Authenticity in RPGing

[AbdulAlhazred]

For me, the issue isn't authenticity, it's artifice.

I like old-school play with a hard landscape milieu and a principled, neutral referee, because those are the conditions that minimize artifice. The game-world is what it is, what happens happens, decisions have consequences, and all victories and defeats are honestly earned. You may not get satisfying narratives or character arcs out of the deal, but at least you know the referee isn't putting a thumb on the scale to hand the players unearned wins.

Both trad and post-trad, on the other hand, traffic in artifice. In trad games, the mechanics don't really support narrative, so it's expected that the GM will fudge and rubber-band and palette-shift and resort to whatever other soft railroading techniques are required to force desirable outcomes without the players being too overly aware of the GM's invisible hand at work — or at least, without giving the players an excuse to drop the polite fiction that the game isn't being quietly directed.

Post-trad games are considerably more honest, in that they foreground the very mechanics that guarantee a story will happen, but in doing so they also foreground how artificial the whole process is. If old-school is an honest game of poker, and trad drifts between being delighted by an entertaining stage-magician and playing blackjack with a crooked dealer (one with a grudge against the house who occasionally slips you a face card from the bottom of the deck), storygames are watching a Penn & Teller routine where they show you how the trick is done.

I'm going to have to ask I guess, what is MORE artificial than the sort of set-piece environment of a typical classic D&D dungeon? I'm hard pressed to see how something like Apocalypse World or whatever is 'more artificial' than that! I mean, there are Indy RPGs that utilize meta-currencies and whatnot in ways that may be entirely outside of the 1st person RP experience, but old-school games have those too! Then there are Indy games like, say, Apocalypse World which don't really have such things at all (or certainly not even to the degree that D&D does). Are they the most 'natural' of all? I mean AW, if you play it 'by the book' is a 100% in-character game. At most the participants have to vocalize what the actions are that are being taken, which I guess is a bit out of 1st person, but not much, maybe not at all in most cases. I'm not at all sure that the dividing lines lie between old-school, trad, and post-trad as you have put it...

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That the conceptual link was made by myself, and is relevantly close to the consistent use, shows that, intentional or not, the term is being used in a way that is not inconsistent.
Your lacking the knowledge of the professional jargon bears little to nothing on Pemerton's lack or non-lack of the technical terms. They're a clade of terms meaning roughly the same as Pemerton's use. And the technical versions show the term to not be opinion in the way "I don't like your avatar" or "D&D sucks" are.

No. Absolutely not. Look, first rule of holes is ... stop digging.

First... the OP never used the phrase "authentic choice."

The OP used the phrase "authenticity."

You used the term "meaningful choice" to defend the OP. Stating that "meaningful choice" is a technical term.

After I pointed out that the OP never used the term "meaningful choice," you are now saying that there is another, even lesser-known term called "authentic choice," which is (a) not used in TTRPGs, and (b) not even as common as the original phrase that the OP didn't use, and (c) also not used by the OP.

Of course, the educational use of "authentic choice" which requires, inter alia, an authentic self making an autonomous conscious choice is ... not really a focus of roleplaying, which acts at a certain remove from that. So ...

And all of this goes away from the central point I keep hammering, which is that the use of technical terms should allow for better communication and precision. Am I really to believe that at this late date, this was the invocation of a specific technical term from another field (that remained unexplained) and you are the only one that got it ... even though the term was never used in the OP?

If so - the jargon did not illuminate, it obfuscated.

 

[adamantyr]

As a software engineer, I run into this problem frequently. Various terms and words are used like "Treatment", "Asset", "Entity", "Classification" get attached to processes, resources, etc. Often with overlap between different teams, which makes for serious confusion.

Reading over the OP, I have no idea what he means at all by "authenticity". For one thing, I don't even know the acronyms of the games they mention. Nor do they supply any links to these threads that prompted the post. What is the three clue rule? I don't know.

And saying "This gameplay style is better because..." always rubs me the wrong way. If you're going to make that kind of claim, show some examples.

 

[aramis erak]

In the Traveller community, there's a dual consensus on when Old School ends: either at 1981 (introduction of HG) or 1984 (Atlas of the Imperium)...
I can't think of any games from before 1981 with anything more metacurrency than HP, and those really don't get counted, since they're a mechanical representation of exhaustion, which culminates in a single telling blow. 1984, it's still rare - WFRP fate points come to mind, and FASERIP Marvel's Karma.

 

[Manbearcat]

Hmm, not really. I talked about successfully figuring out something that exists in the gameworld, but it's not about the puzzle-solving in itself, it's about whether I'm inhabiting my character and figuring things out from their perspective using the information at hand, versus in some form playing both my character and the world around them, creating that world rather than exploring it.

The latter feels less authentic because it pulls the focus back from the perspective of the character I am playing - I'm telling their story more than experiencing it.

It's not that it's worse or anything - I've both played and run FitD games and had a great time doing so - but that sort of collaborative story-forging comes at the expense of actually experiencing that story purely from a character's perspective.

Ah ok. Well, this thickens the plot further because this is yet another angle of conversation different from the prior two; the cognitive state of the participant at the table.

Since you mentioned FitD, I'll just use that.

My position on the cognitive state of any given individual player in my Blades games is the following:

* Autobiographical (it varies person to person what qualifies for habitation in this moment of play)

* Drifting (no one stays in one particular cognitive state continuously)

* Often inhabiting two states simultaneously

* Take Responsibility is quite nuanced and only one of many Player Best Practices (meaning an impetus for "collaborative storytelling" isn't quite the cognitive state throughline that it might be in another game - like, say, "Fate"...this is definitely not a "writer's room" experience)

As GM?

* Navigating my decision-space and then inventorying the outputs of it feels like a Rorschach Test. I'm an audience member not just to the play of the players, and the accreting fiction, but I'm also an audience member to myself in a way that resembles very little else in this world (there aren't many experiences where you're integrating several distinct axes and chunks of information within a structured and constrained environment and having to make extremely quick improvisational decisions).

* I don't feel like and I'm definitely not a collaborator. Be a Fan of the PCs is not a collaborative state of being. Its a particular brand of burden of responsibility that works in concert with other stuff to orient my decisions. The biggest part of that is relentlessly putting on offer honest, thematic opposition and "playing my game pieces with integrity (which includes warranted aggression)."

* I feel like I'm inhabiting the haunted city and all of its constituent parts. I'm representing them as best I can but I'm always in (lets call it) "attack mode."

* I'm constantly mentally interfacing with the myriad, layered rules (that goes back to "playing my game pieces with integrity").

---

So that is my autobiographical testimony about player and GM habitation. Which is different than the lead posts' orientation toward content introduction/character/setting in a shared imagined space. And is different still than my prior post's "the varying nature of Skilled Play priorities."

 

[pemerton]

Does this sort of demonstrate what @pemerton is getting at in terms of creation of a working fiction via discovery of character/setting vs intentional instantiation of it by way of observing and mapping pre-existing stuff (pastiche, tropes, preconception)?

I'm not sure if this is addressed to me.

But I'll reiterate my response to @Dioltach: RPGing-as-puzzle-solving is looking at the activity through a completely different lens from the OP. Rather than authenticity, the most relevant quality I can think of is ingenuity. Or perhaps just quickness - like, some people can just intuit the plot of a thriller or a murder mystery from the first few minutes/pages, while others still need it to be explained to them even when they've imbibed the whole thing, had it all explained in-fiction, and the credits are rolling.

 

[pemerton]

Look, I'm a GM, not a qualified group counselor.

Fair enough. What you think of as counselling, I think of as friendship, collaboration and genuine conversation.

 

[Malmuria]

Fair enough. What you think of as counselling, I think of as friendship, collaboration and genuine conversation.

And the conditions for friendship, collaboration, and genuine conversation resides in...game mechanics and principles?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In the Traveller community, there's a dual consensus on when Old School ends: either at 1981 (introduction of HG) or 1984 (Atlas of the Imperium)...
I can't think of any games from before 1981 with anything more metacurrency than HP, and those really don't get counted, since they're a mechanical representation of exhaustion, which culminates in a single telling blow. 1984, it's still rare - WFRP fate points come to mind, and FASERIP Marvel's Karma.

Hit points are thoroughly 'meta' though. All RPGs have these abstractions. Some of them kinda tell us something about the game world, others don't tell us much at all. old-school, as I think was meant in the comment I replied to, is referring to something similar to original Gygaxian 'skilled play' D&D. You can play that in a style that is very first person, as basically character and player knowledge can be deemed indistinguishable, for example. Likewise player and character thought process, etc. It has not aged well mainly for reasons we need not rehash in this thread, but it CAN technically work in a pretty 'close to the rubber' sort of way where the player is very closely identified with the character. The main problem is it tends to break down or get boring at a certain point (since you are basically playing yourself).

 

[pemerton]

And the conditions for friendship, collaboration, and genuine conversation resides in...game mechanics and principles?

No. RPGing is not the only way to engage in conversation. But some RPGing takes the form of genuine conversation, and some doesn't. To state the more obvious contrasts, a script of a conversation is not a conversation; an interviewer working from prepared questions is not engaged in conversation; putting together a bike we bought at the local department store isn't a conversation, although we might converse while doing it.