Why do RPGs have rules?

[FormerlyHemlock]

I feel you do a good job here of getting at our differences. A dramatic or narrative approach wants those goblins to terrorize the village so that PCs have something to do. An immersionist approach by my lights wants the goblins to terrorize the village because there's a socio-economic reason.

I think there's an even more fundamental drive: a narrative approach wants a coherent narrative to be discernable after the fact. They want to know WHY the goblins terrorized the village, and how it relates to other events.

"We may never know why this crime was committed" is a valid explanation from a simulationist perspective, but from a narrativist perspective it can feel hollow. I'm simulationist at heart but to the extent I study narrativist techniques it's with the hope of enabling players to construct a narrative of their experiences in their heads, retroactively if necessary.

 

[aramis erak]

My own interpretation of "Immersion" is generally one of "so into the game that the time seems too soon when the end of session hits." Personally, I can get this from story or mechanics - I find Advanced Civ (not an RPG, but a 6 to 18 hour boardgame) quite immersive. And I seldom find AD&D even halfway there. It's never been immersive for me as a player.

I was in a game at a store once, a game called GAG (Great Adventure Game, Draft 15.2...). The rules were mathematically sound, logarithm based, and for me, not a huge barrier to entry... the system never gave me immersion, but the GM (Stan Love, IIRC, who was the designer or codesigner) created immersion by how he narrated actions and successes. It was a blast. I may have one of the few surviving copies... the disk with the Word Files, however, died shortly after the playtest ended... so I'm missing the two support books. One was species, the other was something else. I might have copies on mmy mother's Mac LCII... or not...
The one thing I will give Stan mechanically is that the results were interesting. Always a chance.

Meanwhile, in Alien, I find myself immersed in the combats as a GM, specifically because I'm in "Play to find out" mode, and hanging on the GM rolls as much as my players are.
Outside of combat, I'm still in "Play to find out" mode... I just create situations and see how players react, and decide what the most appropriate reaction to that is. And am immersed deeply by not knowing how it's going to unfold. (Yeah, sure, it's most likely to end with everyone having xenomorphs bursting out of PC bodyparts or being food for a growing xenomorph. But when, where, and how?)

But as a rule, Immersion is a bad term to use, because it's so different for so many

 

[aramis erak]

I think there's an even more fundamental drive: a narrative approach wants a coherent narrative to be discernable after the fact. They want to know WHY the goblins terrorized the village, and how it relates to other events.

"We may never know why this crime was committed" is a valid explanation from a simulationist perspective, but from a narrativist perspective it can feel hollow. I'm simulationist at heart but to the extent I study narrativist techniques it's with the hope of enabling players to construct a narrative of their experiences in their heads, retroactively if necessary.

I almost always start dungeon design with 4 important questions:

1. Who built this place
2. what did they intend it to be used for
3. who uses it now?
4. what do they use it for?

I'm not a Narrativist (but I've been accused of it often enough) nor properly a gamist nor simulationist. If one graphs GSN on a triangle, I'm smack in the middle... but I, as a GM, want those 4 answers, even if my players never ask about them...

 

[Manbearcat]

I think there's an even more fundamental drive: a narrative approach wants a coherent narrative to be discernable after the fact. They want to know WHY the goblins terrorized the village, and how it relates to other events.

"We may never know why this crime was committed" is a valid explanation from a simulationist perspective, but from a narrativist perspective it can feel hollow. I'm simulationist at heart but to the extent I study narrativist techniques it's with the hope of enabling players to construct a narrative of their experiences in their heads, retroactively if necessary.

Hey FormerlyHemlock. Just wanted to chime in here. I think for the Dramatism of GDS (Threefold Model), what you've got above might be correct, but if we're talking about Forge Narrativism or "Story Now" (which I think you are?), what you've got above isn't correct.

While things like Rising Action and Climax absolutely end up being a part of the play (but emergent rather than intentional), Story Now play isn't interested preoccupied by creating a story construct in-situ or in post mortem review. Story Now play is preoccupied by a few things:

* A premise, a nexus of conflict, and the players and system are in the driver's seat here. The players as protagonists through their PCs is an absolute imperative.

* Get on with it. Cut to the action. Relentlessly. Do the things. Generate conflict, escalate it, resolve it. Over and over. Till all the things are done. The "Now" is the imperative here and its a relentless "Now." What "Now" also means is "not Before." So no metaplot, no story arc, no scripting.

* Be in the moment, everyone pushes hard, the system does what its supposed to do, and we experience what the game does through our own doing of it. Reflection might happen...or likely will, but its not about the reflection, its about the moments of play (that are hopefully engaging or even visceral).

---

Maybe TTRPGs as improv jazz where a particular group or participants take the lead (inverting the typical conductor : orchestra relationship) and some measure of structure is codified rather than fully emergent. Something like that.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Hey FormerlyHemlock. Just wanted to chime in here. I think for the Dramatism of GDS (Threefold Model), what you've got above might be correct, but if we're talking about Forge Narrativism or "Story Now" (which I think you are?), what you've got above isn't correct.

Thanks. You're right that I think in GDS terms, not Forge Narrativism. I've never really gotten my head around the meaning of Forge Narrativism or Simulationism no matter how many times I reread the threads.

In this case I probably should have said "dramatism" even though I wasn't speaking specifically about GDS, to avoid confusion with with Forge Narrativism. I just meant the basic human desire for narratives.

While things like Rising Action and Climax absolutely end up being a part of the play (but emergent rather than intentional), Story Now play isn't interested preoccupied by creating a story construct in-situ or in post mortem review. Story Now play is preoccupied by a few things:

* A premise, a nexus of conflict, and the players and system are in the driver's seat here. The players as protagonists through their PCs is an absolute imperative.

* Get on with it. Cut to the action. Relentlessly. Do the things. Generate conflict, escalate it, resolve it. Over and over. Till all the things are done. The "Now" is the imperative here and its a relentless "Now." What "Now" also means is "not Before." So no metaplot, no story arc, no scripting.

* Be in the moment, everyone pushes hard, the system does what its supposed to do, and we experience what the game does through our own doing of it. Reflection might happen...or likely will, but its not about the reflection, its about the moments of play (that are hopefully engaging or even visceral).

---

Maybe TTRPGs as improv jazz where a particular group or participants take the lead (inverting the typical conductor : orchestra relationship) and some measure of structure is codified rather than fully emergent. Something like that.

I appreciate the explanation but I confess: I still don't get it! (I mean, I think I get your individual pieces as explained here, but if I go back and read a discussion between Ron Edwards and his buddies it's still going to be impenetrable to me.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Hey FormerlyHemlock. Just wanted to chime in here. I think for the Dramatism of GDS (Threefold Model), what you've got above might be correct, but if we're talking about Forge Narrativism or "Story Now" (which I think you are?), what you've got above isn't correct.

While things like Rising Action and Climax absolutely end up being a part of the play (but emergent rather than intentional), Story Now play isn't interested preoccupied by creating a story construct in-situ or in post mortem review. Story Now play is preoccupied by a few things:

* A premise, a nexus of conflict, and the players and system are in the driver's seat here. The players as protagonists through their PCs is an absolute imperative.

* Get on with it. Cut to the action. Relentlessly. Do the things. Generate conflict, escalate it, resolve it. Over and over. Till all the things are done. The "Now" is the imperative here and its a relentless "Now." What "Now" also means is "not Before." So no metaplot, no story arc, no scripting.

* Be in the moment, everyone pushes hard, the system does what its supposed to do, and we experience what the game does through our own doing of it. Reflection might happen...or likely will, but its not about the reflection, its about the moments of play (that are hopefully engaging or even visceral).

---

Maybe TTRPGs as improv jazz where a particular group or participants take the lead (inverting the typical conductor : orchestra relationship) and some measure of structure is codified rather than fully emergent. Something like that.

Thank you. That's a very clear explanation. Of course, I don't want any of those things as player or GM, but it's nice to have a clear explanation of a playstyle. I may tag this.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I almost always start dungeon design with 4 important questions:

1. Who built this place
2. what did they intend it to be used for
3. who uses it now?
4. what do they use it for?

I'm not a Narrativist (but I've been accused of it often enough) nor properly a gamist nor simulationist. If one graphs GSN on a triangle, I'm smack in the middle... but I, as a GM, want those 4 answers, even if my players never ask about them...

If the GM knows the answers to these four questions, that's enough for a simulationist, but if the players don't know these answers too they won't be able to construct a narrative. I'm always looking for new techniques to relay information to the players, lately including something sort of like OOC Q&A sessions but not exactly.

 

[clearstream]

I'm honestly very sceptical that someone actually starts with socio-economic situation in the region and then extrapolates goblin raids from it, rather than putting goblins there and figuring out a diegetic justification for their raids afterwards.

The skeptical viewpoint here is interesting. It makes me wonder if one reaches a point where the conversation is the content and it becomes unnecessary - even implausible - to be motivated by facts external to it.

From where I stand, the difference between "ooh dragons are cool, and fighting one in the ruins of a church of the Dragon God would be very dramatic, really highlighting how the religion was stolen and subverted by the priests!" and "ooh dragons are mechanically interesting and fighting one in a tight space where it can effectively deny large areas will create an engaging fight that emphasizes positional awareness!" is slim (if not non-existent, as juggling narrative is the meat of the gameplay in games focused on that), and both are at odds with world simulation.

Neither is at odds with world simulation. Possibly what is at odds is the direction of justification, and (depending on what you have in mind) forcing the situation for the sake of the dramatic.

The way I see it, immersion is a process of capturing a feeling through play. If the source, a lightning rod, of that feeling is the character, then the world should bend for them, to enhance and sharpen that feeling; otherwise the feeling would be blurry and fuzzy, weak, becoming sharp only by an accident at best. If I want to, say, capture the thrill of cheating, then I want my character's partner to call them when she is oh so busy getting railed, not a minute earlier or latter.

If the lightning rod is the world itself, then the character is unimportant, and their needs and desires are entertained only so long as they enhance and sharpen the feelings extracted from the secondary world.

It's not really a matter of entertaining or not entertaining their needs and desires. Reading one of the posts above, there are nexuses of conflict, absolute imperatives, cuts to the action, relentlessness... these are all character-narrative concerns. It's right to want the partner to call at the moment of tension in that mode. Whereas in immersionist play, because the world is as it is and the character is who they are, they develop needs and desires. There's guaranteed purchase between those and the world because they were developed within the world.

Above you offer a direction of process, and make the assumption that it would be right to simply invert that to describe immersionist play. That's mistaken: the world isn't first and the character second. They're not ordered one and then the other. The idea is that the world exists and the character lives within it. What is experienced is about the character (or troupe). The nature of the mistake is to describe immersionism using narrativist laguage. To then complain of shortfalls is a commentary on that mismatch: it says nothing about immersionist play, other than that it is not narrativist play.

Full disclosure: I hate the word "immersion" with a burning passion. I always feel like everybody talks about a different thing when it's mentioned.

On terminology, just as much as I don't take narrativist to imply that only modes of play that accept that label include narrative, I don't take immersionist to exclude forms of immersion in other modes. Simulationist could be right. I have concerns around its wargamey implications, and that it can imply rules-heavy while immersionism works just as successfully with rules-light. Simulationist has the additional problem that it comes loaded with the GNS assumptions.

"Immersionist" is hardly exceptional in being applied ambiguously! One pragmatic way to resolve that could be to accept the label those who identify with would apply to themselves, and invest effort in helping to disambiguate.

 

[chaochou]

Games are structured activities that are governed by a set of rules.

A game and its rules are not divisible. The rules are constitutive of the game, and the game is the product of its rules.

I don't see RPGs as any different in this regard.

A universal ability to change, discard or add rules - by definition - means that there is no game.

If I can, at any moment, change the board state or effect of any piece in chess, how can you play me? What move can you legally make if I can declare any move illegal? What move you can usefully make when I declare all the outcomes? What are we even doing?

This is no longer a structured activity governed by a set of rules called 'Chess'. It's now a structured activity in which the apparent rules are a conceit - one which I can choose to pay lip service to in order to present you with the illusion of a game of chess. Or not.

It's also important to note, however, that whatever moves you appear to make, my control of all the outcomes of those moves means I control the boardstate at all times. You're on a railroad that you can't even see.

I don't see RPGs in any different or unique way.

 

[pemerton]

Technical competence serves similar functions in both cases, unless I've misunderstood what kind of GMing is happening in the hypothetical dungeon crawl. "What would actually happen?" is the question both refs/GMs are trying to answer, not "what would make the most interesting narrative?"

I'm not sure why you're stating my point back to me as if it's a point of disagreement with me.