RPGing and imagination: a fundamental point

[pemerton]

I don't see how this confusing language that just obfuscates what's actually happening is helping to answer any of the things you mention.

Fair enough.

I look at it and see that it has driven most of RPG design for the last 10 to 20 years.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Now, suppose that you are going to play a game with others in which the game moves are all about your imagined person doing things.

You would need some way of (i) establishing what is permissible or not for your person to do (@Manbearcat called this "credibility testing" not far upthread), and (ii) establishing what the situation is in which your person finds themself. And because you're doing this with others, you would need a way to have everyone agree on what has been established via (i) and (ii).

Now suppose, further, that you want your imagination about your person to be exciting, and/or suspenseful, in the sense that your person is confronted by challenges or obstacles or conflicts, and you get the thrill of finding out whether and how they cope with them. So the ways you establish what happens next, when your person engages the situation (ie (ii) above) via their capabilities (ie (i) above), need to be different from just you making it up yourself or even you talking it through with your friends.

Now, at least in a rough fashion, we have set out the core problem of RPG design.

Is it "a problem" if it was solved almost half a century ago? In any case, I have no problem with this description, as long as we are aware that the foundational starting point is assuming the role of an imaginary person.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Fair enough.

I look at it and see that it has driven most of RPG design for the last 10 to 20 years.

I feel lumping different things together like here with "negotiation" elides some rather significant differences between different games, and I don't think that is helpful. For example I feel there is way more what I would actually call negotiation in Blades in the Dark than in D&D, but if we just lump attack rolls and actual discussions about the direction of the narrative under the same heading that difference gets lost.

 

[Aldarc]

I feel lumping different things together like here with "negotiation" elides some rather significant differences between different games, and I don't think that is helpful. For example I feel there is way more what I would actually call negotiation in Blades in the Dark than in D&D, but if we just lump attack rolls and actual discussions about the direction of the narrative under the same heading that difference gets lost.

Maybe, but I would note that Baker's examples use orcs jumping out of bushes as an example. This seems to have D&D or fantasy adventure more in mind than anything else, so I don't think that his language of negotiation is somehow foreign to D&D.

 

[Pedantic]

It's contingent on the discussion.

One purpose of perceptual systems - speaking roughly - is to produce shared cognition of real states of affairs. That is, when you and I look at a thing, we both see the same thing and form - in some rough sense, at least - the same belief about what we are seeing. (Of course there are optical illusions and other tricks of the light - it's not a surprise that chess boards and pieces, playing cards, dice, etc are generally designed to minimise such problems by using crisp designs, clearly contrasting colours, etc.)

The Australian philosopher David Armstrong used to say that to perceive is to come to believe by way of the senses. Whatever one thinks of this as a philosophical account of perception, it captures the notion that when perception is going well, the resulting cognitive process and content is constrained by something "external" and hence not voluntary.

Imagination is, by its very nature, not apt to produce the same sort of convergence of belief, precisely because imagination is "active" or "creative" in a way that perception is not. What I choose to imagine is up to me. Suppose I imagine a situation or a series of events - how I imagine what comes next is up to me.

From the above, it follows: the way to get two people to agree on the state of a chess game is to show them the same board with the same pieces. Notice that they can do this themselves, without the need for any third party, by manipulating their own pieces on their own board.

(Cue someone mentioning blindfold chess. Blindfold chess is like mental arithmetic or mental geometry: it is the generation of logical consequences from starting premises plus the periodic introduction of new geometric propositions ("Knight to ab3"). We don't need to solve the philosophical problem of the difference between (i) logic and mathematics and (ii) empirical knowledge to notice that, having read the first four chapters of LotR, you can't work out what happens next simply by using geometric or arithmetic reasoning.)

Yeah, I already did that 5 pages back.

How do you get two people to agree on what happens next, after the first four chapters of LotR? You can introduce a third person who tells them what to think: ie JRRT, who has written the fifth chapter. But now we have a storyteller and an audience, not a RPG.

In a RPG, how do we get two people to agree on what happens next? They talk about it; and sometimes they use rules and other mechanics. They regulate their talk by principles of "ownership" and authority that are sensitive - often in quite subtle or idiosyncratic ways - to what is being talked about, or to what just happened in the fiction, or to what just happened in the real world such as a die throw.

You're doing the same thing I mentioned in the last post, where you conflate the board state, and the actions of players on that board state as the same thing. It is obvious that a TTRPG does not have a physical board state we can reference like chess, and instead the board lives in the mind of one player, who must relate it to the other players which can obviously be a hard communication problem. It does not follow that the board state is malleable beyond the rules of the game, any more than it follows in chess that this is the case; the players are still declaring actions that have mechanically mediated results.

Or, at least it could be. Negotiation isn't fundamental to the form in the way that obscured board in an imaginary state is. That's the lumping and the obscuring part of this discourse that I'm objecting to. We don't have to do that to still be playing an RPG. You could just write down all the actions available to players, like a conventional board game, and still play on an imaginary board with an unbounded play time/victory assessment and get to TTRPG. The thing where we determine "what happens next" can, like any other game, be a function of the game's mechanics taking the player's actions into account.

Rounding the communication problem, the difficulty in knowing a board state that contains more information than a standard board game, and isn't physically embodied up to a negotiation is the bit I don't think follows. It isn't necessary, nor emblematic of the form; you could have an RPG without it that resolves actions in absolute mechanical terms.

I feel lumping different things together like here with "negotiation" elides some rather significant differences between different games, and I don't think that is helpful. For example I feel there is way more what I would actually call negotiation in Blades in the Dark than in D&D, but if we just lump attack rolls and actual discussions about the direction of the narrative under the same heading that difference gets lost.

 

[Pedantic]

I feel lumping different things together like here with "negotiation" elides some rather significant differences between different games, and I don't think that is helpful. For example I feel there is way more what I would actually call negotiation in Blades in the Dark than in D&D, but if we just lump attack rolls and actual discussions about the direction of the narrative under the same heading that difference gets lost.

Blades uses negotiation as the basic unit of resolution. You propose a course of action, defining what you'll get if the dice roll success, the GM offers up some combination of costs and/or risks, haggling over the scope of all of those ensues until everyone is happy enough, dice are rolled to see what occurs.

 

[pemerton]

Is it "a problem" if it was solved almost half a century ago?

Arneson and Gygax didn't solve the problem except for a rather narrow slice of fiction - a group of largely expedient adventurers entering into a rather artificial labyrinth to try and loot it.

 

[niklinna]

Ok. So determining whether my attack hits a goblin by comparing a dice roll to the goblin's AC is a negotiation. Now what? What does calling everything negotiation achieve beyond confusing people?

Nope. What you've described is a tool to ease negotiation—that is, a rule (or mechanic, or prodecure; it seems prudent to give people options for naming their concepts in this thread).

 

[pemerton]

It is obvious that a TTRPG does not have a physical board state we can reference like chess, and instead the board lives in the mind of one player, who must relate it to the other players which can obviously be a hard communication problem.

This is true only in the most railroady of railroads.

 

[niklinna]

Blades uses negotiation as the basic unit of resolution. You propose a course of action, defining what you'll get if the dice roll success, the GM offers up some combination of costs and/or risks, haggling over the scope of all of those ensues until everyone is happy enough, dice are rolled to see what occurs.

Resolution is part of the larger negotiation involved in "who gets to say what happens?" The "haggling" you mention is also one phase of that (which does take the form of what we most commonly think of when we hear the word "negotiation").