Authenticity in RPGing

[Thomas Shey]

I feel like narrowness isn't an issue in works of fiction, because the space is limitless at every point. Folk seem capable of taking the most narrow premise, and expanding it to fill a complex and fascinating work. And the most open premise can result in something vacuous. It's hard to explain, but I actually feel the narrowness or otherwise of the premises has potentially no interaction with the authenticity of the player's interpretation.

The problem is that there are postures from which people play that are not as constrained as a typical written character. While the latter may be developed in a somewhat freeform way that the writer takes, he's still aiming the character at at least a general sort of end (though he may not be sure exactly what that is until he gets there). People absolutely can play that way, but there are many who don't, and don't want to. A more constrained campaign setup is more likely to leave them in the metagame conflict between playing their character in a way that seems authentic to them or staying in the campaign. This is more likely to be avoided if they and the GM involved were on the same page at the point when the character was created, but it isn't a certainty, and often that "being on the same page" isn't a given.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't know if I agree with that. Certainly he may predict a possible confrontation at Fenway or some other element of baseball coming up, or the use of holy water against the vampire. Many of the options that you suggest maybe possible, but many depend on either what has previously been established in play (the famous vampire hunter) or the ability of a player to introduce elements to play ("can I use my Connections ability to establish that I know a famous vampire hunter?")

The context of the game in question and how it functions will always be a huge influence here.

But that was just a random example. If they don't know a famous vampire hunter, then maybe they find a local vampire hunter. The point is they might try to shift the load to someone else with more expertise than them. Unless the GM is thwarting everything they are attempting, at some point I presume they should be able to find some candidate like this (even if the GM puts up resistance to them contacting the top vampire hunter in the world). Maybe there are games where that could be an issue. I think in a typical RPG it isn't a problem (and three clue rule is written with stuff like Call of Cthulhu and D&D in mind). And, importantly, even if they fail at this, the point was just you can't predict how they are going to approach the situation. I am not saying every approach will automatically work out

 

[Bedrockgames]

If something is not moving toward a specific goal, then I don't know why we'd worry about things grinding to a halt. All of this is assuming that the players want to solve the mystery, or that the characters need to, for some reason in the fiction. That solving the mystery is the goal of play (however temporary a goal it may be).

But let's just imagine that they may not solve the mystery, or may decide not to for some reason. If that's the case, what purpose would the three-clue rule provide?

The three clue rule assumes solving the mystery is a thing. I grant that is a goal I suppose, but I think a goal like "solving the mystery" especially if it is a goal the players themselves have chosen to engage is different from the kinds of goals a GM might be tempted to railroad towards. Here I am thinking the GM is planning on a big confrontation in the middle of Fenway Park inspired by the Dirty Harry football field scene with the Vampire. But in the mystery case that the three clue rule is taking about it isn't building up to some big scene like that. The clues are just in service to the core mystery. There isn't any particular destination to railroad towards (there is solving the mystery but that isn't really a destination in the way the football scene is).

 

[Umbran]

The point is they might try to shift the load to someone else with more expertise than them.

Going back to Ashen Stars for a moment, as that's my key example - shoving responsibility onto someone else is generally a possibility, but there are consequences. You might not get paid if you do that, and you have bills if you want the ship to keep flying. You might take a hit to your reputation, which means you may not get paid as much for the next job.

And, remember that there's always an ethical question? Yeah, that. Bailing on an ethical responsibility doesn't usually work out well, if only because if you aren't going to be the most ethical folks around, surely the people you hand the issue off too have no reason to be better than you, now do they?

The three clue rule assumes solving the mystery is a thing. I grant that is a goal I suppose, but I think a goal like "solving the mystery" especially if it is a goal the players themselves have chosen to engage is different from the kinds of goals a GM might be tempted to railroad towards.

In Ashen Stars, it is part of the game conceit that you are a bunch of troubleshooters for hire. If you're not on board with finding answers to problems, you don't play the game at all.

And the characters need to get paid. Troubleshooting is a high-risk, high reward occupation, and generally pays enough. Other things the PCs take on probably aren't enough to play for the ship and cyberware upkeep they've got.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Going back to Ashen Stars for a moment, as that's my key example - shoving responsibility onto someone else is generally a possibility, but there are consequences. You might not get paid if you do that, and you have bills if you want the ship to keep flying. You might take a hit to your reputation, which means you may not get paid as much for the next job.

And, remember that there's always an ethical question? Yeah, that. Bailing on an ethical responsibility doesn't usually work out well, if only because if you aren't going to be the most ethical folks around, surely the people you hand the issue off too have no reason to be better than you, now do they?

I don't know Ashen Stars well. Is there a built in mechanic in the game for unethical actions having consequences or is that more just how you run the game (just genuinely curious here).

These things are all very campaign and situation dependent though I think (and system dependent). Both in terms of evaluating the ethics and in terms of whether the players being unethical leads to consequences. If it is a game setting where you have cosmic forces of good and evil, so say a Ravenloft campaign as I am most familiar with its method for handling that, there well could be consequence for allowing evil to happen by relinquishing your responsibility to do something. In a modern day morally gray setting? Maybe. Like you say there may be direct consequences of doing the unethical thing but the real world sometimes rewards the unethical and punishes the ethical, so it can really depend

Whether the players shifting responsibility to someone else is an ethical problem, that I think is interesting territory in a game. Arguably the expectation is the players are the heroes and should face the evil themselves, but there is a case to be made that it would be less ethical to do that if they find out the villain is a supernatural creature they are ill-equipped to handle. In that case, contacting a more appropriate person or group to manage the threat is probably very ethical. If I find a bear roaming my neighborhood, there isn't anything unethical about me going inside my house and calling the animal control and police because I know nothing about bears and might make the situation worse if I try to intervene myself.

In Ashen Stars, it is part of the game conceit that you are a bunch of troubleshooters for hire. If you're not on board with finding answers to problems, you don't play the game at all.

And the characters need to get paid. Troubleshooting is a high-risk, high reward occupation, and generally pays enough. Other things the PCs take on probably aren't enough to play for the ship and cyberware upkeep they've got.

Which I think ties with what I am saying. There was a minimum buy in here to be solving the mystery so presumably that is the goal.

 

[Maxperson]

While I feel the wording choices are unfortunate, I don't think it is right to cast it as jargon. The third bullet in the definition of "authentic" that Google returns with is

• (in existentialist philosophy) relating to or denoting an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life.

And we do commonly speak of a person as being "authentic" in that sense. @pemerton explained they meant


The vital and interesting question then seems to be contained in your comment that

If we can take "genuine choice" to be necessarily an "autonomous conscious choice" and therefore one that could foreseeably benefit from mechanics around player agency (player ability to narrate what follows) then we can reasonably ask - can it be "a focus of roleplaying" - and therefore challenge the assumption that RPG is an activity which always "acts at a certain remove".

To be authentic to ourselves - responsible, emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive - we would presumably need to express ourselves via autonomous conscious choices, that are not overridden as they are implied to be in some traditions of RPG. In this thread some have noted that our form of "let's pretend" can even lead to preferring the inauthentic to ourselves in order to be authentic to our character (and I would add, authentic to our world). Is that our dichotomy?

Can game rules serve such ends? What do they look like when they do? What is it about other rules that may get in the way? The OP doesn't make the case in full (doesn't show the putative implication to be necessitated.)

@Manbearcat BitD is setting-prescriptive and that's really kind of the point, but that has little to do with what @pemerton is saying because IMO it is less about finding ourselves in distinct settings that emphasise certain themes, and more about how we play in those settings and address ourselves to those themes, according to the game's rules... and let's not forget principles.

I don't think you should have to he a philosophy major in order to understand what someone means. That definition is not the one most commonly used in conversation, and when posting I think that conversational English should be what is used. That way most of the people reading your post will be able to understand and/or relate to it.

Writing a post using terminology/jargon that you'd find in a thesis isn't helpful here. It's going to cause confusion and arguments as terms people commonly understand to mean one thing, are being used to mean another.

 

[Umbran]

I don't know Ashen Stars well. Is there a built in mechanic in the game for unethical actions having consequences or is that more just how you run the game (just genuinely curious here).

So, as mentioned, if they punk on a job, they may not get paid, and are apt to take a hit to Reputation. These are mechanical.

There are two ways that handing off the ethical issue can become a problem for the PCs.

One is mechanical - once they take a job, negative outcomes during and resulting from it are often hits to their Reputation. So, if they find, say, a weapon of mass destruction, and hand that off to someone who sells it to the highest bidder or uses it, that can come back at them via Reputation. If they find someone appropriate, it can work out, but it isn't guaranteed.

There's also the non-rules-dependent issue of narrative consequences. The setting is very much like Star Trek, but an alien force came in and kicked the Federation's butt, and it has fallen apart. The result is a political swamp of forces vying for power and control. It is not an infinitely deep ocean where you can dump crap into the setting and nothing happens as a result.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't think you should have to he a philosophy major in order to understand what someone means. That definition is not the one most commonly used in conversation, and when posting I think that conversational English should be what is used. That way most of the people reading your post will be able to understand and/or relate to it.

Writing a post using terminology/jargon that you'd find in a thesis isn't helpful here. It's going to cause confusion and arguments as terms people commonly understand to mean one thing, are being used to mean another.

I was a philosophy minor and I am only half following it

This conversation did remind me a little of this:

 

[TBeholder]

The flipside of this is that the effect of railroading and all its variations (the "three clue rule",

There’s a good analysis of “three clue rule” and pitfalls on The Alexandrian blog.

GM-enforced alignment,

That’s just weird.

adventures that work by the players figuring out what the GM has in mind as the solution, etc)

The Alexandrian also identifies this among the root causes of railroad problems and offers more flexible variations of a structured adventure (on the page linked above, see links under “Further Reading”).

As to the less-structured ones, there are always sandboxes.

I would go further than what you set out in your last two sentences here. In the OP I mentioned the "three clue rule". I see "node based design" as a variation of the same thing.

It’s not only not the same thing, it’s not the same type of thing. Linear (railroad) and node designs are structure. The “three clue rule” is a basic principle of redundancy, which in itself does not demand any specific structure. It can be applied to fully linear railroad or to node structure gone full bingo table.
Node design is not one-dimensional, so it also allows to distribute redundant connections wider, making it both more reliable and more natural looking.
In a linear adventure all 3 clues lead from A to B. If the players missed or misinterpreted AB1, they still can find AB2 and AB3. Redundancy! But the bottleneck is only slightly wider: what if the players misinterpreted or accidentally destroyed AB1 and then ran off before discovering AB2 and AB3? Now GM has only 2 choices: let them walk into a dead end and wait until they’ll retrace their steps to just the right spot or start making choo-choo noises. Neither sounds like much fun for anyone involved.
In a node based adventure, if the players messed up at A and lost clue AE, they’ll still have a chance to grab BE or CE later, in different circumstances. Meanwhile, they also can do something optional, but meaningful for the plot without advancing from this critical point to that critical point. And their choice to move from A to B or C is not fake (lol, dead end, try again), it can actually affect the course of adventure. Much better.

 

[pemerton]

I ran a campaign of Blades in the Dark using the Flame Without Shadow playtest, which has the players playing Bluecoats and Investigators... the cops of the setting.

So that's a constraint, right? But it's one about which each player may have something to say. They may have good ideas about cops, they may have bad ideas about cops (and probably more importantly just societal power structures and classism and so on, in general), or very likely, they may have a mix of good and bad ideas. What they have to say about that premise and the concepts involved is up to them.

If I say "the premise is that you're all good cops", then I've limited what they have to say. Does that mean they can't have something authentic to say? No. But it's more narrow. Now, instead of being about law enforcement in general, it's more likely to be something like "what's it like to be the one good cop amongst a corrupt department" or similar.

Consider your more narrow premise - "you're all good cops". Who gets to - is obliged to, in and via play - to express a conception of what it is to be a good cop?

In DitV, the premise of play is that the PCs respond to sin and injustice, in their capacity as religious enforcers. They have to express a conception of what constitutes sin, and what sort of response it deserves.

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RPGing can generate pressures that push against authenticity.

By chance recently I've been in a thread or two that describe 4e D&D skill challenges as "players looking for excuses to roll their best stat/skill". The picture of play that this description creates, for me at least, is that the players are sacrificing an authentic conception of the fiction, and what their PC might do in it given their fictional positioning, for the expedience of mathematical success.

I would expect tables at which that sort of expedience predominates to have trouble with the rule in Agon that gives the player final say over whether or not their description of what their PC is doing makes their PCs' epithet (a type of free descriptor that every PC has) applicable, such that a bonus die is added to the player's dice pool. (The same rule applies to other descriptors that can grow the dice pool, but in those other cases - adding a Divine Favour die and a second Domain die - there is a resource cost, of spending a point of Divine Favour or a point of Pathos respectively, and so expedience does not push all one way.)

Designing, and adjudicating, a RPG so that the imperatives of play favour authenticity over expedience is not trivial. It's not magical or mystical either! But I think it does require a certain sort of approach and perhaps a certain sort of "ethos" from everyone at the table.