D&D General Story Now, Skilled Play, and Elephants

[Snarf Zagyg]

I don't feel ready yet to abandon or deny the possibility of a consistent and effective picture of immersion (a word that I would need to narrow to a specific set of concerns before I could even get started). MMDV

"But it is also generally possible to look at immersion holistically, and those techniques that work for most people, most of the time."

I don't think I was asking you to.

(To not hide the ball and be more specific- immersion is very different from realism. People often mistake the two, and will complain about how something isn't realistic and therefore not immersive. But immersion is akin to the willing suspension of disbelief, not to modeling something realistically. Moreover, an immersive experience often requires a lack of realism- sounds that are not real, jumps in time in order to go over "the boring bits," and so on. As such, there are known techniques that work for most people. Unfortunately, conversations often get sidetracked by the individual experience, which can always vary.)

 

[clearstream]

(To not hide the ball and be more specific- immersion is very different from realism. People often mistake the two, and will complain about how something isn't realistic and therefore not immersive. But immersion is akin to the willing suspension of disbelief, not to modeling something realistically.

I agree with that. High value is put on consistency. (If something works this way in one place, it should work that way in every place it applies.)

Game rules need to be sincerely grasped and worked through as to what they entail across the world as a whole. For example, 5e rests. Seeing as ordinary folk don't need to refresh abilities, and some characters don't really benefit much from long rests, if taken sincerely one is forced to envision a very fragmented pattern of work and rest in the game world. That is very different from our world, where things are fairly synched up.

But then rests themselves aren't designed with what they look like in world very much in mind, I think. It's a subtle dissonance.

 

[Umbran]

Skill in RPGing, on the player side, is about getting the fiction that you want by using the game system. If the game system, on the player side, is simply "tell a story", then I think there's an open question whether we're playing a game.

Except, of course, the system on the player side is never simply "tell a story". It is "you may propose a change in the fiction, within some parameters, possibly using some resources and/or having some risk of failing to get what you want" - which is a pretty typical game thing.

(The word game is of course very capacious, and so one doesn't want to be overly prescriptive; on the other hand, I think it's worth maintaining the distinction between RPG and shared/cooperative storytelling game.)

One of the unfortunate things that seems to have come out of a lot of RPG theorizing, is that you can think about role in the internalized/immersion sense ("Inhabiting the mind of my character, what is my next action?") or the tactical sense ("I am the tank in this party, my role in a fight is to soak up hits, so what is the optimal tactical choice for me here?") and folks say you are playing a role-playing game. But, if you think about role in terms of role in the fiction ("I am the Reluctant Hero, what is the best story development for me here?") and choose gameplay accordingly, you are suddenly not playing a role playing game, you are playing a storytelling game.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Except, of course, the system on the player side is never simply "tell a story". It is "you may propose a change in the fiction, within some parameters, possibly using some resources and/or having some risk of failing to get what you want" - which is a pretty typical game thing.



One of the unfortunate things that seems to have come out of a lot of RPG theorizing, is that you can think about role in the internalized/immersion sense ("Inhabiting the mind of my character, what is my next action?") or the tactical sense ("I am the tank in this party, my role in a fight is to soak up hits, so what is the optimal tactical choice for me here?") and folks say you are playing a role-playing game. But, if you think about role in terms of role in the fiction ("I am the Reluctant Hero, what is the best story development for me here?") and choose gameplay accordingly, you are suddenly not playing a role playing game, you are playing a storytelling game.

What? That's not at all what I see. We started with the first two being the norm -- tables ran as wargames and as character games. Roles fell in there as well. There's nothing new here, except maybe you're now exposed to groups that don't decry other modes of play as not-RPGs. And, no one of any sense would call actually playing a role, like your Reluctant Hero, as not roleplaying or regulating that to a storygame. Storygames are games were you tell stories, usually with some form of conch-passing or vying for narrative control in a given moment. Games like Fiasco, where each scene is just the participants improving a scene that fits the theme as they want to, and the game part is the bits where you generate the theme, where the other players score the scenes after being played, where the twist happens, and at the end, when you spend your accumulated score to see how you get to narrate your character's denouement. And Fiasco is still, very solidly, a role-playing game!

If anything, it's people looking at systems that aren't GM mediated resolutions, that allow any player authority over the outcome space, that get handily labeled as storygames and 'not real RPGs.' I've seen that, had it directed at me, numerous times on these boards. I have never once seen an argument that says playing your character is an RPG, but playing your character in the role of a Reluctant Hero is a storygame and not an RPG. Do you have such an incident? I'd like to weigh in.

 

[pemerton]

A major rift in views is that I am pedantic on what outcomes a system formally prescribes (I rolled a damage dice, I got 5, I decrement your HP by 5) and what a DM decides (the troll attacks Jacky instead of Paula). I don't differentiate between big acts of deciding and small acts of deciding: it's all deciding. I don't care if the DM has a story in mind, or decides on the spot, it is still authoring or narrating.

Therefore were I to reject the possibility of skill on the basis of such deciding, there would be little of skill left in RPG. But I think (and observe!) that we can play RPG skillfully. I thus must either abandon the above position on deciding, or say instead that deciding can be done skillfully, can evoke skill, can elevate skill. Deciding can be skillful and can create opportunities for skill. Seeing as I believe all those things, for me my view is consistent.

I'm not sure it's helpful to frame a discussion of skilled play in terms of artful GMing, at least until a bit more has been said about the asymmetry of participant roles in a RPG. Here's one way into that, presented under the heading "Doing Away with the GM":

You need to have a system by which scenes start and stop. The rawest solution is to do it by group consensus: anybody moved to can suggest a scene or suggest that a scene be over, and it's up to the group to act on the suggestion or not. You don't need a final authority beyond the players' collective will.

You need to have a system whereby narration becomes in-game truth. That is, when somebody suggests something to happen or something to be so, does it or doesn't it? Is it or isn't it? Again the rawest solution is group consensus, with suggestions made by whoever's moved and then taken up or let fall according to the group's interest.

You need to have orchestrated conflict, and there's the tricky bit. GMs are very good at orchestrating conflict, and it's hard to see a rawer solution. . . . In our co-GMed Ars Magica game, each of us is responsible for orchestrating conflict for the others, which works but isn't radical wrt GM doage-away-with. It amounts to when Emily's character's conflicts climax explosively and set off Meg's character's conflicts, which also climax explosively, in a great kickin' season finale last autumn, I'm the GM. GM-swapping, in other words, isn't the same as GM-sharing.​

A GM may artfully frame scenes and manage the pacing within and between them. The GM may artfully manage the process whereby suggested fiction becomes established fiction - a lot of this is about action resolution, but not all of it: sometimes its just adding colour to a scene (eg the GM frames a situation, resolution is moving along, and then the player asks of a NPC "Is she tall or short?" and the GM stipulates an answer to the question). The GM may artfully orchestrate conflict (as in your example of deciding which player's PC comes under pressure in a fight scene).

But noticing this doesn't take us any closer to analysing skilled play, I don't think. That is about how players constrain the shaping and pacing of scenes (see eg @Manbearcat's thread about skilled play earning a long rest); how players oblige the GM to make X rather than Y part of the fiction (eg in my Green Knight game, the PCs were able to shed Dishonour points at the end of Encounters by having made choices that established this rather than this other outcome of the situation); and often the previous two things will be fallout of how the players respond to conflict. (Not always, I think - a lot of dungeon crawling might rely on relatively low-conflict scenes, like the gelatinous-cube-in-a-pit trap discussed in the recent "fair trap" thread - but often.)

Certain approaches to how GM's frame scenes, establish fiction and orchestrate conflict are not really compatible with skil;ed play, because they make it hard for players to constrain and oblige, and they tend to make the fall out from conflict independent of the choices the players make when responding to it. Roughly speaking, these are the approaches that @Ovinomancer has called "Force" not too far upthread; and these are the approaches that @Manbearcat has called "participationism" or (perhaps a bit less neutrally) "rudderless system setting tourism".

So I don't think there is any rift. I think that Ovinomancer and Manbearcat (and most other posters in this thread) are well aware that RPGing requires people to make suggestions about the fiction, and requires a process to make these "true" (ie part of the shared fiction) - I don't think anyone dissented from Vincent Baker's remarks to this effect upthread. The point they are making is that not all GM-side processes of this sort are consistent with the exercise of skill on the player side.

 

[pemerton]

@Umbran, I don't think I really have anything to add to what @Ovinomancer said (I don't know Fiasco except by general reputation and defer to him in his account of it).

In my post just upthread I mentioned dungeon crawling as a candidate for a mode of play which is rich in scenes, and in action resolution, but may often be quite low conflict. I think a game in which a player sets out to play The Reluctant Hero and it is understood that the processes and outcomes of play will uphold that character conception may well also end up being fairly low conflict - I don't know Fate well enough to know how it deals with this, but I think it's interesting that in MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic the Milestones are set up so as to preserve the significance of conflict by offering two very contrasting pathways for the hero.

My understanding of "Neo Trad" play as it has been discussed a bit in some of these recent threads is that it is oriented towards this lower conflict, preserve-the-pre-established-conception-of-the-PC play.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I feel like two different concepts are being boxed together under skilled play here. I see skilled play as more about play against the environment, the scenario, the puzzles, etc during the game session. It is stuff like figuring out how to get around traps, how to negotiate with potentially lethal monsters, not stepping on the bricks that explode you to atoms. Whereas stuff dealing with player skill on the character creation side, on the leveling up side, and on the understanding how to maximize your success in the system side, as more in the realm of optimization, system mastery, etc. If I had to divide it sharply I would say Skilled Play versus System Mastery (one can involve the other: you can use system mastery in your skilled play, but they don't necessarily criss cross, and some skilled play would actively avoid system mastery as meta and not being rooted in your character's shoes)

 

[Thomas Shey]

"But it is also generally possible to look at immersion holistically, and those techniques that work for most people, most of the time."

I don't think I was asking you to.

(To not hide the ball and be more specific- immersion is very different from realism. People often mistake the two, and will complain about how something isn't realistic and therefore not immersive. But immersion is akin to the willing suspension of disbelief, not to modeling something realistically. Moreover, an immersive experience often requires a lack of realism- sounds that are not real, jumps in time in order to go over "the boring bits," and so on. As such, there are known techniques that work for most people. Unfortunately, conversations often get sidetracked by the individual experience, which can always vary.)

The people I've seen object to unrealistic elements in regard to immersion in the past have usually been mostly objecting to elements that are fourth-wall issues in one way or another.

The example I saw many years ago was a number of people had problems with highly genre-convention-centric genres because if they immersed properly, they wouldn't play the character appropriate to the genre. When suggesting this meant they needed to construct a model of a character who accepted the genre conventions implicitly (because you can't have a genre convention accepted explicitly, or its not a convention, its a setting conceit), the response was that would require them to engage with a character who felt insane. They were just not capable of firewalling off the convention elements while still being able to engage with the character on the level they wanted to.

As an example, people playing most superhero games kind of take it as a given that some things are just "as they are" and don't push on them; on an metagame level they just accept that they need to ignore that, and they aren't so deep into the character that the above problems come up, or they're good enough at firewalling that they can simply bypass the elements that would cause problems. If none of that is true than they end up trying to deal with elements of the world that no one either acknowledges are true, or that they don't consider relevant, and the character either starts acting really bizarre by the standards of the setting, or actively sabotages the game by doing things its tacitly accepted they won't do.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I If I had to divide it sharply I would say Skilled Play versus System Mastery (one can involve the other: you can use system mastery in your skilled play, but they don't necessarily criss cross, and some skilled play would actively avoid system mastery as meta and not being rooted in your character's shoes)

As I noted earlier, however, "skilled play" that operates outside of the system can frequently come across as more about social gamesmanship (i.e. presenting things in a way the GM will find credible and allow to succeed) than it is about being in the character's shoes, too. The assumption the GM will be a genuinely neutral arbiter doesn't seem to stand up to extended experience in the wild.

 

[prabe]

As I noted earlier, however, "skilled play" that operates outside of the system can frequently come across as more about social gamesmanship (i.e. presenting things in a way the GM will find credible and allow to succeed) than it is about being in the character's shoes, too. The assumption the GM will be a genuinely neutral arbiter doesn't seem to stand up to extended experience in the wild.

It seems there's maybe a difference between "social gamesmanship" and "getting on the same page." Sorting through some arbitrarily large number of options and choosing one because you believe it'll appeal to the GM seems like the former; getting into a mindspace where the first thing you think of to do makes sense to you for your character to do it, and it appeals to the GM, seems more like the latter.

I dunno if that makes sense outside of my head, but your post got me thinking about it.