What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure, that sounds like reasonable advice.



I agree with most of what you say here. I was not saying that GM driven play doesn't rely heavily on the GM. I just don't think it must mean an absence of player agency. I think that for the most obvious example of D&D, yes, player agency is not present in the sense of authoring things into the fiction through action declaration. Players cannot author the presence of an object by declaring that their character searches for said object.

But does that mean that player agency is therefore absent from the game? Of course not.

I don't mind flaws being pointed out about a particular style. I'm willing to point them out myself. It's just when none are seen on the other side...that gets a bit frustrating.

The first part here is all I am really trying to say. There can be strengths in GM centered play. And I also like your reference to play being a continuum. I feel that I use methods of both player driven and GM driven play, depending on what it is we're trying to do, and what aspects of the game are involved.

The fact that some games don't leverage those strengths may indeed be true. But then that's a matter of preference and what one's desired goal is for play.

I think there aren't sides. There's a continuum, but to the extent that the player's exercise agency in a game, that's a move in the direction of player-centered play, to whatever degree. I mean, I think the continuum is like, at one extreme is a GM authored narrative with no actual player input. The players simply make choices where they have no idea what the consequences of the choices are and they might as well be coin-flips (no real game is like this obviously). At the other end is some sort of collective free-association exercise where everything is a suggestion and anyone can establish any 'move' in the game simply by asserting it (honestly I'm not even sure this IS the other end of the spectrum, its actually hard to be sure where you go past a certain point). Again, this doesn't exist, or isn't really meaningfully an RPG anymore.

So, REAL games have an element in which the GM addresses the player's agenda. They make decisions in (and maybe out) of character that have some impact on the narrative. To the extent that the narrative is shaped in a way that reflects their agendas, which is addressing the fictional topics which the players are attempting to bring forth, as opposed to those being suggested by the GM purely for her own reasons, these are player-facing games.

Likewise, even if the players are driving basically every aspect of the game, they are going to still have to rely on a GM to be some sort of 'bringer of frames', someone who establishes how the genre logic of the situation will be applied and which possibility becomes new fictional position, at least when the players cannot do so. Most games have some 'zone' in which the GM always does this. Again, I'm not sure how weak the GM's influence can become before the game stops being a game. Maybe some of the other people in this thread have something to say on that point.

For someone playing a very Gygaxian kind of "classic" D&D, I doubt that they see the lack of leverage for player input on the fiction beyond advocating and acting for their character all that much.

Well, the question might be, is 'Gygaxian play' on this continuum, is it a totally different sort of game, and if it is on the continuum, where? I think that Gygaxian Play is 'game over all else', that is, it is an ultimately and virtually completely gamist enterprise. Is RP important in that mode of play? No, not really, or the rules wouldn't just gank off characters left and right, nor emphasize being able to create a new one in 1 minute flat. There's even a place in OD&D where the rules say to introduce the new character immediately, logic be damned. This is fine as a game concept, just pop in the new guy! As RP its incoherent. Now, maybe in another place Gygax says "yeah, come up with some sort of lampshade for this, maybe wait till the PCs get to a new room and put the character there" or something like that.

I'd note that all the advice in DMG about time tracking is a must and etc is all in the same vein. Its not about REALISM, its about making time into a fungible sort of currency that characters have to spend in order to get certain things done! If you don't track it, then its not really a resource, just like if you told the PCs "hey, don't worry about gold, you can have whatever stuff you want." I guess "keep track of money" was too obvious to actually make into advice though!

So, I'm loath to draw too many conclusions from dungeon crawling OD&D. I think it has deliberate elements to add player agency, but it is also intended to act as a test of skill and not a story telling experience, at least in its most archetypal form. I believe that as soon as Gygax went beyond that then things were added to the game like "let the player find a blank spot on the map for his fighter to build a keep on and let him decide what the spot looks like, etc. within reason"

Right. This is what I mean by GM performance being the issue. If the GM and the players want a different kind of experience than the default, then they need to do things differently. If they decide at the start of a D&D 5E game that the elements of the story are going to be based on what the players bring to the table during character generation, then yes, the DM needs to incorporate those ideas into the game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What causes you to reach for the dice to roll fall damage? I'll wait.

My desire to participate in an activity with other people that I'm playing a game with? Its no different from the cause of me rolling dice if the game was craps, that's what the social convention of the game indicates is my 'move' at that point. NOTHING else is causal. Concepts DO NOT CAUSE THINGS TO HAPPEN. Our brain state, the thoughts we have, which are the result of thinking about these concepts (and of many other things) lead to our taking actions (IE cause those actions).

Cool. What was the first cause? Oh, sorry, did I step across the philosopher line?

Lol, perhaps, but we'll let it slide...

I don't think 'first cause' is really relevant here. We are DEEP (billions of years at the very least) into a vast network of causes and effects. I don't think the nature of a putative first cause has very much bearing on anything taking place at my kitchen table right now, except in a very remote sense.

If we were to consider actually bringing out the philosophical guns though, I beg you to consider the Principle of Dependent Origination...

If you're argument is "the tale of the Red Wedding cannot break a window!" then, sure, we agree. But that's an extremely narrow view of causation. Especially if, while reading about the Red Wedding, I become upset by those fictional events and throw the book across the room and into the window, which breaks (actually, it was my wife that did this, and it wasn't a window, it was a vase). Did the fiction have any part of that causal chain? What if I read a lie that says that windows are actually aliens spying on us and I believe it and begin to break all the windows I see? The lie is fiction.

I think its fuzzy thinking when you use the same term to describe how your thinking evolved, in a psychological sense, and how physical object's interactions are related. I'm going to leave [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] to invoke Hume, but I highly suspect such an invocation would be instructive.

Clearly, there's a bit more to causation, even in the real world, than 'the book broke the window'. The book can't break the window by itself, either.

Again, that an example exists where you do not do a thing doesn't mean that, at all other times, you also do not do that thing. This is a flawed argument -- going from the specific to the general, from an example to assuming it's all just like the examples. Examples illuminate general concepts, they do not define them (generally).

Examples are teaching instruments, but one thing they can teach us are generalizations. This is called 'reasoning by induction'. Inductive reasoning is not 'flawed', that is a generalization which is itself flawed!

Further, I think you fail to understand the true gist of my argument. It is such, "Imagined fictional worlds are not coherent enough to truly talk about causation WITHIN them" so the arguments you make about one fiction causing another are simply not valid IMHO. This is really regardless of any of these arguments you make about fiction causing us to do things in the real world. There is simply no way to gauge what the effect of any cause is in a fictional world, or to even know enough about the cause itself to know if it would create the putative effect, even if we had a complete description of what happened.

We can use our sense of drama and our aesthetic sensibilities to decide what would be a pleasing, or conventionally expected (ie following the conventions of the game) outcome and imagine that. Its not the same thing, at all. This is the actual argument I used to disassemble Ron Edward's whole theory of games (GNS). There is simply no such thing as 'S'. Its all really aesthetic and I don't think that his categories work for describing aesthetic preferences.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Another example:

GM rolls wandering monster die. It comes up 6. GM rolls on a table. The result is "6 orcs".

GM: "You hear a noise ahead of you - round the corner of the dungeon corridor come 6 orcs."

Player of the half-orc PC: "I call out to them in Orcish - 'What are you doing here? Maybe we can help you!'"

<reaction dice are rolled, tables consulted, etc - the net results is "favourable reaction">

GM: "The lead orc replies in Orcish - 'I am Grusk of the Vile Rune tribe. We are searching for the Hidden Grotto of Luthic. If you can tell us how to find it, we will let you live!'"​

Again, the principle causal process here is social, but again there are interspersed moments of dice-rolling. Notice that the presence of the orcs in the dungeon is established, as part of the fiction, before the reason for them being there is established. This is typical of any random encounter generation process - the rules first tell us that something is encountered, and then require the game participants - typically the GM - to author some further fiction that establishes elements of backstory for the encountered creature.

To describe this as "mirroring" seems positively misleading: acts of authorship that occur in time order A, B describe events which, in the fiction, occur in time order B, A.

"Mirroring" is, at best, an uohelpful metaphor. As the second and third examples show, though, it's more than that. It's an exercise in obscurantism.

The "immersive standpoint" is not a valid means of analysing play. That is to say, you CANNOT explain how roleplaying works by pretending you're Falstaff the Fighter. Just the same as Robert Downey Jr can't explain to you how he played the character of Iron Man by pretending to be Iron Man. Or JRRT can't tell you how he wrote LotR by pretending to be Bilbo or Frodo.

Now, all the dialog back and forth about whether or not a fictional event 'caused' a player in the real world to roll some dice COULD all be seen in some light as being a semantic argument, but THIS is the real nut of the thing. Once you hare off into the land of thinking that fictional events matter, that they relate to each other in a 'causal' way, you CANNOT even have a productive discussion and analysis. You have to be able to step back and take apart the process FROM THE OUTSIDE to really understand it. Clearly [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] has a lot better pedagogy skills than I do...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Have you done any empirical work to verify this intuition? I don't know of any reason to think that it is true.

You know, you need to stop bringing up such good points

This actually brings up a whole OTHER point about world building. In a sense HOW CAN the players help to create a consistent fiction about a world THEY KNOW NOTHING ABOUT? They also really have no stake in that world, by default (they could have or develop one, but the GM would need to foster that process I would think). Once you switch from constructing a shared fiction in which the elements focus on what the players are doing and wanting, then there's really no way for them to take the lead at all. They must, almost by definition, lose most of their practical ability to lead things along.

This is how I see it, and coupled with the way I see fiction, as an aesthetic exercise and wholly inadequate as a means of describing any sort of, even fictional, causality, players can't really sink their hooks into the fiction unless they have some degree of authorial function, so that they 'own' both the narrative and the setting to some degree. And so that they are authorities in terms of what the decisions are about what is deemed to 'cause' what and to be 'possible' within that fiction. Only then does the world around the character have any hope of really coming alive.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not so concerned with the social stuff at the table as I am with internal cause and effect within the game world as seen/felt/experienced by the characters. Why? It all comes back to my 'falling dominoes' idea, where one thing leads to another within the game world on a nice simple cause-effect basis. That's what I want to look at - the validity of in-game causes-effects that reasonably and logically allow the DM to narrate event K as a later result of action A and all the subsequent actions and reactions and events B through J that the players (and PCs) don't know about.

Now, maybe one reason I don't end up at the same place you do is a philosophical one. Having been exposed to Buddhist theories of causality and come to understand this very 'nonpersonal' conception of how the universe works, I just don't see any similarity between a fictional game world and the real one.

Just to give you an idea of how that works. Strip away all the conceptual framework, all the categories of things, all the sense perceptions, everything. Om gate gate, paragate "It is empty, empty, TOTALLY empty." This means that all semantics, all ontology, all what we think is 'reality' is nothing. What is real? As a physical naturalist I see nothing but a single universal quantum field, or you could say "nothing but quarks, gluons, and leptons." All the 'things' we conceive of existing, cats, dogs, people, Earth, stars, galaxies, RPG books, all of it is just convenient labels we've created. It has no fundamental objective existence. Parasamgate, bodhi soha "beyond total emptiness, wisdom lies." That is the ultimate truth IS this non-existence of the world of 'concept things'.

At the core of things are simply the fundamentals, and the interactions between them are of infinite complexity. Nothing can be said to be truly caused except by the sum total of everything else. Its meaningless to say "the cat caused the big glass fish to fall off the end table and smash on the floor." What 'caused the cat?' or the fish? or the floor? They're all just more quarks, gluons, and leptons. To try to tease out some specific strand of narrative from this is fruitless. Even REALITY is a story we tell ourselves, RPG fictional reality? Please, just make up what pleases you, that's what IS happening, we're just pleasing ourselves.

Its always best to keep the true nature of things in mind. You can get lost in that vision too, its not the only final word "all wisdom is just something we made up to tell ourselves" is also equally true. However it does help to clarify your analysis of things at times and bring a new focus.

 

[Maxperson]

Going to the fiction here means performing an act of imagining stuff while talking to your friends.

Here is the process, in rough outline:

Player: "I take the wand out of my backpack and concentrate on it - I want to activate it's magic."

GM: "OK, make a Use Magic Device check."

<dice are rolled, tables consulted, etc>

GM: "OK, your check succeeds. A fireball blasts out of the wand!"

Player: "Cool!"​

The fiction does not play any causal role. The player and GM are engaged in a relatively complex social process, which itself is - at certain points - mediated through simpler bio-mechanical processes like rolling dice.

The fact that the player and GM both agree that, in the shared fiction, the player's character is holding the wand and concentrating on it, is a part of the causal process. That doesn't mean that the PC, the wand, the backpack, the fireball, etc play any causal role.

Similarly: a production of Othello won't get very far if those on the stage can't agree who is being Othello, who Iago and so on. Just like RPGers, they have to coordinate their imaginations to establish a shared fiction. But that doesn't mean that the purely imaginary characters Othello, Iago etc are exercising any causal power.

These imaginary things are imaginary. They don't make us do things. We make ourselves do things, in part because we agree with others to engage in various feats of imagination.

This is all well and good, but it's overly complicated and misses the simplicity of the situation. It all can be boiled down to one simnple question. Can the effect happen without the fiction? If the answer is yes, then the fiction is not a causal factor. If the answer is no, then the fiction must be a causal factor. Being imaginary, unknown, or whatever is irrelevant other than to make for fun to read posts. If the effect cannot happen without something, that thing(imaginary or otherwise) a causal factor.

 

[Lanefan]

Now, all the dialog back and forth about whether or not a fictional event 'caused' a player in the real world to roll some dice COULD all be seen in some light as being a semantic argument, but THIS is the real nut of the thing. Once you hare off into the land of thinking that fictional events matter, that they relate to each other in a 'causal' way, you CANNOT even have a productive discussion and analysis.

Well, you can't, maybe; but that's your choice. Me, I think I can.

You have to be able to step back and take apart the process FROM THE OUTSIDE to really understand it.

Looking from the outside, as in from the perspective of a non-participant observer standing at a distance, only provides one part of the information. Looking from the inside, as in from the perspective of a real-world participant in an RPG, provides another; while looking from the perspective of within the shared fiction itself provides a third.

Fictional events matter, in an RPG situation, in two ways:

- in how they relate to and affect other parts of the fiction (cause: I accurately swing my sword; effect: my orc opponent howls and starts bleeding from a cut it didn't have a moment before)
- in what they cause real people to do outside the fiction (in-fiction cause: my character attempts to swing her sword again; out-of-fiction effect: I pick up a d20 and roll it)

And all of this comes well before we decide who is authoring any of this fiction, which was the reason for this thread in the first place.

Now, maybe one reason I don't end up at the same place you do is a philosophical one. Having been exposed to Buddhist theories of causality and come to understand this very 'nonpersonal' conception of how the universe works, I just don't see any similarity between a fictional game world and the real one.

I've yet to encounter this...

Just to give you an idea of how that works. Strip away all the conceptual framework, all the categories of things, all the sense perceptions, everything. Om gate gate, paragate "It is empty, empty, TOTALLY empty." This means that all semantics, all ontology, all what we think is 'reality' is nothing. What is real? As a physical naturalist I see nothing but a single universal quantum field, or you could say "nothing but quarks, gluons, and leptons." All the 'things' we conceive of existing, cats, dogs, people, Earth, stars, galaxies, RPG books, all of it is just convenient labels we've created. It has no fundamental objective existence. Parasamgate, bodhi soha "beyond total emptiness, wisdom lies." That is the ultimate truth IS this non-existence of the world of 'concept things'.

At the core of things are simply the fundamentals, and the interactions between them are of infinite complexity. Nothing can be said to be truly caused except by the sum total of everything else. Its meaningless to say "the cat caused the big glass fish to fall off the end table and smash on the floor." What 'caused the cat?' or the fish? or the floor? They're all just more quarks, gluons, and leptons. To try to tease out some specific strand of narrative from this is fruitless. Even REALITY is a story we tell ourselves, RPG fictional reality? Please, just make up what pleases you, that's what IS happening, we're just pleasing ourselves.

...and if it always ends up this severe and emotionless I think I'll indefinitely postpone the experience, thank you.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

Can the effect happen without the fiction? If the answer is yes, then the fiction is not a causal factor. If the answer is no, then the fiction must be a causal factor.

Yes, the effect can happen without the fiction - because the fiction doesn't exist yet the effect happens!

(Demonstration: I am now going to make you think about Barnaby Joyce as Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. I can do that even though Barnaby may, for all I know, have resigned by now - I haven't followed the news since this morning, when he was still hanging on. The effect my words have on you can occur whether or not Barnaby Joyce is Deputy PM - this is why you can't tell whether or not someone is lying, or whether or not a statement is false, just be identifying the effect that it has on you. Bertrand Russell made this point in a series of essays published around 1910-12.)

The effect can't happen without thinking about the fiction. But that's a real event, not an imaginary one. And in the context of a RPG, it's a highly social event with a pretty complex structure..

 

[pemerton]

Fictional events matter, in an RPG situation, in two ways:

- in how they relate to and affect other parts of the fiction (cause: I accurately swing my sword; effect: my orc opponent howls and starts bleeding from a cut it didn't have a moment before)

Agatha Christie's crime stories aren't news reports. She's not discovering whodunnit, by following the clues and tracing back the causes.

She's making it up!

In the context of your PC's sword swing, the only way anyone knows that the sword was swung true is because there is a social process, which includes rolling dice and looking up to hit charts and the like, which tells us what the next bit of the fiction is to be: we all agree that f the dice come up a hit, then the fiction includes the sword swinging true; if the dice come up a miss, the the fiction includes a failed attempt to hurt the orc.

So the "causal relationship" between sword swing and injured orc is authored in response to the dice rolls.

in what they cause real people to do outside the fiction (in-fiction cause: my character attempts to swing her sword again; out-of-fiction effect: I pick up a d20 and roll it)

The fictional event doesn't cause you to roll a d20. Your action declaration "I attack the orc", perhaps followed by a nod from the GM, is what causes you to roll the die.

This is what I am saying about analysis: no one is obliged to analyse, but once you do you have to at least try and get it right. Saying that events in the fiction cause people to do stuff is obviously not right. Look at the actual procedures of the game - it is people talking to one another that causes them to pick up dice, consult charts, etc. It is these actual social processes that lead to the creation of some fiction. The fiction doesn't create the social processes!

 

[pemerton]

I don't see why. I really don't.

Because the real world is not a fiction that someone authored. Asking who has agency over the content of the real world doesn't make any sense. The real world isn't content/I], it's actual stuff that enters into actual causal processes.

But a fiction is authored. So if the GM writes the bulk of the fiction, and the players principal relationship with it is to learn it from the GM, then player agency over the content of the fiction is close to zero. Describing that as the same as their agency in the real world is just obscuring what is really going on, which is that they are learning the content of a fiction written by someone else.

In my approach to gaming, the GM is tasked with establishing the state of the world. The players are free then to "live" in that world and make things happen. The players have the same agency as people do in this world which seems like a lot.

What does making things happen mean? In the real world, I can throw a rock and break a window.

At the RPG table, the players can declare "I pick up a rock and throw it at the window." Who decides what happens? Who decides if there is even a rock or a window ready to hand? Until we know how these things are established, how can we work out who has what sort of agency?

Eg if the GM gets to decide whether or not there are rocks, and whether or not there are windows, and whether or not any given thrown rock hits and smashes any given window, then what is the agency of the players? They can force the GM to make some decisions (about whether or not there are rocks and windows about; and about whether or not any rock smashes any window); but that is not very much agency.

Now maybe that's not your game. Maybe the player gets to make a roll to find a rock. Maybe the player gets to make a roll to find a window. Maybe the player gets to make a roll to have a thrown rock break a window. But then it's no longer true to say that the GM is tasked with establishing the state of the world - because in fact the player can do that, by making the rolls just described.

Obviously, when I DM, I just speak as the character and I don't narrate. And while I may make up things that I don't know, I base what I make up on what I believe is reasonable for how I've defined that character. If I'm doubtful, I will secretly dice for a decision. If it's something trivial, then I just go ahead and choose something.

As a player playing a character you do the same thing, right? When your character is spoken to, you speak for your character. You make that up. It's not your personality necessarily. It's the personality you have conceived for your character.

What you say about how I play my character is correct (subject to mechanics like morale checks etc).

When the GM does the same thing in respect of some NPC the players are trying to have their PCs relate to, or get some benefit from, etc, that is another mode of the GM exercising agency over the content of the shared fiction.

An example of the difference here would be the GM deciding that a certain NPC won't take a bribe; compared to Classic Traveller, which resolves that issue through a mix of a reaction roll and a Bribery check. The latter allows a degree of player agency that the former doesn't.

I feel like the campaign is a good one when I feel like I'm immersed in the world and I'm being some fictional character. The more I feel like I'm inside that characters head the more fun it is for me.

This is true for me too - I suspect just as much as it is true for you - but that is neither here nor there for the current conversation.

When I'm in the head of my character, and I look around for a rock to throw through a window, there needs to be a way of working out what my character can see and hence what s/he can do. There are a lot of possibilities, but the main ones discussed in this thread are (i) the GM decides or (ii) the player makes a roll. One gives agency to the GM. The other permits some agency to the player.

Also: there is no judgement in the above, just analysis.