Tony Vargas
Legend
Or a setting could be much smaller. You could lay your scene in fair Verona, for instance, and that's the setting.
Unless they strike the set and put up a different one for the next performance...
Why Worldbuilding is Bad
I am assuming that the mystery was written by the GM - is that right?
And if that's right, that means that - from the player point of view - a fair bit of play would have been aimed at making the "moves" that would trigger the GM to reveal information that would then permit the players to (try and) unravel the mystery. Is that right?
Well, in a traditional D&D game that would suggest the end of the campaign! Wouldn't it?
Well, the inverted commas around "stage" tell it all, don't they?
An actual stage is an actually existing material thing. Once constructed, its existence is independent of the mental states of any particular person. The same is not true of a purely imaginary thing. [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] is drawing attention to this point, and expressing a view about whose mental states should be understood as constituting the "gameworld" - namely, all the participants, not just the GM.
The last quoted sentence seems as good as any to describe what is going on. I think the current usage of "worldbuilding" in discussions of RPGing brings with it an assumption of GM authority over that process. I think this is very evident not just in many of the posts in the current threads, but other threads one reads on ENworld, blogs one reads, presentation in D&D rulebooks, etc.
It's also very often taken for granted, in RPGing, that a "gameworld" is more-or-less independent of any particular group of players or characters - which relates to the idea of "neutrality" that has been put forward by more than one poster in these threads. The process you describe for City of Mists does not produce a "neutral" setting.
This description seems to be of a game that broadly conforms to the "standard narrativistic model":
One of the players is a gamemaster whose job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications. . . .
The actual procedure of play is very simple: once the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.
The actual procedure of play is very simple: once the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.
Now given that it's a PbtA game, I suspect (without having read it) that the emphasis on scene framing is less than in the standard narrativistic model. But I think in the context of this thread that's probably a minor point. I think the difference between what you describe, and a traditional GM-heavy-worldbuilding game, is fairly striking.
Doug McCrae
Legend
Yes, the mystery was entirely written by the GM. The players did a lot of writing but this was mostly theories. Paul, the GM, also developed a lot of theories in his role as the Professor. He told me recently that producing those theories was a lot more work than creating what was actually going on, which I found quite surprising.
Yes we were making moves to try to get the GM to reveal information though we thought of it in game world terms. One such move occurred in the very first DGC dream intrusion when the players' dream personae discovered the 'dream enemy' of an External and were able to question it. There would sometimes be joking about getting Paul drunk and trying to persuade him to reveal the game's secrets but he always, even after the first phase of the DGC ended, kept them well hidden.
It always felt like a sandbox game where we had a great deal of freedom, which I think is what it was. Towards the end of the first phase of the DGC our available moves were severely reduced as the Professor was hospitalised, we were under attack in the physical world, we'd burned our bridges with the Brotherhood (a secretive NPC organisation that seemed to possess psychic talents), and as the example of play in the previous post shows had even become reluctant to dream intrude. As that was happening, Pix's character's own clairvoyant abilities were developing and these became our main source of information. There was a noticeable difference in the gameplay when this happened as the visions Pix received were entirely dependent on the GM. Pix had no power to trigger them. For all we know he may have been able to develop that capability but by that time we were gunshy when it came to such things. Rereading the old journals, at that point the game starts to feel a bit more like the GM telling the players a story.
Things had taken a very downward turn by the end of the first phase of the DGC. The Professor and the in-game version of Paul were dead. The Brotherhood had been decimated. Mark had become alienated from most of the rest of the group and, infected by an External, was then sectioned at our behest. The DGC had clearly reached an ending, an extremely downbeat one, where the surviving characters could barely function as they had in the past. The very last paragraph in the journals (written by Pix) reads:
But such patients, such successes, belong to the past. The only good thing we can do now is retreat before the onslaught. I very much hope that if we stop pushing, then whatever is on the other side will stop pushing back. Whatever it is, it's too strong for us.
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billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
The difference between Keep on the Borderlands and Village of Hommlet is the amount of worldbuilding.
I think this is one of the obstacles to clear analysis of RPGing techniques - making the move from the "in play" perspective to the "anthropological" perspective. (Neither of the terms in inverted commas is perfect, but hopefully clear enough.)
I'm not saying I agree, but at least you're picking two examples, which others might know directly, and drawing a line with those two examples as reference points. From there, a useful conversation *could* ensue, if anyone can demonstrate that the difference in background material between those two publications has ever affected anyone's experience in actual play.
If you use "world building" to mean "excessive setting development", then I am happy to use that as a working definition, in dialogue with you, even though I use the term differently elsewhere. (Much as I understand that KB on the package of a digital storage device might mean kilobyte or kibibyte depending on context.)
All the world's a stage?
Tony Vargas
Legend
Would it kill Game Theorist to pick labels remotely intuitively suggestive of the content of their theories...?
...and, even if it would, it'd be a noble sacrifice.
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