A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

If our reality is indeed a computer simulation, who knows for sure how tea houses pop up?

Maybe rpgs have gotten so good, we don't even know we're in a game. Some days I really want to switch tables though...

Now I'm craving tea, and I don't even like tea. I also have to go grocery shopping. I'm going to be eying my fellow shoppers very carefully, for signs of sect activity. No, GM. I don't want to find any sect members here.

pemerton said:

This thread is a spin-off of this thread. Its immediate trigger is the following post:


In real life, people move through a physcially-structured environment where events happen in accordance with causal processes. Notions of request, permission, decision etc have no explanatory work to do in relation to real-life causal processes (except for a rather narrow range of phenomena involving interactions between human beings).

At a RPG table, in the situation being described in the posts above, the players give rise to an idea - our PCs find some sect members at the teahouse - and they suggest that that idea should be an element of the fiction that is being collectively created at the table. The GM then decides whether or not that idea actually does become part of the shared fiction, and communicates that decision to the players by telling them what it is that their PCs find at the teahouse.

That causal process has very little in common with the causal processes that bring it about that, if I go to a teahouse looking for members of a particular sect, I find any of them there. The most obvious difference is that whether or not, in real life, I meet any sect members doesn't depend upon whether anyone takes up a suggestion I make about an interesting idea.

Whether or not the GM making decisions about the gameworld, and then conveying that to the players, makes for good RPGing seems a matter of taste. But whether or not such a process is like real life seems a straightforward matter of fact. It's not.

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I have had plenty of situations like the tea room hunt for cultists occur in RPGs of many types as player and gm.
Never had problem resolving them.
So, not seeing much of a dispute ever coming from such in actual play.

5ekyu said:

I have had plenty of situations like the tea room hunt for cultists occur in RPGs of many types as player and gm.
Never had problem resolving them.

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Nor have I had problems resolving these situations.

S'mon said:

Is going to a tea house in a computer game like going to a tea house IRL, or going to a tea house in a TTRPG?

The CRPG tea house was created by the programmer. He didn't create it based on the desires of the player. He decided to make a tea house independent of player preference, just like the IRL creators of a tea house made it without reference to my preference.

Likewise, in some TTRPGs a tea house may be created as in the CRPG - independent of player desire/preference.

Pemerton you seem to see the TTRPG world as something that is always and necessarily created in a manner I recognise from Ron Edwards posts and Nar games, but is not really how simulationist play creates the world. And you seem to want to erase the distinction between the two approaches, or are confused about the difference. Hopefully the videogame example makes it clearer.

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If I've understood you correctly, you are suggesting that is established/narrated without regard to player preferences as functions like real life. I don't agree with that suggestion. One main reason is that real life is indepenedent of anyone's will.

A further consideration is that, in a TTRPG, it is relatively uncommon for a GM's notes or a setting book to specify every patron of a teahouse at all times. Or to have an encounter table for each teahouse. (I own many setting books. None of them purports to offer comprehensive coverage of the teahouses and the like that they describe.) So the action declaration We go to the innhouse looking for sect members triggers a decision-making process on the GM's part which is more than just looking up and reciting a note, or even looking up and rolling on a table (eg even if the encounter table has a "cult" entry, the GM has to decide if the rolled cultist is a sect member).

There are many principles that can govern the GM in making those decisions. But my contention is that none of them makes it like real life. A further point - related, but not the same: I think that, in practice, most of those principles make the gameworld far less varied and far more predictable than real life generally is.

This comes out in [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s post not far upthread:

In real life if I go to the local tea house looking for members of the mafia, I may or may not find some there. If the mafia runs the tea house, the chances that I will find members there are high. If the mafia does not run the local tea house, then it's still possible that some member of the mafia likes tea and just happens to be there, but the odds are fairly slim that I will just happen to be there at the same time.

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On Friday I left some friends to head off and do my own thing. My own thing was a bust, so I went into a nearby library. I sat in there for about half-an-hour until my laptop battery went dead. Then, just as I was leaving, my friends were coming in so that I bumped into them at the entrance.

This is a very big library on a very large university campus, so a minute either way for me or them and we would not have bumped into one another. Not to mention this was the first time I'd been in that library for over ten years, and the first time ever one of my friends had been in there - so neither of us would be on the other's library encounter table.

Having re-met, we then were walking back to where one of my friends was parked when we bumped into another firend as he was leaving work. Our paths were only going to cross on a 50 metre stretch of footpath, so again a minute either way and that encounter wouldn't have happened. Whereas, as it was, I eneded up getting a lift home with him and then talking to him in his car outside my house for about half-an-hour.

My view is that for a RPG experience to be like real life even in outcome, it at least has to produce these sorts of events.

pemerton said:

My view is that for a RPG experience to be like real life even in outcome, it at least has to produce these sorts of events.

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Well, not quite: it has to have the potential to produce these sort of events. That's where dice come in.

I've just read the lead post so I have no idea what the following 3 pages says, but the lead post made me think of something.

Ouija is basically a game whereby participants fake lack of volition and create a narrative about a spirit. A question is asked (not unlike "are there members of sect x at the teahouse?"), the planchette moves around the board (a form of mechanical resolution via the agency of one of the players who secretly takes the initiative) and answers the question. Another question is asked, mood is set, rinse-repeat, and at the end you get a story.

In TTRPGs, just like in Ouija, there is no paranormal volition. There is merely the volition of participants at the table (and perhaps some math).

The illusion of lack of (material) worldly volition is just that; illusion. The illusion of causal processes underpinning the outputs, which are discrete from a singular participant/the collective/or from mathematical output is just that; illusion.

The illusory process of content creation may engender a neat feeling within the participants of "paranormal-ey-ness" or "immersive-ey-ness"...but its just an illusion. Someone is expressing agency over content introduction. There is no disembodied will providing the necessary energy for play to persist.

Because a shared imagined space isn't a real thing (a computer game's setting isn't a shared imagined space...its a real space, with encoded boundaries, parameterized to some degree of resolution or another to persist and interact "physically" with inhabitants), and because for the purposes of TTRPGs humans can't parameterize a shared space at anything remotely nearing the resolution of the physical world (without encoding it...and even then we aren't even close currently...or at least nothing brought to market), we're going to have to have questions answered that are without prior parameterization or consideration. When we do that, something/someone (content introduction procedure/table participant) mediates and the agency of that thing/person is expressed. We feel one way or another about this (immersed, empowered, disempowered, regretful, bored, excited, disgruntled, anticipatory, etc). Rinse and repeat and the shared imaginary space develops.

One person at the table may "feel" that they had a paranormal experience or an immersive experience while another may feel silly or disgruntled...but fundamentally, the machinery of output is the same; someone (be it a participant at the table or the designer) is guiding the planchette through their personal volition (unlike actual life where many concrete, established causal forces and varying wills are integrated on multiple timescales).

pemerton said:

If I've understood you correctly, you are suggesting that is established/narrated without regard to player preferences as functions like real life. I don't agree with that suggestion.

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I think everyone agrees that playing an RPG is not exactly like experiencing real life. This seems a trivial observation.

The problem seems to be that there are several very different approaches to generating the contents of the tea house, and it feels as if your central paradigm is the GM deciding it in the moment with a "what would be cool?" type question. Which is a fine way to do it, but can lead to a less real-feeling world than "what would likely be there?" Most games tend to encourage a mix of the two.

Manbearcat said:

In TTRPGs, just like in Ouija, there is no paranormal volition. There is merely the volition of participants at the table (and perhaps some math).

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You're omitting the role of the dice roll.

As GM I tend to find answering "what would I like to happen?" type questions exhausting, and I prefer something which takes control out of my hands. A bit like my Parliament voting for a referendum and agreeing to abide by the result - it's most satisfying if the outcome isn't fudged.

One thing I often do is use published site-based adventures, seed the world with them and run them as-is. I very rarely make a decision to alter the content, usually only in extremis ("Oh no, no babau stat block in my 5e MM! I guess bar-lgura is close...") - and the players decide where to go and what to ignore. I find this creates more of an objective living-world feel for me and for them.

Eg yesterday my Runelords group could have followed the tracks to Runeforge, or go straight to Xin-Shalast, but instead decided to build a boat and sail it to Guiltspur. I have all three sites detailed in Paizo adventures but I have only a general idea what is in each, and as I play I'll be surprised at what happens. I like that feeling.

S'mon said:

I think everyone agrees that playing an RPG is not exactly like experiencing real life. This seems a trivial observation.

The problem seems to be that there are several very different approaches to generating the contents of the tea house, and it feels as if your central paradigm is the GM deciding it in the moment with a "what would be cool?" type question. Which is a fine way to do it, but can lead to a less real-feeling world than "what would likely be there?" Most games tend to encourage a mix of the two.

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My contention is that the what would likely be there approach is not an approximation to real life. And thus that whatever experience it engenders in those who enjoy it, like real life or more like real life than (say) declaring and resolving a Streetwise check is not an appropriate description for that experience.

Lanefan said:

Well, not quite: it has to have the potential to produce these sort of events. That's where dice come in.

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As I said, my friend and I wouldn't be on the typical GM's library encounter table, given that I have been in that library once in the past 10 or so years, and one of the friends whom I bumped into there has never been in there.

And potential is not enough. They actually have to happen. The real world is something in which I am intimately embedded and have repeated experiences which are coincidences, but reaffirm my myriad connections to the world. Many RPG settings are incredibly sparse in comparison.

S'mon said:

You're omitting the role of the dice roll.

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I was folding that into math:

* The designer (Moldvay) has decided x aspect of play has a (just above) 16 % chance while the GM who sets a DC and gives Disadvantage (where the player now needs a 13 or better twice) is the volitional force of that 16 %. The players can express their own by choosing Elf (if it’s Secret Doors) or by deploying Inspiration or some other means to offset the Disadvantage (if they have it).

I liked your post. I do agree that there is a spread of volitional force (or planchette moving) in orthodox adventuring site/module play (designer, GM, player). I think it’s just that, were we able to (not that it can’t be done...just that it would require extreme computing power), we could build a model that could discern the precise % of volitional force of those 3 - 10 (ish) humans for every moment of play...and that would add up to 100 %...in the same way that Ouija or real life doesn’t have a provable external volitional force (paranormal or metaphysical)...but different from real life in that the number of participating volitional forces in the system is extreme (which is not something a GM can approximate in any real sense...we’re all just doing our Knuckledragger Best to abstract it and pretend to tease out, but inevitably fail to do so, our cognitive biases).

Always IME, the problem I encountered with Gms explicitly self proclaiming Keepers of Reality/Causality/Plausibility (which nonetheless implicitly they are and should be, in classic Gm driven style) is that they tend to the extremes in enforcing the proclaim:
either by running a too strict railroad kind of game, in which the drama, the turning points are already established during prep, not accepting off the rails Pcs' declarations and course of action statements,
or, on the other side,
by a sandboxy style game where, though, nothing interesting really happens, and when one asks for "stuff" to happen, or Npcs to actively interact, they just dismiss it as naive requests of drama in their world of pure immersion and realistic (read boring) display of setting.

Interesting the fact that both behaviours don't like nor allow backgrounds for Player Chararcters, dismissing them as burdens soon to be relieved of as the game/story begins to unfold.

My opinion is that a component of apprehension, almost fear, is preventing a more collaborative and enjoyable playstyle; a deep concern about sharing some narrative aspects of Rpg, about listening to inputs from the table and adding those to the usual output of being a Gm, so to enrich the experience.

Again, IME in actual play: nothing to do with the ongoing diatribe in the OP, which I find interesting to read, btw.

Anyway I understand that in a long campaign, with players coming&going, the Gm is the Keeper of Continuity, and rightfully so; I'm ranting about the rigid, fringe behaviours that role, more often than not, leads to.