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

[Cadence]

It feels like for a theory about anything where there are competing interests/views, that the jargon - and word choice in general - can easily feel like it gives insight into what the espousers' interests are and what they feel about the other side.

In psychometrics, for example, there is one type of model whose proponents describe it as doing "objective measurement", with a well defined set of principles behind it. Does this imply anyone doing any other model isn't doing "objective measurement"? If psychometricians are discussing things, then it can feel like "objective measurement" only means "using models that have these really nice properties". But then when the respective camps are selling the models to the users without the technical training, is one side "not objective" in the standard dictionary sense? That feels like it has a connotation. And then it kind of isn't as fun to have the discussions...

But I guess even if words without an initial connotation are chosen, they'll be given one a lot of times by one side or the other. ::::

Is the problem really jargon, or is it the innate human nature to naturally want to treat things (from religion to politics to fields of study to scientific theories to popular culture franchises to gaming preferences) like it's all being sportsball fans in the fanatic sense?

If there wasn't the nature to want to separate and divide, would the jargon simply be words to look up?

 

[Malmuria]

He wasn't saying incoherence --> dysfunction. He has other articles praising the use of incoherency in other games. So, that's not it. Instead, he's pointing out a specific case where the incoherence leads to the dysfunction.

But doesn’t he call that hybrid? Unless he has two terms that mean the same thing?

Dysfunction
Simply, role-playing which is not fun. Most Forge discussions presume that un-fun role-playing is worse than no role-playing.

Hybrid
Play which combines two or more Creative Agendas. Observed functional hybrids to date include only two rather than all three, and one of the agendas is apparently primary or dominant, with the other playing a supportive role. See my review of The Riddle of Steel.

Incoherence
Play which includes incompatible combinations of Creative Agendas among participants. Incoherent play is considered to contribute to Dysfunctional play, but does not define it. Incoherence may be applied indirectly to game rules. Abashedness represents a minor, correctable form of Incoherence.

“Does not define it” because there are a lot of other things that, for him, lead to dysfunctional play, like power gaming or other ‘problem player’ type behavior

 

[Manbearcat]

Yeah I’m mega busy these last few days and probably today and maybe tomorrow.

But I was hoping to put a big post together about “(in)coherency” and “(dis)function” and write a post about Torchbearer and why it’s intentionally designed in incoherency is not only not a problem but rather an asset. Therefore hopefully displaying why I find the concepts bear out and why I find them useful as a lens.

But man…hard left into a train wreck (what @hawkeyefan ’s last 2 paragraphs say) from a very interesting and cozy place when I was last in here a few days ago.

Is this thread basically dead? I mean…it looked successfully salvaged from the most hostile initial orientation possible of the first 2 pages. Now it’s basically ALLLLLLLLL THE HOSTILITY…and I don’t really see what new information happened to make that so?

I mean Edwards has a poor take on Blades in the Dark. I know it’s poor because I’ve run Blades 9-10 times for a lot of varying people and reflected hsrd on the experience (for the same reason I agree with his lens on Vampire (HCS), AD&D 2e (HCS), Moldvay (G), Over the Edge (N) and a few others). And I’ve listened to his detailed excerpt of his Blades experience. I think I even listened to some play (can’t recall). Unfortunately, the GM either (a) didn’t know what they were doing or (b) they were displaying “IDGaF I’ll GM how I want because system doesn’t matter-itis” (clearly) which Ron should have been WAAAAY on top of either way. But he wasn’t. So Ron didn’t understand the game well enough to call out the improper play he was engaged with.

Now to his credit, he couched his assessment in those terms. But I still found it disappointing. He might have amended his position on things since then (I don’t know…I haven’t had the time or memory to check back in the last while).

I can speculate about why he might have had this odd (even though couched) take on Blades. And I have.

But even despite his poor take on Blades…even if it wasn’t a particularly impartial take…that doesn’t then keep me from putting on and testing out the critical lens through which he evaluates other games (which I share a lot of hours of experience with him).

He can be wrong about his assessment of Blades (despite using couched language to express he needs more play). It might even be driven by a bit of partiality (totally might not though…he may have just had a cognitive blind spot himself when playing it). But that doesn’t stop me from evaluating all of his other claims on their own merits.

---

Sooooooo…can we just get back to talking about games and whether or not the critical lens in question has some explanatory and predictive power (at the design phase and, most importantly, at the play phase)? I’m thinking about a post and how to put it together in a coherent way that might be of service (see paragraph 2 above). This I actually difficult for me anymore because I’m someone who is suffering from the impacts of a life of concussions (real brain damage)! So I’d rather not devote the mental energy over the next day or so if the thread is just going to get nuked.

 

[Malmuria]

So I’d rather not devote the mental energy over the next day or so if the thread is just going to get nuked.

Hopefully not! I’d love to hear more of your thoughts. If you have any thoughts on Torchbearer as “incoherent” vs “hybrid” that would be helpful. Maybe that’s a new thread anyway.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Please define narrativism in plain English, in your own words, without resorting to tautology or quoting Edwards.

Post four in the thread (possibly five I account for Iserith's, which I cannot see).

Not at all. My argument is pointing out that lots of people have worked on understanding how gravity works and that fans of a particular scientist are wildly overestimating his importance when they wrongly claim that their guy was the first to do something when we have the receipts pointing to others having done the same and better decades earlier.

Except you don't have the receipts. The fact that you're asking me to define narrativism suggests you cannot. If you cannot define it, how can you claim that it's always existed and their are receipts.

Your argument automatically discards anything that doesn't fit into the conception you currently have. It's not curious about new ideas, it's saying there are none, and you shouldn't look. The ask to define narrativism absent Edwards (which I did more than once in this thread) is indicative of hostility to the idea. If the idea has merit, it's source shouldn't matter. But even when it's source is elided, you still reject the idea.

They really haven't. Go read The Elusive Shift.

Yes, go read a fairly expensive book to get to the idea you're proposing. Except, the Elusive Shift doesn't make the argument you're making -- that's it's all come before and that RPGs extend back to the 1700's. It's very clear that it's talking about the creation of a new genre of games with the advent of D&D. Your source is contravening your larger argument!

Not so much. The Forge was a gathering place for a lot of more recent designers and conversation about theory, yes. But the majority (all?) of the theory talked about there has been talked about since the late '60s, if not since the 1800s. At absolute best, Edwards gave old theories new names.

No, it hasn't. You cannot explain the theory that came out of the Forge. You cannot steelman an argument for narrativism. You cannot even steelman the arguments for simulationism or gamism. So far, every time I've seen you characterize these ideas they are incorrect. How can you begin to claim that it's all been done before if you can't even articulate what it is?

I'll freely admit that there were pieces of narrativism floating around prior to the Forge. But they weren't brought together and formalized until the Forge. There's nothing talking about this way of playing prior or games that aim to support it. You can bend some older games to do so, but they aren't designed with this concept in mind, they just got there. For all @pemerton's championing of Prince Valiant as a proto-Story Now game, when I read it I see it leaning more towards Trad play and simulationism, and only if you bring a narrativist lens to the interpretation do you get a game that leans that way. It's a post hoc realization -- I do not think that a contemporaneous player would have reached that conclusion, or only a small number might and they'd not have any framework to hang their play upon conceptually.

The discussions look similar because they are similar, if not identical to conversations that have swirled around the hobby since at least the beginning, if not much further back.

The discussion are similar only because the vast majority of the hobby base has no interest in theory, and of those that do, the vast majority are inculcated into a particular mode of play because it's so massively dominant. And they're told over an over and over by the culture that that mode of play does everything they could need. So they don't even bother to look outside of that box. Those that do are a small fraction, and quite often when they speak, it's hard to get traction. You see this all the time in cultures. This argument going on in this thread is really a culture war inside of the RPG hobby. Not one with about politics or the larger culture war, but a clash of cultures between a dominant nearly hegemonic mode of play and not that. It's functionally ridiculous that people discussing the ideas of the Forge are being called elitist and gatekeepers when they are the small fry compared to the mainstream!

Even a bad examination of the history of the hobby shows this is patently false. People who care about RPGs and theory run into Forge jargon because fans of it think it's the beginning and end of theory. They're explicitly wrong. We literally have documentation of fans talking about these exact same things since the late '60s.

Every single person in this thread that has had anything positive to say about the Forge has also made a clear and explicit claim that they do not agree with it 100% but think instead that it is useful. No one thinks the Forge is the end all be all, and especially no one in this thread. This is another ad hominin attack making claims about people that are absolutely false in order to shut down the discussion by casting them as unreasonable zealots. It's the "they have a different idea and must be crazy fanatics or something!" line of argument.

 

[Manbearcat]

Hopefully not! I’d love to hear more of your thoughts. If you have any thoughts on Torchbearer as “incoherent” vs “hybrid” that would be helpful. Maybe that’s a new thread anyway.

Honestly, not the worst idea in the world. If you or @pemerton or @Ovinomancer or @niklinna want to start a new thread devoted to a focused conversation on the ideas around “(in)coherency” and “(dis)function” with the original examinations and any subsequent updates, I’d rather post in a focused conversation like that to be honest.

If no one does, I’ll post TB incoherency stuff (with an excerpt) in this thread if it remains tomorrow or Wednesday.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The thing is, when I look at the rest of what he has to say, I get exactly the same impression the brain damage comment gives, just under a veneer of pseudo-academic impartiality. That’s why people don’t just ignore the brain damage thing and focus on the rest of his writing: the brain damage thing is characteristic of what they perceive in the rest of his writing. They don’t trot it out to say “look, he said the problematic thing, so we can ignore everything else he says,” they bring it up to illustrate that no, they’re not just imagining the vitriol they perceive in his less openly-resentful writing. Underneath the mask, he really does hate the games we enjoy and look down on us for enjoying them.

I'm not saying that his words aren't sometimes problematic. I'm saying I just don't worry about it. I think what he had to say is more important than how he said it. That doesn't mean that how he said it isn't an issue to some degree, but I have to say that I disagree with you that people are not using it to entirely dismiss anything he has to say. It's absolutely a choice to either discuss his ideas on gaming, or to get hung up on his brain damage comment. I choose to do the former. Many seem to prefer the latter, which leads us nowhere.

I'm not even a huge jargon guy, or that big a proponent of GNS theory. I've read several of his essays from the Forge, though, and they're absolutely insightful. Do I agree with everything he says? No. Is he sometimes needlessly contentious? Sure. Do I care? No. If I am actually interested in understanding something, I want to hear different opinions on it. I want criticism to be harsh at times.

I don't like the general push for wearing kid gloves about this stuff, and about calls to ignore his thoughts because he sometimes was harsh, or made some mildly insulting comments at times. Are we all so fragile? If this was film or literature criticism, none of us would be so pearl-clutchy about it being harsh because criticism is harsh, and those fields have known that for nearly as long as they've existed.

So, in the spirit of the thread, I'll repeat what I already posted earlier: Brain Damage is jargon for Cognitive Bias.

If we think cognitive bias is a thing, which I expect most of us would, then we can just accept that and move on, however distastefully Edwards phrased it. If someone doesn't think cognitive bias is a thing, then I'd like to hear their thoughts on why.

Bringing it up again and again is absolutely an attempt to shut down discussion and to play some kind of "I win" card. Two or three pages back, the conversation was going well. Since the brain damage stuff got invoked....that's been the bulk of the comments, and moderation has happened and so on.

Wasn't the conversation a few pages back better?

 

[Ovinomancer]

But doesn’t he call that hybrid? Unless he has two terms that mean the same thing?



“Does not define it” because there are a lot of other things that, for him, lead to dysfunctional play, like power gaming or other ‘problem player’ type behavior

So, yes, my point is proven out. However, your end statement is also not correct. It's helpful to quote what Edwards defines these terms as instead of relying on the reader to understand the context. Edwards doesn't define "problem player" but does have a few definitions that can be a problem:

Prima Donna
A Narrativist player who engages in Premise-addressing, but will not share screen time or Premise-significant decision-making time with other participants. An extremely dysfunctional subset of Narrativist play.

Turnin'
A potentially dysfunctional technique of Hard Core Gamist play, characterized by treating one another's characters as the primary source of Challenge. A functional equivalent in Narrativist play is Blood Opera.

Powergaming
A potentially dysfunctional technique of Hard Core Gamist play, characterized by maximizing character impact on the game-world or player impact on the dialogue of play by whatever means available.

Wimpiness
A dysfunctional form of Gamism characterized by poor sportsmanship, i.e., the unwillingness to accept a loss.

The glossary is actually a fantastic place to start, as it introduces concepts and explains them simply that are then incorporated into the Big Model.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The Forge essays were completely raw. People are dismissing them because they are insensitive and/or insulting. Okay, let's look at the revised version of the ideas for Creative agenda, in short an sweet forms:

Right to Dream, the
Commitment to the imagined events of play, specifically their in-game causes and pre-established thematic elements. One of the three currently-recognized Creative Agendas. As a top priority for role-playing, the defining feature of Simulationist play.

Step On Up
Social assessment of personal strategy and guts among the participants in the face of risk. One of the three currently-recognized Creative Agendas. As a top priority of role-playing, the defining feature of Gamist play.

Story Now
Commitment to Addressing (producing, heightening, and resolving) Premise through play itself. The epiphenomenal outcome for the Transcript from such play is almost always a story. One of the three currently-recognized Creative Agendas. As a top priority of role-playing, the defining feature of Narrativist play.

Premise​

A generalizable, problematic aspect of human interactions. Early in the process of creating or experiencing a story, a Premise is best understood as a proposition or perhaps an ideological challenge to the world represented by the protagonist's passions. Later in the process, resolving the conflicts of the story transforms Premise into a theme - a judgmental statement about how to act, behave, or believe. In role-playing, "protagonist" typically indicates a character mainly controlled by one person. A defining feature of Story Now.​

The key idea is the top priority -- is this creative agenda your top priority in play. It can change, like how 5e can move from a "Right to Dream" agenda to a "Step On Up" agenda during the combat swoosh. This kind of shifting of priorities, though, has been sometimes called out at ENW as engaging in powergaming (not the Edwards version) and munchkinism, so it's far from a universal agenda shift. It also causes incoherencies in play, especially if fudging is used.

 

[Malmuria]

Two or three pages back, the conversation was going well. Since the brain damage stuff got invoked....that's been the bulk of the comments, and moderation has happened and so on.

It’s probably best to bracket it out in general. Sometimes these things lurk in the background. Like, b/x is a great edition of the game, and keep on the borderlands is the signature scenario, but I also sort of feel that “nits make lice” is its guiding principle and at some point fans of the game have to deal with that. And…well, I’ll spare you the thoughts of Jonathan Tweet, or Sandy Peterson, or…etc.