AnotherGuy
Hero
I'm not sure, I suspect this may be subjective.
As a player for me it depends on two things - the eloquence of the GM and how much time my head space is out of the fiction dealing with the meta.
D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.
- Thread starter Reynard
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As a player for me it depends on two things - the eloquence of the GM and how much time my head space is out of the fiction dealing with the meta.
clearstream
(He, Him)
It sounds like you agree with me that they may be likened inasmuch as they are applications of discretion by specific participants.
EDIT I perhaps noticed something interesting here. Why would I count extrapolating as an application of discretion rather than choice? One has to remember that the application is to the question of whether to call for a roll. What is wanted at that point is a reasonable belief that meaningful consequences will be entrained. That chimes with how folk very often play procedures that require discerning-consequences: they call for a roll on the basis of a belief its consequences will be interesting without having chosen what those consequences are going to be. Two notions suggested in the BW Codex for how that can work are 1) GM sees that the consequences are implicit in the test, and 2) GM maintains the appropriate attitude (one liable to devise appropriate consequences.)
I agree with you that said applications of discretion are then markedly differentiable. One involves comparing what has been said with a description that is part of rules. While the other involves extrapolating or inferring from what has been said along lines suggested by such descriptions.
That job of comparing seems as you say incommensurate with a job of extrapolating. Perhaps too, many participants can more reliably perform the former than the latter, notwithstanding the necessity of the latter in fabricating our shared ongoing narratives.
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EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Agreed. Often, I find high detail does make it easier to believe the thing is grounded. But sometimes, high detail becomes distracting. That can happen by calling attention to itself, especially if it's high detail on things A/C/D and low detail on things B/E/F etc. But it can also happen even if the detail is well-distributed...but clearly nonsensical, which is going to vary a lot from person to person. I'm a physics guy, and to a lesser extent a philosophy guy (though I cannot hold a candle to the actual philosophers here like pemerton). So if I hear of overtly ridiculous physics in detail, it's gonna stick in my craw badly (I often have this happen with societies where their water and/or food sources don't make sense), or if there's a legal system or belief system built on dodgy exploitable rules that were clearly put together by an amateur.
I usually try to keep comments about that to myself if it crops up in a game, because I know it's bad form to be the "WELL, AKSHULLY..." unless the problem is truly overwhelmingly egregious (and I try to err on the side of caution for what counts as such).
This is one of the reasons why I put forward the notion, previously, that using systems one is unfamiliar with can directly create a feeling of non-verisimilitude completely unrelated to the actual rules themselves or their origin. Until you know a system like the back of your hand, you're gonna be needing to check what the system expects relatively frequently. That pulls one's headspace out of the fiction to deal with the meta, as you put it. Totally unrelated to whether the system is new or old chronologically--it's whether it's familiar or unfamiliar to the user.
As a good example, I really really don't grok what people mean when they say that playing old-school games means you stop "thinking with your character sheet". Because on the one hand...that isn't how I played 4e. Yet on the other, when I did play an OSR game (Labyrinth Lord, specifically)....I saw a lot of what seemed to me like playing from one's character sheet, just with things that were bought or carried rather than things that were learned or practiced. And, at least for me, it felt hard to get into my character's headspace (even though I was playing a pretty standard character type for me--the GM was a rock, no complaints about him or his conduct), specifically because I was constantly second-guessing whether stuff I wanted to do made sense within the rules of LL. Not knowing its systems, I often had to check rules again before making any decisions. Further, I was feeling pretty lost with the rules at times because of the...well, if I'm being uncharitable, what felt like intentional obscurantism in the rules, but a more charitable way to put it is the intentional avoidance of unified mechanics and instead creating bespoke ones for each major need.
What @hawkeyefan said. "Exciting" is a useful shorthand for "interesting, exciting, emotionally resonant, etc".'
@zakael19 got at something similar when referring to amazement (I think that was the word - sorry, I didn't hit quote and haven't gone back to check) at what might be said or revealed in "downtime" PC interactions.
I aspire to play being exciting, engaging, interesting, surprising, tragic, hilarious or otherwise moving, as much as possible. Of course there are breathers after dramatic moments, chatter, breaks to pour drinks or whatever. But I don't need what I have called upthread "low stakes" action declaration and what @Campbell recently called "conflict neutral" action declaration, where the PCs are just "poking" at the setting so that the players can elicit further information from the GM about what the ingame situation is. Nor do I need extended periods of no-stakes colourful in-character narration (eg someone upthread talked about half an hour of play choosing outfits for a ball - maybe @AlViking?).
Let's suppose that your game goes x,x,x,x,H,x,x,x,x,x,x,x,x,H,. . . . - where the "x"s represent non-highlight events, and the "H"'s represent highlight events. And let's suppose that this is verisimilitudinous. Now suppose someone else's game elides all those "x"s - they are understood to happen offscreen, or are narrated through quickly via saying "yes" to no-stakes action declarations, and only the "H"s actually get time and attention at the table. That second game is all highlights, but its setting and fiction are just as verisimilitudinous, because idential to, the setting and fiction of the first game.
The short answer is no.
The slightly longer answer is that, if your character has revenge as a goal, then the GM will be framing scenes now that somehow speak to that goal. And that is what you as a player will be engaging with. And it is that engagement - that interesting and emotionally resonant stuff right now - that we are playing for.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Fair enough. I hadn't looked at it from that perspective.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I understand what you're getting at, and it absolutely makes sense that handling the game that way gives you a feeling of verisimilitude. But for me, skipping or heavily abstracting more than the most banal of activities makes me feel like the director is constantly calling, "cut!" and re-setting the scene for the next piece of drama to show an audience, and that's just not what I want out of my play. I'm really, really not saying there's any problem with your and others scene-framing style (and if I'm mis-characterizing your play I apologize), or that a more casual method is in any way objectively better, but I personally do not care for it.
Yes, I've occasionally had long shopping trips. I don't "allow" it in any sense because I don't intervene in what the players are doing as long as I don't believe they are simply misunderstanding something. As far as shopping for outfits? The players were having a blast, why would I tell my players that the fun they were having was wrong?
We have different approaches and that's fine. But as @robertsconley eloquently pointed out above it does point out quite clearly that you are exercising a great deal of control on what the players do and putting your thumb on the flow of the game when you stop no-stakes colorful-in-character narration. The only time I intervene with what the players are doing is if I think there's a misunderstanding or I suppose if one player is grandstanding and hogging the spotlight while everyone is bored. But it's been a long time since I had a spotlight hog, usually I can deal with it in other ways including having an out-of-play discussion.
I do keep track of pace of play, think of ways to vary the tempo of play with heavy RP session if the last session was heavy combat, light hearted moments when there's been a lot of doom-and-gloom lately. But I don't tell players what their characters should be doing, I give them interesting options, change things up if I think the enthusiasm is dragging. But if they want to spend a half hour on a shopping trip and it's fun for the group? A-shopping we will go.
There is no need to apologise!
But what prompted my response to your earlier post was that you framed it as "to me, a game that's all highlights makes no sense to me as a verisimilitudinous setting". That is, as a property of the fiction - ie the setting.
Whereas in your post I just quoted, you frame it as being about your experience of the fiction - ie whether the way the fiction is presented elicits in you a certain sort of feeling/response.
Perhaps you think the distinction I've just drawn is a very fine one, or quibbling too much over your choice of words. But to me the distinction I've drawn seems to be a recurring one in this thread - it also comes up when I (or another poster) say(s) that imaginary things can't have real causal impacts, and others respond that an actual person imagining something can have real causal impacts. Of course the latter is true, but the former denial is not talking about acts or experiences of imagining but rather the imaginary things themselves.
And the reason I (and I think some other posters eg @hawkeyefan) have wanted to stress this difference, between the fiction and the way people experience or imagine the fiction, and how this makes them feel or act is because it is the latter which matters to how play - as a real event in the real world - occurs.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I agree that the experience is the more important bit. For me, and I suspect to some degree for you, to get the experience I want I have to use the process I want.
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