simple: if all the salient fiction is authored by the GM, the players didn't exercise agency over the content of the shared fiction.

There are various ways that players can exercise agency. One is by succeeding on action declarations, which establishes, as part of the shared fiction, the contnt that, prior to the resolution of the declaration, the player desired to be part of the shared fiction. Another is by establishing material - perhaps elements of the shared fiction (eg relationships with significant NPCs, which are fairly formal part of Fate and Burning Wheel and can be an informal part of most other systems), or perhaps thematic orientation (eg by choosing to play a Raven Queen devotee, the player makes Orcus and undead salient as key antagonists in the game); and there are probably other ways of establishing material that I'm not thinking of at the moment. This second mode of player agency is quiet important, because it is another way in which players can influence the content of the shared fiction without having to engage in collaborative storytelling.

None of this is rocket science. Eero Tuovinen describes it all in a blog that I've linked to several times now.

the player-facing game wraps up all of the agency into the 'search for the map' declaration because that's the only real choice the players make in the scene -- everything else is provided by the GM (possibly according to notes prepped and found useful for this situation) as framing, framing that points straight at getting to this kind of declaration.

Leaving aside the fact that the scene might have more at stake then just the map, what you say is still not correct. Where does the GM get the framing material from? Where does the GM get material for narrating consequences from?

If the check to find the map fails, it's quite legitimate for the GM to declare that (say) the document hidden in the drawer is, rather, a letter from a loved one that reveals some "unwelcome truth" (to use the Dungeon World terminology). Assuming that it's the player who has established the existence of the loved one, and the orientation towards the loved one that would make the truth unwelcome, then the GM's narration of the consequence expresses not only the GM's but also the player's agency over the content of the shared fiction. This is how, as Tuovinen puts it, "choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices".

A skill challenge in which the party accrues too many failures before necessary successes fails at their objective prior to being positioned to ultimately succeeed. A player that searches for a mace may find evidence that his ultimate goal -- rescue his brother from possession -- fails because it's discovered his brother is a willing ally and not actually possessed against his will. This is the failure I'm talking about. And, in a DM-facing game, this can accrue by too many failures prior to obtaining positioning for success as well. The party may be killed. The party may run out of time. The party may take actions that cause the map to be destroyed (setting the building on fire) or moved (alerting the enemy to the objective). All of these things can happen in either style, and that was the point I was making.

The failures you refer to in the "GM-facing" game - lack of time, alerting enemies, searching the wrong spot or setting the wrong spot alight, etc - are all results of GM stipulation. The only one that is not a result of Gm stipulation is the PCs being killed - at least at most tables, combat is resolved by resort to the mechanics rather than GM stipulation. And so, to repost what you replied to, "If a player stakes discovery of the map, and fails, that is losing at a move in a game. That is actually quiet different, I think, from the GM stipulating failure. I don't see them as 'pretty much the same' at all."

The scene you describe opening with does not address the primary goal of play for the character involved. That goal is saving his brother. You didn't introduce a scene where saving the brother was at stake, and any declaration of 'I save my brother from possession by a balrog!' would not have the fictional positioning to succeed and would automatically fail. Instead, you introduced a scene who's primary purpose was establishing a challenge that had to be overcome in order to move towards gaining the fictional positioning to save the brother.

I have linked to the actual play report several times in this thread, but maybe you haven't looked at it. Here it is again:

I had pulled out my old Greyhawk material and told them they were starting in the town of Hardby, half-way between the forest (where the assassin had fled from) and the desert hills (where Jobe had been travelling), and so each came up with a belief around that: I'm not leaving Hardby without gaining some magical item to use against my brother and, for the assassin with starting Resources 0, I'm not leaving Hardby penniless.

Some instincts were written up too: the ones that (sort of) came into play were, for the mage, When I fall I cast Falconskin and, for the assassin, I draw my sword when startled.

<snip>

I started things in the Hardby market: Jobe was looking at the wares of a peddler of trinkets and souvenirs, to see if there was anything there that might be magical or useful for enchanting for the anticipated confrontation with his brother. Given that the brother is possessed by a demon, he was looking for something angelic. The peddler pointed out an angel feather that he had for sale, brought to him from the Bright Desert.

So, to repeat what I posted earlier, "the very first scene in my BW game presented the PC whose goal was to find magical items to help him free his brother from balrog possession with a chance to acquire an angel feather. The "challenge" in the scene was to determine the nature of the feather, whether it was worth trying to buy, whether instead to try and steal it, etc." In other words, there was no challenge that had to be overcome to establish fictional positioning to pursue the player's goal.

(The choice of instinct also affected the content of the fiction: one reason for, later on in the session, establishing the NPC mage's residence as a tower was because it spoke to an instinct about falling.)

In "story now"/ "standard narrativistic model" RPGing there's no need to fiddle about and delay the onset of the real action. The first encounter in my 4e game, following the initial scene where the PCs met one another and their patron, involved a clash with Bane-ite slavers, whom most of the PCs had an established reason to oppose beyond just them being a challenge the GM threw out there.

Although [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] is mistaken when he says that your description of my argument is "a pretty accurate assessment" - because that description didn't address at all the source of material - innerdue is 100% correct to say that " If [the GM] wants to frame a "pass the guards" challenge or a "successfully sneak through the hallways undetected" challenge, great! As long as the scene frame represents appropriate dramatic need." Whether having guards outside the study will satisfy that criterion is an entirely contextual matter, depending on such things as (i) established fiction about the study, (ii) established fiction about the guards, (iii) elements of the framing of both, etc.

If a PC is a worshipper of Ioun, and the guards are there to stop the unworthy gaining access to valuable knowledge, then it sounds like it could be quite interesting (and also ripe for the PCs to persuade the guards to let them through, if they want, by persuading them that keeping secrets is what Vecna wants, not Ioun).

If the guards are just a roadblock, they sound a bit boring to me.

That said, system also matters here. 4e combat is very intricate, and combats that have little connection to broader dramatic concerns may still allow a group who is into that sort of thing to enjoy playing and expressing their characters. I wouldn't say that the same is true of combat in Classic Traveller. Or consider Cortex+: the dramatic needs of characters are established via their milestones, but these are often rather independent of the particular minutiae of a given scene (eg Captain America earns XP for engaging with superhero teambuilding): so the actual challenges that the PCs confront may often be secondary to the PC-to-PC interaction and character development that is taking place (much as can be the case in superhero comics). So in Cortex+ Heroic, the thing to think about in framing the guards outside the study is not so much whether the guards per se speak to dramatic need, but whether the framing establishes an opportunity for the players to pursue their PC milestones. For instance: one of Wolverine's milestones involves meeting with and interacting with old friends and old enemies. Wolverine's player is free to establish that an NPC is such a person, but this requires the GM to frame Wolverine into an encounter with a named character whom it makes sense to call out; so if Wolverine was one of the PCs, then as well as the nameless guards the GM would want there to be someone interesting leading them for Wolverine's player to hook onto in exploring that milestone.

This is another illustration of how player choices (here, choosing/building a particular character with a particular milestone) can influence material that becomes part of the shared fiction, although the player is not exercising any sort of direct narrative control.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It seems odd that you feel the need to state the second sentence to me. Throughout the thread I've been posting, again and again, that RPGs in the mainstream form are not about collaborative storytelling.

It's not that odd. I had no idea that this thread even existed, until recently. I had to check it out to see if you were still spewing your lies and slanders against roleplayers, and lo and behold!

But as it turns out, there are ways to have multiple authors generate a shared fiction without engaging in collaborative storytelling. Gary Gygax stumbled onto some of them. The "standard narrativistic model" sets out a different set of them.

What you're saying here is that you don't understand the concept of collaborative storytelling, in addition to not understanding the concept of roleplaying. Or at least, you're pretending to be ignorant, so you can continue to troll people.

Roleplaying is when a player makes decisions for their character, from the perspective of that character.

Collaborative storytelling is when more than one person shares narrative control.

 

[pemerton]

What causal influence does the story (as opposed to a physical book that contains physical words that convey the ficitonal concepts of the story Hound of the Baskervilles) exert then that Sherlock Holmes, as a fiction character, cannot?

I made a long post about this and mentioned you at the top of it.

Short version: the physical words of a book are interesting (and different from, say, creases in or scribbles on the paper) because they encode ideas. A person who knows the language can read the book and have ideas caused in him/her in virtue of that knowledge and that encoding.

Sherlock Holmes does not cause the idea of Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle's act of authorship (which itself has a long causal history that includes his knowledge of English) together with a publishers act of printing, together with a reader's act of reading (which itself depends upon both prior causal processes like learning the language, and also immediate causal processes in the eyes and the brain), cause the idea of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes can't cause anything: he doesn't exist. Ideas can be caused and can cause things, however; they are real things (psychological states/processes). And language - the encoding of ideas - is also a real thing.

If the fiction has a recursive effect on future acts of authorship, can we claim that since fiction doesn't exist all acts of authorship are the same? No, clearly this is false.

I don't understand what this means. Fictional things have no effects, recursive or otherwise. But works of fiction have all sorts of effects on future acts of authorship - eg it's absolutely inconceivable that the very first work of fiction ever produced by a human being should be something like Waiting for Godot - that play has a complex causal history in which prior acts of authorship figure (among other things).

But I still don't know what your point is.

You cannot have a work of fiction, comprised of fictional elements, exist as a collective while denying that it's components have not existence. This is logically impossible.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is a work of fiction. It's components are words - ie encodings of ideas. Sherlock Holmes is not a constituent of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Strictly parallel: a news report that astronauts just landed on Mars would be mistaken. The report's components are word - ie encoding of ideas. The landing of astrounauts on Mars would not be a component of such a report - obviously, given that no such thing has happened. (There are some philosophical views to the contrary eg Meinong at least on some readings. I don't think those views are plausible. My point about mistaken news reports is taken straight from Bertrand Russel c 1912. My extension of it to deliberate fictions is my own, but hardly a novel move in this field.)

Moral of the story: ideas are not identical with the things they are about. This is why people can believe false things and imagine impossible things.

What if I author the statement 'Character X has found a map in the study' and 'Character X has NOT found a map in the study'? According to you, these are just as equivalent a move as above -- they both follow the same acts of imagining and authoring. Yet they are directly contradictory, and lead to different fictional outcomes that are opposed to each other.

Of course contradictory and logically impossible things get authored all the time. For instance, I can tell you a story right now about the great but forgotten mathematician Hilda who discovered a technique for squaring the circle; and while she was at it, she also proved every true statement in a system that nevertheless was strong enough to yield arithmetic.

It's not always pointless, either: most mathematicians accept the permissibility of proof by reductio, and what is the starting point for reductio, after all, but positing a contradiction!

How we manage contradictions in our fictions and our posits (and even our beliefs) is a complex question. But in any event, it is not really relevant to anything I said, as I will go on to explain:

If all acts of authoring are the same

<snip>

the fiction authored doesn't matter

I've never claimed these things. You imputed these views to me in a post upthread, and I made the same point then.

What I have actually said that two particular acts of authorship, which I described in some detail, have the same structure:

(1) Adding to a fiction about a study, with a person in it looking for a map, that said person finds a map;

(2) Adding to a fiction about an orc, confronted by a sword-wielding person, that said person kills the orc.

The identify of structure is this: both take existing elements of the fiction and append a new description to those elements: the person who was in the study looking for a map now is a map-finder; the person who was confronting the orc while wielding a sword now is an orc-killer. And the new description does not introduce any contradiction into the fiction.

The salience of that structure to RPGing I take to be self-evident. But in case explanation is needed: the appending of a new description pertaining to a salient character, to existing elements of the fiction which involve (i) that character, and (ii) his/her immediate environs (the study, the orc), is the central act of mainstream RPGing, in which players declare actions for their PCs that trade on the established fictional positioning of those PCs.

Of course, if you assume that the fiction in (1) includes a GM-authored but unrevealed element like "The map is in the kitchen" then of course the finding of the map in the study would contradict that. But all that shows is what is obvious and what I have pointed out from the beginning of the thread, namely, that GM secret backstory can operate as an unrevealed bar on the success of players' action declarations. It doesn't show that there is any inherent difference between (1) and (2) as candidate action declarations. The same would be equally true if the GM had notes saying "Whatever happens, the orc can't be killed." It's just that fewer GMs use notes of that sort. (Some do, of course, and some modules suggest such approaches to adjudication.)

 

[pemerton]

Roleplaying is when a player makes decisions for their character, from the perspective of that character.

You mean like deciding to search a study for a map?

 

[Lanefan]

I find that...terribly difficult to believe. You'd either have to be in incredibly unique gaming circles ...

In all fairness, I think to some degree he is.

Pemerton is in Australia - more precisely Melbourne, if I'm not mistaken.

I noticed the other day that of the people posting in this thread that of those who are putting forth a more traditional side most are from north-western North America. It's very possible we are in fact posting out of quite different gaming cultures and basing our views on accepted norms that aren't necessarily the norms in other parts of the world.

What this means, of course, is [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] needs to move up here so we can show him how it's really done.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

I find that...terribly difficult to believe. You'd either have to be in incredibly unique gaming circles or...well I don't know.

To the latter part, I never actually said any of that. Perhaps you should re-read my post and what I did write, as it might give a clearer idea of how I think a game should function than ya know, whatever it is you think I think.

I'm going to requote your post so we're both on the same page:

To put it simply: Because too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth.

<snip>

The same dynamic functions at the table. The DM determines the vision. "A heroic campaign against The Ultimate Evil!" The players have input on how this vision is facilitated: do they join with the lesser of two evils? Do they stand by only the truest of the true? Do they make their own path?

This system exists in real life for the same reason it exists in D&D: because it is the simplest and most efficient system, and a system to which the majority of human society has practiced and finds acceptable.

<snip>

If the group has a very cohesive vision (they all like to play do-gooders, they all want to play murderhobos, they all want to do *thing*) then you can sometimes have communal games. But getting even a handful of people together who innately share a similar vision of the game is incredibly difficult. Which is why most systems operate on the idea that someone builds a playground and lets people play around in it.

When people respond to you with statements of "Well, that's just how we do it." it is because they are having difficulty, or are perhaps in some sort of wonderment over the fact that you find this difficult to understand. The answer to your question is obvious. It may be the "worst system except for all the others" but it's fairly workable so it's what we go with.

Here are the most striking things you say that are at odds with my experience:

* That it's hard to find people who share a similar vision of the game;

* That, in RPGing, too many cooks spoil the broth;

* That it is more efficient for the GM to establish all the shared fiction, rather than be one of several people who are doing that.​

It's a long time since I've played in club groups, but back when I did I had no trouble finding players who (i) were interested in joining a player-driven game (many of the players who joined my group back in those days were refugees from various forms of railroad), and (ii) who had interesting ideas to contribute to the game in the build and play of their PCs.

On those occasions when I was a player rather than a GM I also encountered plenty of players who would fit these descriptions, although they weren't always able to live them out because the GMs of those games were typically interested in highly GM-controlled play.

As for too many cooks spoiling the broth, again I've not had that experience. I'll give one illustration: In my first long-running RM game, one PC ended up allying with Vecna. I established one of Vecna's goals as being to help the Great Kingdom conquer Rel Astra. That PC supported Vecna in that endeavour, despite it meaning he had to betray his home city. Another PC, whose long-term goal had been to be a magistrate in Rel Astra, joined with this assault on Rel Astra in return for a promise of a magistracy under the new regime.

That episode wouldn't have occurred but for (i) one of the players having his PC's goal be world domination, (ii) me introducing Vecna into the campaign as a force capable of such a feat, (iii) that player therefore making a choice to have his PC ally with Vecna, (iv) me framing a situation involving Vecna which forced that first player to choose between two loyalties for his PC (city vs Vecna), (v) another player having his PC's goal be attaining a magistracy, and therefore (vi) the first player being able to persuade the second player to sacrifice his city's independence for his own desire for promotion.

To me, this is RPGing at its best: multiple participants expressing their ideas through their various participant roles (the players playing their PCs in accordance with their understandings of dramatic need; the GM framing situations that put those dramatic needs to the test). It simply couldn't happen with a single "cook" - just to focus on one aspect of it, if the GM is the one who establishes who the PCs are to ally with, or what should be sacrificed for what (eg by giving advice on what sort of choice would conform to an alignment requirement), then where is the drama and the emotional wrenching?

Not all my RPGing moments involve such high-stakes situations - partially because I'm not as good a GM as I would like to be, partially because sometimes everyone dials it back a little bit and just coasts along for an hour or a session - but the sort of thing I've just described is undoubtedly the goal, and it depends upon multiple cooks.

Finally, as for efficiency: it seems to me far more efficient to let stuff be established either by a quick collective discussion, or by engaging in action resolution, then for the GM to write out a whole lot of stuff in advance. I spend my prep time for Traveller rolling up characters, rolling up worlds and designing ships. Those give me the stuff I need when the game systems or the situation call for it; I don't need to write up a whole "atlas of the Imperium" and list of secret plots as well. That can all be worked out during, and as part of, play.

This is why I inferred that you must have had some terrible experiences with players who couldn't be trusted. Because if you'd had the sort of (non-terrible) experiences I've had then you wouldn't think that I've been in "incredibly unique gaming circles".

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The problem we're up against, however, is that for some of these guys game worlds and other imaginary constructs don't have facts. Only reality has facts.

Anyone who refuses to acknowledge the basic premise of a role-playing game - that we're pretending the game world is a real place, and trying our best to treat it as such - is simply not arguing in good faith. There's no point in trying to reason with them.

 

[chaochou]

Do you never differentiate between in-character and out-of-character during play? It's the same thing...

Playing let's pretend doesn't bring things into existence.

Says you, ignoring options other than just add or do nothing:

Change the story without adding: there's a giant red teapot full of kittens in your garden

Adding to the fiction - one of your two options with respect the fiction.

Ask questions for clarification about the story...

Which doesn't add to the fiction... the other of your two options with respect the fiction.

But in a game setting there's another layer to it all; a layer which you choose to wilfully (and wrongly, I think) deny the existence of: the reality within the fiction.

I don't wrongly deny it. I understand that you are playing 'let's pretend'. I understand that all the things you pretend in your rpg are neither true nor real. When you say 'I'm Falstaff the fighter' it's a lie - you are not. You are simply inviting us to pretend that it's true for the sake of entertainment.

But you, and others, are attempting to tell me that pretending you are Falstaff the Fighter means Falstaff the Fighter now 'exists'. You claim that lying about it makes your lie 'true within itself'. "The lie is true with respect to itself" is the construction you and Ovinomancer and other clowns are attempting to deceive with.

This need to convince yourself that the things you imagine are now actually real doesn't make it so. You're playing a glorified game of let's pretend. And your argument is also a pretence.

Well, when that authorship comes about via the authors immersing themselves into the imaginary world and acting or reacting as their avatars (PCs) would logically do, doesn't it only make sense to analyse it from that angle?

No. When people sit and play 'let's pretend' - that is, they imagine that not true things are true to entertain themselves - the first step to analysis is to accept that the game is a pretence. Stopping playing and insisting that the things imagined now have their own lives 'within the pretence' is laughable.

And sorry tell you this, since it sounds like no-one has - but 'immersion' is self-deception. Just with a prettier name. It means playing 'let's pretend' while lying to yourself about what you're doing.

Again, that's fine. But to stop playing and then lie to me about your game of let's pretend doesn't wash. Nothing you pretended actually exists. They were just lies you chose to believe for a while.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Basically, world-building’s purpose is because, despite traditional word choices, I am not playing a game. Nor am I telling a story. My experience is an exploration of a world of fantasy and wonder. There is no extrinsic goal to that immersive experience other than the assumed goal of pursuing happiness that drives most people’s actions most of the time.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

You mean like deciding to search a study for a map?

Sure, if you decide to search a study for a map, because you know that you will only find it where it already is since the world is not in a state of quantum flux whereby you may cause it to appear somewhere else as a direct result of searching for it, then that's role-playing.