What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Lanefan]

At one point in my RPG play and GM-ing experience, I would have felt that the bolded part of the quote above was paramount to my enjoyment of RPG play. "Believable" and "immersive" play was the whole purpose in playing. I've always been a very "actor stance" player, more so than anyone else in the groups with which I've played. The best moments playing RPGs for me were the times I felt like I could really stay in the character's head.

The problem for me eventually became, it didn't matter how much I could "stay in my character's head" when my character never actually seemed to be pursuing something relevant to their framed fictional positioning. There was always tension between the things my character would do in the game, and the things that should have been intrinsic to their circumstances.

So at points throughout play, the immersion would dim, as my character would be led from one GM plot hook to another, because that's what was in front of us.

Where I've always felt free to ignore hooks and go my own way if that made more sense to the character...and this has included role-playing myself right out of games now and then; not because I-as-player wanted to quit, but because what the party was doing made no sense to the character I was playing, and in character I couldn't talk them into doing something else.

So what I'd often do would be come back with a different character, sometimes one who had more reason to do whatever was being done but more often a throwaway...though sometimes those 'throwaways' ended up becoming really interesting characters in their own right!

Too, my enjoyment would wane significantly when the party would get "stuck"

I just see this as being immersed, as your PC is also probably frustrated at being unable to determine what comes next.

---we somehow missed the GM's clues, and then he'd get exasperated and have to throw in some random bit of "deus ex machina" to get things back on track.

This can work well or badly, depending on the situations and just how the DM handles it.

One of the issues of GM-led games is that GMs---myself included---can rarely conceive of all of the potential connections between pieces in the game world. One of the most common logical fallacies is "narrow framing." The world is generally much more interconnected than we comprehend, and the problem of narrow framing only grows in an RPG when the GM is the sole arbiter of what exists in the fiction. As an "actor stance" player, I've often, OFTEN felt that my character would be significantly more self-aware and comprehending of their own circumstances than what was being presented by the GM.

I've hit this now and then also (I just fill in the missing bits with my own imagination until-unless contradicted by the DM's narration), and am probably guilty of causing the same headache to my own players when I DM.

The ability for a player to author fiction becomes immersive when the player is able to set their character into the fictional frame in ways that they feel are important.

To a point. My problem comes when that fictional frame isn't consistent from one day-week-month to the next; far less likely if the DM has built a solid stage (game world) on which we can do our thing.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

Is anyone really doing that? Or are we all just talking about the fiction and how events within the fiction SEEM to influence each other?

Why did Boromir die? (oops spoiler alert!!!)

Because he was shot by orcs while trying to usher the hobbits to safety. That, or something very like it, is the answer you'll get if you ask that question.

What people are really doing is suggesting that the story about how Boromir died (ie he was shot by orcs) can explain how a fiction was created in which Boromir was shot by orcs.

Similarly, people are saying that the story about the map being hidden in the kitchen can explain why a fiction is not created in which the map is found in the study.

And that is what I, [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] and perhaps others are contesting.

If you want to understand where the shared fiction in a RPG comes from, you need to look at the (sometimes quite complex) practices that govern the processes of authorship. If you want to talk about who has agency over the content of that shared fiction, again you have to look at those practices.

And saying that a player has the same agency in the game as a person does in the real world as if that explains why the GM, rather than the players, gets to decide that the shared fiction is about a map being hidden in the kitchen rather than a map being found in the study, is confused and obscurantist.

 

[pemerton]

if, while reading about the Red Wedding, I become upset by those fictional events and throw the book across the room and into the window, which breaks (actually, it was my wife that did this, and it wasn't a window, it was a vase). Did the fiction have any part of that causal chain?

No.

Someone wrote the book. That brought into being (through a complex series of causal processes) a volume in the hands of your wife, with words in a language that she was able to understand, with the result that your wife was caused to imagine the events that those words described. Imagining those events caused your wife to get upset. Your wife being upset caused her to throw the book, which then - via fairly straightforward mechanical processes - caused book to strike the window, in turn causing the glass in the window to shatter.

We could simplify this by saying "Your wife read some things that upset her, and therefore threw the book which broke a window."

The imaginary stuff plays no causal role. The event of imagining the stuff - what [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] called "experiencing fiction" - played a causal role.

This is not rocket science; it's a pretty basic distinction (between a thing and the idea of a thing). As I said upthread, this is what makes false beliefs, imagination, fantsy etc possible. It also explains why I can imagine Godzilla even though Godzilla is too big to fit in my head.

 

[pemerton]

My problem comes when that fictional frame isn't consistent from one day-week-month to the next; far less likely if the DM has built a solid stage (game world) on which we can do our thing.

Have you done any empirical work to verify this intuition? I don't know of any reason to think that it is true.

 

[Lanefan]

At the table:

Player: "I draw my knife and throw it at the orc!"
GM: "OK, make an attack roll"

<dice are rolled, numbers compared, rules applied, etc>

GM: "Your knife lodges in the orc's chest. It falls down dead."​

Mirrored in the fiction by Falstaffe drawing a knife, throwing it into the orc's chest, and the orc dropping dead as a result of this wound.

That is a causal process, primarily social in its character but there is also the rolling of dice in there - a more simple bio-mechanical process - which provides triggers for varioius parts of the social process (eg one part of the social process involves comparing the number rolled on a die to another number that is salient in the social context).

As part of the social events described, the participants all imagine a knife being thrown and killing an orc. To describe this as "mirroring" doesn't seem to add anything.

I'm not so concerned with the social stuff at the table as I am with internal cause and effect within the game world as seen/felt/experienced by the characters. Why? It all comes back to my 'falling dominoes' idea, where one thing leads to another within the game world on a nice simple cause-effect basis. That's what I want to look at - the validity of in-game causes-effects that reasonably and logically allow the DM to narrate event K as a later result of action A and all the subsequent actions and reactions and events B through J that the players (and PCs) don't know about.

Another example:

Player: "I cast a Death Spell!"

<player rolls dice; GM consults charts, notes, etc>

GM: "All of the orcs are dead - your magic snuffs out their spirits. But the ogre that was with them survives."​

This is similar to the first example, except that it is far less clear what the participants are imagining. What is casting a spell? Given that (unlike throwing a knife) that is a purely imaginary, impossible thing,

Never done any circle magic or been a member of a fraternal order, have you.

each player probably evnisages it differently. And why did the orcs die? The AD&D PHB (p 82) tells us that the victims are slain instantly and irrevocably. But by what process? The GM has embellished it as "snuffing out their spirits" - but what does that even mean? What causal process does it describe?

Yes the DM has embellished the narration (nothing wrong with that) of the effects caused by the Death spell.

Magic in the game is not immune to cause-effect.

Another example:

GM rolls wandering monster die. It comes up 6. GM rolls on a table. The result is "6 orcs".

GM: "You hear a noise ahead of you - round the corner of the dungeon corridor come 6 orcs."

Player of the half-orc PC: "I call out to them in Orcish - 'What are you doing here? Maybe we can help you!'"

<reaction dice are rolled, tables consulted, etc - the net results is "favourable reaction">

GM: "The lead orc replies in Orcish - 'I am Grusk of the Vile Rune tribe. We are searching for the Hidden Grotto of Luthic. If you can tell us how to find it, we will let you live!'"​

Again, the principle causal process here is social, but again there are interspersed moments of dice-rolling. Notice that the presence of the orcs in the dungeon is established, as part of the fiction, before the reason for them being there is established. This is typical of any random encounter generation process - the rules first tell us that something is encountered, and then require the game participants - typically the GM - to author some further fiction that establishes elements of backstory for the encountered creature.

To describe this as "mirroring" seems positively misleading: acts of authorship that occur in time order A, B describe events which, in the fiction, occur in time order B, A.

Seems very realistic, though.

Some guy walks around the corner in front of real-world me on the street - I've no idea why he's there or what he's doing, but he's become a part of my reality; and his presence there has been established before (in my view) his reason for being there. Now obviously he HAS a reason for being there...and the same is true of the orcs in the game world...but neither I-as-me in the street nor I-as-character in the game world knows what that reason is, to begin with, and might never know.

"Mirroring" is, at best, an uohelpful metaphor. As the second and third examples show, though, it's more than that. It's an exercise in obscurantism.

Well, I can't think of a better way to put forward the concept I'm trying to get across.

The "immersive standpoint" is not a valid means of analysing play. That is to say, you CANNOT explain how roleplaying works by pretending you're Falstaff the Fighter. Just the same as Robert Downey Jr can't explain to you how he played the character of Iron Man by pretending to be Iron Man. Or JRRT can't tell you how he wrote LotR by pretending to be Bilbo or Frodo.

Either one can offer all kinds of insight for why those characters did certain things by explaining it from the character's point of view, however; and that's more what I'm after.

I've had an interesting experience of this matter in my own household quite recently. My daughter recently received a copy of The Princess Bride. As you may know, the book contains an introuction in which the author explains how his (grand?)father read him the story, how he (the author) abridged the book by getting rid of all the boring bits, etc.

That introduction is a fiction. A story. Just as, in the movie version, Peter Falk as the grandfather is just as fictional as the evetns involving Buttercup, Westley and the rest.

I've never read the book but I've seen the movie about a gajillion times; and perhaps it's reflective of my immersion preferences that I unfailingly find the scenes where they cut to the kid and his grand-dad to be no more than a jarring and annoying interruption in the story.

When playing a RPG, the player can - if s/he wishes - ignore the fact that the GM made up a reason for the orcs to be in the dungeon after rolling the wandering monster dice that told everyone that there are orcs in the dungon. But the player can't give any coherent account of how the game actually works until s/he recognises that fact. For instance, you can't write GM advice about how to use wandering monsters until you are prepared to write something like "After rolling on the table to determine what creature is encountered, it is your job as GM to determine the backstory of the encountered creatures, their reason for wandering the dungeon corridors, etc."

Of course, if the DM's doing it right the player shouldn't be able to tell whether these orcs are 'wandering monsters' or not; and also shouldn't be able to tell whether the DM made up their backstory after rolling their existence or had it pre-authored all along.

Obviously the language of "mirroring" has absolutely nothing to offer in writing that instructional text for GMs. And it's equally obvious that you can't just tell the GM to focus on "the events unfolding in the collective imagination of the players and DM." After rolling on the wandering monster charts the GM can focus on those imaginary events as much as s/he likes, but that is not going to tell her what the orcs are doing in the dungeon. S/he's going to have to make something up!

Yes she is, and if she's any good what she makes up will be indiscernable from what she had pre-authored.

If she's really on her game she'll build in their reason for being there right in the initial narration of their presence: "You hear a noise ahead just before three orcs come around a corner about 20 feet ahead of you. Two of them are carrying large buckets, probably empty, while the third holds some sort of metal implement - a crank handle, perhaps?"

"Using this in-game logic and causality to provide a play experince" is just an obscure way of saying "making things up". Whisch is [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s point: the "in-game logic" is convention and genre conceit. So it is a convetion that we allow stories about dragons, even though from many points of view (biomecahnics, aerodynamics, etc) they are impossible.

Pretty much everything I've said here assumes all-round acceptance of that convention; otherwise what's the point?

All that bolded bit means is that you're telling a story about characters who believe in causation, and who live in a world governed by causal laws. Which is somewhat implausible for a fantasy RPG, if you think about it - those characters know that uncaused events (ie magic), or events caused by subjective concerns like the will of the gods, happen all the time!

Even something bizarre that happens at the will of the gods still has internal cause and effect: the cause is the deity exerting its will, and the effect is (usually) exactly what the deity wants it to be.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

We clearly aren't discussing brain function

<snip>

What was argued is that I can imagine possible things, consistent things, and have an objective line on that consistency.

I don't know what you mean by "an objective line on that consistency" - but imagining things clearly is a "brain function" ie an event that occurs in someone's brain.

a simple statement like, "The boy walked up the hill" can meet all of those criteria and still be fiction.

I don't know what criteria you have in mind. Are you simply meaning that it is possible that a boy walked up a hill?

you authored the fiction that the mathematician cannot be in two places at once because he cannot be in two places at once.

I decided that the mathematician can't be in two places at once. I also decided that the mathematician can invent perpetual motion machines. Your because does no work here. I have to decide what bits of reality I am going to stick to, and what bits I'm going to reject. This is not about consistency, it's about authorship.

In the boy story, what stops you from going on "And the hill was on the moon"? (Think of, say, Le Petit Prince.) Only a decision not to. There is no objective constraint.

Question: do rules exist? According to your arguments, they cannot, as they are concepts.

As I said in the post to which you replied, "I have an idea of Godzilla. That idea exists - it's in my brain. I'm prepared to say that the content/meaning of that idea exists - it's an abstract object. The idea in my brain expresses that content."

So I've already said that concepts exist. They are abstract objects. They don't exercise causal power. And they are not identical with the things that they are "of" or "about". The idea of Godzilla is not Godzilla. The idea of a mathematician who can square the circle is not a mathematician who can square the circle.

Godzilla does exist -- not as a 80 story tall atomic lizard, but as the concept of an 80-foot tall lizard. That concept exists'

Godzilla is not identical with the concept of him.

Immanuel Kant thought that the concept of a triangle has 3 parts, the concept of a square 4 parts, the concept of a chiliagon 1000 parts. Kant was wrong.

Likewise, I can write the word "red" in black ink with no loss of meaning.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], if you don't want to talk about how authorship takes place, that's fine. If you think that Robert Downey Jr telling you about his character's motivation is the same as talking to Iron Man, that's fine too but a bit weird.

But you can't talk coherently about the processes of RPGing without talking about authorship, and without acknowledging that an author describing a character's motivations isn't the same things as actually talking to someone and learning his/her motivations.

In your post, you say - in response to my remark that the GM will have to make something up "Yes she is, and if she's any good what she makes up will be indiscernable from what she had pre-authored." That is all that matters in this discussion. The GM is authoring things; they are not being "caused by the fiction" (whatever that would mean). If the players want to ignore those moments of authorship, that's their prerogative, but you can't say that players who are completely disengaged from the authorship of the shared fiction nevertheless exercise significant agency in that respect. That's a contradiction.

 

[Lanefan]

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], if you don't want to talk about how authorship takes place, that's fine. If you think that Robert Downey Jr telling you about his character's motivation is the same as talking to Iron Man, that's fine too but a bit weird.

No, I don't think talking to Robert Downey Jr. is the same as talking to Iron Man.

I also don't know how immersed he gets in his roles, but it's reasonable to say that if asked why Iron Man (or Tony Stark) did something he might begin his response with "Well, put yourself in Tony Stark's shoes for a moment in that situation..." - the answer is based out of the character perspective.

Now he could just as easily flippantly say something like "Because that's what the writers wanted him to do." and leave it at that; but even from there if he goes on to say something like "even though it's out of character for him" he's gone back into the character-based perspective.

But you can't talk coherently about the processes of RPGing without talking about authorship, and without acknowledging that an author describing a character's motivations isn't the same things as actually talking to someone and learning his/her motivations.

Except in the case of Robert Downey Jr./Tony Stark we're not talking about an author (at least I don't think RDJ writes any of the scripts), we're talking about a middle step - a player, as it were; tasked with taking someone else's authorship, infusing it with personality, and bringing it to life on the screen. He has to deal with the processes of movie-making while he's at it, just like a D&D player has to deal with game mechanics while she's playing her character; but if he likes he can as far as possible leave all that in the hands of the director (DM) and just focus on his character.

In your post, you say - in response to my remark that the GM will have to make something up "Yes she is, and if she's any good what she makes up will be indiscernable from what she had pre-authored." That is all that matters in this discussion.

Yes it is, but not for the reason you might think.

The GM is authoring things; they are not being "caused by the fiction" (whatever that would mean).

Who says? What she's authoring now may be a direct result of something that happened in the fiction half an hour ago. The orcs are going to the underground well now because the PCs cut off their surface water supply this morning.

If the players want to ignore those moments of authorship, that's their prerogative, but you can't say that players who are completely disengaged from the authorship of the shared fiction nevertheless exercise significant agency in that respect. That's a contradiction.

So? That's not where player agency lies, so why worry about it?

Player agency, or the exercise thereof, is what got the PCs here into this orc-infested castle in the first place. They didn't have to come here*. They could have gone to any number of other places and-or done any number of other things; yet they decided to come here. And they decided to stay here, even though they've lost both their henches down a chasm and a fair bit of their adventuring gear went with them - they could have turned around and gone home after this setback, but decided not to.

Every such decision is where players get their agency. They don't get to write the game-world, just like an actor (most of the time) doesn't get to write the movie script. But they - unlike an actor - do get to decide what they're going to do within that game-world; and how they're going to approach it; and - along with the DM - what story will end up being told.

* - unless the DM isn't any good and has railroaded them here despite their intentions otherwise

Lanefan

 

[Emerikol]

W
And saying that a player has the same agency in the game as a person does in the real world as if that explains why the GM, rather than the players, gets to decide that the shared fiction is about a map being hidden in the kitchen rather than a map being found in the study, is confused and obscurantist.

I don't see why. I really don't. In my approach to gaming, the GM is tasked with establishing the state of the world. The players are free then to "live" in that world and make things happen. The players have the same agency as people do in this world which seems like a lot. I mean we are used to being people and taking actions in this world. So for me at least, it's comfortable being a character. Naturally we often try out being someone a bit different from ourselves but we still want to be a character. We want to make character level decisions. It really does feel like cheating if I as a player can decide things outside of my character. And I'm describing my feelings not saying you really are cheating if your group plays differently.

So as a player, I feel like the campaign is a good one when I feel like I'm immersed in the world and I'm being some fictional character. The more I feel like I'm inside that characters head the more fun it is for me.

I'm not saying you can't like different sorts of agency and if you do all power to you. But I am resistant to the idea that the agency in my games is somehow not fun because it is limited to being in character. For a lot of us that is a lot of fun.

 

[Emerikol]

In your post, you say - in response to my remark that the GM will have to make something up "Yes she is, and if she's any good what she makes up will be indiscernable from what she had pre-authored." That is all that matters in this discussion. The GM is authoring things; they are not being "caused by the fiction" (whatever that would mean). If the players want to ignore those moments of authorship, that's their prerogative, but you can't say that players who are completely disengaged from the authorship of the shared fiction nevertheless exercise significant agency in that respect. That's a contradiction.

Obviously, when I DM, I just speak as the character and I don't narrate. And while I may make up things that I don't know, I base what I make up on what I believe is reasonable for how I've defined that character. If I'm doubtful, I will secretly dice for a decision. If it's something trivial, then I just go ahead and choose something.

As a player playing a character you do the same thing, right? When your character is spoken to, you speak for your character. You make that up. It's not your personality necessarily. It's the personality you have conceived for your character.