RPGing and imagination: a fundamental point

[Lanefan]

Citation needed then, because I simply can't take these assertions seriously at this point when I'm up to my nose in what smells like revisionism.

Best citation I can give you is my brief in-person conversation with David Wesely (creator of Braunstein) some years back, in which he quickly detailed the progression from Arneson learning the role-playing ropes in Braunstein to Arneson's tacking on of various other aspects to build his own system, which went on to become part of the foundation for D&D. The war-game elements were largely Gygax's doing; and the real genius lay in the combining of those war-game elements with the role-play elements first seen in Braunstein to produce what became D&D.

Then surely you believe the GM to not be a player.

In D&D at least, the GM is often both a player (playing the world and its NPCs as her "character") and not a player (an impartial referee) at the same time. Attempts to define a GM as strictly "a player" or "not a player" are doomed to failure.

 

[Emberashh]

In D&D at least, the GM is often both a player (playing the world and its NPCs as her "character") and not a player (an impartial referee) at the same time. Attempts to define a GM as strictly "a player" or "not a player" are doomed to failure.

From my perspective thats fine (mostly) but thats not what pemerton was describing. I consider GMs to be players, period, regardless of their additional role as referee.

Suggesting that its impossible to play DND without a player describing an action is to suggest GMs aren't players too.

While its reaching, Id wager that line of thought has a pretty straightforward throughline from the Forge reacting so negatively to 90s style metaplots and the in-vogue railroading GM style that then resulted in game design that explicitly diminished the capacity of a GM to drive the game, so that the capacity for a GM to railroad people was eliminated.

The irony being of course that in doing so they just horseshoed themselves into the game engine railroading people. Hence the general flaw with the PBTA heritage where nothing mechanically restrains the player in the same way a GM is, resulting in the feedback loops providing negative reinforcement the more they're engaged.

 

[pemerton]

To be devil's advocate for a moment: there's some to whom playing an RPG is akin to playing a boardgame, only with fewer confinements and more variability in play as the game proceeds. Characterization and imagination are a distant second (if present at all) to meta-tactics, strategies, and problem/puzzle-solving at the player level. Pawn-stance play at its extreme is a version of this, where the player's character is seen as nothign but a pawn on a very big board.

Just to add to @niklinna's reply: pawn stance D&D still requires shared imagination. The game participants have to imagine their characters in certain situations (like 10' wide corridors with 8' high ceilings and iron-bound wooden doors).

 

[Lanefan]

Just to add to @niklinna's reply: pawn stance D&D still requires shared imagination. The game participants have to imagine their characters in certain situations (like 10' wide corridors with 8' high ceilings and iron-bound wooden doors).

Only to a point: if those hallways etc. are being drawn out on a board (or, even more so, built with Dwarven Forge terrain pieces) and the players are placing minis to show where their characters are positioned and which way they're facing etc., then the degree of imagination required drops significantly.

That said, the use of such things also greatly helps unify the imagination among the participants.

 

[darjr]

Original DND is a mini's based wargame. That changed over time as the wargame elements were emphasized less and less in favor of emphasizing playstyle. The Thief was the first instance of the pattern being used and it only exploded from there.

Edit: it actually explicitly calls itself a wargame. The conflation of that wargame with roleplaying (the implicit improv game I was referencing) came later.

Yea, but the thing here is you are using a more modern idea of what wargame means. One that isn’t completely congruent with what they meant. For instance Braunstiens were “war” games.

 

[Emberashh]

Yea, but the thing here is you are using a more modern idea of what wargame means. One that isn’t completely congruent with what they meant. For instance Braunstiens were war games.

Im not seeing how you could infer that I was using wargame to mean something else based on what was said.

 

[darjr]

Im not seeing how you could infer that I was using wargame to mean something else based on what was said.

It seemed dismissive of D&D as an rpg. As if to put it in a separate class of games. When it isn’t as simple as that. It absolutely was a role playing game. They called it a war game because lots of games like it were called war games and they didn’t have another useful term.

It’s not like they rejected calling it a role playing game. The term didn’t exist, as far as I know.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In many tabletop roleplaying games character progression can be fairly minimal (Cortex, Dune 2d20, FATE) or is a pacing mechanism rather than a rewards system (Legend of the Five Rings 5e, Classic World of Darkness, milestone experience in 5e). Some like Quietus, Dread and Cthulhu Dark don't even have progression systems. These games instead place the rewards system directly into their core playloops.

I think when we start our conversations about tabletop roleplaying games from a place where we are removing games that consider themselves and are well understood to be tabletop roleplaying games from consideration while at the same time stretching definitions so as to include Devil May Cry and Gloomhaven we have taken a severe misstep.

You need not look far, Traveller has ZERO mechanical advancement! You do your lifepath and that's it. There's a system for studying psionics, and I think sort of a note that logically if a PC studies something they could acquire skill in it, but no actual formal advancement exists in CT. Later games and many houserules addressed this, but it was never a focus of play.

 

[pemerton]

Then surely you believe the GM to not be a player.

I imagine that you're familiar with the very typical contrast, in talking about RPG participant roles, between the player role and the GM/referee role. As per my post 18 upthread, replying to you, I hope it's tolerably clear that I am using that terminology.

The moves made by a participant in the GM role are very different from those made by a participant in the player role, because they include the presentation of adversity (both in framing situations and in narrating consequences).

A key question, in RPG design and in RPG play, is under what circumstances and in what ways the GM is entitled to unilaterally establish the content of the shared fiction. In fact, I think it's fair to say that this is the cause of more social conflict and of game/group breakdown than anything else in RPGing.

The classic D&D answer to this question is the pre-prepared, and initially hidden-from-the-players, map and key. The reliance on this method is one reason why classic D&D is able to handle only a limited range of situations: because only a limited range of situations is amenable to treatment via the map-and-key technique. Within that range of situations, the only limit on player moves is - as I have posted upthread - what everyone collectively agrees to imagine those characters doing within those situations.

The limitations of map-and-key, in games based around shared imagination, very quickly become obvious. Gygax demonstrates awareness of those limits in his 1979 DMG, in his discussion of how various sorts of dungeon will respond to raids by PCs. The short version is that map-and-key introduces a degree of stability or "status quo" that lacks verisimilitude for many fictional contexts.

It turned out to take a reasonable while - around two decades, roughly from the late 70s to the late 90s - for GM-side methods to emerge that are clear alternatives to map-and-key, but that also put limits on the capacity of the GM to unilaterally establish the content of the shared fiction; though various signs of, or precursors to, those methods can be found earlier (there are hints in 1977 Classic Traveller, more than hints in 1989 Prince Valiant, and then important developments in the 90s with Over the Edge, Maelstrom Storytelling, and probably other RPGs I'm ignorant of).

Obviously, the approach of formally unlimited unilateral GM power over the fiction remains quite popular among RPGers. To an extent that I think many RPGers regard it as an essential feature of this type of game.

 

[pemerton]

Only to a point: if those hallways etc. are being drawn out on a board (or, even more so, built with Dwarven Forge terrain pieces) and the players are placing minis to show where their characters are positioned and which way they're facing etc., then the degree of imagination required drops significantly.

That said, the use of such things also greatly helps unify the imagination among the participants.

If (1) the game is played with minis on terrain, and (2) moves like "I walk up to the door and tap it with my crowbar - what do I hear?" are not permitted, then it's not a RPG. It's a boardgame. (Or perhaps a board-based wargame.)

If moves like "I walk up to the door and tap it with my crowbar - what do I hear?" are permitted, then it's a RPG: it's a game where the making and resolution of player-side moves occurs within the context of a shared imganation.