What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Ovinomancer]

One thing that should be reiterated here in this excellent essay is that there IS NO CAUSAL PROCESS WITHIN THE FICTION. The fact is no such person as Sherlock Holmes, no person with characteristics similar to him, can exist in the real world. This isn't even limited by just ordinary physical constraints (IE nobody can focus their attention well enough or remember things so reliably as to perform the feats attributed to him). It extends to LOGICAL POSSIBILITY as well, fiction need not even abide by the basic tenants of logic. Things can both exist and not exist, be in two places at once, have mutually exclusive characteristics, etc. within fiction. Not only that, but this HAPPENS ALL THE TIME. Mostly we don't notice. We suspend disbelief and we simply accept the fiction's conceits as given.

There's nothing remarkable about this when we're talking about a fixed passive form of story where the reader simply participates by reading and imagining what is told by the author. However, when we get into RPG THEORY then its VERY VERY IMPORTANT to understand this! What it means is that the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS is who, by rule/convention/whatever, is able to assert elements of the fiction. There is no 'fictional causation', it doesn't exist, it is, at best, a convention to pretend that it exists, and that only certain participants are bound by it. It is this convention, the practice of RPG game play, which is the subject of RPG game theory, which is what we are discussing here.

Every time people talk about what is 'in the fiction' except as it pertains to how they will relate it to play procedures, is just not significant. What is significant is 'what are those procedures and how do they work?' In particular how does pre-authoring content work, why is it done, and what effect does it have on play processes? (since that was the question of the OP).

Most of the recent thread has passed me by, but I wanted to touch on this argument as it seems foundational to many.

I fail to understand how saying fiction has no causal process is remotely relevant when the argument then becomes 'except as stipulated in the rules of the RPG.' The first argument may be true (there's still an open philosophical debate as to whether fictional things are real), but it fails to remain relevant when it's then accepted that RPGs treat some fictions as causal by convention.

If the argument is that the exact fiction authored is meaningless and it's the authoring the matters seems very, very premature when you then limit the nature of what is authored by already authored fiction. If "fictional positioning" has any meaning, it's causal to what can be authored to the fiction at that point. If "genre tropes" has any meaning, it's causal to what can be authored to the fiction at that point. If you use fiction, even by convention, to constrain how new fiction can be authored (and even who can author the fiction, characters not involved in a scene have little input in most RPGs) then you're accepting that fiction has causal power.

I can see a rebuttal that takes the form: ah, but it isn't the fiction that does this, it's the agreement on rules that does this. And that gets around a good bit of it, but it doesn't account for the fact that we still check the fiction to see what's allowed. You can't say, for instance, "new fiction must not contradict the existing fictional positioning" and stop there -- you still need the existing fictional positioning, which is still fiction. The rules define which bits of fiction gain causal power over new fiction, but there's still fiction involved that is doing work. I don't see a coherent position that excludes fiction as having any causal power that then utilizes existing fiction to limit future fiction.

What am I missing, here? Because, at the moment, this seems like one of those things that sounds really smart and relevatory, but it actually isn't. If you want to say that fiction has no causal power then you cannot reference fiction as a limit of authorship, as that's using fiction to apply causal power. And you can't cut the fiction out of that by saying it's convention or rules, as the actual limits on authorship depend on the nature of the fiction referenced.

 

[pemerton]

The number two, being an abstract object, has no causal effect on anything. Yet the number 2 is a limit that will be approached by y = ((x^2)/x) +2, as x approaches zero.

The time my super-mathematician spent yesterday squaring the circle, being an impossible event, has no causal effect on anything. But a consistent story about my super-mathematician would have to allow that while that series of geometric figures was being drawn, my super-mathematician cannot also have been designing yet another perpetual motion machine. Only one set of plans can be drawn at a time.

Lesson? Consistency is a logical and/or conceptual relation between abstract objects, not a causal relation between physical objects.

 

[Aenghus]

I think most players want to do both: start with one - the 'everyman', perhaps, or the novice at its class - and end up with the other: the special hero.

I think this has changed over time, a lot of players want to skip the vulnerable early levels, especially when they have played through them a lot before. Some people want to start with the special hero.

While it can be fun to play a special snowflake once in a while, always playing one gets boring fast; even more so if you've got a DM who gives the PCs plot protection so they just about can't die or have anything else really bad happen to them.

Lanefan

IMO a PC who's a special snowflake in one game might be a good fit for a different game table with different standards. In a game where PCs are expected to have backstories and personal goals a rootless orphan with no background could be the special snowflake, it all depends on expectations.

A game with plot protection for PCs needs other stakes rather than mere PC survival to play for. A lot of game tables don't feature casual PC death any more, but feature plenty of meaningful success and failure nethertheless. PCs may be more complex starting off, have significant backstories or game goals they expect to be relevant to play.

There are legitimate reasons for plot protection, such as games for children, and groups that specifically ask for such game. If I run games for children I apply content filters as appropriate, simplify the game rules, and run short sessions. Running for teens I would have laxer content filters and expect to spend more time keeping order.

If players request I avoid certain themes or plotlines I will at the very least consider such requests carefully, and probably go along. If a particular player is having personal difficulties, I am going to go easy on them in the game.

There are lots of legitimate reasons to apply various sorts of plot protection, content filters and reduced or increased game focus on particular activities.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Gygax stated it this way and then proceeded to provide all kinds of perhaps-unintentional encouragement to play it a bit less than heroically.

Exhibit A: giving x.p. for treasure, thus encouraging looting and pillaging over heroism every time: advice our crew has gleefully followed for 35 years or more, even though we dumped the xp-for-gp rule in about year 2.

Yeah, and I have said the same thing a few times here too. So I think we agree that the messaging was a little confusing, but just reading the 'wrapper on the tin' you would certainly expect a game of heroes and heroic adventure.

I will add, as an aside sort of, that I started in 1975 with OD&D, and it was less like that. There wasn't a clear message. It was more like "look at this neat variation of a wargame!" and we were all just struck by the infinitely flexible nature of play where the rules were only a starting point and not the whole story. I GUESS we kind of expected some sort of fantastical experience, but I don't recall that what I got was somehow surprisingly different from what was advertised. The oeuvre seemed to be more 'delving into dungeons is stupid dangerous, you will probably die!'

I was specifically replying to your analysis that I quoted, which seemed to be restricted to only a couple of types of play and thus imply those were the only ones that mattered.

I think its hard to say how many types of play there really are! Probably depends on how you draw the lines.

These (quoted) are a series of assumptions which may be true in some settings and games and people's points of view but not in others.

I've always seen PCs as adventurers; a step or two above the normal commoner but by no means unique: there's lots of other adventurers out there. There has to be, or else where do all the levelled villains come from, and where do all the higher-level people who train the PCs come from, not to mention all the replacement PCs you might need if you do a good job grinding the meat.

See above. And if the charts show there's so few, that kinda clashes with the number of henches allowed by one's Charisma score (a high-Charisma character can have a dozen henches or more, if memory serves)

I was just going by what the game presents. Your fighter is a 'hero' at level 4, the illusionist a 'Master Trickster', the thief is a 'Robber' and the cleric a 'Curate' (these are 1e level titles, but I think the earlier ones are about the same). Now, maybe I came to D&D by a different route than later folks, but TO ME the portrayal of NPCs with levels was a simple convenient convention. It stems from Chainmail where normal figures are basically equated to levels 1-3 (10 characters to a figure). That makes a level 1 fighter the equivalent of 10 veteran soldiers (though when you do that fight in D&D itself using the d20 combat system it obviously doesn't quite work out that way). The point is making the town guards 'level 2 fighting men' is just a way to create an elite warrior with 2 hit dice, it doesn't imply that they are heroic figures who advance in level. In fact 1e explicitly states that such people are not in fact eligible to advance, not being heroic material.

Yes, there must, of necessity, be an endless supply of heroes for D&D's meat grinder, and so for henchmen as well (though its VERY hard to get many in any one place, you have to move around a LOT by the DMG). I would argue this has more to do with the incoherence of D&D (heroic concept, meat grinder low level cannon fodder implementation) than it does with what is stated as the intent.

I mean, I don't think you're wrong about what game Gygax was actually designing, just that people certainly don't EXPECT it to be that game when they read it!

I think societal and legal pressures would tend to keep such people tightly under wraps in the real world.

I think it is literally impossible for such people to exist! What we call in reality an 'adventurer' is someone who's traveled to 5 or 10 exotic locales and done a few memorable and mildly (by D&D standards) dangerous things. No real world human being would survive the travails of a D&D character for even a month, it would break you even if you managed to actually survive the danger itself.

That said, once the zombie apocalypse has come and gone and it's everyone for him/herself....

BRAINSSSSSSSSSS.....

I think most players want to do both: start with one - the 'everyman', perhaps, or the novice at its class - and end up with the other: the special hero.

While it can be fun to play a special snowflake once in a while, always playing one gets boring fast; even more so if you've got a DM who gives the PCs plot protection so they just about can't die or have anything else really bad happen to them.

Lanefan

Now, see I see it the opposite way. I'm an average guy in real life, in my gaming time, I want to be special. Sure, I want to make up and play out what really makes me special, but I never want to be a feckin level 1 AD&D character again as long as I live, BORING!

As for what the challenge is, I just don't see dying as being a part of it. I mean, death happens, that's fine, its part of the story, but one more character death, maybe number 846 or so, don't mean much! It means something though if its me dying to save my friends, or failing to do so BY dying. Now its interesting! I don't give player's 'plot protection', I give them the chance to shape the plot, and if they don't play well or get really unlucky, it will shape in the form of a tragedy!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Most of the recent thread has passed me by, but I wanted to touch on this argument as it seems foundational to many.

I fail to understand how saying fiction has no causal process is remotely relevant when the argument then becomes 'except as stipulated in the rules of the RPG.' The first argument may be true (there's still an open philosophical debate as to whether fictional things are real), but it fails to remain relevant when it's then accepted that RPGs treat some fictions as causal by convention.

If the argument is that the exact fiction authored is meaningless and it's the authoring the matters seems very, very premature when you then limit the nature of what is authored by already authored fiction. If "fictional positioning" has any meaning, it's causal to what can be authored to the fiction at that point. If "genre tropes" has any meaning, it's causal to what can be authored to the fiction at that point. If you use fiction, even by convention, to constrain how new fiction can be authored (and even who can author the fiction, characters not involved in a scene have little input in most RPGs) then you're accepting that fiction has causal power.

I can see a rebuttal that takes the form: ah, but it isn't the fiction that does this, it's the agreement on rules that does this. And that gets around a good bit of it, but it doesn't account for the fact that we still check the fiction to see what's allowed. You can't say, for instance, "new fiction must not contradict the existing fictional positioning" and stop there -- you still need the existing fictional positioning, which is still fiction. The rules define which bits of fiction gain causal power over new fiction, but there's still fiction involved that is doing work. I don't see a coherent position that excludes fiction as having any causal power that then utilizes existing fiction to limit future fiction.

What am I missing, here? Because, at the moment, this seems like one of those things that sounds really smart and relevatory, but it actually isn't. If you want to say that fiction has no causal power then you cannot reference fiction as a limit of authorship, as that's using fiction to apply causal power. And you can't cut the fiction out of that by saying it's convention or rules, as the actual limits on authorship depend on the nature of the fiction referenced.

OK, here's my attempt at a cogent response.

First I would note that D&D (as an example) never calls out what the fiction proscribes, or what it prescribes, except specifically where it intersects a mechanic (I will use 1e as my example if it matters since I'm most familiar with it). So, for example the rules state that every 10' a character falls deals 1d6 damage. Likewise when your hit points reach 0, you die (or at least go unconscious, rules are flexible!). I'd note that SOMETIMES, always in the DMG in a place separate from the rule itself, Gygax tries to describe what, fictionally, would best be represented by certain game constructs. So he talks about what sort of walls a thief could climb, and even suggests rules adjustments for them.

Now, you might take all this to indicate 'rules describe how the world behaves', but note that these descriptions are ONLY in terms of how things affect characters, their possessions, and other elements that are part of the direct fiction. The only time this gets blurry is for high level PCs who have class features which are narrative in nature (IE strongholds, where he talks about taxation systems and such, but they are only rules BECAUSE they intersect with character class features). In other places things are specifically called out as 'guidelines' or recommendations, or just procedures which can be used in the course of play, like random generators.

So, I maintain that the rules of the game are about the GAME, and not about regulating the fiction. This is underlined by the way 1e, again and again, calls them all 'guidelines' and specifically instructs the DM to use any means he finds suitable to adjudicate the game.

In terms of the narrative 'being' rules... I don't think it is. I think the narrative is intended to be coherent. You are supposed to be able to hear it, or read it, or experience it as a player, and be able to construct a mental image of the action, much like you would construct a mental image of Moria when you read the chapter of Fellowship of the Ring where they enter Kazhad Dum etc.

The players, presumably in some sort of consensus, are free to decide HOW, or even IF the narrative, the fictional positioning, binds them. This isn't a matter of rules, specifically. There's no rule in D&D that gravity exists. There's a convention, and a falling damage rule accompanies that convention, but there's no rule! In fact, if the players are in the Ethereal Plane, then falling doesn't happen at all. Presumably they're free to make up other such locales, and a whole game could hypothetically take place in such a locale.

So, I think there are CONVENTIONS, what we often call 'genre assumptions' or 'tropes', and even just 'common sense assumptions' (IE gravity) which we assume and use because they are convenient, yet they only take on binding force by consensus in play. A game designer is free to establish some of these are rules, thus staking his game's claim to a certain territory, but it would be impossible for games to actually try to spell them all out. MOST of what we play is what we decide to play, not what is in the book. 'Causality' is simply a convention we may use, or even more likely, just a lampshade we hang on certain plot devices.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The number two, being an abstract object, has no causal effect on anything. Yet the number 2 is a limit that will be approached by y = ((x^2)/x) +2, as x approaches zero.

The time my super-mathematician spent yesterday squaring the circle, being an impossible event, has no causal effect on anything. But a consistent story about my super-mathematician would have to allow that while that series of geometric figures was being drawn, my super-mathematician cannot also have been designing yet another perpetual motion machine. Only one set of plans can be drawn at a time.

Lesson? Consistency is a logical and/or conceptual relation between abstract objects, not a causal relation between physical objects.

Careful there, you will soon discover the Heart Sutra and we'll lose you in endless repetitions of

"Om, gate gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi soha!"

 

[Sadras]

So, I maintain that the rules of the game are about the GAME, and not about regulating the fiction.

Okay so gravity is not spell out.
[MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] - what about specific spell effects when casting underwater (fictional positioning)? It does appear like these effects/rules were created due to the causal nature of the fiction.

 

[pemerton]

On causation - prompted by [MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION], and (I think) consistent with what [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has been posting.

In AD&D, a dragon gets combat bonuses when defending its young. Does that mean that, in the world of D&D, only dragons are driving to great effort to protect their children? No, it means that the designers, who lavished a lot of attention on dragons, thought this was an interesting idea to call out in respect of them, and so wrote in the bonus.

Again in AD&D, a fireball can't be cast underwater, while a lightning bolt turns into a sphere rather than a bolt. But can a fireball still be cast with full effect in a raging cyclone? Why does an electric eel's "lightning" attack work normally underwater?

Again, this isn't about causation in any meaningful sense - it's about using mechanics to try and convey some idea that seems interesting and fun. The designers cared about underwater, but not so much about tropical storms. And were not all that interested in trying to model the actual physical behaviour of bolts of electricity.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Okay so gravity is not spell out.
@AbdulAlhazred - what about specific spell effects when casting underwater (fictional positioning)? It does appear like these effects/rules were created due to the causal nature of the fiction.

What 'causation', can you (or me or anyone) describe why magical fire is affected by being underwater? Fires don't burn underwater because water denies them oxygen, but magical fire doesn't (perhaps, nobody knows) use oxygen. If it does, then would a fireball work in an atmosphere lacking oxygen? Would it work in a vacuum? I mean, really, there's some consistency here?

No, there's no 'causality' involved, there's a TROPE. I'm not saying the trope doesn't loosely originate in the observation that water puts out fires (note that even in the real world there are things which burn underwater). Its just a convention.

And here's my issue with relying on these conventions as the basis of how you STEER the narrative; how does anyone really know what they are? I mean, some of them are pretty basic, like gravity, or that people need air, etc. Even so these can cause problems sometimes because we have different understandings of HOW they work, and why. When it comes to magic fire underwater all bets are off. All the player can do is either ask, or hope it works how they need it to work.

Now, if you steer the narrative on the basis of dramatic need and player agenda, you don't have this problem. Yes, you still deal with fictional positioning to some extent, but now you have a strong guide as to how it should work, which is basically the 'rule of cool' (which 4e explicitly states, an interesting observation as it turns out). If something furthers the goals of the game, then make it work that way (notwithstanding some reasonable degree of consistency, which is itself just an aid to figuring out what fictional positioning is going to be needed).

That's my take on it anyway

 

[Lanefan]

I find it immensely sad that we've somehow gone from this...

The oeuvre seemed to be more 'delving into dungeons is stupid dangerous, you will probably die!'

...to this

I think this has changed over time, a lot of players want to skip the vulnerable early levels, especially when they have played through them a lot before. Some people want to start with the special hero.

Low level play is great! The lucky survive and move on, and the unlucky die. Just like it'd be in real life, were real life to have adventurers like this.

Lan-"other replies below"-efan