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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Would you see fronts as a process space?

Well, in DW they are, IMHO, a mechanism by which the GM injects some structure into the plot. I mean, you could do it without explicit fronts, but it is just that DW is VERY explicit about everything, so they invented them to make sure the GM knows 'do this'.

You could do the same sort of thing in my game. I guess I like being explicit. They might be flavored a bit differently. I've held onto a version of 4e's 'tiers', so probably a 'front' would exist within a tier, or maybe that would be a fairly limited front, and then you might have one that spans tiers, perhaps. I don't know.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Just to be clear, I am agreeing with you and expanding on your point. Consider the diceless combat of Eve Online. Fully deterministic so far as I know - therefore diceless - and yet clearly constrained rather than sufficiently constrained. En-garde is a similarly good example. Or those Ace of Aces picture books. It's actually interesting to figure out what the difference really is? Like DW they chain together moves, and in fact those moves propel the narrative. So how does one accurately state what DW is doing that they were not? We obviously could write each DW move on a card! Your point about containing the narrative in the card seems important. DW doesn't know exactly what narrative will emerge from a move, and is far looser about what might be validly chained.

Right, I think of Fight in the Skies/Dawn Patrol. It has a 'book' and each player picks a move from the book, basically. Then you see what happens (there are some dice that come in after that point). It is not technically an RPG either of course... As with En-Garde! the moves CONTAIN the fiction instead of being an outgrowth of it. In an En-Garde! duel a lot of stuff can happen, because there are a lot of moves and you chain a bunch of them together, so the output space is large, but every possible outcome results in a specific knowable fiction. It is an RPG, the ref can pretty much decide what the consequences and follow on to the duel are, (aside from those dictated by the rules) but the internal fiction of the conflict is its own small thing dictated by the moves. Dawn Patrol is the same, if one player does an Immelman and the other player follows him, then X happens. There isn't any provision for some totally unexpected thing to happen, or the GM to intervene (DP doesn't even have a GM).

Same with choose your own story books and similar things, or Magic: the Gathering games (though you can certainly embellish them with more detailed stories).

 

[pemerton]

I can to a degree understand objections to things like mechanics which cannot be carried out (or it might be general process) without breaking out of character in a strict sense; that is out of 'actor stance'. OK, I find that I react to a lot of that objection as post facto reasoning, but I can certainly accept that it is something people can define that a game does, and then object to.

What frustrates me about a lot of "actor stance" discussions is:

(1) Many posters who label themselves as "actor stance" turn out to be using (what The Forge calls) Author Stance - that is, they decide to do something for metagame reasons (eg beating the dungeon) and then retrofit an in-character reason. There's nothing objectionable about that - most RPGers do it a fair bit of the time - but it's not Actor Stance!

(2) Many posters assert that certain mechanics are inconsistent with Actor Stance when they're clearly not: eg I think I recall that X (make a Wises check) or I wonder if I bump into Y (make a Circles check) or I commit every fibre of my being to this effort (spend a fate point) are all consistent with Actor Stance (ie making the action declaration based on a conception of the character's own drives and needs).

(3) As far as mechanics are concerned, it might be possible to talk about a class of mechanics where every outcome that might flow form the use of the mechanic is an outcome that in the fiction, flows primarily from the causal powers of the character. Wises checks and Circles checks will not typically fall within that class of mechanics. But that class of mechanics doesn't have anything to do with Actor Stance - it's quite consistent with Author or even Pawn Stance, as the history of D&D shows - and also doesn't have any logical connection to immersion (though may have some connection for some individual RPGer due to idiosyncrasies of their own biography).

 

[Thomas Shey]

But that class of mechanics doesn't have anything to do with Actor Stance - it's quite consistent with Author or even Pawn Stance, as the history of D&D shows - and also doesn't have any logical connection to immersion (though may have some connection for some individual RPGer due to idiosyncrasies of their own biography).

I think there's a defensible position that some classes of immersion are incompatible with mechanics that can be viewed as "unavailable" on an in-character level. its just hard to talk about because there's at least two different threads of thought about what "immersion" means, and they aren't particularly compatible in their assumptions.

 

[Campbell]

Part of the reason I tend to use bleed rather than immersion to describe my preferences is to clarify that I'm looking to experience play from the experience of my character rather than the top down perspective I find many people who are interested immersion really care about. They want to think abstractly about the shared imagined space and have it make sense to them as a player rather than to see the world in the way their character does. It's a big part of why I like abstract distances and mechanics that represent a character's mind space.

I'm personally somewhat picky about game currencies. I like being able to push your luck before, but not after the die roll. I also prefer a certain degree of correspondence to fiction. Stuff that represents in setting stuff like Momentum in Infinity/Conan, Willpower in Vampire, Strings in Monsterhearts, Team in Masks, Void Points and Strife in Legend of the Five Rings, Stress/Heat in Blades in the Dark, Initiative and Essence in Exalted is preferable to stuff like Fate Points in Fate, Artha in Burning Wheel, Inspiration in 5e, Hero Points in Pathfinder Second Edition, and Threat/Doom/Heat in 2d20. I'll play games with the second sort of currency, but I prefer something that serves a similar purpose, but grounds it directly into the fiction in a way that helps me to see things from my character's perspective.

That brings me to our discussion of what can be done to expand more traditional play. I think when you look at games like the new edition of L5R, Exalted Third Edition, and Chronicles of Darkness you see a class of games that is still very much grounded in representative mechanics yet manages to address the psychosocial experience in a somewhat powerful way.

 

[pemerton]

I think there's a defensible position that some classes of immersion are incompatible with mechanics that can be viewed as "unavailable" on an in-character level.

I think it would be helpful to see that position articulated. I think it is going to have to say something about the relationship between various participant roles (player, GM) and authorship of the fiction. I'm not sure beyond that what it says; I think one reason I've never seen it articulated is because those who cleave to it also tend to be very reluctant to discuss the processes of authorship in RPG play.

 

[pemerton]

Part of the reason I tend to use bleed rather than immersion to describe my preferences is to clarify that I'm looking to experience play from the experience of my character rather than the top down perspective I find many people who are interested immersion really care about. They want to think abstractly about the shared imagined space and have it make sense to them as a player rather than to see the world in the way their character does. It's a big part of why I like abstract distances and mechanics that represent a character's mind space.

Thinking abstractly about the shared imagined space and having it make sense to me as an observer seems just about the opposite of actually inhabiting a PC!

 

[clearstream]

Part of the reason I tend to use bleed rather than immersion to describe my preferences is to clarify that I'm looking to experience play from the experience of my character rather than the top down perspective I find many people who are interested immersion really care about. They want to think abstractly about the shared imagined space and have it make sense to them as a player rather than to see the world in the way their character does. It's a big part of why I like abstract distances and mechanics that represent a character's mind space.

Thinking abstractly about the shared imagined space and having it make sense to me as an observer seems just about the opposite of actually inhabiting a PC!

@Campbell you seem to say that you like to think abstractly about the shared imagined space ("abstract distances and mechanics"), because that helps represent a character's mind space. While also implying that there is some other way of thinking "abstractly" about the shared imagined space that is to do with having it make sense to the player. @pemerton I expect you see why your thought brings this on-surface contradiction into light.

So... two kinds of thinking abstractedly? Can you say more about the difference you are drawing between these two kinds of abstract thinking? It can't be that at issue is being "abstract", because both are labelled with that quality. (Or the language should be disambiguated.) Are they necessarily dichotomous? How? Are you familiar with Sicart's discussion of the duality of player as subject to game and player as continued inhabitant of their society, culture, real world? (He discusses it as a motive for beliefs about ethics in games.) From an ontological perspective, I've several times emphasised that players are those external to the game, that enter into it. They are again dualistic.

Are you picturing something like that going on? That player is dualistic (or pluralistic) and that there are desirable abstractions for each mode?

 

[clearstream]

I think there's a defensible position that some classes of immersion are incompatible with mechanics that can be viewed as "unavailable" on an in-character level. its just hard to talk about because there's at least two different threads of thought about what "immersion" means, and they aren't particularly compatible in their assumptions.

We hit those differences in a previous thread. It's an unhelpful shared use of a term in common.

I take immersion to be about experience of the world. So the player-as-subject-to-game is looking outward. They're not concerned if they like fancy hats, they're concerned if fancy hats are in fashion in Waterdeep. Typically this requires more work on the world itself, and you see people use the term consistency to describe the value they put on the world having a sort of independent reality. The fiction stands up, and continues to stand up, no matter who looks at it or from where. Critics might point to fruitless efforts at over-precision, and a paucity of human story.

On the other hand, I see many thinking of immersion as about in some sense becoming the character. Consistency in the price of fancy hats doesn't bother them, they're concerned for if their serious-minded paladin would ever really be seen about town in that hat. And if they are, they're concerned for how that feels, how they will act, how others will react. I'm being flippant, but I hope this conveys a sense of thought about who the character is rather than where they are. Critics might point to nonsensical disconnects where things don't follow, and a paucity of wonder in the world around them.

In a way, this speaks to an old divide. Dualism and physicalism. World as subject. World as object. Some physicalist-minded persons will say that they don't believe in magic because the physical universe is so magical. World informing human thought. Human thought determining world. Tolkien wrote about the wonder of exploring Middle Earth as a kind of geographer or historian. He may well have been an immersionist in the first sense. We really need different terms, because for me both are valid and they're not dichotomous. There's no reason the second kind of immersionist can't live in a world envisioned by the first kind. I'd go further and say that if they did, they'd discover even more possibilities for their preferred immersion.

 

[Campbell]

I'm a software engineer now, but I pretty much grew up in the theater. For me roleplaying is an extension of that practice, unless we're playing an emphatic war game like Moldvay B/X. I want to embody a character and experience the world as they experience it. Through their intuitions, fears, feelings, sense of physical space, etc. generally with a strong emphasis on relationships. That's what bleed is all about for me. I like stuff like range bands because they encourage describing the setting as my character sees it (Close, Short, Medium, Far). It's relative to them. I feel similarly bout stuff like Strife in Legend of the 5 Rings. It helps me to be mindful of what's important to my character and how they see the world.

So classically in RPGs the GM is supposed to describe the setting/world/shared imagined space neutrally and concretely. Players move their characters within it precisely in a considered/strategic fashion. When players are addressed it's usually done collectively with no real sense of urgency. I think this encourages a sort of detached view of the situation the characters find themselves in. There's always plenty of time to think and anyone can respond to the GM's prompt.

Basically under a classical model players think about the shared imagined space concretely and their characters abstractly. I mostly prefer play where players think about their character as concretely as possible and the shared imagined space abstractly in the same way we navigate through meat space on a daily basis, relying on our intuition, focusing on what we think is important with a real sense of urgency in our decision making process.

I'm a lifelong amateur athlete as well so that sense of physicality, immediacy, and being in my character's body is critical to me.