I bet he wears Affliction clothing and swears at innocent cashiers too.
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RPG Theory- The Limits of My Language are the Limits of My World
- Thread starter Snarf Zagyg
- Start date
This is incredibly strange to me. Throughout the 4e era I improved my 4e play by engaging with the analysis and discussion of RPGing in general, and other games that had relevant things to say - Burning Wheel (the best advice on scene-framing play I know), HeroWars/Quest and Maelstrom Storytelling (both excellent for skill challenges, because pioneering RPGs for closed scene resolution play) being some of the main ones.
Analysis of RPGs in general also helps. For instance, this from Ron Edwards basically sets out the essence of 4e's mechanics and anticipates every flashpoint in the Edition wars:
But if Simulationist-facilitating design is not involved, then the whole picture changes . . .
* Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict. This isn't an issue of whether Author (or any) Stance is employed at all, but rather when and for what.
* Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion.
* More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se.
In virtue of having thought about RPGing that adopts this sort of approach, I was able to write the following bit of advice to the prospective players in my 4e game, some time towards the end of 2008 or in early 2009 (sblocked for length; the references to 3E D&D and RM reflects the main systems the members of the group had been playing up to that point):
Relationship Between Game Mechanics and Gameworld
Unlike 3E or Rolemaster, a lot of the 4e mechanics work best if they are not treated as a literal model of what is going on in the gameworld. So keep in mind that the main thing the mechanics tell you is what, mechanically, you can have your PC do. What your PC’s actions actually mean in the gameworld is up to you to decide (in collaboration with the GM and the other players at the table).Some corollaries of this:
Character Levels
Levels for PCs, for NPCs and for monsters set the mechanical parameters for encounters. They don’t necessarily have any determinate meaning in the gameworld (eg in some encounters a given NPC might be implemented as an elite monster, and in other encounters – when the PCs are higher level – as a minion). As your PC gains levels, you certainly open up more character build space (more options for powers, more feats, etc). The only definite effect in the gameworld, however, is taking your paragon path and realising your epic destiny. How to handle the rest of it – is your PC becoming tougher, or more lucky, or not changing much at all in power level relative to the rest of the gameworld – is something that will have to come out in the course of play as the story of your PC unfolds.PC Rebuilding
The rules for retraining, swapping in new powers, background feats etc, don’t have to be interpreted as literally meaning that your PC has forgotten how to do things or suddenly learned something new. Feel free to treat this as just emphasising a different aspect of your PC that was always there, but hadn’t yet come up in the course of play.Skill Checks and Power Usage
When you make a skill check (especially in a skill challenge), use a feature or power, take the second wind action, etc, the onus is on you to explain how what you are attempting works in the gameworld. (Where a feature or power has flavour text you may use that flavour text or come up with your own.) Feel free to be dramatic.Inadequate explanation which leaves everyone at the table scratching their heads as to what is going on in the gameworld may lead to a -2 penalty, or even automatic failure of the attempted action, depending on the circumstances.
I have no doubt at all that general familiarity with at least some of the variety of possible approaches to RPGing, gained from reading different RPGs and moreso from reading around The Forge, helped me with the above. Reading The Forge also significantly improved my RM play, in part by helping me appreciate ways in which RM differs from RQ even though - at a certain level of generality - both are very similar purist-for-system/"process simulation" RPGs. For instance, both use attack vs parry as part of their combat resolution. But in RM parry is a player decision-point about round-by-round allocation of overall available effort; whereas in RQ it is a roll against a fixed target number with no comparable decision point. This difference matters hugely in play. Now the only person I've ever seen make this particular point about those two systems is me: but I couldn't have identified and articulated it but for my reading of Edwards, and his discussion of the way different systems open up different sorts of decision-points that enable players to inject their own priorities from "outside" the unfolding in-fiction logic.
Another example, not about 4e D&D or RM but about Classic Traveller, which I've certainly posted in threads you've participated in: my approach to GMing in my current Classic Traveller campaign is heavily influenced by reading and discussing Apocalypse World - treating all the little subsystems as "moves" in the AW sense, and treating "if you do it, you do it" as the basic principle of play. And without wanting to embarrass him my saying it yet again, it is @Campbell who has helped me most with this, by pushing me to see what differentiates AW and BW as systems (roughly, AW is follow-the-fiction + "if you do it, you do it" while BW is scene-framed + "say 'yes' or roll the dice" + intent-and-task + "let it ride"). Appreciating those differences also sharpens my sense of the BW techniques, which helps my BW GMing and play and also makes it easier to bring those techniques into other systems where they are highly appropriate but not fully spelled out (eg Prince Valiant; Cthuhu Dark).
A final example: I recently watched video where Ron Edwards says some critical things about BitD. I'm not familiar enough with BitD to form a view as to the merits of his criticisms: but it did prompt me to reflect further on Agon - another John Harper game with very intricate and overlapping resource and advancement tracks, which I have just started playing. That helped me identify possible stress points in Agon play, which I can handle and overcome by being aware of them and approaching them a certain way in my GMing.
And a concluding more general point: as an academic researcher I publish in a few fields. But I attend seminars and try to keep track of general developments in many more: being aware of what is happening in the general discipline is something I regard as essential to avoiding narrowness, parochialism and ultimately methodological error in my own fields. RPGing isn't something I approach as seriously as my work!, but I still find the same basic principle applies.
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First: I was ninja'd by you re my post just upthread, and shoud acknowledge that.
Second: I've read @Manbearcat's account of 5e's social mechanics in earlier thread. Because I'm not really into Pictionary + Wheel of Fortune (at home, when we play Pictionary, the phrases get to play with dad as a partner and drew the short straw are largely synonymous), my appreciation for them can only be abstract and vicarious.
Third: I fully agree with you about 5e backgrounds. I feel similarly about backgrounds - with their free-descriptorness - in 13th Age. I feel these are really the one place where these post-4e games have pushed the logic of 4e's design further than 4e itself managed to. (Whereas I found 4e's backgrounds incredibly lacklustre and largely ignored them.)
But I don't think that what I appreciate about 5e backgrounds is widely shared among the 5e advocates whose posts I read.
Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
Real gym bros wear plain tapered tees because nothing else fits them. If they level up they wear hoodies with shorts. Power lifters occasionally wear Relentless Athletic Wear because they lift raw
. They would. Damn hipsters of gym bros.
Grendel_Khan
Hero
So, since this keeps coming up, phrased in one form or another, from more than one preson...
Has anyone here ever heard or read, "People like what they like" and thought, Yes, yes, this is very valuable insight.
How about pointing out that something is inherently immune to critique and pointless to analyze because it's wildly popular?
I can't for the life of me understand what value either of those have. The only goal or result for either would seem to be to try to end the discussion. They certainly never advance it.
Has anyone here ever heard or read, "People like what they like" and thought, Yes, yes, this is very valuable insight.
How about pointing out that something is inherently immune to critique and pointless to analyze because it's wildly popular?
I can't for the life of me understand what value either of those have. The only goal or result for either would seem to be to try to end the discussion. They certainly never advance it.
payn
He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
IDK, I usually only see it when folks are at loggerheads and beyond reasonable critique or discussion. It's essentially a agree to disagree declaration. I'd say just ignore that poster going forward. If the comments are directed at you, maybe examine your postings. They could be drifting away from constructive criticism and killing desire for discussion.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Oddly enough, the excessive shapelessness of 13th Age Backgrounds was the one thing I actively disliked, but that's more because I can see to many degenerate conditions arising from it with people I play with than any other part.
Seeing as those phrases are my coinage, I thought I might reply.
To begin with: many, many RPG texts are very unclear about how the game is actually to be played. The first RPG that I, personally, read that I could see was just coming out and telling me how it was to be played was Burning Wheel. Since then I've discovered older texts that do this too (eg Maelstrom Storytelling, Over the Edge). I've also come to realise that Gygax's AD&D and Moldvay Basic do this to a large extent, though they have some misleading trappings (about heroic fantasy etc) in their introductory material.
But when playing a system like AD&D OA (which clearly is not meant to be played in the Gygax/Moldvay style) or Rolemaster, In my experience you're basically on your own.
I read a lot of stuff - both official stuff for both systems, and other commentary - which told me that I should create a rich gameworld, lots of interacting factions, etc (ie a "living sandbox"), or strongly implied that I should to that by presenting it as a model. Relatedly, both OA and various RM books have lots of tables for determining (perhaps by rolling, perhaps by choice) arcs of events in the campaign world, clearly intended to provide both a backdrop to play and material for play.
I also read a lot of stuff that talked about how to design and adjudicate action in locations, which clearly took for granted eg that movement would be adjudicated by tracking distance moved on a map vs movement rates.
And then one gets to the actual moment of play and of adjudication, and the question arises, what to do with all this prepped material? Eg, if one of my background events is the assassination of the emperor, and my maps and movement rates tell me that if, at this moment, I reveal a rumour to the players, then even if they travel to the capital at their fastest they can't arrive in time to stop the assassination as per my prepared timelines, what am I to do? Stick to all my prep, and have this dramatic event happen offstage? Or adjust my timeline?
At the same time, it's becoming clear in play that the players are into some stuff - eg the scheming of the Scarlet Brotherhood - but not other stuff - eg the border wars in Furyondy. Do I still focus on both in my prep and management of the sandbox? What if my random rolls for event generation reveal that all the exciting stuff is going to involve Furyondy and not the Scarlet Brotherhood. What if the players decide to try and infiltrate a Scarlet Brotherhood stronghold and I don't have it prepped - or haven't even thought about whether and where it might be?
My ability to deal with these questions in my own play was helped a great deal by having someone else - mostly Ron Edwards - explain what was giving rise to them, namely, a certain set of assumptions about how prepped backstory, framing of situations, and resolution of declared actions, would all fit together. Encountering systems like BW - with its Circles and Wises checks - made it clear, by showing how rather than just asserting that, that other approaches are possible. I was able to realise that the relationship between successful moments of play, and various techniques I'd used without necessarily noticing that I was using them, was not accidental but causal. And so I was able to become more systematic.
And now, when I GM, I have a set of conceptual and practical tools for thinking about how I use prepped backstory, and how I prep for situation, and how I adjudicate actions. For instance: I can now see clearly that if (i) I treat prepped backstory as fluid, non-binding suggestions and (ii) I adjudicate declared actions as automatic failures on the basis of unrevealed backstory then (iii) I'm basically just fiatting failure or the possibility of success. No AD&D or RM book ever explained this to me. I also now have a clear way of thinking about how to bring backstory into framing, so it becomes part of the established fictional positioning. I also understand much better than I use to how to incorporate player suggestions about backstory into framing and adjudication.
All these things have made my RPGing better.
FrogReaver
As long as i get to be the frog
There's not a single person here that has done this...
