This is not accurate.
Upthread I quoted
two formulations of the Lumpley Principle:
[N]othing happens, in the fiction of role-playing, unless someone says it and it's heard by others. . . . Whatever mechanics you use, you are agreeing to use them among the group, usually as a creative inspiration or constraint, specifically as a way to affect what is going to be said.
System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play.
The second of those two formulations is not equivalent (either abstractly, or in its reference) to
system is anything leading to agreement about imagined events in play.
Here are some things that help lead to agreement about imagined events but are (typically) not among the means by which a group secures such agreement, and hence are not elements of system: familiarity with one another; easy-going dispositions; common cultural background which supports shared patterns of thinking about how particular stories "should" go on; shared assumptions about who "should" own what elements of the fiction.
The Lumpley Principle, in both its formulations, serves a point.
The point of the first formulation is to stress that RPG rules are not self-actualising. They must be taken up and applied in a social context. (This is sometimes expressed via a shorthand like "social contract is prior to system".)
The point of the second formulation is to stress that
system, in RPGing, includes elements that go beyond the things standardly presented as action resolution mechanics. It includes principles that constrain narration; allocations of ownership to elements of the fiction (these might be seen as a special case of principles that constrain narration -
go to town in your narration if it's a bit that you own, but otherwise maybe dial it back a bit); rules or principles that govern turn-taking; etc.
But the second formulation is still a claim within the field of studying RPG design and RPG play. It is not an assertion about the general psychology of agreement.
I don't see why we need to redefine
fictional positioning.
Here is
Vincent Baker:
Here's Emily Care Boss, writing in 2006 about the reward cycles she sees in freeform play:
creativity: free form play, of whatever stripe, has as its primary reward the creation of in-game events, material etc. Think about how allocation of narrative rights have become a huge part of mechanical systems: people want to be able to be creative, and giving them the right to do so is a powerful reward. How this is allotted and allocated in free-form is not as regulated by reproducible procedures, though, instead it often comes down to things like the informal social networks that Christian [Griffen] points out. Because of:
reinforcement and mirroring: what is real in a game world is what gets played/with. If everyone else ignores or doesn't know about what you've made up, it may as well not exist. So, the people who are the most "powerful" creatively speaking in freeform, are the ones whose ideas get picked up on and incorporated into the play of others. Those whose actions affect others and who end up having them reverberate around the shared creation. This can be done via any channel depending on the type of play: character action, background creation, informal discussion out of character, or "gming" (which in free-form, means setting the parameters of play, use of props, dissemination of information, creation of guidelines and intervention/adjudication. damn, online gms can do a hell of alot, more even, than tabletop ones, in a way, because there may be so many more people involved. same with large larps).
positioning: this is a wierd one that seems to arise out of the way that narrative control is not parcelled out in a regulated way in freeform. Other folks may have had very different experiences, so take it with a grain of salt. Anyway, what it is is setting up in-game events and interpretations to support your following (character) actions. For example, if I want to shoot your character with a gun, I have to first establish that there is a gun present, that it is loaded etc. If I want to kill your character, I will have to establish, and get others to collaborate with me in establishing, that my character can keep yours from escaping, that mine has the ability to successfully shoot yours, that help will not arrive in time etc. Instead of a die roll, based on various things that represent all this stuff, it has to be negotiated, or simply spoken and accepted as "what has happened" in order for it to occur. So in freeform, you may be thinking (even unconsciously) three moves down the road, in order to back yourself up on future actions.
Well, that's a couple anyway. Sorry to go on. It is a big thing for me, though, that there are systems in there, even if they are unspoken and little understood.
(my emphasis; original
here)
Here, Emily's talking about the player's position: what gameplay options do I, as a player, have available to me right now? Over the course of the game, my legitimate moves change; what are my legitimate moves at this moment of play?
In freeform games, Emily says, what determines your selection of available legitimate moves is the current state of the fictional stuff in the game. If there's a gun in your character's hand, that adds certain moves to the selection available to you, the player. If there's a gun in someone else's character's hand, that changes the likely outcomes of the moves you might make.
(For now, let's politely pretend that making a move in a roleplaying game means asserting something, like "my guy shoots yours," and subjecting it to the group's assent or dissent to determine its actual in-game veracity. I think this is not true, but it makes it easier for now.)
Contrast freeform with cue-mediation. The freeform rule at play here is "if you've established that your character is holding a gun, all other things being equal, it's a legitimate move to assert that your character fires it at someone." The equivalent cue-mediated rule would be "if you have a gun on your character sheet, all other things being equal, it's a legitimate move to assert that your character fires it at someone." See the difference? Playing freeform, we look into the fiction-as-established to determine whether a possible move is legitimate; playing with cues, we look over at the cue to determine whether it is.
Given that D&D is cue-laden, many of the legitimate moves that a player can make will follow not from fictional position but from the state of the cues ("cue position"). For instance, whether my PC is conscious or unconscious is typically not an element of fictional position but rather follows from the fact that my hp tally is greater than zero. Attack reach, in contemporary D&D, is likewise typically a matter of cues and not fictional position (contrast Dungeon World, or some approaches to AD&D).
The "typically" in my previous sentence sits in the same conceptual space as Baker's "all other things being equal":
In a given game design or game in play, freeform and cue-mediation can happily coexist. You see where I included "all other things being equal" in both rules? Often in practice that includes a quick check across the boundary between them. Like when you have a pistol on your character sheet, but in the fiction as established your character's just stepping out of the shower, right?
As far as
everything a player is motivated to say, that does not seem to be part of position at all. Rather, and as Emily Care Boss explains, it is motivation that drives positioning: ie because I want the fiction to include such-and-such a thing (say, my PC isn't killed by the giant), then I have a motivation to establish an appropriate position that will enable me to avoid that outcome, be that a fictional position (eg I'm hidden from the giant) or a cue position (eg I've got a sword of giant-slaying on my PC's gear list). Of course my current position might constrain my possibilities of further positions (eg fiction like
I've just encountered a giant on an open plain or a cue record like
I'm subjected to paralysation). But I don't see how motivated action declarations are themselves part of position (fictional
or cue).