Introduction to Israeli Theory

[PsyzhranV2]

Gnome Stew is currently publishing a series of articles about the Israeli RPG theory scene, featuring Israeli writers offering their perspectives on play culture.. The general outline of the series is as follows:

1. Characters don’t exist – We can only affect actions and feelings through the players, and not the characters, and this simple understanding can take us very far.
2. There is no GM – At the core of the gaming experience there are only “Guiding actions”, actions that powerfully affect the game’s experience for some or all players, and a GM is basically a designation given to the person we expect to use them, but she’s not the only one doing so.
3. The game doesn’t have a story – The concepts of story, narrative and plot as we usually perceive them do not really apply to the core activity of tabletop games, requiring a new paradigm.

So far, two articles in the series have been published: Your Character Does Not Exist by Haggai Elkayam Shalem, which makes the claim that “the most important question in a roleplaying game is, what do the players do?”; and Everyone is a GM by Michael Gorodin, which talks about the concept of how both GM and players can guide the flow of play not just through IC actions but through OOC social cues and body language, both intentionally and inadvertently.

 

[Aldarc]

I could see how several of these approaches could rile up a few feathers for those accustomed to more traditional TTRPG modes of play assumptions.

 

[John Dallman]

Reading the first article, it seems to be be an attempt to rationalise a casual, uninvolved play style into a description of all role-playing. To look at the examples:

The shoggoth presentation is poor session management by the GM. Let the players take their pizza slices and finish laughing at their jokes, remind them that they have a game to get on with, so that they switch to concentrating on the session, and then spring the monster on them, preferably in a more invidious way than "appearing from the shadows," so that it is close to them, with a positional advantage, by the time they notice it.

The dragon attack is puzzling: how have "high-level characters" never met a dragon before? Even if they have not, they are likely to have heard about them and have some idea of what they do. In most D&D worlds I've experienced, the best options for dragons are flee, talk or attack at full strength immediately. Getting in close is a good idea, because that makes it harder for the dragon to get lots of people in an area-effect breath weapon, and a dragon's sheer size mean there's space for everyone who does melee to attack.

The rust monster scene is just weird. Does a "high-level party" not have a magician capable of dispatching, charming or polymorphing a rust monster quickly? To me, admittedly not a player of modern versions of D&D, rust monsters are a low-to-medium level monster, and putting one up against high levels is just giving them something that they'll collect, usually via Polymorph Others and use as a weapon later.

 

[aco175]

1. Characters don’t exist – We can only affect actions and feelings through the players, and not the characters, and this simple understanding can take us very far.
2. There is no GM – At the core of the gaming experience there are only “Guiding actions”, actions that powerfully affect the game’s experience for some or all players, and a GM is basically a designation given to the person we expect to use them, but she’s not the only one doing so.
3. The game doesn’t have a story – The concepts of story, narrative and plot as we usually perceive them do not really apply to the core activity of tabletop games, requiring a new paradigm.

Meh. Some of this is common sense, isn't it? Look at number 1- of course characters do not exist. If I'm looking to scare the PCs, I cannot rely on the sheet saying that this PC is scared of moon symbols and think the player will react the same as when I introduce spiders, knowing the player is scared of those.

#2 I erased what I was going to post to not offend.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

I could see how several of these approaches could rile up a few feathers for those accustomed to more traditional TTRPG modes of play assumptions.

I'm not riled, it's a valid playstyle, it's just one I'd personally find unsatisfying. A rational person knows that Blackleaf isn't real, but that doesn't mean you have to approach your character as if it were a player token in a Monopoly game.

 

[pemerton]

I wasn't fully persuaded.

The 2nd essay - "Everyone is a GM" - included the following:

We all recognize a general common denominator we expect of all GMs: as a social position that carries the expectation and the responsibility to guide the game (at least more so than the other participants), as the person who can veto anything in the fiction (the Imaginary Space)​

Many of us don't have this expectation of GMs. And the idea of players' guiding actions seems to make more sense in the context of (notionally) GM-driven play.

The 1st essay doesn't seem to include the possibility that players will think themselves into the situation of the character. It also seemed to assume a GM-driven game in which the GM therefore has to generate player buy-in.

I'm not sure that the essays shed a great deal of light on the play of, say, Burning Wheel. But would be happy to have the contrary point laid out.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I could see how several of these approaches could rile up a few feathers for those accustomed to more traditional TTRPG modes of play assumptions.

I am still digesting and thinking about the articles but a lot of this seems like it would actually appeal to more traditional modes of play. In particular the idea that you are engaging the players, and evoking responses in players, not in their characters (I think many traditional minded players like the idea of being challenged by the game rather than their character being challenged by the game)

 

[darkbard]

I wasn't fully persuaded.

The 2nd essay - "Everyone is a GM" - included the following:

We all recognize a general common denominator we expect of all GMs: as a social position that carries the expectation and the responsibility to guide the game (at least more so than the other participants), as the person who can veto anything in the fiction (the Imaginary Space)​

Many of us don't have this expectation of GMs. And the idea of players' guiding actions seems to make more sense in the context of (notionally) GM-driven play.

The 1st essay doesn't seem to include the possibility that players will think themselves into the situation of the character. It also seemed to assume a GM-driven game in which the GM therefore has to generate player buy-in.

I'm not sure that the essays shed a great deal of light on the play of, say, Burning Wheel. But would be happy to have the contrary point laid out.

While I admire the analysis and attempt at rigor of the articles, I agree.

I'm rereading Dungeon World right now and came across this pertinent paragraph:

Dungeon World, 160

Addressing the characters, not the players, means that you don't say,"Tony, is Dunwick doing something about that wight?" Instead you say, "Dunwick, what are you doing about that wight?" Speaking this way keeps the game focused on the fiction and not on the table. It's important to the flow of the game, too. If you talk to the players you may leave out details that are important to what moves the characters make. Since moves are always based on the actions of the character you need to think about what's happening in terms of those characters--not the players portraying them.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

Didn't see it earlier, but the third article in the series has been posted:

Intro to Israeli Theory - Your Game Doesn’t Have a Story

This is the third article in a series on Israeli RPG theory. The first article in the series was “Your character does not exist“, and the second was "Everyone is a GM". One of our writers, Daniel Andrey Fidelman, summarized the classic article The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast in the...

gnomestew.com

 

[pemerton]

Didn't see it earlier, but the third article in the series has been posted

I'm sorry to rain a little bit on your thread, but that blog really didn't impress me. There is not the least engagement with "story now" play which has been a thing in practice since some time in the 1990s (Over the Edge and Maelstrom Storytelling are two early entrants in the field) and has been a theorised thing since some time in the early 2000s.

Consider the following from the blog:

The second meaning of “story” covers the things happening during the session. This meaning is the one that properly doesn’t exist: In real time, the story can hardly be identified. Looking at the events as they unfold, we find an endless amount of detail that we wouldn’t consider a “story” – think of a shopping session lasting two hours of play time, or an argument about how the characters actually move from point A to point B. Both are examples of events we will probably not include in the post-hoc narrative of events; In the post-hoc process we extract the interesting bits, to wind up with what we tell after the session. . . .

Justin Alexander suggests we “prep situations, not plots”. In a nutshell, it means we’re not planning a sequence of events, but rather a rich and interesting situation we can put our PCs in. Another famous approach is the one preached in Apocalypse World: “play to find out what happens” – being aimed primarily at GMs. Combining the Alexandrian and Apocalypse World, we’d say that the right way to do it is to prepare situations that make you want to find out what happens. . . .

We suggest a shift from the object, “the story”, to the practice: the players form expectations regarding the narrative; the GM plans situations that interact with the players’ expectations; the result is a story, but only a post-hoc one. The end.​

Personally I think that The Alexandrian and Apocalypse World combine about as well as oil and water. The Alexandrian's "three clue" rule and "node-based design" are both techniques that only make sense in GM-driven play and are intended to make GM pre-authored plot more feasible while maintaining an illusion of player authority over the content of the fiction.

More broadly, the assumption seems to be that we are playing a game essentially like traditional D&D - with equipment lists, map-and-key resolution for travel-oriented action declarations (at least - maybe other stuff to), etc - and now we are going to try and find a way that will avoid overly evident railroading but won't involve changing any of those other conceits about how play works, how declared actions are resolved, etc.

It is possible to have RPGing not just with post-hoc story but with story now. The techniques are well-known. The systems are well-known: PbtA and FitD are probably the best known at present; I really like scene-based ones like Burning Wheel and Prince Valiant; and there are others which can be used this way like Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP and (I believe but have never tried) Fate.

A blog that doesn't even engage with those systems, or the thinking that inspired them, isn't shedding very much light.