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

lowkey13 said:

Not to be a dink, but as a critical theorist, Ron Edwards was a heckuva biologist.

Or, more generally, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. There is certainly nothing wrong with academic critiques of RPGs (and the accompanying jargon), but it's a bit much to use obscurantist* terms that are certainly not generally accepted, and to continue to refer to those definitions and to an essay that is hardly universally accepted in order to make your points.

Or, put another way, I can quotes Barthes to the cows come home, but it doesn't mean that someone can't enjoy J. K. Rowling, and while RPGs are just as much of a subject of academic interest as anything else, one rarely convinces people by defining terms.

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This is fair, excepting that other posters took up the terminology and definitions to make their own arguments. I think, at that point, calling someone out for referring to the shared source of argument is a little weird.

*Yep, I read what you wrote Ovinomancer.

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Yay?

*Deleted by user*

Numidius said:

Edwards "played" with the concept of Stances in his 2001, little, humorous rpg Elfs. The following quote is from an old online review:

"Rules-wise Elfs is quite simple. A character has three stats, a sort of alignment, a one-sentence description, a kill list, and an equipment list. For reference I present one of our playtest characters:

Lystria, Spunk: 3, Low Cunning: 2, Dumb Luck: 2, Oral personality, ego-tripping bimbo.

All in-game actions are resolved by first stating your intent and then rolling 3d10 versus Spunk; dice that roll Spunk or less are counted as successes. If you can narrate your stated intent as being especially sneaky or childish, you get to add your Low Cunning to your Spunk, thus increasing your chances of success.

However, Dumb Luck is what makes Elfs stand out from the crowd. To get the Dumb Luck bonus added to your Spunk, you must make two action statements; one for what your character would want to happen, and one for what you want to happen."

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The actual resolution bit was missing in my previous quote:

" If you get three successes, your character's action succeeds. If you get one or two successes, your action succeeds. And if you fail, you fail. This novel mechanic is the source of much of the silliness of Elfs, as using Dumb Luck is an excellent way to hose your buddies."

In the example of the Pc entering the forest looking for trail, applying stances as per that above, I guess:
Pc intent: looks for a tavern, a hot soup, and asks if forest is dangerous. Player intent: Pc enters the forest clueless. Rolls...

Then maybe, Pc intent: find a trail and get out safe; Player: gets lost and captured by creatures. Rolls...

Sounds funny, but also provides a framework to show that realism, bad outcomes, complications, adversity, can come from the Player POV; the Gm (or other Players) then might elaborate on what kind of creatures dwell in that forest, and so on. It requires a "double-think" process from participants not dissimilar to that of immersive, no-metagame, play.

Edwards' Trollbabe rpg, has a more rigid framework: the Player faces: Pc normal declarations (Actor stance?); call for conflicts (Director st?); after roll, failures are narrated by Player, incorporating bits from scene/Npcs, in Author stance (?) cause retroactively (after the roll) gives an in fiction reason for failing. [Edit. Maybe Director's, since uses 'the world' to narrate, also]
Also after failures, Player may choose, from a list of situations, one in order to reroll (Pawn / Director stance).
Successful Pc rolls are narrated by Gm (Actor/Author/Director stance, depending on what is narrated)
Relationships of the Pc are listed on the sheet and their usage is under Player control (Pawn stance), while their feelings are under Gm's control (Actor stance).
Death of the Trollbabe can occur only if: Player attempts a reroll when already Wounded; fails; the Gm, in this case only, describes how she is KOed plus a very bad outcome; if Player does not like it (Pawn stance), describes how the Pc dies (Author stance).

lowkey13 said:

Not to be a dink, but as a critical theorist, Ron Edwards was a heckuva biologist.

Or, more generally, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. There is certainly nothing wrong with academic critiques of RPGs (and the accompanying jargon), but it's a bit much to use obscurantist* terms that are certainly not generally accepted, and to continue to refer to those definitions and to an essay that is hardly universally accepted in order to make your points.

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I'm not the one who introduced Forge terminology into this thread.
[MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION] introduced discussion of "stance", and [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] embraced it.

I think [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] may have been the first poster to use GNS/GDS terminology, but my memory on that is hazier.

But if other posters want to use that termnology, I'm happy to engage with it.

One source of frustration in playing a character in a RPG can be when player priorites and character priorities very obviously come inrto conflict. I'm thinking of the sort of situation in which the player has to choose to be faithful to the PC, but get hosed in the game play; or can make a choice that will avoid being hosed, but seems like a distortion of the character.

Iin my own experience of long-term group play using relatively traditional systems, part of the required player skill-set is anticipating and managing these possible conflicts. One example I have in mind, which I think I already mentioned upthread, has to do with intraparty conflict: a player who declares hostile actions against another PC, but who ameliorates the degree of hostility compared to what s/he might do against a NPC, is trying to remain true to the character (along the line of actor stance) but has "massaged" the character's motivations/deciions by having regard to the practical demands of group play at the table (author stance).

Another example which is frequently mentioned by posters on these boards is building a PC who has a reason/motivation to go "adventuring" with the other PCs. This reduces the likelihood that the plaeyr will find him-/herself torn between chosing something that would make sense for the character, and choosing something that works for the game at the table.

The troll example - in which the player knows what is required, but has to pretend that the player does not - is an instance (in my view) of the frustration I mentioned very much coming to the surface. A quite different way to ameliorate the frustration from the one mentioned by [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] (that is, of coming up with a clever way of bringing the non-hosing action declaration back into consistency with the PC's mental states) is to use ad hoc adjduciation by the GM, or systematic system changes, to render the staeks of the encounter less of a hosing for the player (eg think about how in The Empire Strikes Back the "troll" captures Luke rather than killing him). I woudn't expect a game in which [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]'s approach counts as "cheating", by giving the player an "unfair advantage" in the encounter, to consider this alternative pathway. But it's one that eg RQ suggests, by having combat outcomes that are less binary than D&D's, and by making capture and ransom a more significant part of the game.

Another frequent oddity (and perhaps more oddity than frustration) of the sort I'm talking about is the contrast between the shock/fear that many characters might be expected to feel when confronted by horrible monsters, and the lack of such feelings at the table as the players plan how their PCs will tackle this most recent encounter. I like how 4e handles this for (at least some) monsters, like the Deathlock Wight which has a "Horrific Visgae" that inflicts psychic damage and causes the characters to recoil in horror; or the Tyrant Fang Drake (? 4e's version of a T-Rex), which has a roar that stuns those who hear it, freezing them with terror. Prince Valiant and Cortex+ Heroic use similar devices within their own mechanical frameworks. In all these cases, the upshot is that the player doesn't need to deliberately choose the "in character' but "losing rather than winning" option of RPing his/her PC's fear - the game mechanics take care of it instead.

As a player, my ideal state is one of "inhabitation" - that is, the emtions and choice situation I experience as a player closely correspond to those confronting my character. BW produces a fair bit of this eg my character has an instinct to interpose himself between innocents and danger, and so do I (because if I act on my instnct to the detriment of my character I earn a fate point); blind declaration in combat means that I experience the same "fog of war" as my PC; etc.

As a GM, one of the best "inhabiation"-inducing mechanics I've seen in play is the 4e Chained Cambion's psychic chains ability, which (in the fiction) binds two characters with the same torment and frustration that the cambion itself experiences, and at the table binds two players together in a way that (given the dyamic nature of the typical 4e combat) produces increasing frustration and recrimination (eg because even when one player saves against the efffect, s/he is still subject to it until tthe other player also saves).

That one has always stood out for me becauase of the way in produced "inhabitation" in respect of intra-party adversity and hostility rather than the more straightforward cases such as cooperation, gratitude and the like.

pemerton said:

Declaring an action "using only knowledge and perceptions that the character would have" precludes using knowledge and perceptions that the character doesn't have - such as the player's belief that adventure and XP are to be found in the wood.

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Right, which is why I'm not doing that.

Another common misunderstanding of Actor Stance is to confound it with "acting" in the histrionic, communicative sense - using a characteristic voice, gestures, and so on. The communicative and demonstrative aspects of "acting" are not involved in Actor Stance at all, which only means that the player is utilizing the character's knowledge and priorities to determine what the character does.

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Sure. I'm not doing that, either.

Ron Edwards is, in fact, not terribly careful about how he provides canonical statements of his key concepts. Which is not uncommon even in academic social science, let alone work being done in this sort of context. You can see this also in his discussion of "story now", where he provides a canonical definition of narrativism as engaging with a premise in the literary sense, but then provides as an examplea of a narrativist-inclined games The Dying Earth RPG, which doesn't really engage with a premise but rather aims at producing ironic humour that will entertain the real-life participants.

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Not being careful with something like "only" seems very reckless to me. Even so, my declaration regarding the forest involves only knowledge and perceptions that the PC has, and has a motivation of the PC.

But if one reads the whole essay, the analysis usually becomes clear. On this occaion you appear not to have done that, though, as you seem to be resolutely asserting that an action declaration can be driven by real-world priorities and yet be actor stance.

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If by "you seem to be resolutely asserting..." you mean "has never asserted," you would be correct. I have asserted, and ONLY(the real use of "only") that I am working with PC knowledge, perceptions and motivations.

Maxperson said:

So making decisions based on PC knowledge and perceptions is author stance? Once again, The Forge's own definition of actor stance is below. And no, I did not retroactively put a motivation onto the PC. The PC's motivation ("I want to see what is in the forest) was first and primary.

"In Actor stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions using only knowledge and perceptions that the character would have."

So we see, ONLY knowledge and perception matters for actor stance. We can't even include motivation at all, since it specifies ONLY those two things. However, as I pointed out, the motivation is entirely the PC's anyway.

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Ok, fair enough. Let's work with [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s definition here and see where it leads us.

So, we have "forest" and ... "not forest (?)" as our two options.

Now, since motivation is not necessary for actor stance, "I want to see what is in the forest" should be discounted. That's a motivation. It's irrelevant.

So, [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], justify your choice of going to the forest as opposed to the "not forest" without referencing motives. You have easy to travel open fields and a forest (apparently without a trail since that's been specified earlier). So, why are you going to the forest? What reason would the character have for going there? The character is curious? Why? The character has no background, thus, no personality, thus, no curiosity. That was also established earlier.

The character could just as easily travel to the "not forest". There's no real reason for the character to enter the forest. And, certainly, if we're traveling, not going into the trackless forest is a more plausible choice. There is no actual in-character justification for traveling into the forest.

Thus, it's not actor stance. For actor stance to have any meaning, you MUST HAVE an actor in the first place, which means establishing motivations for that character outside of the player's motivations. Since you haven't established an actor, there's no actor stance to be taken.

But, yeah, I think [MENTION=6799753]lowkey13[/MENTION] has the right of it. I'll go back to lurking for another couple of hundred posts. It's fun watching people try to bang their heads on the wall of Max, but, my own morbid curiosity has been satisfied, so, it's back to lurking.

Ovinomancer said:

You bolded too late. The stances are about where decisions are made, not just what thry are made with. If you're in Actor stance, you can explain why you went into the forest at that time because the decision was made solely within the character's frame -- ie, his knowledge, motivations, and needs.

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So it doesn't matter if I have a 30 page list of my PC's motivations or no set list, I'm not going to step out of character to explain why I am declaring something for my PC. The motivation is there through, from the declaration above regarding the forest, to the in depth background. It doesn't cease to be actor stance just because I haven't explained the motivation to the DM.

pemerton said:

I'm not the one who introduced Forge terminology into this thread.

[MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION] introduced discussion of "stance", and [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] embraced it.

I think [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] may have been the first poster to use GNS/GDS terminology, but my memory on that is hazier.

But if other posters want to use that termnology, I'm happy to engage with it.

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I'm just using it, because I've seen you use it a lot. It's not something I usually talk about as I don't think it's all that helpful.

Hussar said:

So, [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], justify your choice of going to the forest as opposed to the "not forest" without referencing motives. You have easy to travel open fields and a forest (apparently without a trail since that's been specified earlier). So, why are you going to the forest? What reason would the character have for going there? The character is curious? Why? The character has no background, thus, no personality, thus, no curiosity. That was also established earlier.

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I already answered this. To look for a trail to follow. That decision was made entirely with character knowledge and perceptions.

And, certainly, if we're traveling, not going into the trackless forest is a more plausible choice.

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We don't know that it's trackless. I'm going in to find out. When I get in, my PC will have more knowledge and perceptions upon which to base further declarations.