What is the point of GM's notes?

[Emerikol]

What do you mean by natural, above? Something like the inevitable consequence of play without interfering artifice? But if so, that suggests One True Wayism, doesn't it?

No. I mean natural for those wanting to be in character stance or viewpoint. It's an obvious outcome of character viewpoint play. I very much am not saying that other types of play are wrong or bad. Given my limited time for long campaigns they aren't for me. My main approach in most of these discussions is just defending against what I see as false claims about my own style of play.

Further, and I don't know how to say this more clearly, you are never your character. Willing suspension of disbelief to experience the game (mostly in brief flashes) as if you were your character is a fine goal, but you, the player do not understand how to manipulate magical energy fields to conjure a ball of fire, call upon your deity to produce a miracle lifting a plague that devastates a village, have the physical strength and dexterity to flip and somersault across a room wherein vicious monsters threaten your life at every turn, or have the experience of a criminal mastermind in planning an infiltration heist into a high security vault. (I speak in the aggregate here; there may be some specific exceptions in some readers to some proposed examples.) There are many, many things your character knows but you do not, as has been pointed out in countless threads across the years. You gloss over things you, the player, don't actually know or experience in play all the time. But you don't suppose your character doesn't know the things they are expert in!

Yes. The fun of roleplaying and why it exploded in my opinion was the game allowed you to be those things. Yes the game is abstracted so that I am able to play a character capable of all those things. My decision making process though is untouched. I decide to swing my sword when it swings. I decide to cast my spell. Sure I don't have the muscle memory of an 18 strength fighter who has mastered the sword. That you conflate these two sorts of knowledge is again just evidence you don't understand our viewpoint.

Why is it so hard for you to believe someone can experience the game through "character viewpoint" only by supposing that their mastermind criminal would know something the player does not and plan accordingly but that this might manifest through the use of flashbacks because the player only now realizes something their character would have known or done? I fully understand why this would spoil your enjoyment of the game, but why you think it cannot be a "natural outcome" of seeing the world through the character's viewpoint is frustrating, to say the least.

By definition character viewpoint precludes those things. By definition. It's just a definition. And I'm sick of people constantly trying to redefine terms to include things that those terms never included originally. Make up your own term. I'm not disputing you enjoy your game or that others might enjoy your game. I am disputing that the stance/view I am talking about could possibly include such a disconnect between player and character.

 

[Campbell]

@Emirikol

I am someone who places a premium on that sense of sharing the experience of my character in the moment. It's often my highest priority. I often use different techniques than you do to achieve similar ends. The idea that my play is somehow alien to the perspective of the characters I play or that my agenda is not what I say it is because I utilize different techniques is just wrong. You do not get to own that particular play agenda.

This is not about whether or not I enjoy the games I play. It's that you are making claims about what other people's aims must be. That you would experience a disconnect between player and character in something like Blades I do not dispute. I dispute that I do.

 

[Emerikol]

@Emirikol

I am someone who places a premium on that sense of sharing the experience of my character in the moment. It's often my highest priority. I often use different techniques than you do to achieve similar ends. The idea that my play is somehow alien to the perspective of the characters I play or that my agenda is not what I say it is because I utilize different techniques is just wrong. You do not get to own that particular play agenda.

This is not about whether or not I enjoy the games I play. It's that you are making claims about what other people's aims must be. That you would experience a disconnect between player and character in something like Blades I do not dispute. I dispute that I do.

But terms mean things. Character view point for example means making decisions as if you were the character. If you make a decision your character cannot make then you've left that viewpoint. That has nothing to do with the merit of any approach. If I say I like or don't like something because I want to stay in character viewpoint, it's meaningless as a statement if no one can agree on the terms. And it seems every time I try to state my preference, the very first thing people do is try to prove my whole concept doesn't exist and they redefine the term. It's as if allowing me to have a reason for my preferences is not allowed. They will go to any end to prove my taste is purely random and based upon nothing in the game. It's annoying to say the least.

 

[Fenris-77]

Lets leave the defending/attacking reading aside for the moment. I would say that I find the particular reading of character viewpoint that you bring up somewhat limited in how it actually describes the play of an RPG. I don't deny that it accurately describes, at least in a general sense, a particular approach to play, nor that it the approach is the one that you tend to enjoy the most, lets call those two items given. My issue with it is more philosophical than anything else. I think that your reading doesn't really capture the range of decisions and mechanics present in many RPGs in terms of buttons that the player can push to 'do character things'. The problem here, I think, is that the opinion of a given player can range pretty dramatically about what is, and is not, 'in character'. Even something as simple as a Lore test, where the GM has to provide you information based on what you character should or might know, is out of character by your definition, at least in some ways. I think the example of lore tests is a good one though, as it clearly outlines the nature of RPG mechanics as mechanics, as widgets that allow some level of emulation in terms of playing in character. They are not accurate reflections in most cases of what people actually do in that situation. In those terms, I find a lot of discussion that valorizes 'in character' to be somewhat arbitrary. YMMV, of course.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Also, any time the player manufactures additional facts about reality on the fly, this to me is stepping out of character because I don't do that in real life. I already know what I know.

So if you’re playing a wizard and you come across some arcane runes on a doorframe in a dungeon, how is the process of determining if you know what these runes say anything like real life?

When I encounter something in real life, i either know it or I don’t, as you say. I don’t get to decide in that moment if I already know it

Nor do I turn to my friend and say “hey do I know this?” then watch him roll some dice, and tell me “Nope, you don’t.”

Neither process maps to real life. We are determining things in play retroactively consistently. It’s baked in to play.

You see the character already knew about the flashback. So the player is learning about what the character supposedly already knows. The problem though is that clashes directly with the idea that the player is the character and knows what the character knows.

The player never knows everything the character knows ahead of time. A player could come to the game with a 700 page backstory and there would still be plenty of things that he doesn’t know until after the fact.

The issue would seem to be that many of the ways this happens in play have been around for so long, and are so prevalent that they are simply accepted. They’re a standard of play to the point that they aren’t obvious.

But if you take a more overt example of this...whether as a spell or some other method like a Flashback....then it stands out.

Now, having said that...it’s fine not to like those overt actions, or to only accept those that can be handwaved by magic or some other setting detail...that’s all fine, and I think everyone involved can understand why someone may have this preference.

But there’s nothing more or less natural about how folks try to inhabit their character. There are just different methods of doing so, with pros and cons that will vary by person.

 

[Maxperson]

We don’t inhabit our characters and experience anything like an actual cognitive continuity (and again, there is no such thing). If one PC asks another PC “what were your dreams like last night” or “did you try my coffee I brewed over the spit this morning” or “when was the last time you were sick” or “you’re from here...where is the farrier...we need to get our horses taken care of”, the Player in question is going to have to make something up for the PC to recall. There are dozens and dozens of instances like this that can/will come up in play that will intersect with that unavoidable lack of cognitive continuity.

Sure. We don't have perfect knowledge of our PCs, so there will be times where we have to make stuff up, just like there will be times where we have to step out of character to roll dice or look up something in a book. The goal is not perfect continuity, but to immerse ourselves as best that we can with the knowledge that we have.

I like to write up backgrounds and develop a personality for my PCs, and I add to that as is needed during game play. The fewer instances where I have to step out the better.

So why do Flashbacks have special domain in being jarring/disruptive to a priority for a cognitive continuity that already doesn’t exist (and, as per my first part above, is undesirable for a sense of experience an actual “human-like existence)?

Because they are a much larger step out of what continuity is there than something like coming up with a dream or figuring out if my PC likes coffee. Even if I have to make up some things as the game goes on, it's still go on sequentially. One moment to the next. I'd also like to say that I'm not necessarily against flashbacks. I've experienced and used flashbacks and cut away scenes in my games. The issue I have here is using a flashback to impact what is going on currently

 

[prabe]

On the first paragraph:

Yes, no fictional character experiences temporal continuity. Their “lives” and the imagined space that those “lives” occupy are meta-contrivances, given purpose by our hand/mind (to render an allegory, invest a story with dramatic arc, test an idea, play a game).

They don’t know this because they’re incapable of interacting with the “4th wall” ( unlike Bugs Bunny, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or Deadpool) because the only volition and persistence they posses is that which we invest them with (and it ceases when we elide intervals of their “lives”).

This is probably a defensible position, but I disagree. I do not believe that the author/s omitting parts of a character's life means those parts do not exist. Just because characters in a novel never use the bathroom does not mean they don't excrete--it just means the author doesn't bother to narrate it. If you start a story in medias res, you are going to go back and narrate things that have already happened at the point where narration begins.

 

[prabe]

I think you're missing the point.

I don't think I am at all. I think I'm disagreeing, but that's not the same thing.

In order for my PC to remember that X, it has to be the case that X. (Otherwise it's a delusion, not a memory.)

So the fact that I narrate some recollection on my PC's part - of drinking, or not, the coffee - also establishes something prior ie that my PC did or didn't drink the coffee. And this happens at the table after I am prompted to by another character asking the question of my PC. So at the table we have (1) (a) Question asked which establishes, in the fiction (b) that my PC was asked a question about what s/he did earlier that morning and then (2) (a) My narration of my PC's answer, which may also include a recollection, but which - crucially for present purposes - establishes (b) that my PC drank, or didn't drink, some coffee earlier that morning.

At the table, the (2)(a) event comes after the (1)(a) event. In the fiction, the (2)(b) event (drinking, or not, the coffee) comes before the (1)(b) event (being asked the question).

That is my point, and as far as I can tell is also @Manbearcat's point.

And I disagree with both of you.

Establishing the events of the past out of order in the narrative doesn't mean they happened out of order. Y'all around the table are experiencing the establishment, not the events themselves. The non-linearity is in the telling, not the events.

Notice that if we change coffee to potion of longevity and we change the situation from after-breakfast free roleplaying to an encounter with an AD&D ghost, nothing changes about either the (a) sequence or the (b) sequence, but that @Emerikol and @Lanefan would insist that the player can't "retroactively" change the fictional past to make it the case that his/her PC drank the potion to get younger and hence build up a buffer against the ghost's aging power.

Given that one is more consequential than the other, I'd say there's some reason to allow one but not the other at a TRPG table (presuming a D&D-esque game with no mechanics to allow it).

That is why I assert, and as far as I can tell @Manbearcat agrees, that what is at stake in relation to BitD flashback is not temporal sequence but rather a rule about when important stuff has to be established as part of a "plan than act" play priority (best elaborated, I think, by Gygax in the pages of his PHB just prior to the Appendices).

I don't disagree with this, but I know there are people with a low-enough tolerance for non-linear storytelling that they'd have problems with it regardless, and I can see how that might vary by medium, and how it might be specific to TRPGs. I have a pretty high tolerance for non-linearity in storytelling myself, in other media, but I'm not sure it works super-well for consequential things in TRPGs.

I don't know BitD, but I doubt that the Flashback mechanic cares whether a player narrates it as his/her PC recollecting his/her prior cunning planning, or narrates it in a somewhat impersonal past tense (as might happen in an omniscient narrator novel) or narrates it with a vivid sense of having been there (a RPG approximation to the cinematic flashback scene). What is fundamental is that the events of the fiction are established, and hence revealed, in a sequence that differs from that in which they occurred in the fiction.

Hence the identity of structure to the coffee example. And hence the assertion - given the ubiquity of stuff like the coffee example in RPGing - that the objection to the flashback mechanic must be grounded in something other than general aesthetic preference.

Again, though I disagree with you about the chronological nature of fictional realities, I don't disagree with your assertion that a BitD Flashback is at least very nearly identical to a flashback in some other narrative medium. I think it might feel more like an actual narrative device (I mean, it's named for one) and that might matter to some people, if they don't like getting Story into their TRPGs.

EDIT: I saw this in reply to @Manbearcat:

If this means what I think it means, then I don't understand why you're disagreeing with me and arguing that the coffee example exhibits a different relationship of real-world narrative events to imagined in-fiction events from a BitD flashback.

What I think I'm disagreeing with is that I think you're saying that the order in which the players experience events in the narrative is the exact same as the order in which the characters experience them.

 

[Manbearcat]

Sure. We don't have perfect knowledge of our PCs, so there will be times where we have to make stuff up, just like there will be times where we have to step out of character to roll dice or look up something in a book. The goal is not perfect continuity, but to immerse ourselves as best that we can with the knowledge that we have.

I like to write up backgrounds and develop a personality for my PCs, and I add to that as is needed during game play. The fewer instances where I have to step out the better.

Because they are a much larger step out of what continuity is there than something like coming up with a dream or figuring out if my PC likes coffee. Even if I have to make up some things as the game goes on, it's still go on sequentially. One moment to the next. I'd also like to say that I'm not necessarily against flashbacks. I've experienced and used flashbacks and cut away scenes in my games. The issue I have here is using a flashback to impact what is going on currently

When you say larger here can you winnow down what you mean exactly?

Do you mean one or all of these three things (and @Emerikol , you may be interested in answering this as well)?

1) It (a Flashback where you convince the maitre-d to stuff a revolver in a kettle) is a larger interval of prior elided time (than the morning ritual of having/not-having coffee and interacting with the people/place/stuff).

2) It is a more consequential (in terms of impact on the gamestate/fiction trajectory) interval of prior elided time.

3) It is a more Skilled Play intensive (in terms of preferred Skilled Play priorities) interval of prior elided time.


(1) has to do with immersion. Its setting up a qualitative evaluation of "jarringitude" based on the proportion of elided time.

(2) may be immersion-adjacent though not necessarily. It looks to me to look more like about the aesthetic of play (I want to be devoting table time to this stuff vs this other stuff).

(3) is entirely about Skilled Play preference.

 

[Maxperson]

When you say larger here can you winnow down what you mean exactly?

Do you mean one or all of these three things (and @Emerikol , you may be interested in answering this as well)?

1) It (a Flashback where you convince the maitre-d to stuff a revolver in a kettle) is a larger interval of prior elided time (than the morning ritual of having/not-having coffee and interacting with the people/place/stuff).

2) It is a more consequential (in terms of impact on the gamestate/fiction trajectory) interval of prior elided time.

3) It is a more Skilled Play intensive (in terms of preferred Skilled Play priorities) interval of prior elided time.


(1) has to do with immersion. Its setting up a qualitative evaluation of "jarringitude" based on the proportion of elided time.

(2) may be immersion-adjacent though not necessarily. It looks to me to look more like about the aesthetic of play (I want to be devoting table time to this stuff vs this other stuff).

(3) is entirely about Skilled Play preference.

It's more disruptive to my immersion. If I have to step out to roll a die and then step back in, very little disruption has happened. If I have to step out to quickly formulate a dream, very little disruption has happened. If I'm stepping completely out of the timeline and going back to play something in some other time, then come back and have what I just played impact what is currently going on, it's a significant disruption to my immersion in the character.