What is *worldbuilding* for?

[pemerton]

you cannot really perform an analysis of RPG techniques by focusing strictly on the resultant fiction.

I not only think that you can, but that you must; as the fiction that results (and how it becomes what it is) is a direct result of the RPG techniques applied

If you include, within your focus, how the fiction becomes what it is then your are not focusing strictly on the resultant fiction - ie your analysis has the character that [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] says it must have.

If you don't include that within your focus, then you have not analysis at all. Concrete example, from the session that I GMed today: the PCs, travelling north along a ridge above a glacier, came to a frozen lake where a great ash tree was growing, ravens perched in its branches and three (NPC) women trying to light a fire in its lee. The NPCs declared that Yggdrasil was dying, the earth around its root frozen. The trol PC used his power over the earth and stone to open a rift allowing first a hot spring, and then hot air from a subterranean geothermal source, to come up to the surface and thaw the root. This saved Yggdrasil from dying.

From that recount, what can you tell about the session? What actions did the players declare for their PCs? What bits of fiction were the result of those action declarations? What bits were part of the framing, and who framed them? What actions, if any, did I as GM declare for the NPCs? What consequences did I establish in response to failed checks? Who decided that Yggdrawil was in danger of dying, and that subterranean warmth could save it?

You can't answer any of these questions just by reading the recount of the fictional events that I wrote out above.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yeah, but what I'm saying is that the caveat "or created during the game in a heuristic manner" was meant not to cover action resolution (I find a secret door) but to cover 'winging it' (IE the GM making a roll to see if maybe a secret door existed here because he just created the scene and doing so with regard only to the independent likelihood of it existing and not based on dramatic considerations or character actions). Thus 'created during play' doesn't EXTEND the backstory authority of the participants in the game beyond what they had BEFORE play started! Players have backstory authority over (at most) their characters, usually. The GM has backstory authority over everything else, although in No Myth there is a rule that it can ONLY be exercised at the table to frame scenes in accordance with Eero's definition of the 'standard narrative technique'.

Now, this means that a player CAN exercise backstory authority on the fly. He can say "oh, yeah, my character traveled to this town before and he knows this guy..." and that's acceptable (at least its potentially an acceptable mode that could work in Story Now). Again though, when the player says "my character searches for a secret door" this is not a heuristic technique (because it is done in respect of the needs of the fiction, not neutrally and not using a purely mechanical heuristic technique that disregards fiction, like rolling on a table). It is not backstory generation in any other sense either, because its OUTSIDE the player's backstory authority (and Eero makes clear that standard narrative technique doesn't include general backstory authority for players).

Some games may provide mechanical support for backstory resolved by players outside that of their PCs, maybe by expending some resource, etc. This mechanism of regulation must then take on the work of preventing the defusing of dramatic tension which Eero warns about which would take place when players are in charge of both resolving and constructing challenges (which is the matter of the Czege Principle). He specifically criticizes 'conch passing' techniques as not doing this.

So, again, why is 'classic' DM-centered technique NOT 'standard narrative technique'? It really isn't so much because of backstory questions, it is because the GM simply isn't 'going to the story'. Its not dramatic because it could take 10 hours of play to negotiate the lightless and unbranching underground dwarf highway in Moria (or particularly one that has various uninteresting branches, cracks, etc.). In principle a game could even eschew ANY ability of players to resolve checks in favor of new fiction or even to have the GM 'say yes' to them, but that would put an enormous burden on the GM to always perfectly anticipate the needs of play and what the players WANT, and to always give them the chance to make the wagers that will provide their dramatic trajectory choices. Its too much to put on the GM! This is AT BEST all you can get from 'classic' play, and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] called it the "when pig's fly" technique (to paraphrase).

You've, like just about everyone else, misrepresented Eero's piece in mostly the same way. This is frustrating because he's so damn clear about what his piece is about: the uncritical addition of narration sharing to games that have either strong backstory authority or strong character advocacy. He doesn't say that players can't have backstory privileges as part of the game, but that adding those to games where backstory is supposed to be strongly held or where the players are also expected to have strong character advocacy as a focus of play may cause things to go wobbly, sometimes to detrimental effect.

So, the argument that Eero really means that a game where the player has designed backstory privileges to add a secret door or cultist lore through a game move IS NOT what he's discussing -- those are games that have critically considered the effect and understand how it shapes/holds the game. This is very clear in his piece that he's more than fine with as he directly cites his own game that has both backstory authority sharing and has play that switches focus on character advocacy to focus on what's best for the story because he's considered the impact critically and designed to accommodate them.

This twisting of Eero's general advice to be careful about willy-nilly adding in narration sharing -- specifically to take a moment to understand the game you're playing and what impacts the addition may have that undermine the premise/mechanics/gestalt of that game -- is NEVER a general pronouncement that player action declarations cannot involve backstory creation. This is counter-indicated by his explicit examples of action declarations that involve backstory.

Adding to the backstory through player action declarations is JUST FINE. Arguing that Eero either says that you shouldn't or that action declarations are special cases are both so wide of his rather mild point of understanding what game you're playing before making changes that can affect it. Eero focuses on Narrativist games here because that's where this particular issue of a community encouraging narration sharing is crossing over into games where, while Narrativist, will likely be made poorer for uncritical additions of narration sharing. That's it. There's no deep analysis or truth about playstyles here, it's just a well written opinion on a niche topic withing RPGs. That people have spent so much time imaging it as either a validation of their playstyle (when it doesn't really speak to that at all, just cautions against uncritical changes) or that it contains the one idea that will prove that another playstyle fails (when it just talks about specific possible failure modes when changing the game system conceits) is effin ridiculous. It's a good piece, it makes a good point about how you should consider the impacts of changes to your game, but it's not a treatise on how to do it right in all cases and it certainly doesn't warrant the hair-splitting of "well, clearly, since I believe this article is validation of my play, I must assume the author REALLY meant that action declarations cannot cause backstory to be authored and I cannot rely on this piece as a strong defense of my playstyle choices otherwise!" Climb down, people, Eero wasn't defining your playstyle or your game, and he's perfectly happy that you can author backstory secret doors and cultist lore in your games because that ability wasn't an uncritical addition to your game and is, in fact, both intentional and functional to the intent of play for that game.

Gah. [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], you drug me back into this. I shan't forgive you.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well put.

I only care about backstory within the fiction, for these purposes; and how (and by who) it got there or gets there.

I not only think that you can, but that you must; as the fiction that results (and how it becomes what it is) is a direct result of the RPG techniques applied; with those techniques in some cases being forced by the particular game system in use.

I think you must have forgotten how that part of the thread went, we're not going to re-litigate it here, but your position on this was reduced to utter ridiculousness. Of course you have to care about the process, otherwise you could care less what the player's experience of the game is AT ALL??!!! Don't lets even contemplate going back to this sad chapter!

My disagreement with story-now and its ilk is primarily with a) the means by which the fiction becomes what it is,

OK, and now you just totally contradicted your last statement! I'm confused...

and b) the unavoidable (and unacceptable) inconsistencies that will inevitably result from 'a' which will then ruin further play at the table.

Except of course they are not unavoidable, nor inevitable. I actually contend, and have contended all thread, that any illusion of consistency based on world building or other pre-authored content is totally illusory.

So what you're saying is that Eero doesn't use the term 'backstory' the same as any reasonable person familiar with RPGs would use it; i.e. to mean the backstory internal to the game-world that got the fiction to the state it's in at the time the PCs interact with it?

That would explain some of the confusion, to be sure.

If so, the blame's on him for said confusion as he's the one changing definitions, not on us for simply reading and analyzing what he wrote.

I disagree that he's got some bizarre definition. I explained it quite clearly, and if you do a careful reading of the essay we're talking about you find that, in fact, that's the only consistent reading. Backstory is what was done previous to play, 'in the background'. If something is invented DURING play, yes, it may have some sort of "game world historic" implication (IE the secret door was always there, someone must have built it 100 years ago) but the players are not engaging in a process of writing stories about what happened 100 years ago. They are engaging in a process of resolving a story that is happening RIGHT NOW. So labeling what they're doing when they search for the secret door "writing backstory" is silly. Can you see my point? [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] is being simply incredibly obtuse by insisting on this reading, it doesn't even make sense in the context of the rest of the essay. I can only conclude that his reading of it is either strange, or superficial.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

He is using it as he tells us he is using it:

Backstory is the part of a roleplaying game scenario that “has happened before the game began”. The concept only makes sense when somebody has done preparatory work for the game or is using specific heuristics to simulate such preparation in real-time.
​

Right, but obviously the phrase you quote "has happened before the game began." BY ITSELF could be construed in the timeline of the in-game fictional world. This is what Max did. The problem is he seems to have scanned the essay for statements which support his view, but not actually considered it as an integrated whole. As you said in the part of this I didn't quote, there would be no difference between backstory and framing otherwise!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Besides AbdulAlhazrad's point - how much is enough? - there is also the point - how does the GM decide whether or not the outcome is in doubt?

This replicates all the same issues as finding the secret door - are the players expected to find out what the GM thinks is a useful way to disrupt the ritual? Or are they allowed to posit modes of disruption, with a check being used to ascertain their effectiveness?

Again, this is why I see railroading as a recurrent (sub-)theme in this discussion.

I would make this observation. The pre-authorship of individual encounters, assuming that the GM has got the scene framed properly (which is harder before the fact, but not impossible) is not as problematic as some other aspects of 'back story/world building'. An encounter is tactical. The PCs have arrived at the point where the ritual is to be disrupted, the GM can probably anticipate the most likely approaches. Even things he cannot anticipate are going to be limited in focus and present no more or less issue than with dynamically framed and generated encounters. Depending on the scope of the encounter, the larger the more this is true, the players might try to use action resolution in ways that bypass or skirt the main issue at hand. So the GM might need additional framing in a large complex situation. The more tactical, the less problematic it is. I mean nobody is really doubting that I can put 3 orcs in an empty room and how that's going to go down.

I think world building is also less problematical at a large 'world scale' where it blends into genre and more general milieu construction. A world map, or a general designation that 'orcs exist somewhere in the west' is not super problematic most of the time. Particularly if there's plenty of room for some enclave of orcs in the east that some player wants to invoke to set up some sort of goal or whatever. This is largely how Dungeon World works. You can have 'swiss cheese' and the holes get filled in by moves made by the GM and sometimes the players.

Its the creamy middle filling part where things get ugly. When you have maps that are solidly filled in and places where an enormous amount of detail about NPCs, towns, whatever exists then you start to have problems just tossing stuff in where it seems to be needed at the moment. It also becomes a lot harder with 300 pages of setting material to maintain complete consistency. I'm not a huge adherent to the need for perfect consistency, particularly with events that happened in games long past, but inconsistency seems to obviate the point of world building for sure!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You've, like just about everyone else, misrepresented Eero's piece in mostly the same way. This is frustrating because he's so damn clear about what his piece is about: the uncritical addition of narration sharing to games that have either strong backstory authority or strong character advocacy. He doesn't say that players can't have backstory privileges as part of the game, but that adding those to games where backstory is supposed to be strongly held or where the players are also expected to have strong character advocacy as a focus of play may cause things to go wobbly, sometimes to detrimental effect.

So, the argument that Eero really means that a game where the player has designed backstory privileges to add a secret door or cultist lore through a game move IS NOT what he's discussing -- those are games that have critically considered the effect and understand how it shapes/holds the game. This is very clear in his piece that he's more than fine with as he directly cites his own game that has both backstory authority sharing and has play that switches focus on character advocacy to focus on what's best for the story because he's considered the impact critically and designed to accommodate them.

This twisting of Eero's general advice to be careful about willy-nilly adding in narration sharing -- specifically to take a moment to understand the game you're playing and what impacts the addition may have that undermine the premise/mechanics/gestalt of that game -- is NEVER a general pronouncement that player action declarations cannot involve backstory creation. This is counter-indicated by his explicit examples of action declarations that involve backstory.

Adding to the backstory through player action declarations is JUST FINE. Arguing that Eero either says that you shouldn't or that action declarations are special cases are both so wide of his rather mild point of understanding what game you're playing before making changes that can affect it. Eero focuses on Narrativist games here because that's where this particular issue of a community encouraging narration sharing is crossing over into games where, while Narrativist, will likely be made poorer for uncritical additions of narration sharing. That's it. There's no deep analysis or truth about playstyles here, it's just a well written opinion on a niche topic withing RPGs. That people have spent so much time imaging it as either a validation of their playstyle (when it doesn't really speak to that at all, just cautions against uncritical changes) or that it contains the one idea that will prove that another playstyle fails (when it just talks about specific possible failure modes when changing the game system conceits) is effin ridiculous. It's a good piece, it makes a good point about how you should consider the impacts of changes to your game, but it's not a treatise on how to do it right in all cases and it certainly doesn't warrant the hair-splitting of "well, clearly, since I believe this article is validation of my play, I must assume the author REALLY meant that action declarations cannot cause backstory to be authored and I cannot rely on this piece as a strong defense of my playstyle choices otherwise!" Climb down, people, Eero wasn't defining your playstyle or your game, and he's perfectly happy that you can author backstory secret doors and cultist lore in your games because that ability wasn't an uncritical addition to your game and is, in fact, both intentional and functional to the intent of play for that game.

Gah. @Maxperson, you drug me back into this. I shan't forgive you.

Well, mostly I agree with you. Its NOT an essay which intends to explicate the whole 'standard narrative model' of gaming. It IS an essay ABOUT games of this kind and how different narration mechanisms can work or be problematic within them. Thus, while it explicitly eschews defining the model, it is actually a fairly coherent explication of key points OF that model. I don't think [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is 'twisting' it. He may be immersed in that conceptual space to an extent where his contextual understanding of the thing gives it weight and meaning to him which other people would need to get by going back to some of the more general Ron Edwards et al material to get.

Honestly, the definition of 'backstory' is not that critical TO THE ESSAY, it was just important in the context of this thread! Now, maybe there's better things that could be quoted. I would perhaps do that, except I wasn't a Forge-ista and I really honestly am not all that firsthand familiar with the writings of Edwards, and others. Honestly I found a lot of it fairly tedious, doctrinaire, and (Edwards in particular) unsympathetic of contrary viewpoints. This may be one of the reasons that The Forge shut down (although I really don't know anything about that either). It became an echo chamber and also a focus for criticism. I know just saying 'Forge' or 'GNS' or whatever on many boards would start a fight! I guess that's faded somewhat, but I think there's still echoes of it in some of the more extreme 'OSR' reactionary nonsense and whatever.

Anyway, not TOO much should be read into the Tuovinen essay, but it does make points relevant to the questions of world building that started this thread, and certainly addresses questions to ask about who has the responsibility/authority to author details about the world beyond character actions.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Well, mostly I agree with you. Its NOT an essay which intends to explicate the whole 'standard narrative model' of gaming. It IS an essay ABOUT games of this kind and how different narration mechanisms can work or be problematic within them. Thus, while it explicitly eschews defining the model, it is actually a fairly coherent explication of key points OF that model. I don't think [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is 'twisting' it. He may be immersed in that conceptual space to an extent where his contextual understanding of the thing gives it weight and meaning to him which other people would need to get by going back to some of the more general Ron Edwards et al material to get.

Honestly, the definition of 'backstory' is not that critical TO THE ESSAY, it was just important in the context of this thread! Now, maybe there's better things that could be quoted. I would perhaps do that, except I wasn't a Forge-ista and I really honestly am not all that firsthand familiar with the writings of Edwards, and others. Honestly I found a lot of it fairly tedious, doctrinaire, and (Edwards in particular) unsympathetic of contrary viewpoints. This may be one of the reasons that The Forge shut down (although I really don't know anything about that either). It became an echo chamber and also a focus for criticism. I know just saying 'Forge' or 'GNS' or whatever on many boards would start a fight! I guess that's faded somewhat, but I think there's still echoes of it in some of the more extreme 'OSR' reactionary nonsense and whatever.

Anyway, not TOO much should be read into the Tuovinen essay, but it does make points relevant to the questions of world building that started this thread, and certainly addresses questions to ask about who has the responsibility/authority to author details about the world beyond character actions.

That was a way fast flip from saying that backstory cannot be part of action declaration or the article is incoherent to saying that the actual definition of backstory isn't important to the article, just this thread.

You have been reading that article with the same kinds of justification lenses that [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] has been using -- scanning and interpreting so that it supports your arguments. Honestly, I blame this on the need to look to this article as some kind of authority statement, thereby pushing people to interpret a lazily written (Eero's description, by the way) blog post on a niche aspect of how some mechanics are universally applicable to all games. So what's been happening is an increasing calcification of definitions and spins so that what is said both supports the views expressed and can still be made to match the cited authority. It's ridiculous.

The example of searching for a secret door and a success meaning that there is a secret door there is an exercise of backstory creation. THIS IS FINE!

The example of spouting lore about moon cultists is an example of backstory creation. THIS IS FINE!

Nothing about either of these examples introducing new backstory invalidates or weakens the games they can occur in. It doesn't make them poorer or richer, itjust makes them them. Those games are built with this kind of thing at the foundation, and are well conceived to allow that kind of move at the table. This doesn't conflict at all with Eero's blog post, and everyone needs to step back and recognize it doesn't. Everyone needs to stop trying to justify why their mode of play is better for anyone other than them -- that Story Now and/or traditional D&D play are both valid, acceptable, and useful ways to play that cannot be directly compared. I brought up chess and checkers so many time but everyone just seems intent on figuring out how the other game is lesser because it doesn't allow for the moves in their favorite games. To this we've had messed up definitions of backstory, agency, advocacy, world building, you name it, all in an attempt to pin down a rhetoric point that show that, in this case, with these assumptions, my way is better. Not better for me, but just better. I have more of this word, as defined this way.

This is counterproductive and, frankly, assinine. There's only an occasional attempt, often by a new participant, to engage in understanding, but the usual suspects just drive those post right back into the definitional wars on which style can eek out a win in this esoteric column. "I have more agency over the fiction!" "Sure, but you do that by sharing some narration." "NO, I don't, because action declarations cannot be shared narration or have any backstory because... blah blah blah." Guess what, action declarations can have plenty to do with sharing narration and backstory, and THAT'S FINE! On the other side, it's "But you just put players into situations where they might have wanted to doing something else and that's RAILROADING!" Guess what? It's not, because the players signed up for that kind of play. They aren't playing to be cautious explorers of the intersections and sneakers-up on giants. They players are getting EXACTLY the game they want. If they want to be sneaky, then they have every opportunity to declare this as part of their interests, and then call the GM out if he screws it up. And not in the 4 second interruption window, but as a function of what they've established as important to them.

And the Pippin thing? Good grief. "My way can cause that outcome better than your way!" Seriously? You're trying to figure out what system can cause that specific outcome and arguing over that?! Both will create a story with regards to the situation in Gondor and the player's goals if played with integrity. Can you really say that you, as a GM, would be so likely to frame the exact situations that allow the Pippen player to declare actions that will resolve properly to gain that result and also say that a traditional DM could not do so? That's hubristic and believing far too much in the superiority of your playstyle -- a playstyle that specifically avoid assumptions about outcomes, yet here we are, arguing which playstyle can best replicate the specific outcome of a novel. Ridiculous doesn't even get close to it.

For what it's worth, I have a a few more sessions of BitD under the belt, it's going swimmingly and everyone's having a complete blast being scoundrels. We have a character building a mechanical hull for the ghost of his childhood dog, the crew getting even more wrapped up in weirdness from their now allies the witches Dimmer, and a brewing war between the group and a neighborhood that was roughly treated by them. And the streets are getting even more dangerous as the background gang war heats up and the Lampblacks are becoming desperate. On the other hand, I just ran a modified version of Sunless Citadel for my regular 5e group, which includes all of my Blades players, and we had another blast as attempts to bluff through guard posts failed and now the kobolds are in fighting retreat back to more defensible positions and setting up ambushes on the fly in a long, combat time play (we've passed a minute and a half of combat time now, and the fight's still on, yay kobolds!). It doesn't matter what you're playing, neither is the better style -- the better style is the one you're having fun playing. Everyone needs to step back and figure out if you're trying to help others see how much fun you have and why or if you're just trying to defend your method as superior in the face of someone with a different set of ideas.

 

[billd91]

That seems a perfectly good point in the thread to stick a fork in it and call it done.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

[...]

lol! That's a lot of commentary to digest, but let me just respond that it DOES matter what are the interpretations of some of these questions, and Tuovinen's essay DOES have some relevance! I mean, look, [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s interpretation of Story Now (of standard narrative model) becomes ridiculous when he flat out states that you can have NO agenda or signaling between players and GMs and somehow magically you have a narrative model game or magically you just achieve the same ends. I mean, regardless of how we explicate it (and I'm OK with your "this discussion of backstory is getting ridiculous") Max and Pemerton cannot both be correct!! I know from experience of play in this technique that some of the things Max asserts are simply not tenable. I know it. I don't need Eero Tuovinen to justify that, its simply outright demonstrable in my experience, because I've tried to do what Max claims 'just happens'. It never works!

Now, I'm not saying his game "doesn't work" or he's fooling on anyone. I just think that what he does and what [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] does, and what I do, and what [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] does, etc. are not the same thing. I think if you understand the Tuovinen essay in the light of Pemerton's definition of backstory then you see how things make sense. It DOES cast a light on this distinction. Perhaps the guy wasn't being particularly precise when he wrote it and it isn't perfectly clear and doesn't touch on all the relevant points. Perhaps its even not perfectly consistent. I'd say he's not talking about a specific game, and thus the concepts are covering a lot of different possible game designs. That makes it easy to draw inconsistent conclusions from it, but a careful reading does provide insight!

Anyway, I've done more than skim it for statements that support my PoV, and I've got plenty of experience that seems to indicate certain truths about how RPGs work. I don't know what else to say. I don't care about superior or inferior but when I read monkeyshine I generally respond in a way that is intended to explicate where the shine is and where the monkey is.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That seems a perfectly good point in the thread to stick a fork in it and call it done.

heh, I think its beyond 'well done' at this point and more on the level of 'burnt to a crisp'.