Authenticity in RPGing

[AbdulAlhazred]

A question that raises for me is that supposing a player has an aim of exploring/expressing personal authenticity, and writes a belief that they do not have "I will always choose the right-hand path!" How can they pursue a belief that they do not have authentically? It requires them to choose actions (for their character) that they would personally not choose. It seems to require inauthenticity.

I don't think the criteria is what is authentic for the PLAYER, most of us would not do 99.9% of the things that are depicted in RPGs. A belief in taking the right-hand path is of course a bit simplistic, but in a magical world it could easily be a superstition or a way of signaling allegiance to some sort of divine power or something. Why would this belief/superstition be inauthentic just because the player doesn't ACTUALLY hold the same? When acting in character they certainly, authentically, act as if this is a part of their mental makeup. If it is supported by mechanics, then they participate in that level as well, and might, as @pemerton suggests, decide to contravene that belief for some reason. Now, the reasons for doing that might be an interesting point of discussion here, I'd go for an examination of what exactly to call that!

 

[hawkeyefan]

hawkeyefan, thanks for the kind post!

Where I referred to genuine choices that say something, you've referred to choices and actions mattering. There's overlap in our two formulations, but maybe not strict synonymy. With my use of "saying something", and also my use of authenticity as a key notion, I think I might be putting more emphasis on a particular way that things can matter - their role in expression, revelation etc in a type of interpersonal, creative context.

Does that make sense?

Absolutely. I realize a lot of my comments have been more adjacent to that, but I understand what you mean.

I see it in the broader sense of the players having an authentic means to interact with the game, and meaningful choices being one way to accomplish that.

I would go further than what you set out in your last two sentences here. In the OP I mentioned the "three clue rule". I see "node based design" as a variation of the same thing.

I'm not contradicting you, but perhaps pushing the implications of your point a little further than you intended. (Or maybe not - perhaps you can see why I push further in the way that I do.)

I do see it. I’m expect folks may share examples of play that may contradict the idea. I think I view such methods as having a tendency toward limiting authenticity rather than a certainty.

Do you think it’s more the latter?

I’m thinking of my recent Spire campaign. I absolutely initiated the game with an investigation. The PCs were members of a clandestine revolutionary organization (this is always the default premise for the game), and they were tasked with finding out what had happened to another cell of their group that had been wiped out by the powers that be.

So the initial idea is that they were to solve this mystery… what had the previous group learned or been up to that got them pinched and killed? Very similar basic set up to any number of games… I can imagine Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green having a similar set up, or any game where the PCs are members of/employed by an organization.

However, I didn't really care if that mystery ever got solved. All I really wanted was for the PCs to go to the district in question and start investigating. Once they did that, they’d become embroiled in all kinds of things that were going on, and they’d make bonds there that would influence how they’d act and view things and so on.

I wasn’t concerned with maintaining the initial mystery and to keeping the game about that “adventure”.

And I don’t think the game would have went where it did had I tried to do that.

By GM-enforced alignment I would certainly include what you say, but also am intending to capture play in which the GM more-or-less unilaterally tells player what the moral meaning of their action declarations for their PCs is.

I think the alignment system was a bit too rigid in the AD&D era and that led to many GMs doing what you describe. I prefer alignment to be a more loose descriptor. I like when it has some heft to it, but not when it’s so absolute that a GM would say something like “you’re Lawful Good, no way would you agree to breaking into the farrier’s shop, even if you expect he may be a cultist of Orcus” and the like. I think this is less common these days, but obviously my take is purely anecdotal.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I would go further than what you set out in your last two sentences here. In the OP I mentioned the "three clue rule". I see "node based design" as a variation of the same thing.

I'm not contradicting you, but perhaps pushing the implications of your point a little further than you intended. (Or maybe not - perhaps you can see why I push further in the way that I do.)

Node based design and the three clue rule are not synonymous though. I haven't personally used much of the node based adventure ideas so I can't speak to it as well as I can the three clue rule. But Alexander has a wide range of play advice and often mixes in one set with the other (so if I recall he incorporates three clue rule into his article on node based design, but also points out it can be pretty chaotic to add the three clue to a plotted campaign). Another thing worth mentioning is one of his key pieces of advice in that piece links to his "Don't prep plots, prep situations" which is something a lot of people who were reading that and involved in discussions with Alexander at the time were doing (Clash Bowley has similar posts on this concept). The idea there is it is actually more work and more of a hassle to prep plots, scenes, events that the players are expected to go through (even if those are more complex than a linear set of nodes) and you should just prepare situations

This takes us pretty far afield of the three clue rule or the OP but this is his description of prepping situations rather than plots:

PREPPING WITHOUT PLOTS

Don’t prep plots, prep situations.

What’s the difference?

A plot is a sequence of events: A happens, then B happens, then C happens. (In more complicated forms, the sequence of events might fork like a Choose Your Own Adventurebook, but the principle remains the same.)

A situation, on the other hand, is merely a set of circumstances. The events that happen as a result of that situation will depend on the actions the PCs take.

For example, a plot might look like this: “Pursuing the villains who escaped during last week’s session, the PCs will get on a ship bound for the port city of Tharsis. On their voyage they will spot a derelict. They will board the derelict and discover that one of the villains has transformed into a monster and killed the entire crew… except for one lone survivor. They will fight the monster and rescue the survivor. While they’re fighting the monster, the derelict will have floated into the territorial waters of Tharsis. They will be intercepted by a fleet of Tharsian ships. Once their tale is told, they will be greeted in Tharsis as heroes for their daring rescue of the derelict. Following a clue given by the survivor of the derelict, they will climb Mt. Tharsis and reach the Temple of Olympus. They can then wander around the temple asking questions. This will accomplish nothing, but when they reach the central sanctuary of the temple the villains will attempt to assassinate them. The assassination attempt goes awry, and the magical idol at the center of the temple is destroyed. Unfortunately, this idol is the only thing holding the temple to the side of the mountain — without it the entire temple begins sliding down the mountain as the battle continues to rage between the PCs and villains!”

(This is derived from an actual, published adventure. Names and milieu have been changed to protect the innocent. Bonus points to anyone who can correctly identify the original source.)

A situation, on the other hand, looks like this: “The villains have escaped on two ships heading towards Tarsis. One of the villains transforms during the voyage into a terrible monster and kills the crew, leaving the ship floating as a derelict outside the coastal waters of Tharsis. At such-and-such a time, the ship will be spotted by the Tharsis navy. The other villains have reached the Temple of Olympus atop Mt. Tharsis and assumed cover identities.”

He also has a whole series on hex crawls and a number of other approaches. He is just interested in tools and structure in general (personally I find his more broad advice much easier to incorporate into my campaigns than the extremely detailed step by step articles like node based design: just my preference, I know plenty of people who like the more detailed stuff).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Again, I think we've gone in circles on what the terms mean here. It is probably better to dig into what we are actually talking about. Depending on what aspect of 'authentic' one is leaning into it certainly might tilt more in the direction you are pointing to. But I do think what I am pointing to is a middle territory that is important and gets glossed over with dividing things this way. If we are using authentic to mean real or genuine, I would still say if the stakes are profound enough, even if your choice isn't informed, it is a genuine choice. Your decision, even if it wasn't a product of you reasoning through what option is likely to yield what result, still resulted in something of significant consequence. Getting on the plane and not getting on the plane (if the plane ends up crashing) would have been a genuine choice in my life, even if I had no way of knowing there was anything wrong with the plane. Arguably the process by which I arrived at my decision was less interesting and less a result of any significant deliberation (though even there it could have been the result of me wrestling with fear of flying issues). I am not saying there isn't a difference between that and between a more informed choice that also has significant consequences. But I see there being three basic types of choice: 1) meaningless (the GM decides what is behind the door or the mechanics decide regardless of what you choose), 2) meaningful (the choice is a real choice between two objective outcomes even if you don't have much information to go by), 3) informed and meaningful (you have more information helping you make a choice about which door to choose),

That is why I used the real world example of taking the bus versus driving to work. I think part of why authentic versus inauthentic choice the way it is being used here falls short for me (apart from deciphering what is meant by authentic), is you miss that. Again I am not saying load your adventures with doors A and B with something horrific that cannot be deciphered beyond one of them. I am saying you need that range, and to me, one of the things that makes it meaningful is that the GM wasn't playing tricks behind the scenes, or just deciding regardless of what I chose. And again, even if I don't know what is beyond the door, I make tons of little decisions leading up to the opening of the door that are more informed (by my experience, my characters personality, etc). So even the most reductive example (door A versus door B) is going to have a lot more going on in terms of choice than just "I pick door B".

That said, I do think you are pointing to another important distinction. Which is there is clearly a difference between the door A and B example and something more emotionally or morally weighty (like a character who has to choose between saving the President or his wife for example in a terrorism scenario, or a character who has to choose between loyalty to his friends or loyalty to the law). My point is just there is a spectrum of choices that are significant with different degrees of the player being informed about them (most are probably going to reside somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, many will be more malleable and subject to the players trying to discern more: in the Door A and B example, deciding to listen at the door might yield relevant information, but it might not if what aways is just a mechanical trap). My argument for including choices with less information is the way they can enhance excitement, surprise and suspense. And I don't think including such choices in any way makes a game more railroady or makes characters less able to have development (though I would say if the GM just flat out says "nothing the players can do yields any information, no matter what" then you are getting into railroad territory).

For me personally a good campaign has a mixture of choices type 2 and 3.

Yeah, as I say, I'm not especially against 'Door A or B' sorts of situations. I just don't see them as really offering much in terms of choice, and thus its hard to say that the 'choice' part of it is relevant to character development, etc. The consequences attaching to which door you opened are of course a whole other story, but I'd ascribe these developments to that and not the fact that you had to randomly pick a door. There's of course a 'surprise factor', but does that even attach to the random choice at all? I mean, its equally a surprise if a trap goes off regardless of the existence of another door. Sure, you may experience the "gosh I was unlucky" feeling, and that's fine I'm not against that either, though I don't think it is typically very profound (I guess a player could spin that into a belief that their character feels unlucky all the time, which might be interesting later).

In terms of their being a wide variety of levels of information, sure. I didn't really state that there's some level that makes things qualitatively different, though perhaps people will feel that there is. I suspect if they do feel that way it will be particularized to the person and situation. As a general principle though, I am in the school of always providing some sort of information where consequent choice is on the table. It may be that this information would have to be sought, and thus might not actually be available as things have played out, and it can surely be incomplete, or even sometimes wrong (and that would probably be a whole other type of situation). So, indeed there is a large middle ground in terms of what comes up in games.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the alignment system was a bit too rigid in the AD&D era and that led to many GMs doing what you describe. I prefer alignment to be a more loose descriptor. I like when it has some heft to it, but not when it’s so absolute that a GM would say something like “you’re Lawful Good, no way would you agree to breaking into the farrier’s shop, even if you expect he may be a cultist of Orcus” and the like. I think this is less common these days, but obviously my take is purely anecdotal.

In the early days, when we DID use alignment, maybe back in the '70s and early '80s, I seem to remember thinking of it as more of an in-setting thing. In other words the GODS interpret the actions of the PCs and make calls as to what THEY think about it, and that's reflected in the alignment on the character sheet. If they decide you changed alignment, then the negative effects of such judgment come down on you, authored by them. Of course mortals can also police behavior under the notion of upholding their deity's beliefs, or of trying to avoid a more general form of punishment for transgressions. I always assumed that, for low level PCs at least, this is the form that alignment conflict would take, and there might be various ways it could play out (maybe the gods agree with the PC, maybe the people and the PC break with the gods, etc.).

Not that any of that got around the real issue, which was the impossibility of game participants agreeing as to what was what. However, if a GM is impartial on that score they COULD use alignment in a pretty story-driving way.

 

[hawkeyefan]

In the early days, when we DID use alignment, maybe back in the '70s and early '80s, I seem to remember thinking of it as more of an in-setting thing. In other words the GODS interpret the actions of the PCs and make calls as to what THEY think about it, and that's reflected in the alignment on the character sheet. If they decide you changed alignment, then the negative effects of such judgment come down on you, authored by them. Of course mortals can also police behavior under the notion of upholding their deity's beliefs, or of trying to avoid a more general form of punishment for transgressions. I always assumed that, for low level PCs at least, this is the form that alignment conflict would take, and there might be various ways it could play out (maybe the gods agree with the PC, maybe the people and the PC break with the gods, etc.).

Not that any of that got around the real issue, which was the impossibility of game participants agreeing as to what was what. However, if a GM is impartial on that score they COULD use alignment in a pretty story-driving way.

Yeah, alignment by itself isn’t an issue. And it can certainly be the inspiration for meaningful play.

I think that in my experience, it really only mattered to a small subset of classes, and therefore a small subset of characters. Like the paladin… always at risk of losing like 90% of his cool stuff if he does anything that could be considered evil.

And while I get that… it’s the tradeoff of those abilities… I think a lot of GMs felt that this needed to be applied (at least to some extent) across the board. We can’t have the fighter and wizard just behaving any way they like if the paladin can’t… and while we can’t take away their abilities, we can block them from certain actions based on alignment.

That was more my experience with this kind of thing. It wasn’t always terrible, but it could stop a player from doing what they felt the character would do based on a two word descriptor that’s pretty wide open to interpretation.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, alignment by itself isn’t an issue. And it can certainly be the inspiration for meaningful play.

I think that in my experience, it really only mattered to a small subset of classes, and therefore a small subset of characters. Like the paladin… always at risk of losing like 90% of his cool stuff if he does anything that could be considered evil.

And while I get that… it’s the tradeoff of those abilities… I think a lot of GMs felt that this needed to be applied (at least to some extent) across the board. We can’t have the fighter and wizard just behaving any way they like if the paladin can’t… and while we can’t take away their abilities, we can block them from certain actions based on alignment.

That was more my experience with this kind of thing. It wasn’t always terrible, but it could stop a player from doing what they felt the character would do based on a two word descriptor that’s pretty wide open to interpretation.

Well, I can only speak to AD&D, it doesn't ever say the GM can or should block a character action. It simply lays out the basic default consequences of alignment change. Various classes build on that, adding more penalties. I admit, there are also 'restrictions' on classes like the Thief, who is not supposed to be 'good'. Its unclear how that is supposed to work, but one option is simply to consider those to be an INITIAL restriction when the character is created, and during play that can change. I mean, OK, GMs may have interpreted things differently, but that seems consistent with the game text, and does work. As you say, the problems are more 'table' than 'game', but certainly the whole system kind of begs to create issues. I have certainly witnessed a few myself.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

In the early days, when we DID use alignment, maybe back in the '70s and early '80s, I seem to remember thinking of it as more of an in-setting thing. In other words the GODS interpret the actions of the PCs and make calls as to what THEY think about it, and that's reflected in the alignment on the character sheet. If they decide you changed alignment, then the negative effects of such judgment come down on you, authored by them.

This would make more sense in a monotheistic system though. If the alignment is just "opinion of the gods" then in a world with multiple gods I'd expect there to be some serious disagreement.

 

[MGibster]

Such investigative type adventures are very susceptible to railroading. They tend to be linear and many elements are predetermined. It takes some real effort to work against these elements pushing things a specific way.

I don't really think they're any more prone to railroading that other adventures. The PCs are still in control of how the proceed and conclude the investigation. I'm working on a scenario for Blade Runner, a murder mystery, and the meaningful decisions won't have anything to do with finding clues. The meaningful decisions come from deciding what to do with those clues. In my scenario, the PCs get to decide the fate of a replicant named Casey. Knowing he did nothing wrong, do they capture/kill him as their boss demands which is bad for their humanity but good for their career? Or do they allow him to escape in the San Diego reclaimation zone and sleep easy at night?

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't really think they're any more prone to railroading that other adventures. The PCs are still in control of how the proceed and conclude the investigation. I'm working on a scenario for Blade Runner, a murder mystery, and the meaningful decisions won't have anything to do with finding clues. The meaningful decisions come from deciding what to do with those clues. In my scenario, the PCs get to decide the fate of a replicant named Casey. Knowing he did nothing wrong, do they capture/kill him as their boss demands which is bad for their humanity but good for their career? Or do they allow him to escape in the San Diego reclaimation zone and sleep easy at night?

One of the reasons I like investigations and mysteries is they are very easy if you want to avoid linear or railroad adventures. I have met people who want something more like Scene A to Scene B to Scene C, but the impression I get is most players and most GMs who do investigations like having an openness to how the scenario is approached by the party.