Why Jargon is Bad, and Some Modern Resources for RPG Theory

[Snarf Zagyg]

Hey, @Snarf Zagyg , you finished Elusive Shift, right?

Would it be too out of line to say that Steven R. Lortz’s Cannibals & Castaways (1978) is similar to PbtA games in that it’s focused on drama, only has mechanics for dramatically important situations/moves, ignores everything not directly related to the drama of the core premise, and the rest is free role-play.

Because it sure reads like it’s a PbtA game…with slightly different phrasing. What’s the Forge jargon for PbtA games? And isn’t it wild that one very likely was written back in 1978.

Well, I'd love to say yes ... but not really. While Stephen Lortz can often sound like a proto-Vincent Baker, including breaking down how games work (and what they are) for design purposes- as well as providing "actual play" transcripts of his mini-games, there is still a difference in his conception.

Cannibals & Castaways, for example, attempts to put the fiction first (not "F"iction "F"irst) by creating a closed system wherein the rules are opaque and unknown to the players, simple, but predetermined. The referee, on the other hand, has no discretion in terms of the rules.

It's a fascinating game, but at a basic level keeping the (simple) rule set away from the players ... even though the referee has no discretion ... would differentiate it from a PbtA game, IMO.

That said, when you read some of what he wrote, you are reminded that history may not repeat, but it often rhymes.

 

[Aldarc]

That said, when you read some of what he wrote, you are reminded that history may not repeat, but it often rhymes.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

YES IT IS! You literally just outlined the cause and effect and of course it based on dramatic concerns! "What kind of situation will challenge hope" is a dramatic concern!

And of course the dramatic concerns affect the resolution too, as the GM is supposed to take those into account when introducing complications.

I think the issue here is we all just have very different things in mind when we use the word 'drama'. One of its senses is to label any fiction relating to characters and events which is neither tragedy nor comedy. More narrowly a story who's subject matter is serious and intense, and generally involves conflict. You seem to focus on the 'serious and intense conflict' element, which is (in a general sense) something that is likely to emerge from Narrativist play. OTOH there's a great question as to whether anything which is comprehensible as a STORY (IE has a recognizable plot and cast of characters) will necessarily arise from such play. I think that is the sense in which some posters like @Manbearcat, @pemerton, @niklinna perhaps, and others have resisted using the label. Speaking for myself I'm not dead set against it, but I do think that calling it 'dramatic' play is not always going to be on the mark. The aim is not so much drama as it is 'play to see what happens'. That is, producing a satisfying narrative is not a priority, finding out where the situation goes and how the characters involved are affected and how they evolve is more the point. Dramatic literature/performance does OVERLAP there, but it is also MUCH more concerned with plot structure, pacing, etc. than an RPG is.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This distinction could be heavily ascribed to the fact almost all the GDS simulation proponents were of a particular stripe of immersionist playstyle; they absolutely did not want to do anything that was not an in-character decision unless it could be pushed down to a pretty much reflexive state (so that most strongly representative mechanics were just an expression of all that immersive decision making.

This is why, for such people, strongly genre-convention games were a nonstarter, in the way the dramatists and gamists (or even less strong simulationists that, say, weren't so attached to immersion); there was no possible way to engage with them without being aware of the genre tropes, and that meant one of two things: either everyone else was too (at which point the whole complexion of the setting changes; as noted it moves villains intrinsically into tragic figures because they can never win but are compelled to try anyway, and that's just the tip of the iceberg) or only their PC is aware of it, at which point they are pushed into being, by the standards of the setting, insane. The way they wanted to play and that sort of genre (and there are others) simply wouldn't work.

The fact its also a pretty brightline distinction even for people more willing to, say, play from authorial stance is to some degree a happy coincidence.

Right, and I think this is strongly related to my observation that one of the early themes in thinking about RPGs was that if you could just make your game a perfectly immersive simulation, such that the rules literally produced, sheerly by appeal to internal logic, the milieu appropriate outcomes, then magically this would be a sort of perfect RPG where everyone would be perfectly in character and all the action would 'make sense' and produce entirely genre-appropriate outcomes. It was, obviously, a pipedream, but a whole generation of RPG designers chased their tails for years on that quest. Obviously nobody thought they would actually reach 'RPG Nirvana', but much of the early tweaking on D&D, for instance, had this general character (IE if we can only make combat realistic, then other things will follow, so we have to 'fix hit points'). My guess is this was the early genesis of all the ICE 'Law' books which, around the end of this period, were grouped together as Rolemaster.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm going to strongly disagree thatn Champions does not have a pretty noticable Gamist agenda, and though I don't think it consciously realizes it, so to a lesser degree does Vampire. Champions also has an overlay of dramatic/narrative and genre emulation on it, but if its recieved criticism its very much because of its gamist and simulationist (in the GDS sense) elements.

Mmmm, well, in some respects Champions can be moderately crunchy, though IIRC things like combat have a somewhat abstract aspect. I think it is one of those games which took GAME seriously enough to try to achieve a decent level of playability (unlike a lot of early '80s/late '70s RPGs). Still, it seems mostly focused on what I would label 'HCS concerns'. V:tM... Hmmmm, if it had any pretentions to be gamist in any sense, the sheer lack of quality of its rules (which the author claims is deliberate!) would seem to remove it from real consideration. Certainly any 'gamism' in that game is purely accidental! Those are my opinions on it. I think we just don't operate from generally similar definitions. 'Gamism' to me has to really be trying to create challenge and generally some reward/score kind of construct (though it may not be explicit in a lot of games).

 

[Xetheral]

Speaking for myself I'm not dead set against it, but I do think that calling it 'dramatic' play is not always going to be on the mark. The aim is not so much drama as it is 'play to see what happens'. That is, producing a satisfying narrative is not a priority, finding out where the situation goes and how the characters involved are affected and how they evolve is more the point. Dramatic literature/performance does OVERLAP there, but it is also MUCH more concerned with plot structure, pacing, etc. than an RPG is.

(Emphasis added.) To clarify, by demphasizing the importance of producing a satisfying narrative, are you saying that you're ok if the outcome of play is an unsatisfying narrative? Or are you saying that you're ok if the outcome of play isn't a narrative at all?

In either case, how do you see the label "narratativism" as applying to your style of play?

 

[Campbell]

@Xetheral

Speaking personally when playing something like Apocalypse World or Burning Wheel I'm not looking for a satisfying narrative. I'm looking for a raw, visceral experience. One where we basically lay it all on the line creatively and see what comes out. I don't want polish. I want tension and emotion. It's an opportunity to experiment creatively. I don't want players making decisions for the story or to curate outcomes as a GM. I want us all to see where it all leads.

For a more polished experience I tend to look to games like Vampire, Deadlands or Legend of the Five Rings. When we play those games, we are looking for a polished satisfying narrative. We actively coordinate with each other to build something more cohesive and satisfying in the way that a long running TV show feels satisfying. We try to make sure characters are polished and vivid, that there is a good flow and intersecting play between characters. That characters feel true to established vibes. We still don't really engage in fudging or the like, but we do absolutely collaborate for the sack of the narrative.

For me these are different sorts of experiences. Each is vital to me.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think I understand the commonalities being claimed; I'll just again suggest that these commonalities range from trivial to irrelevant to people focused on "process sim", and often may not be much more so to people who really don't care about that but do care about genre emulation.

OTOH from my perspective pure 'process sim' simply doesn't exist. People have beaten their heads against that wall, but there's no such thing, you cannot meaningfully simulate a world, so it instantly breaks down and ceases to exist in all actual play. What people really end up at is either HCS, or purist-for-system. For instance, I have talked about the quixotic quest to make the 'perfect sim game' that would magically produce the RP experience people wanted. The problem is, the real world is not dramatic, and just adding, say, magic and dragons, doesn't change that. If it was, our actual lives would be dramatic stories, but they're not... So as soon as actual play happened, the GM or some other participant had to try to inject the drama or whatever it was that would make the story go. Either that was some sort of system that used not-in-world logic (or attempted to describe something that drove play AS an in-world element) OR it drew from some sort of conceit/concept and incorporated rules/process which would become the focus. This is all very handily described using a structure along the lines of GNS. It makes NO SENSE AT ALL, isn't even addressed in GDS terms. So we see that what you call 'process sim' actually devolves into 2 closely related patterns which GDS doesn't recognize the relatedness of.

Essentially, cats and dogs have a lot of common traits including being mammalian predators, but that doesn't mean their similarities are particularly relevant to people who have a preference in one direction or another. So you have to ask what purpose your classification of them is actually serving.

So, phylogenetic cladistics is useless. Huh, I'm sure that's news to many 1,000s of PhD level biologists and paleontologists, lol. Clearly there are all sorts of useful theses which can be drawn from the degree of relatedness of different organisms. I understand that you may not recognize the criteria for the ontology being used in GNS, for whatever reason. I'm perfectly willing to accept that GDS, as a different ontology, might also have value. I mean, in biology there are many ontologies as well (such as the division of animals into groups like fish, fowl, domestic, and game animals for instance) that use different criteria and can have different utilities.

That's been my argument; the narrowness of Nar's classification means it served some actual purpose. Its not clear to me that GNS sim's classification really does.

Sure, we will just have to differ on that.

I just don't really agree that they do. Again, genre constraints are a fundamentally story based concern; they're designed to produce a particular look and feel and enable particular kinds of stories. GDS sim actively rejects story as a reason to structure things in such a way.

But the similarity still exists, lol. I have pointed them out, so I think it is better to just table the whole discussion.

Its not the things a model successfully describes that is the sign of its value; its the number of ones it fails. It somewhat describes D&D because the latter tries to be all things to all people.

It was merely an example. We can view what any RPG is doing in terms of agenda and analyze it. I'd be more interested in contrasting Forge-era GNS with more modern formulations (I don't think any of them label themselves as GNS).

I'd tend to describe that in terms that are not particularly charitable, to tell the truth. I don't think its really defensible once you get into its guts at all. I think the confusion about what D&D is doing is largely a consequence of it having been used as the all-purpose fantasy tool for so long people don't even recognize the possibility they're hammering nails with the wrench sometimes because they're so used to doing it.

Well, as I said before, I don't even believe that the idea of 'process sim' is a viable concept. Nobody can accomplish it, so it doesn't actually exist in the real world as an actualized agenda. One way to view 3e is sort of as a result of competing philosophies which attempt to deal with that fact, though apparently without much deep understanding of the issue...

See above. I mean, honestly, to use a particularly well known example that originally set of GNS development, there were people who were certain Vampire was a narrative game, and banged away at those nails for all they were worth. As best I can tell, D&D for a long time (I won't speak particularly of 5e, though not much I've heard counters this) is a largely gamist structure overlayed on a genre focused target (with the note that its largely become its own subgenre), with some dollops of dramatist and simulationist fragments here and there. But most of the latter is vestigial, and most of the former is being done on levels that the game only passingly helps you with.

See, from my perspective there's very little left in D&D that is gamist. I mean, its a game, and it certainly has some general success and failure criteria (and still contains the original leveling concept, which is fundamentally gamist). So, OK, there's a part of it that is kind of a gamist core, but I think the game is almost pure HCS in that it has effectively become a game ABOUT the D&D subgenre of fantasy. So, maybe we actually are pretty close to agreeing on 5e

I don't have a strong view on V:tM. It too seems to me to be pretty much HCS. It has mechanics which make your character "play like a vampire" and its purpose seems to be to provide a game where the action and concerns of the PCs are centered on vampire tropes, largely drawn from the Ann Rice vampire milieu, with some elaborations and adding in some elements from late '80s Urban Fantasy. In GNS terms it isn't really Narrativist at all, though I suspect there were people who spun it more in that direction, perhaps. I don't have a really good understanding of the details of the RP mechanics though, so I'm not sure exactly all of what you could do there.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Hey, @Snarf Zagyg , you finished Elusive Shift, right?

Would it be too out of line to say that Steven R. Lortz’s Cannibals & Castaways (1978) is similar to PbtA games in that it’s focused on drama, only has mechanics for dramatically important situations/moves, ignores everything not directly related to the drama of the core premise, and the rest is free role-play.

Because it sure reads like it’s a PbtA game…with slightly different phrasing. What’s the Forge jargon for PbtA games? And isn’t it wild that one very likely was written back in 1978.

Hard to say, as issue #1 is one of the ones not available on the Internet Archive, and Different Worlds Publications web site is no longer functioning. As I remember it is a pretty abstract kind of game. Without going back over the text I'd be hard pressed to express an opinion about it. I would note that there definitely are various places where early games give just a glimpse of the idea of things like this. It just didn't enter into common parlance until the mid-90s, generally speaking. Toon, for instance, is a game which basically entirely eschews any sort of reference to realism at all, as well as any kind of gamist elements (you cannot die, there's no meaningful 'stuff' your character can accumulate, no notion of experience, etc.), and it introduces '4th wall breaking' mechanics, all in the early 1980s. It was a fairly successful game too.

 

[Xetheral]

@Xetheral

Speaking personally when playing something like Apocalypse World or Burning Wheel I'm not looking for a satisfying narrative. I'm looking for a raw, visceral experience. One where we basically lay it all on the line creatively and see what comes out. I don't want polish. I want tension and emotion. It's an opportunity to experiment creatively. I don't want players making decisions for the story or to curate outcomes as a GM. I want us all to see where it all leads.

For a more polished experience I tend to look to games like Vampire, Deadlands or Legend of the Five Rings. When we play those games, we are looking for a polished satisfying narrative. We actively coordinate with each other to build something more cohesive and satisfying in the way that a long running TV show feels satisfying. We try to make sure characters are polished and vivid, that there is a good flow and intersecting play between characters. That characters feel true to established vibes. We still don't really engage in fudging or the like, but we do absolutely collaborate for the sack of the narrative.

For me these are different sorts of experiences. Each is vital to me.

Thanks for explaining! In the various discussions of PbtA and BW, I've noticed the emphasis posters have placed on raw, visceral experience. (That wasn't part of my PbtA play, but I suspect my MC wasn't using the system fully in line with the design intent.) However, I'd previously understood that desire as interest in creating a narrative that was raw and visceral, and that a system that produces narratives of that sort was the design goal. Indeed, that emphasis on creating that particular type of narrative was where I understood the term "narrativism" to came from.

So I appreciate you explaining that in your experience the desire for raw, visceral experience is divorced from any desire for a satisfying narrative. That helps me learn more of the nuance! In your experience does the demphasis on satisfying narratives mean the term "narrativism" itself is misleading, or is there another way that you see the label "narrativism" as applying to PbtA and BW (and/or to the the goals of players of those systems)?