GM fiat - an illustration

[Micah Sweet]

I presume you do have a lot of respect for it, then?

If so, would you be willing to give your best attempt at such a description?

Maybe later. I don't have time for paragraphs of text at the moment, especially if whatever I write is going to be crawled over and dissected.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But how is it illuminating if it feels like it is dismissive of entire styles of play, and feels like it favors others. It is like saying "all the blues is twelve bars and pentatonic scales, it doesn't achieve the full richness and complexity of the structure and harmonic organization of baroque and classical". Blues musicians would object.

Except you have added something that was not present. I may be having significant disagreements with @pemerton in this thread, but he has never--not one time--suggested that his pithy description "doesn't achieve the full richness and complexity" of some other structure. Or, at least, I have not seen it; if you have quotes or posts you can point to where it did, I'm all ears (eyes?).

They might also say "you aren't wrong, we use pentatonic scales and 12 bars but there is so much more going on". And many of them may not be able to articulate to the critique because lots of blues musicians are not versed in music theory (and many would even consider learning music theory to not be helpful because they have their own language for talking about the music)*

*Note I am not saying you can't join music theory and the blues, two of my guitar teachers growing up were blues musicians who had great command of music theory

Well...you're kind of undercutting your own point here? I'm not really sure what to make of this. It seems like you're making three claims that don't really form much of an argument together.

1: We should not apply any form of theory to RPGing of most styles, because applying theory is automatically dismissive.
2: The people who are doing this style/activity don't have the ability to describe it, and it would be actually harmful for them to learn any such thing.
3: Except there are some people who do learn such a thing and it's actually quite good for them to know it.

That's...I mean, the first claim is pretty much completely unacceptable, and is itself an unfair and biased dismissal of a thing (in this case, dismissing theory as inherently antagonistic, which is both incorrect and hurtful!) The second has some really bad implications if we take it at all seriously--e.g., nobody who cooks or bakes should ever learn chemistry--and basically rejects entirely the idea that it is possible to educate future generations on the basis of distilling the lessons learned by current and past generations, which is a pill you'll probably never get me to swallow. And then the third point completely undercuts that second point, and not only does it do so, but in exactly the way I personally have called out: teaching something to future generations!

 

[Campbell]

Clue(do) lacks a (shared) fiction in that players lack the ability to impact or influence it and there is no response to the actions players take. This is why despite being more jargony I think "shared imagined space" was actually better for communication than "the fiction". Both are meant to describe the same thing to those in the know but SIS is far less ambiguous.

 

[Campbell]

@Bedrockgames

The problem with discussing the play practices you are talking about in the way you talk about them to others who play that way is the same fundamental problem you get when discussing method acting with method actors. The language in use does not account for other ways of playing/acting as legitimate/real. It has no way to compare and contrast its methodology with other methodologies because it casts them aside as illegitimate or only playing at doing thing / engaging in fakery.

It does not imagine there is any other way. It says we are really doing the thing, and you are not (if you do not do it our way).

On a basic level it should be obvious that some adjustments in language need to be made when discussing things with people not coming from our communities. That say when discussing say Apocalypse World if I make no effort to do so in a way that is not deeply steeped in the language of Story Now play culture than I am not likely to be successful communicating with people not deeply steeped in that play culture. The same is true when discussing trad games with people who are not deeply steeped in that culture of play.

There's this sense that instead of meeting us halfway you expect us to meet you where you are (with no expectation you will do anything on your own to understand where we are coming from).

 

[Manbearcat]

Pictionary is a game where a person/place/phrase/concept is written on a card and a teammate is required to convey the contents of that card to a player via a drawing; you might look at this participant as "the GM." The player attempts to infer the contents of the card via the drawing and "solve the mystery."

Charades is a game where a person/place/phrase/concept is written on a card and a teammate is required to convey the contents of that card to a player via pantomime; you might look at this participant as "the GM.". The player attempts to infer the contents of the card via the pantomime and "solve the mystery."

Taboo is a game where a person/place/phrase/concept is written on a card and a teammate is required to convey the contents of that card to a player via deft wordplay; you might look at this participant as "the GM.". The player attempts to infer the contents of the card via the deft wordplay and "solve the mystery."

Contained mysteries are challenging to all three of build, articulate, and resolve. However, relative to labyrinthine mysteries with complex initial conditions, weighty information sets with comparatively huge noise (intended) to distill signal from, and laborious chains of inference that easily have their coherency foiled in the build or articulate phase of play, contained mysteries are a relative sinch with a very high success rate.

In my experience, a D&D dungeoncrawl is somewhere between a contained mystery and a labyrinthine mystery with a lean toward contained. However, when codified deftly via ruleset and generated deftly via GM, you can have the equivalent of a puzzle/obstacle course with several discrete puzzles/obstacles that can be isolated to themselves, making the dungeon tantamount to a series of contained mysteries; this is an important distinction both in terms of design and application (the play).

---

I wanted to get this premise and supporting ideas out of the way for what is to follow. I'm not concluding this today as I don't have the time. At some point in the future, I'm going to construct the full-on Actual Play of a mystery (Threat) in the Between that @hawkeyefan 's character ( @Campbell and another player were in this game as well) exclusively handled; The Reaver's Last Victim. That one seems the most easy to articulate as it is just (i) one character + (ii) initial conditions/framing + (iii) maybe 4 scenes (and 3ish Day/Night phases?). Further, there was only (iv) the 1 Question ("Where are the remains of Anton Farrow hidden?") along with (v) only 6 Clues. I think I can reconstruct that pretty easily and explain how the play produces both (a) the experiential quality of a hunter/detective puzzling through a series of fictional parameters and situation-states as well as (b) a player that actively has to draw inferences into an integrated solve. I'll also contrast it with Pictionary/Charades/Taboo and a dungeoncrawl and contained vs labyrinthine.

I'm going to reference this post when I do this in the future, so I'm going to attach the Excel Keeper snippets/notes we took for reference (below).

 

[Old Fezziwig]

It does not imagine there is any other way. It says we are really doing the thing, and you are not (if you do not do it our way).

I'm reminded of Laurence Olivier talking to Dustin Hoffman on Marathon Man after Hoffman stayed up for 72 hours before a scene where his character had been up 72 hours: "My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?"

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Pictionary is a game where a person/place/phrase/concept is written on a card and a teammate is required to convey the contents of that card to a player via a drawing; you might look at this participant as "the GM." The player attempts to infer the contents of the card via the drawing and "solve the mystery."

Charades is a game where a person/place/phrase/concept is written on a card and a teammate is required to convey the contents of that card to a player via pantomime; you might look at this participant as "the GM.". The player attempts to infer the contents of the card via the pantomime and "solve the mystery."

Taboo is a game where a person/place/phrase/concept is written on a card and a teammate is required to convey the contents of that card to a player via deft wordplay; you might look at this participant as "the GM.". The player attempts to infer the contents of the card via the deft wordplay and "solve the mystery."

And what is common to all of these, that there is an objective correct answer. That to me makes it "real solving."

 

[Bedrockgames]

Well...you're kind of undercutting your own point here? I'm not really sure what to make of this. It seems like you're making three claims that don't really form much of an argument together.

1: We should not apply any form of theory to RPGing of most styles, because applying theory is automatically dismissive.

I am in a doctor’s waiting room on phone so forgive me if my replies are not thorough. I am not saying don’t apply rpg theory. I am saying do so if you want. But I do think the theory you are drawing on, while it might work well for explaining certain styles of play, doesn’t work well when illuminating what you guys call trad play. I was also saying even something like music theory, which I think is much more demonstrably effective than RPG theory, can have blind spots that fail to capture nuance (for example the difficulty that microtones present in a theory of music based on 12 tones). Now music theory tends to expand and adapt. So it has attempted to address this problem. But there is this insistence in these conversations that we have to adopt your language, way of analysis, and even conclusions.

2: The people who are doing this style/activity don't have the ability to describe it, and it would be actually harmful for them to learn any such thing.

That isn’t what I said. I said some people don’t have fluency in the language you use and use broader language. I am not saying all bakers shouldn’t learn chemistry. I am saying for some it might be counter productive or steer them away from what they are doing that already is working

3: Except there are some people who do learn such a thing and it's actually quite good for them to know it.

this doesn’t undercut point 2 at all. Some people benefit from more music theory. Some people don’t. Because people are all different. For some people music theory provides enormous clarity, for others it gets in the way or they just find it frustrating (there is a meme among musicians with a picture of a music teacher instructing a class saying “come on it’s not rocket science” followed by a rocket scientist teaching a class saying “come on it’s not music theory”. And again I have to make the point: music theory has a much better track record I think than RPG theory (which is extremely contentious among gamers)

 

[Bedrockgames]

@Bedrockgames

The problem with discussing the play practices you are talking about in the way you talk about them to others who play that way is the same fundamental problem you get when discussing method acting with method actors. The language in use does not account for other ways of playing/acting as legitimate/real. It has no way to compare and contrast its methodology with other methodologies because it casts them aside as illegitimate or only playing at doing thing / engaging in fakery.

It does not imagine there is any other way. It says we are really doing the thing, and you are not (if you do not do it our way).

On a basic level it should be obvious that some adjustments in language need to be made when discussing things with people not coming from our communities. That say when discussing say Apocalypse World if I make no effort to do so in a way that is not deeply steeped in the language of Story Now play culture than I am not likely to be successful communicating with people not deeply steeped in that play culture. The same is true when discussing trad games with people who are not deeply steeped in that culture of play.

There's this sense that instead of meeting us halfway you expect us to meet you where you are (with no expectation you will do anything on your own to understand where we are coming from).

You are drawing a value judgment from what so am saying that isn’t there.

 

[Campbell]

You are drawing a value judgment from what so am saying that isn’t there.

I'm not saying that you personally are making a judgement. I am saying that the terminology itself only addresses itself, only imagines itself and leaves no room for other things to exist and be legitimate. That it cannot be used to compare and contrast because it leaves no room for anything else. This is not @Bedrockgames issue. It's trad culture defining itself as the definition of what roleplaying games should be in their platonic form. That it leaves no room for other forms of play to exist (and be legitimate or authentic).

It's not that slight is meant. It's a failure to imagine that there might be any other way.