Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[Thomas Shey]

I think this is a core of the issue, honestly. The description is accurate… it cuts out the “Magic of Roleplaying” (TM) and describes what’s happening plainly. And that simplicity can be eye-opening. It can be surprising. It can be uncomfortable. All the things that @innerdude posted about a few pages ago in an excellent post.

And a lot of people don’t like that. They need to think that more is happening in play than the players declaring moves, and the GM consulting the map & key/ his prep to determine what happens. Even though that’s clearly what is happening in play.

I'm going to take both sides of this.

1. That's because in a decent game there is more happening there. There's a lot of narrative flourish on both sides (which is not trivial), there's at least some degree of engagement on mechanical/decsion making, and usually more. Acting like the map-and-key elements alone are what's doing the lifting impoverishes the experience.

2. That said, its not like that's not the core of the process in most cases. Its the foundation everything else builds on, and barring more ad-hoc internal-model decisions, almost all games use it (sometimes in less obvious ways) for the basis of most adventures in even quasi-trad games. After all, what is map-and-key but a way of saying "You know what's going on, who's doing it, and where it is." The fact the oldest versions were, essentially, dungeon maps and keys doesn't change that in a sense, almost all games do that to some degree. I mean, when I set up a superhero session, what I'm noting is what threats the heroes are going to be potentially dealing with, what's causing them, and when there's opponents, who they are and what they're like. That's different than a traditional dungeon run (well, usually, its not like raiding a supervillain lair is fundamentally that different other than the fact that no one is picking up every valuable along the way), but structurally, its still a map-and-key situation.

 

[Thomas Shey]

One thought I had about these battles over labels recently was - why do we allow them to stymie productive conversation so? Like, if a label really is neutral for one party, and pejorative for another, why not go with a different label that is neutral for both parties?

Because its often incredibly hard to find one that is. It can sometimes be very difficult to find a term that both evokes what you're trying to evoke and is semantically neutral to everyone.

 

[innerdude]

I may be misunderstanding, but is this like a competition for limited resources then?

i.e., Group A wants to do X-talking. Group B wants to do Y-talking.
Enworld is the best place to do both X-talking and Y-talking.
The X-talking has a positive impact for the A people, and the Y-talking has a positive impact for the B people?
The X-talking bothers the B people, and the Y-talking bothers the A people?


Sorry, by that, do you mean there's no merit to the idea that certain conversations help you but bother others, and other conversations bother you but help someone else?

Sorry that this is going back a ways, but I had to bring this up. Before I finally read some of the Forge essays myself and tried (and mostly failed) to successfully run a few sessions of Dungeons World back in 2017, if we consider the "Y talk" to be narrative/non-trad discussions and "X talk" to be "traditional" approaches of D&D, then prior to 2017 I would have told you that anything remotely involving "Y talk" was useless and borderline madness, because "RPGs simply don't work the way this 'Y talk' nonsense claims."

"Y talk" felt insulting because it felt like it was invalidating the only play style I knew existed. Well obviously the appearance of insult was on me, not the ideas being expressed. Just because I couldn't grasp or place the ideas into a workable context didn't mean I had to take umbrage.

And the "Y-talkers" had a valid point---It's pretty difficult to have a valid discussion about the theory involved if one side doesn't even acknowledge the validity of the argument. I went the rounds multiple times with pemerton, chaochou, Abdul Alhazred, Manbearcat, and others and their firm stance was always, "Your inability to comprehend these non-trad concepts neither invalidates your playstyle nor negates the validity of what we're describing, so please stop saying narrative techniques don't work and are impossible."

And that's exactly the stance I now take myself, oddly enough.

But I wanted to touch on this, too, talking about trad map and key approaches:

For my money it better constrain and not just inform if there is going to be a real game to be played. If play lacks the systemic constraints of something like Apocalypse World the GM damn better (consider their selves to) be constrained by their prep or I want nothing to do with it.

What Campbell is expressing gets to the heart of the unease I began to feel in my own trad gaming back in 2016. Because I as a GM found it far too easy to justify modifying either the map, the key, or both to push events in the direction I wanted as a GM.

And I realized that despite my best intentions, there were times I sacrificed the integrity of the map and key simply because it happened to please me as the GM. And I began to be uncomfortable with the ramifications. Was I being untrue to the group social contract? Would the players be upset if the found out? Would they have preferred to have more input into the world and what mattered to their characters? And I realized that whatever techniques I had innately gleaned over the years didn't answer those questions.

 

[pemerton]

For fun, and by way of illustration, here's a different way the warehouse stake out (see post 566 upthread) could play out in Apocalypse World:

The player declares "I try to identify gaps in the security schedule without getting caught or shot!" The GM replies "OK, after a couple of days of staking the place out you can see that there's a gap around dinner time - those guards are creatures of habit! But it might be hard to sneak in then, as that's the same time the street is full of food and water vendors."

This would be offering an opportunity, but perhaps with a cost.

Which one of the two possibilities I've canvassed, and the countless others that can be imagined, is the better one depends on the mood of the table, what is going on in the rest of the fiction, what trajectories and expectations have been built up, etc. The GM's prep of fronts and threats might also help here, as it might have information about what the warehouse guards are inclined to do if subject to scrutiny.

 

[Lanefan]

See this quote right here is what distinguishes map and key play from non-trad play. There is no mechanic like this in trad play. There is nothing a player can do to establish their own facts.

All they can do is reveal the map and key. There’s no way to change it. The players cannot change the map and key directly. Only by first revealing it through play and then interacting.

I agree with you up to here. The whole point of map and key play is investigation and exploration of the pre-set map*, which as you say can then be changed through both short-term and long-term nteraction. All is good.

* - here I use 'map' to indicate the whole setting including its people, history, cosmology etc. as well as simple geography.

And the primary process of revealing the map is largely guesswork.

But then you say this, which IMO isn't true at all. The primary process of revealing the map is investigation and exploration, either directly (e.g. looking around the next corner or over the next hill) or - far more often - indirectly (gathering information through asking questions and getting answers, if those answers aren't already provided in the setting write-up).

Unless things are intentionally supposed to be confusing, if the players/PCs find themselves reduced to simple guesswork that means either something's gone wrong with their info-gathering process or they just haven't been using it.

 

[Lanefan]

I don’t see how.

I don’t even play non-trad games. Or at least I haven’t in years.

Take any dungeon crawl you want to name. The pcs just entered. The first room has three corridors leading out, one in each direction. There are humanoid footprints leading in and or of all three corridors, all of a similar size although the eastern corridor footprints tend to be a bit smaller.

How do you choose which direction to proceed? In what way is it not more or less a coin toss? Or to put it another way, a guess?

Did the party try to gather more information about who-what lives here before arriving on the scene? Did they spend any time running surveillance on the entrance before wading in? If yes, they might conclude the smaller footprints belong to the Kobolds rumoured to live here while the larger probably equate to the Orcs they saw arriving last night......

Further, in situations like this IME the immediate choice of which way to proceed doesn't much matter as their intent will nearly always be to eventually explore all three directions anyway; with the only question being one of in which sequence to take them (or, in rare but not unheard-of cases, whether to split up and go all three ways at once!).

 

[Pedantic]

But it probably wouldn't happen like that in Apocalypse World. The player declares "I try to identify gaps in the security schedule without getting caught or shot!" The GM replies "OK, you're loitering across the way from the warehouse, when a guard comes up to you and asks what your business is!" (That's a soft move, putting the PC in a spot.) The player replies "This seems like a charged situation - I read it" and makes the required throw. Suppose they get 7+, the GM has to answer one of the listed questions truthfully. Suppose the player asks "Where's my way in?" or perhaps "What's my enemy's true position?", well now the player probably has knowledge of a weak spot. But that doesn't mean it was authored by them. I mean, it could be - the GM could go "Ok, you've been staking this place out for a while now, what way in have you discovered?", but the GM's not obliged to do that. They could narrate their own thing.

And of course, once the situation's been read the GM is probably going to come back to the fact that there's a guard there asking the PC what their business is!

I don't see any problem per se with any method you're preparing, but I would find this particular resolution very frustrating. The player is immediately caught before resolution begins, and did not have an opportunity for that not to be the case, even after stating that they specifically were trying not to be.

For fun, and by way of illustration, here's a different way the warehouse stake out (see post 566 upthread) could play out in Apocalypse World:

The player declares "I try to identify gaps in the security schedule without getting caught or shot!" The GM replies "OK, after a couple of days of staking the place out you can see that there's a gap around dinner time - those guards are creatures of habit! But it might be hard to sneak in then, as that's the same time the street is full of food and water vendors."

This would be offering an opportunity, but perhaps with a cost.

Which one of the two possibilities I've canvassed, and the countless others that can be imagined, is the better one depends on the mood of the table, what is going on in the rest of the fiction, what trajectories and expectations have been built up, etc. The GM's prep of fronts and threats might also help here, as it might have information about what the warehouse guards are inclined to do if subject to scrutiny.

This feels significantly different, in that the PC has now achieved their stated intent.

 

[Manbearcat]

ON MAP & KEY PLAY BEING "A GUESSING GAME"

Just wanted to comment on this. Map & Key play isn't natively "a guessing game" in its skillfully GMed and skillfully played form. If Map & Key play has degenerated into "a guessing game," one failure state or another has occurred:

* GM mapping or keying or scenario design has failed.

* The conversation between GM and players has broken down for one reason or another or multiple. There is a fairly likely chance that the GM hasn't subtly + deftly telegraphed sites of conflicts, nature of obstacles or threats or opportunities or NPCs, dynamics of setting/situation/hazards/puzzles. Players may not be uploading the information presented to them correctly for a number of reasons (or they may have developed rote SOPs that don't functionally address the needs of play and fail to adjust).

* The resolution mechanics/pressure points/consequences don't have sufficient teeth to create a vital and vigorous decision-space for players.

* The GM is manipulating either/or/both the Map & Key in real time or subverted players' inputs in favor of the GM's desired outcomes. This will create a situation where players' mental models for this particular instantiation of play, and often play generally under this particular GM, break down ("a guessing game" ensues) and this cannot be remediated without actual, overt redress by the GM; "yeah, I recognize I subverted the competitive integrity of play and disallowed your authentic contribution to dictate the trajectory of play...I apologize...won't happen again <and then putting in the time to "mend that wound">.'

 

[Thomas Shey]

Fundamentally what we're talking about is how situation and setting is determined by the play group. How do we acknowledge that in one case it is determined by a GM ahead of time writing some stuff down / defining things / thinking about how it must be while in the other case it is being determined in the moment based on what speaks to the interests of the player characters and the ongoing narrative as experienced so far? How do we acknowledge this difference without treating the second as if it somehow involved more artifice than the first?

In either case the player characters are moving through a set world and dealing with a set situation. How we construct that / resolve that is different.

Basically, how do I never hear Schrodinger's X ever again?

I think the problem here is a word you use here: "set". To many people (and I'll admit up-front I'm one of them) if the situation is not decided until the moment, even if its derived from prior events (because, after all, what people will see as the obvious and logical/dramatically appropriate extension from that is going to vary considerably) its not "set". That is, indeed, pretty significant in its difference to many people, which is why you get "Shrodinger's X". To them, the difference between a predefined situation and one constructed as appropriate on the moment are vastly different.

 

[Pedantic]

ON MAP & KEY PLAY BEING "A GUESSING GAME"

Just wanted to comment on this. Map & Key play isn't natively "a guessing game" in its skillfully GMed and skillfully played form. If Map & Key play has degenerated into "a guessing game," one failure state or another has occurred:

* GM mapping or keying or scenario design has failed.

* The conversation between GM and players has broken down for one reason or another or multiple. There is a fairly likely chance that the GM hasn't subtly + deftly telegraphed sites of conflicts, nature of obstacles or threats or opportunities or NPCs, dynamics of setting/situation/hazards/puzzles. Players may not be uploading the information presented to them correctly for a number of reasons (or they may have developed rote SOPs that don't functionally address the needs of play and fail to adjust).

These two points may be too specific to a particular kind of play. They both presume the importance of specific obstacles, and that a GM has gone through it specific effort to create them. A lot of this could be pure exploration/extrapolation of setting elements that don't aren't explicitly part of scenario design, i.e. players in a dungeon vs. players in a suddenly hostile castle after they've murdered the queen mid-function. Things that were previously set dressing might how be obstacles, and it's arguably too specific to expect them to have been called out that way in the "key" (but not, I would argue, too specific to expect the game mechanics to handle interaction with them).

* The resolution mechanics/pressure points/consequences don't have sufficient teeth to create a vital and vigorous decision-space for players.

* The GM is manipulating either/or/both the Map & Key in real time or subverted players' inputs in favor of the GM's desired outcomes. This will create a situation where players' mental models for this particular instantiation of play, and often play generally under this particular GM, break down ("a guessing game" ensues) and this cannot be remediated without actual, overt redress by the GM; "yeah, I recognize I subverted the competitive integrity of play and disallowed your authentic contribution to dictate the trajectory of play...I apologize...won't happen again <and then putting in the time to "mend that wound">.'

I think these are always universal failure points.