Authenticity in RPGing

[Deset Gled]

wrong thread

 

[billd91]

And rather than "authenticity" I think that these games are built in a way to lead to an emergent story rather than a structured story. All of the players - including the GM - are participating in the structured improv game and so there can be an emergent story that nobody at the table had planned - including the GM.

I had been thinking more along the lines of spontaneous story, except that won't definitively distinguish the types of games when you consider that some GMs improv pretty much everything. Perhaps a better distinction would be an improv game with decentralized authority vs GM-based authority.
There's got to be a way to describe this sort of thing without value-laden terms and their implications. That's one of the more off-putting aspects of the narrative game community.

 

[innerdude]

For me, what those RPGs - with all their variations in details of technique, principles, etc - is authenticity. That players and GMs make genuine choices, in play, that say something . . . .

You know I have absolutely zero issue with PbtA / FitD play principles, and in fact am now a strong proponent of them after many years of being the opposite. But I still have to question what it is you're actually saying.

When you say, "choices, in play, that say something," what is that something? What is being stated, and about what does it have to say?

What is being "spoken" in these instances?

Are you specifically talking about, "It says something about the characters and how the players connect to them, relative to their position in the world"? Okay, what do player and GM choices in relation to those principles actually say? Are you saying that there is a more genuine component of characterization allowed when players can more strongly advocate for their characters and their characters' position within the fiction? If so, is that the sole criterion of authenticity?

I'm having a hard time understanding how the descriptor of "authenticity" applies here.

On a certain level, maybe I can vaguely envision some aspect. There's a scene in the pilot episode of the HBO series The Newsroom, where Jeff Daniels' character is on stage at a political campus event, and the moderator tells him, "I want a human moment from you."

And then Daniels' character (Will McAvoy) goes on a minutes long rant that disembowels the idiocy and blind ideology that underpins most of American politics.

And for a brief moment, you see "inside", so to speak, the character who has let his walls down beyond the superficial.

And I love that scene, that character, and the entire TV series, but I'm still not sure how that translates to "authenticity" in play within an RPG.

 

[bloodtide]

"Authenticicy" is way to awkward a word. An "authentic game". But you can't really compare different games. And you can't compare diffrent stlyes. In your game people do X. I my game it's a traditional old school railroad hard fun game. Your players did X and had fun. My players were railroaded to the Shallow Sea of The Death Shells where they had to fight giant blink snapping turtles, because I made that fun adventure and wanted to run it.

In a railroad game you don't have emergent story because the GM is guiding the story down a certain track.

Except this is not true. The basic railroad is the DM guiding the story to it's end.....but a good DM does not care about the end, as long as the game gets there.

 

[pemerton]

Authenticity: the property of being authentic. Authentic: issuing from and being true to the self; thus, revealing (something about, some aspect of) the self.

Related things: responsibility (for what you bring to the table, for the self that you reveal), vulnerability (of the self that is revealed), honesty (to oneself, to the others at the table), forbearance and mutuality (we're all here together, all doing this thing, all taking these risks).

Genuine choice: the adjective is not qualifying the choice qua choice, but the source/motivation/origin and also impact/consequence/upshot of the choice. These go together: the choice is authentic in the above sense, and is recognised and accepted as such by the others at the table, and hence given its due weight. What follows on follows from that choice. It has no independence from it.

@Fenris-77 is correct that this is about an ethos/spirit of play. Some RPGs bring this explicitly to the fore in the rules and procedures they set out. They're not the only RPGs that make this ethos/spirit possible.

@Dioltach, @innerdude - what it says something about is the participant - a person in the real world doing something together with others in the real world. The shared fiction, and the character, is a vehicle for that. I think it may be true that characters also become more authentic on this approach, but that's a further thought beyond what motivated the OP and I'm not sure.

@Dioltach - "To me, RPGs are first and foremost games. The DM creates a scenario, and the players try to make their way through it. There are goals and challenges. I don't want "collaborative storytelling"." That's a crystal-clear statement of a different conception of RPGing. You're absolutely correct to see it as contrasting with the OP.

 

[Campbell]

I think there is something to be said for embracing taking creative risks without regard for where we ultimately end up. To putting our naked creativity on display, collaborating with others and seeing what comes out of the alchemy. When I was in film school, I used to love the creative experiences from just getting a bunch of people together, starting with a premise and just like shooting all weekend.

From my perspective there's a certain raw emotion to less curated creative material. Jam bands, garage rock, small independent movies. That raw visceral emotion is what I tend to think of when I think of more authentic creative experiences.

From my perspective games like Blades in the Dark or Sorcerer tend to encourage that sort of creative experience at the table because they incentivize taking creative risks at the table. It's less polished, but kind of more raw/visceral because no one knows where things are going to lead and the game's encourage us to not steer them.

This introduction to the Play Passionately blog hits the notes that remind me of that sort of garage band experience:

Play Passionately is a public space setup for me to think out loud about what I enjoy in role playing, the techniques and games that support it, to invite others to try it, and to offer advice on how to do it better. To me, “playing passionately” is something very specific I enjoy in my games and this introduction is intended to outline the core elements likely to be explored and developed further in other articles.

To me, a game is most fun when there’s an element of social risk. When playing passionately there are two layers to that risk. The first is the same as any collaborative creative endeavor: Failure. Simply, the game or some part of the game and the created fiction might suck or be no fun. It might take some practice or critical thought to understand exactly what went wrong and how to avoid disappointment in the future.

The second layer of social risk is, perhaps, a bit more controversial. Plainly, you might get hurt or offended. Playing passionately involves an element of emotional vulnerability, putting a little of yourself out onto the table for others to poke and prod. It’s about finding the uncomfortable spaces inside us and deliberately bringing them out into the light. That kind of honesty brings us closer together through vulnerability, trust and shared pain.

Playing passionately accomplishes all of this by embracing mechanics that allow us to encode and express thoughts and feelings about the characters and fiction directly into the state of the game. It involves aggressively applying the rules of the game with as much thought and practice as the fictional contributions. Rules are something to be learned, mastered and applied consistently as tools of creative expression, not forsaken for “the story” or “fade into the background.”

Indeed solid rules design allows us to throw ourselves into the game and not have to pull our punches. Without appropriate rules the kind of play I’m describing can quickly turn into social or emotional bullying. With the right rule set I know I can push as hard as I want because there are mechanisms in place that enable you to push back with equal force.

I want to be clear that Playing Passionately is not about drama-queening or competing for best thespian. It is about honesty and self-reflection through gaming. When real issues and feelings are on the line we are often more honest about what we really think through fictional proxies.

In the end Playing Passionately is about finding and pushing our emotional limits by investing ourselves in the characters and created fiction and expressing that investment through application of the game mechanics. In the process we learn something about ourselves and our fellow players, oh and create some pretty compelling fiction as well.

 

[aramis erak]

"Authenticicy" is way to awkward a word. An "authentic game". But you can't really compare different games. And you can't compare diffrent stlyes. In your game people do X. I my game it's a traditional old school railroad hard fun game. Your players did X and had fun. My players were railroaded to the Shallow Sea of The Death Shells where they had to fight giant blink snapping turtles, because I made that fun adventure and wanted to run it.

Except this is not true. The basic railroad is the DM guiding the story to it's end.....but a good DM does not care about the end, as long as the game gets there.

A good GM doesn't normally railroad; the description of a railroad as the "GM driving the plot towards some particular end", at least in most places, a correct definition.

While it is possible for story to emerge apart from the rails, the term generally refers to forcing the players through the prepared stations for set encounters, so the only story is that laid out ahead of time - story on rails. The classic example is the dungeon where each room leads to a 1 way trip to the next... the second clearest is the dungeon with no branches - choice is limited to advance or retreat.

At least with the one path dungeon, one has the option to retreat... a few of Gygax's don't...

 

[Jack Daniel]

For me, the issue isn't authenticity, it's artifice.

I like old-school play with a hard landscape milieu and a principled, neutral referee, because those are the conditions that minimize artifice. The game-world is what it is, what happens happens, decisions have consequences, and all victories and defeats are honestly earned. You may not get satisfying narratives or character arcs out of the deal, but at least you know the referee isn't putting a thumb on the scale to hand the players unearned wins.

Both trad and post-trad, on the other hand, traffic in artifice. In trad games, the mechanics don't really support narrative, so it's expected that the GM will fudge and rubber-band and palette-shift and resort to whatever other soft railroading techniques are required to force desirable outcomes without the players being too overly aware of the GM's invisible hand at work — or at least, without giving the players an excuse to drop the polite fiction that the game isn't being quietly directed.

Post-trad games are considerably more honest, in that they foreground the very mechanics that guarantee a story will happen, but in doing so they also foreground how artificial the whole process is. If old-school is an honest game of poker, and trad drifts between being delighted by an entertaining stage-magician and playing blackjack with a crooked dealer (one with a grudge against the house who occasionally slips you a face card from the bottom of the deck), storygames are watching a Penn & Teller routine where they show you how the trick is done.

 

[Lanefan]

I know I have used the term meaningful choices in the same way. If they players don't have enough information to predict at least two outcomes based upon their choices, and the GM has in mind at least two predictable outcomes based upon the players choice, then the choice isn't meaningful.

Examining both forks there...
If the player can't see the difference between picking door A or door B, the choice isn't meaningful to them (unless a narrow grammaphobic).

If the player choice doesn't matter, because the GM is going to put the same monster behind whichever door is chosen, again, the choice is non-meaningful - as the outcome negates the choice.

Thing is, a choice or decision may be immensely meaningful; only its meaning and-or impact doesn't become apparent until after the fact.

Sure, at the time it might look like a coin flip - e.g. which of two identical doors to open with no other info to go on. But when looked at in hindsight, choosing the door that led to stupendous treasure vs choosing the door that led to despair and disaster might be the most meaningful and life-altering choice that character ever made.

The flip side, of course, is that what seems a meaningful choice at the time might later turn out to be relatively unimportant.

 

[AnotherGuy]

nvm