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

[clearstream]

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.

That makes a lot of sense. So these aren't necessarily dichotomous, right? I come at it from a very different angle from you, in that I see the consistent living world as working in service to character expression. For example, when I ran OOTA I tried to envision the consequences of Demogorgon's destruction and occupation of Sloobludop. That led to imagining a diaspora, which then created foils for character expression.

On surface, I don't grasp how we can have character expression in the purely abstract. A character must occupy a world. Or to put it another way, the only persons we know of, and can possibly imagine, are those that occupy a world. The less we know about our game world, the more each character's expression must be down to external inspiration. That is of course absolutely okay. The character immersion I enjoy is that which is articulated in the context of - greatly inspired by - an alternative living world. Ergo over ego.

We did see a lot of fruitless attempts at over-precise objective worlds. A question to ask though is if any RPG can occur in the absence of a game world? DW has its fronts. L5R has Rokugan. I feel sure you are not saying your character is played in deliberate ignorance and absolute denial of inspiration from the game world it finds itself in? As a kind of blind, deaf, and numb wanderer in such worlds. You let in chinks of light from the game world, right? It's really hard to picture the character that is so self-obsessed that the game world is anathema to it (I shall wear hats, even where there are none!)

Might it be that your objections land less on a disagreement with world-immersion, and more with disagreement as to the forms world-immersion has sometimes assayed?

 

[Campbell]

I'm not opposed to prep. Most of the games I run are fairly heavily prepped. I run a lot of games using established settings like Conan 2d20, Exalted, Legend of the Five Rings, Blades in the Dark, Pathfinder Second Edition and Vampire. Also sandbox stuff like Worlds Without Number, Godbound, RuneQuest, et al. I do some lower prep stuff like Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, but they aren't zero prep games.

In any game we have to choose where to direct our energy. There are always going to be elements that are more tangible than others because we put more effort into them. The most important setting design I do is building the world around the player characters so they feel like integrated parts of the setting. I usually start with a scenario, work with players to get them connected to it, and then start building relationship maps and a world around the characters. It's most important to me to make the stuff that has the most proximity to the characters feel the most real.

It's mostly important to me that the way players relate to the shared imagined space is through the lens of their character. It should be personal and immediate rather than detached and academic.

 

[clearstream]

In any game we have to choose where to direct our energy. There are always going to be elements that are more tangible than others because we put more effort into them. The most important setting design I do is building the world around the player characters so they feel like integrated parts of the setting. I usually start with a scenario, work with players to get them connected to it, and then start building relationship maps and a world around the characters. It's most important to me to make the stuff that has the most proximity to the characters feel the most real.

I'm more interested in characters entering the world and unfolding what is there. I dislike when the world is inert - propelled only by the characters - because for me that misses opportunities for inspiration. Thinking on that, I guess I value most inspiration that is some sense unexpected or surprising. So it takes characters to places they wouldn't have gone if everything had developed outwards from them, rather than having life - purpose and currents - of its own.

I do agree about choices as to where to invest effort.

It's mostly important to me that the way players relate to the shared imagined space is through the lens of their character. It should be personal and immediate rather than detached and academic.

I agree, and would go on to say that an immersive world is one that is not detached and academic. If that is where a group landed, they are unlikely to find world-immersion helpful to their RPG.

It is like your earlier comment about "top down perspective I find many people who are interested immersion really care about. They want to think abstractly about the shared imagined space"... perhaps it's not the abstract thinking that offends, seeing as it is literally abstraction - 'existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence' - all the way down. Perhaps it is where the approach to abstraction feels too 'top-down' and 'detached'? For me, those are not goals of immersion-in-world.

Think of what Tolkien wrote, or Le Guin? Was their immersion in world detached? Le Guin took an anthropologist's approach to her world building. Her worlds are warm places, filled with people as alive and flawed as Tenar and Ged. Tolkien was an academic, and maybe one can criticise his characters as somewhat facile; but I don't believe one can fault them more than one can fault the vast majority of characters portrayed in RPG. Hence I'm doubtful on 'academic' being at issue: does it stand in for a more specific set of faults?

There might be a difference between us on who owns what, and theories about that. We both want 'personal' and 'immediate', and we seem to believe different things about how to achieve it. Is part of that, that you want the world facts to be established by everyone at the table, whereas I am okay with dividing up the job, with different participants having different spheres of influence? Is at issue where fiat lies?

 

[pemerton]

@@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.

Abstraction is a relation - the abstract thing has been abstracted from ("detached from") something.

@Campbell has already replied, but I can elaborate. The abstraction in the presentation of the gameworld - which Campbell goes on to describe as "detached and academic" in contrast to the "personal and immediate" - is abstraction from the experience of and life of the character. There are a number of ways this typically occurs in RPGing. Campbell gives one - the presentation of space in terms of bird's eye or even god's eye views and precise measurements (as in the classic wargaming or gridded battle mat) rather than in terms that characterise the character's perception ("near", "far", "right up on top of you!", etc). Another would be the presentation of information about the setting in the form of an encyclopaedia or travel guide entry, rather than as the sort of recollection and cultural experience that is a person's source of knowledge about places they are not a tourist.

These two things can intersect: I live in an inner suburb of a city that is more than one hundred years old. The streets were laid out in the nineteenth century, and still include many lanes that once facilitated "night soil" collection. Despite having lived in the same suburb for over 20 years, I can still go for a walk and be surprised by encountering a little side street or lane that either I've never noticed before, or have certainly forgotten about and (eg) could not have directed anyone to had they asked me. On the other hand, if someone asks me for directions to a cafe or pub or chemist or supermarket or which tram to take to go where, I can easily tell them. This is basically the opposite to the traditional RPG map-and-key method, where - if the players are shown the GM's map - knowledge of the layout is perfect, while being able to actually find one's way around the place (the inns, the apothecaries, the butchers, etc) depends on quizzing the GM about his/her key.

Describing things in terms that do engage with the character's perception may involve abstraction - eg "near" and "far" abstract away from the physical quantity of distance; "the place you remember from your childhood" abstracts away from the physical quantity of time; "after a few weeks travel through the woods you make your way from Kent to Warwick" abstracts away from both those physical quantities. But by doing so it actually (at least in my experience, and I believe also @Campbell's) it enhances immersion, because that is how people engage with their lives. I can't tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing on this day three weeks ago without looking at my diary or my receipts or some other external reminder of how I spend my time!

 

[Thomas Shey]

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

Yeah. I suspect the usage developed in different places, and here we are.

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.

I tend to see it more as "immersion as becoming" as compared to "immersion as being".

Immersion-as-becoming, as people note when this comes up, is what people do in other fiction; they associate with the character and their emotions and interests, but they don't, per se, have problems with various metagame things that move those interests along; they just don't make decisions as to what they want as a player (or at least try not to). As a nod to old usage in RGFA for the other version, I sometimes think of it as "Deep Actor". Among other things, they aren't as likely to get fixated on setting or rules issues that seem odd, because taking setting conceits as a given when you immerse in fiction is just a thing.

Immersion-as-being is a little different. This is where a player tries to see things entirely as the character would, only making decisions that the character would make, and as much as possible becoming a transparent medium for the character and a passenger on them at the same time. Its a more brittle version than the above, as it makes it hard to engage with some kinds of mechanics (though exactly which ones vary from person to person). As Campbell says above, metacurrency has to have some sort of in-world rationale (like TORG Possibilities) for the player to be comfortable with it, and setting or rules elements that don't bare too much examination can be jarring. Back in the day, RGFA called this "Deep-IC" in its early evolution.

It seems to me that both of these care about both internal and external character situations; its just that one handles the character externally (though very intimately) and the other internally. As I imply, I think they're analogous to Actor and IC stance, just more strongly committed to not letting other factors in (which, to make it clear, is not an unmixed virtue; both versions can come across as selfish when it comes to how their characters' actions are impacting other players, not because they want to be, but because how they engage with the game doesn't leave much room for that. Its why the better ones try really hard to make sure when doing initial character design and integrating the character in with the rest of the players that they pay attention to how that character is liable to play out in the context of the group and campaign to minimize this. Its also why combing this with Develop In Play can be particularly fraught).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Regarding the abstraction discussion, this is also one of those things that I suspect varies considerably to how you relate to the world. While range bands could work for me if I was playing in Immersion mode, that would only be true if nothing ever came up to concretize one of them, because at that point the imagined space in my head would jar seriously with the game reality. I'm actually better at having actual numbers (or alternatively a descriptive thing like "a couple blocks") than an abstraction here.

(Caveat; I normally play a mix of IC and Author modes; I like immersion, but have trouble sustaining it in a FTF or voice talk game because the contradiction between the visual/audible cues and what's going on in my head is jarring. I was able to do it much better years ago when I was MUSHing.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

I suspect that's because for most of them, that discussion involves too much view of making of the sausage; "authorship" of a character is very much not a thing they want to engage with on a conscious level, so talking about it is, at best, something they have no interest in examining, and at worst, actively hostile to their process.

Edit: I just realized I didn't respond to your first sentence. I'd suggest that the issue is that non-in-world metacurrency (as noted there are some forms that either explicitly or implicitly represent things that are fundamentally resources in the world) requires an actively pull-out-of-character process for most people (I qualify, because there are always people who have better firewalling than others).

This is related to the issue of what mechanical engagement someone finds disruptive here; classically in the RPGA days, some people could deal with quite complex mechanics when immersing as long as they felt naturalistic (i.e. they related to what was going on in the minds of the players directly and didn't require too much handling for them), while simpler ones that didn't were a problem (this tended to come up regarding things like card-play mechanics which tend to be a pretty explicitly authorial process and require some actual consideration to boot in most cases--TORG/Masterbook being the poster child here).

 

[Campbell]

I personally tend to view direct authorship (on either side of the screen) as a necessary evil if we want to have depth of fiction which I value more than avoiding authoring entirely, but I like to keep it somewhat separate. So like Apocalypse World style questions are awesome because it creates a mode shift, but I am not deeply enamored of dramatic editing or Circles checks. Mostly I want us all to get to the point where we don't need to do more direct authoring as soon as possible. I do recognize that all play is fundamentally authorship though.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I personally tend to view direct authorship (on either side of the screen) as a necessary evil if we want to have depth of fiction which I value more than avoiding authoring entirely, but I like to keep it somewhat separate. So like Apocalypse World style questions are awesome because it creates a mode shift, but I am not deeply enamored of dramatic editing or Circles checks. Mostly I want us all to get to the point where we don't need to do more direct authoring as soon as possible. I do recognize that all play is fundamentally authorship though.

I think there's obviously going to be some authorship from most people, immersion or not, outside of the normal game context (I say most because some people are hostile to doing that at all). I think you can definitely draw a distinction between doing it during set-up and other non-IC play and in the midst of actually playing the character, though.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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!

Yes, and I think that a lot of people, I see it mostly in GMs but it happens with players too, is that they sublimate or rationalize away the whole thing. They build and arrange an entire game around utterly gamist precepts and then insist that it is all logical and reasonable and "how things would be if X" or something like that. Then on that edifice they insist that any slightest over Author Stance anything in their game is anathema because it subverts this mythical thing that never existed to start with!

(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).

Well, here I think there are some distinctions we could draw with classic D&D at least: In classic D&D you trundle along the corridor and you describe to the GM what you are doing, poking the floor with your 10' pole, searching the walls for secret traps, scanning the ceiling for lurkers above, etc. These are all obviously cloaked strictly in the 'action process' paradigm, but they are concrete actions related specifically to the GM-provided fiction. You could go through this whole exploration routine without ever jumping out of actor stance. If a situation comes along where a roll is called for, suppose a monster comes along and you want to know who is surprised, classically the GM could roll it himself (not sure what Gygax would say to that, except it is allowable). Even if the player rolls, they aren't selecting a course of action, they are simply RESOLVING an already selected action. The action is tied closely to a fictional process or circumstance. The goblins get surprise, they leap out of the shadows, blows are exchanged, there's initiative checks, attack and damage rolls, etc. Again this is built very close to the action. The fighter doesn't have any 'choose what power to use' kind of choices, only resolution of in fiction stuff. The wizard is maybe a bit different, but Vancian Casting is engineered to give something close to the same experience!

I think this WAS a cardinal principle of D&D design. I'm not sure if it was something Dave Arneson conceived for immersion reasons, or if it was simply an outgrowth of keeping the rules fairly light weight and Gary's desire to put the DM firmly at the center of the game. Either way, it is a trait of early classic D&D. I am more dubious about it existing in MODERN D&D!

(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).

Yeah, and I think my description of classic D&D illustrates that it has that property (or can have, I'm sure it is not guaranteed in every game). I think, at least as conceived by me above, it DOES have the property of technically allowing you to remain in an actor stance DURING PLAY. However, there is a vast amount of 'stuff' you cannot address in that kind of play, or which you have to just arrange for by the super meta-gamey genre conventions and table play conventions of classic D&D (IE the dungeon itself as a model of adventure). I think in the end we end up at the same place, and we both wonder why people who accept the super meta-gamey conventions then balk at 'Wises Checks', why is that some sort of line in the sand?