D&D 5E [+] Explain RPG theory without using jargon

[Vaalingrade]

OSR: What those other OSR guys told you about OSR is wrong.

 

[Malmuria]

A history of the OSR: The OSR Should Die

 

[Raduin711]

The first of these was that these three ways of having fun were the only ways of having fun that were intrinsic to an RPG. People who talked about other ways that they enjoyed RPGs - like the fact that they got to hang out with friends regularly - were told that that was just incidental to the game and not intrinsic to it.

They aren't? I mean, if I like getting together with friends, it really doesn't matter what game we're playing. If I'm looking to decide what game to play, hanging out with friends isn't an input -- what those friends like and what they want from a game is, though.

I mean, yes, but the question is "what brings you to the game?"
GNS theory says the answer to that question will fit into 3 categories. So where does "I just came for the free pretzels" fit in to GNS theory?

We could be going to a movie. One person says they like going to the movies because they enjoy cinematography. Another might say it's the special effects that he loves. Another might just want to lose themselves in a story. Another just comes for the popcorn.

Why should popcorn be considered an invalid reason to see a movie?
You asked. I answered. You may think it silly. Or irrelevant. Yeah, I know nobody is making watch the movie. I could walk in, buy a tub of popcorn, eat it, and walk out again, as weird as that would be. I never said I didn't like the movie, it's just... what brings me to the movies... is...


But I get it... if GNS theory is there to tell us how to write a better RPG, then the answer "popcorn" is not going to help in that regard... But if GNS theory is there to tell us why we like playing RPG's, ignoring "popcorn" is perhaps short-sighted, and indeed, our gaming sessions may be helped more by making sure you have plenty of snacks than by psychoanalyzing your players.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I liked your thoughtful write-up. There is a lot to think over. A weak or less-well-explained link to my reading is the jump from necessitating a fiction, to necessitating a story. "This tells us"... but does it? How? And how does that ultimately connect with all (and not just some) of the binaries?

Somehow I missed this before, so while I am working on the follow-up example post, this is worth responding to.

Note that in that section I included the word "somehow." That was not an accident. "Story" can be relatively thin, but it must be essential to the experience. Again, I'm arguing from the way actual roleplayers view assertions like, "I am roleplaying while playing perfectly ordinary chess! Chess is a game about leading an army." That is, you can claim this, but most people won't take it seriously because something is missing. Merely projecting a fictional context over rules is not enough. People also make similar criticisms of things like EVE Online, where there really is a clear fictional context going on, but it's pretty much totally superfluous to actually playing the game--such that integrating Microsoft Excel into the game was recently hailed as a pretty cool new feature.

This forces us to ask, "What is the something missing, that causes roleplayers to reject chess (and other games like it) as not being roleplaying games?" And I assert that that gap is the absence of somehow having a story that is told about, around, or via play. And I mean that "story" in the most literal sense possible: as Dictionary.com puts it, "a narrative [ed: however brief], either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; tale." Obviously it would in general be fictitious and written in prose for most roleplaying games. There needs to be inherent narrative, of SOME kind, in SOME sense, that is actually important for understanding and (especially) for participating in play.

With chess, it's entirely possible to live your whole life without every knowing that the roots of chess are as a pretend battle between two theoretically equal armies. There's no need for imagining a world, you can literally just work with the physical pieces and the movements permitted by the rules. This specific fact--that the imagined world, the fictional context, is completely unnecessary for playing chess--is why people reject chess as an example of a "roleplaying game," even though it is a game, and it is possible to roleplay while playing it. (Consider, for a slightly more campy parallel, someone shouting "you sunk my battleship!": the fact that there is a thin cloak of story draped over the game is pretty irrelevant to the actual process of play.) Believe it or not, Wikipedia even backs me up on this one, referring to chess (and its ancestral game, chaturanga, a game from ca. 600 AD India) as an "abstract strategy game," which (on the page specific to such games) specifically says most such games are defined, among other things, as "involving little to no narrative theme." There is the barest trace of narrative theme left in chess, e.g. it refers to pieces by colorful names like "bishop," "knight," and "queen," but the narrative around them is essentially superfluous. They could have been called "diagonalizer," "leaper," and "omni-mover" and the game would proceed exactly as it currently does.

So, as said, there must be some amount of narrative directly and importantly involved in the process of play.

Unfortunately it would take much too long to actually give you the requested "how does this play into the things you're alleging as categories, Ezekiel" stuff, not because I don't intend to answer the question but because it would be rather redundant to do so and then also go into examples of play. Being extremely brief, and thus possibly not explaining very well, the third and fourth of my four given answers put the story right at the heart of the experience, the second expects story to naturally arise from the other processes of play, and the first requires narrative to be present in order for the evaluations and successes to matter in any meaningful way. Hence, story is involved, even in the most extremely numbers-heavy "Score and Achievement" games, but it may not be involved to the same degree nor for the same reasons as it would in (say) "Conceit and Emulation" games.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Along the same lines, Richard Feynman (another physicist in the stratosphere with Einstein for those who aren't familiar) was asked to teach freshman physics at CalTech. He agreed as long as (a) they recorded it all and (b) he only had to do it once. You can find the lectures themselves on Youtube, and Caltech has a nice transcript of them.

Feynman was a lot funnier.

 

[Aldarc]

But doesn’t that kind of put paid to the idea that these agendas can’t be served simultaneously? If the only claim the theory is making is that sometimes these agendas can conflict with one another… I don’t feel like that’s saying anything particularly revelatory. And it has seemed to me that people have been arguing that at any given moment of gameplay, one agenda must take precedence over the other. Also, some have claimed that a game can only serve at most two agendas. None of this seems to track for m.

It's more difficult for me to address this because your point here relies on a lot of he-said-she-said, and I'm not sure if there is a good way to speak to or navigate through whatever you may be alluding to. Is there perhaps a way that you could rephrase this or focus on something in particular about GNS Theory that giving you difficulties or misgivings?

Side Story: The idea that different authors with different ideologies wrote five books of the Torah was not that revelatory or novel for biblical scholars in the 19th century either. Scholars had long recognized discrepancies in the Torah for thousands of years, and many were skeptical of claims of Mosaic authorship. In the late 1700s and 1800s, biblical scholars had hypothesized and identified roughly two to four hypothetical literary strands: Yahwist (J), Elohist (E), Priestly (P), and Deuteronomist (D).

Then in 1878, German biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen published Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels ("Prolegomena to the History of Israel"), which built upon and synthesized this earlier work, presenting not only a compositional history of the Torah using these four literary strands but also a history of Israelite piety. Though the details of his work was challenged - typically debating whether certain verses (or even portions of singular verses!) belonged to one strand or another or in identifying sub-strands (e.g., Dtr1, Dtr2, DH, etc.) - his work remained the hegemonic view for about a hundred years of biblical scholarship until it was challenged by a wave of much stronger criticisms from scholars in the 1970s (e.g., Rendtorff, Van Seters, Schmid).

In short, a general scholarly consensus agreed that a Priestly and Deuteronomistic source(s) existed, but most source criticism scholars are skeptical of the literary integrity of hypothetical Elohist and Yahwist sources, with many scholars generally referring to the collective JE materials as "non-Priestly." There was also the problematic issue of how Wellhausen's narrative of Israelite religious history appeared to be ideologically driven with undertones of antisemitism and Christianity as the capstone, which was much harder to ignore post-Holocaust and the growing cooperation between Christian, Jewish, and areligious scholars. However, despite the massive criticisms against the Documentary Hypothesis, a new explanatory model on the level of Wellhausen's Prolegomena hasn't emerged. Now within the past few decades, a Neo-Documentary Hypothesis has been put forth, ironically from mostly Jewish American and Israelite scholars, but many other scholars are supicious of their arguments for reasons I won't get into. Most scholars nowadays operate on a much more working view on the composition of the Torah that acknowledges the general idea that the Torah was composed of earlier sources (e.g., P, D, non-P, etc.) and then compiled in either the Persian or Hellenistic period as a literary unit.

Despite Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis being functionally dead, nearly every single fledgling Biblical Studies student and religious seminarian will likely be forced to learn the basic ideas and arguments of Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis because of just how enormous its impact remains on Old Testament biblical scholarship. (The New Testament has a similar issue referred to as "The Synoptic Problem.") It's important to know the basics if you are in the clergy and picking up a biblical commentary on the Torah (or even elsewhere in the OT/Tanakh), because it's likely that JEPD will rear their heads. It is a significant piece of critical work in the history of biblical scholarship. We are still using a lot of terms from 19th century source criticism!

I say all of this because GDS and GNS occupy a similar place in the field of TTRPG theory, even if the latter was mired in a lot of anti-Forge controversy. Some of the basic ideas will seem revelatory. Some will not. Some of the core ideas will hold up. Some will not. Some people have moved on from it. Some still hold on to it. Some will revise it. Some will reject anything that so much as even remotely resembles it.

For sure. I certainly don’t think that because people have different definitions of the agendas, they must be invalid. I think it’s far more likely that there is at least a cohesive underlying theory (if not necessarily one I would agree with), and that the conflicting definitions are indicative of the theory being commonly misunderstood. But I have to wonder if that common misunderstanding is due to the theory not being very accessible.

I would suggest investigating GNS on your own, using primary sources, to determine how accessible you find it so you can properly draw your own conclusions, though I suspect a large barrier for accessibility is that Edwards's writing is difficult, if not annoyingly so, to parse. (I'm reminded of how the basic ideas of 'deconstruction' are fairly easy concept to grok, but reading Deconstructionists talk about 'deconstructionism' can be an everliving nightmare.)

I also recommend this website discussing "What GNS Theory Claims."

Maybe. It may surprise you to learn that I rather like what I have seen from ostensibly narrativist games and mechanics. I love 4e. PbtA is awesome. FATE seems pretty neat. I can see their appeal, and why someone who wants that kind of experience would find (most editions of) D&D dissatisfying. I don’t feel like I need GNS theory to explain that, and I feel that what I understand of GNS theory misses the mark on what is appealing about more traditional RPG play, which is something it ostensibly aims to do.

You don't feel like you need GNS to explain why someone may like these sort of games that are out in the market; however, GNS was developed at a time when there was an absence or dearth of these sort of games in the market. The Forge helped hammer-out (no pun intended) a lot of the concepts, frameworks, and terms that would help lay the groundwork for these games.

That said, would you mind expanding your point in the bold? What do you feel is appealing about more traditional RPG play that GNS theory misses the mark about?

Frankly, I don’t really know what jargon comes from GNS and what comes from elsewhere.

It doesn't matter. I find the more general practice of clarifying game terms more useful than getting caught up about where it came from.

 

[Manbearcat]

Somehow I missed this before, so while I am working on the follow-up example post, this is worth responding to.

Note that in that section I included the word "somehow." That was not an accident. "Story" can be relatively thin, but it must be essential to the experience. Again, I'm arguing from the way actual roleplayers view assertions like, "I am roleplaying while playing perfectly ordinary chess! Chess is a game about leading an army." That is, you can claim this, but most people won't take it seriously because something is missing. Merely projecting a fictional context over rules is not enough. People also make similar criticisms of things like EVE Online, where there really is a clear fictional context going on, but it's pretty much totally superfluous to actually playing the game--such that integrating Microsoft Excel into the game was recently hailed as a pretty cool new feature.

This forces us to ask, "What is the something missing, that causes roleplayers to reject chess (and other games like it) as not being roleplaying games?" And I assert that that gap is the absence of somehow having a story that is told about, around, or via play. And I mean that "story" in the most literal sense possible: as Dictionary.com puts it, "a narrative [ed: however brief], either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; tale." Obviously it would in general be fictitious and written in prose for most roleplaying games. There needs to be inherent narrative, of SOME kind, in SOME sense, that is actually important for understanding and (especially) for participating in play.

With chess, it's entirely possible to live your whole life without every knowing that the roots of chess are as a pretend battle between two theoretically equal armies. There's no need for imagining a world, you can literally just work with the physical pieces and the movements permitted by the rules. This specific fact--that the imagined world, the fictional context, is completely unnecessary for playing chess--is why people reject chess as an example of a "roleplaying game," even though it is a game, and it is possible to roleplay while playing it. (Consider, for a slightly more campy parallel, someone shouting "you sunk my battleship!": the fact that there is a thin cloak of story draped over the game is pretty irrelevant to the actual process of play.) Believe it or not, Wikipedia even backs me up on this one, referring to chess (and its ancestral game, chaturanga, a game from ca. 600 AD India) as an "abstract strategy game," which (on the page specific to such games) specifically says most such games are defined, among other things, as "involving little to no narrative theme." There is the barest trace of narrative theme left in chess, e.g. it refers to pieces by colorful names like "bishop," "knight," and "queen," but the narrative around them is essentially superfluous. They could have been called "diagonalizer," "leaper," and "omni-mover" and the game would proceed exactly as it currently does.

So, as said, there must be some amount of narrative directly and importantly involved in the process of play.

Unfortunately it would take much too long to actually give you the requested "how does this play into the things you're alleging as categories, Ezekiel" stuff, not because I don't intend to answer the question but because it would be rather redundant to do so and then also go into examples of play. Being extremely brief, and thus possibly not explaining very well, the third and fourth of my four given answers put the story right at the heart of the experience, the second expects story to naturally arise from the other processes of play, and the first requires narrative to be present in order for the evaluations and successes to matter in any meaningful way. Hence, story is involved, even in the most extremely numbers-heavy "Score and Achievement" games, but it may not be involved to the same degree nor for the same reasons as it would in (say) "Conceit and Emulation" games.

I would go back one step further.

The thing that separates TTRPGs from Chess and strict boardgames or CRPGs is that a sufficiently vital shared imagined space is necessary to index in the resolving of actions and varying collisions of will.

That primordial soup of TTRPGs will yield some conception of “story” downstream of it (even if it’s just Pawn Stance Dungeoncrawling) as those moments of imagine > (a lot of jargon-y stuff goes into this “>”) resolve collect and build out some kind of continuity (I say “some kind” intentionally). And it doesn’t matter whether play is scripted 100 % or improvised 100 %. That reality stays the same.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I would go back one step further.

The thing that separates TTRPGs from Chess and strict boardgames or CRPGs is that a sufficiently vital shared imagined space is necessary to index in the resolving of actions and varying collisions of will.

That primordial soup of TTRPGs will yield some conception of “story” downstream of it (even if it’s just Pawn Stance Dungeoncrawling) as those moments of imagine > (a lot of jargon-y stuff goes into this “>”) resolve collect and build out some kind of continuity (I say “some kind” intentionally). And it doesn’t matter whether play is scripted 100 % or improvised 100 %. That reality stays the same.

So how would this jibe with tabletop wargames? They tend to generate as story, and some forms of play that is rather important. I played in a Necromunda campaign a while ago, and all our gangers had names and every battle had its own little backstory to explain the context and they lined together to form a rudimentary narrative. It definitely has RPG-like elements, though I wouldn't obviously call it a RPG.

One other game I've been playing lately is Mysterium. It is (an excellent) boardgame about mediums trying to solve a murder by getting "vision cards" from a ghost. It definitely forms a story. The mediums are named characters, and they have even backstories in the rulebook. Now you of course usually don't play that in-character assuming the persona of your medium, but you could, and some players do that a bit (I definitely do.) But I think you could pretty easily play it mostly wholly in character, and it would make perfect sense. It probably still wouldn't be a RPG though.

 

[Manbearcat]

So how would this jibe with tabletop wargames? They tend to generate as story, and some forms of play that is rather important. I played in a Necromunda campaign a while a go, and all our gangers had names and every battle had it's own little backstory to explain the context and they lined together to form a rudimentary narrative. It definitely has RPG-le elements, though I wouldn't obviously call it an RPG.

One another game I've been playing lately is Mysterium. It is (and excellent) boardgame about mediums trying to solve a murder by getting "vision cards" from a ghost. It definitely forms a story. The mediums are named characters, and they have even backstories in the rulebook. Now you of course usually don't play that in-character assuming the persona of your medium, but you could, and some players do that a bit (I definitely do.) But I think you could pretty easily play it mostly wholly in character, and it would make perfect sense. It probably still wouldn't be a RPG.

My guess is the “sufficiently vital” does the bulk of the work here.

If a shared imagined space lacks possibilities (real or merely perceived) and is either (a) so barren or (b) superfluous such that indexing it isn’t really necessary to resolve actions and collisions of will?

Fair chance that what you’re doing is something else that doesn’t constitute “TTRPGing?”

I’ll only say “fair” here though because I would say erring on the side of inclusion when it comes to margin-of-error here is best practices (and I don’t just mean ethically…I mean my intuition is that most things will likely fall on the “it’s a TTRPG” side of the fault line if you have to examine the question too hard).

EDIT - Another reason why I don’t think “story” is the metric we’re looking for here (hence go back one step to the sufficiently vital shared imagined space necessary to index > declare > resolve) is that Sport yields story like crazy. It’s an inevitable emergent consequence of the theatre of sport. I’ve spent my whole life in athletics and martial arts (and now I’m noticing it when climbing and watching climbs or competitions). The tendency to feel an arc while you play, to witness an arc while you watch, and to pass on your recounting of events as a story is ubiquitous…which is surely why our modern media/folklore is filled with “sport/martial contest as story.”

 

[Ovinomancer]

I mean, yes, but the question is "what brings you to the game?"
GNS theory says the answer to that question will fit into 3 categories. So where does "I just came for the free pretzels" fit in to GNS theory?

We could be going to a movie. One person says they like going to the movies because they enjoy cinematography. Another might say it's the special effects that he loves. Another might just want to lose themselves in a story. Another just comes for the popcorn.

Why should popcorn be considered an invalid reason to see a movie?
You asked. I answered. You may think it silly. Or irrelevant. Yeah, I know nobody is making watch the movie. I could walk in, buy a tub of popcorn, eat it, and walk out again, as weird as that would be. I never said I didn't like the movie, it's just... what brings me to the movies... is...


But I get it... if GNS theory is there to tell us how to write a better RPG, then the answer "popcorn" is not going to help in that regard... But if GNS theory is there to tell us why we like playing RPG's, ignoring "popcorn" is perhaps short-sighted, and indeed, our gaming sessions may be helped more by making sure you have plenty of snacks than by psychoanalyzing your players.

If "popcorn" is your reason (and I said this upthread) then it doesn't matter what you're playing. Monopoly is as good as 5e.