Pawn can't happen without author stance, and you certainly aren't authoring anything in the beginning of that module.
See, this isn't correct.
To
requote:
In Author stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions based on the real person's priorities, then retroactively "motivates" the character to perform them. (Without that second, retroactive step, this is fairly called Pawn stance.)
And to rephrase that: in
pawn stance, a player determines a character's decisions and actions based on the real person's priorities; in
author stance, a player supplements what otherwise would be a pawn stance action declaration with a second step, of retroactively imputing an appropriate motivation to the character.
Why give
pawn stance that label? Because the character is a "piece" (or "pawn", or to use Gyagx's terminology a "figure") used by the player to succeed at the game, where
success of course is determined by real world priorities.
Why give
autor stance that label? Because the player, in moving his/her "piece" in a way that gives effect to his/her priorities, is also
authoring the character by establishing appropriate mental states in the fiction that, within the fiction, make sense of the character's actions. A pretty typical example: in the first session of a D&D game, a player decides that his PC approaches the other PCs in the tavern, declaring that "My guy thinks that pair of elves looks pretty interesting, and so I introduce myself to them" - the player's real world priority (of getting the party together) is what actually motivates the action declaration, but the player retroactively imputes a motivation to his/her PC ("those elves look pretty interesting").
To declare actions in
actor stance, those motivations already need to be established, so that there is sufficient material to infer actions without needing to introduce the player's real world priorities.
I understand and I'm saying you are wrong. If I have no background, and nothing else to go off of, and the DM says to me, "There is are light woods ahead of you," that is sufficient for me to achieve actor stance. My character has knowledge of the woods, has perceived the woods, and I can based off those things inform the DM as to what action I take. If I declare that I got into the woods and look for a trail through," that is an actor stance declaration.
No it's not. Where does your PC's motivation to look for a trail come from?
We don't need to know his mental state. We only need to know what he knows and perceives about the situation. You are ascribing more to actor stance than is required or included in the Forge's definition.
Yes we do, and no I'm not.
Choices and decision are grounded in motivations. The player can either decide for his/her PC using real world motivations ("priorities"), in which case we have author stance. Or can decide using only the PC's mental states and extrapolating from them, in which case we have actor stance.
Here's another quote from Ron Edwards, in
one of his review essays about "fantasy heartbreakers", that feeds into the point I'm making:
The key assumption throughout all these games is that if a gaming experience is to be intelligent (and all Fantasy Heartbreakers make this claim), then the most players can be relied upon to provide is kind of the "Id" of play - strategizing, killing, and conniving throughout the session. They are the raw energy, the driving "go," and the GM's role is to say, "You just scrap, strive, and kill, and I'll show ya, with this book, how it's all a brilliant evocative fantasy."
It's not Illusionism - there's no illusion at all, just movement across the landscape and the willingness to fight as the baseline player things to do. At worst, the players are apparently slathering kill-counters using simple alignment systems to set the bar for a given group . . .; sometimes, they are encouraged to give characters "personality" like "hates fish" or "likes fancy clothes"; and most of the time, they're just absent from the text, "Player who? Character who?" . . . The Explorative, imaginative pleasure experienced by a player - and most importantly, communicated among players - simply doesn't factor into play at all, even in the more Simulationist Fantasy Heartbreakers, which are universally centered on Setting.
I think this is a serious problem for fantasy role-playing design. It's very, very hard to break out of D&D Fantasy assumptions for many people, and the first step, I think, is to generate the idea that protagonism (for any GNS mode) can mean more than energy and ego.
To build on what Edwards says here, of course one can trivially "convert" pawn stance into actor stance if one posits that one's PC has no motivations other than those of Edwards's "Id": a drive to "win" by killing and looting. But the goal of post-D&D "simulationist" FRPGs like RQ, C&S and the like is to enable actor stance in a richer sense than this, by providing sufficient context (psychological and/or social) to permit a relatively rich inhabitation of the PC and resultant actor stance action declarations.
Throngor perceives that the caves exist and knows where they are. His actor stance action declaration in response to that knowledge and perception is to mount a personal assault on the Caves. That's all you need.
<snip>
I can go through that module making each and every decision based on what my PC knows and perceives about the situations at hand.
This is precisely an example of Edwards's "Id". There's no character here, no in-fiction motivation. Just raw drive, which is indistinguishable from the player's desire to succeed at the game by beating the dungeon.
In an RPG, if a player is playing Spot, he will determine the motivations and such.
Of course, but that tells us nothing about stance. If those motivations are determined
as part of the process of action declaration - which in RPGing they very commonly are - then we have
author stance. Similarly, if your decide that your PC looks for a trail through the woods because you, the player, are thinking about what seems like a sensible thing to do in a wargaming sense, and you then impute to your PC a belief that
trails lead to safety, that is author stance too.
This is a bad example.
<snip>
Writing a book is not roleplaying, so you are comparing apples and oranges here.
With respect, this suggest that you've either missed the point of the example, or missed the logic of "stances".
An author deciding what Spot does next, and a player deciding what his/her PC does next, are very similar (in some cases perhaps identical) decision-situations, and both can be approached in actor or author stance as defined by Ron Edwards. (You can't write a story in pawn stance, at least if your character is to have any inner life at all.)
pemerton said:
I disagree. The adventuring prince/noble is a trope. My PC could marry the princess and still go off and search for the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth with his buddies in his free time.
This seems to completely miss Kubasik's point.
When Kubasik says "Modules disintegrated the moment a player got the bright idea of having his character become a lord by courting a princess," he is talking about
courting the princess being the actual substance of play. I have played Prince Valiant session in which courting noble ladies has been the principle focus of play. The system supports that. It supports romantic rivalry, whether between PCs or between PCs and NPCs. B2 doesn't: as Kubasik says, D&D "offered no rules for courting a princess". In B/X and Gygax's AD&D there are rules for fighting, for searching doors and walls, for opening doors, for encountering and evading rival armed bands, and for determining the reaction rolls of de-contexualised strangers. There are no rules for courtship or for romantic rivalry. And a game which is
The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth will not, cannot, have courtship and romance as its principal focus of play.
This idea that you have to have incredible richness in order to achieve actor stance results the achievement of actor stance being a snipe hunt.
Nonsense. When I play Burning Wheel, I'm nearly always declaring actions in actor stance.
Here's an excellent description of the process by Eero Tuovinen (again, he doesn't use the particular terminology but he describes the phenomenon well in the context of what he calls "the standard narrativistic model" of RPGing):
The rest of the players [ie all but the GM] each have their own characters to play. They play their characters according to the advocacy role: the important part is that they naturally allow the character’s interests to come through based on what they imagine of the character’s nature and background. . . .
[O]nce the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character.
Burning Wheel has formal elements of PC build that help establish these PC motivations. For instance, my character Thurgon has the following relevant elements on his PC sheet:
Beliefs
*The Lord of Battle will lead me to glory
*I am a Knight of the Iron Tower: by devotion and example I will lead the righteous to glorious victory
*Harm and infamy will befall Auxol no more!
*Aramina will need my protection
Instincts
*When entering battle, always speak a prayer to the Lord of Battle
*If an innocent is threatened, interpose myself
*When camping, always ensure that the campfire is burning
Relationships
*Xanthippe (Mother, on the family estate at Auxol)
*Aramina (sorceress companion)
Reputations & Affiliations
*+1D rep (last Knight of the Iron Tower)
*+1D rep (infamous among demons - intransigent demon foe) [This one was earned in play]
*+1D aff von Pfizer family
*+1D aff Order of the Iron Tower
*+1D aff nobility
But actor stance is eminently possible in games without these sorts of formal elements. In one RM campaign, one of the PCs was a rather powerful sorcerer who had been born a slave, bought his freedom, and climbed the social ladder. He had a nice townhouse that he leased, and had aspirations to become a magistrate of his city. These features of the character made it easy for me, as GM, to present situations that could be responded to in actor stance.
And there are obviously other ways to approach this outside of the scene-framing method that I personally incline towards. For instance, if the setting is rich, and the PC is built by reference to that setting (see, again, RQ for an example) then - provided the player understands the setting and his/her PC's place in it - then actor stance is relatively easy to achieve.
Of course, it's always possible for a GM to frame a situation that is, from the perspective of the player adopting actor stance, a non-sequitur. If the GM doesn't describe a situation that speaks in some fashion to the motivations established by a player for his/her PC then the player will have to drop out of actor stance and adopt some other stance (see eg [MENTION=6972053]Numidius[/MENTION]'s post about his/her (? sorry, I'm not sure what the right pronoun is) WHFRPG game, where to make things happen it was necessary to declare actions in pawn stance). Or in a setting-based game, if the GM's situation doesn't engage the player's understanding of the setting, the result might be pawn stance, or even the degenerate case of the player asking the GM
What would my character do in response to such-and-such?
Whether this sort of non-sequitur (assuming its not degenerate) counts as good or bad GMing will depend on the details of system, table, mood, present in-game circumstances, etc. In my RM game, the player of the would-be magistrate sorcerer sometimes declared actions in author stance rather than actor stance because he wanted to facilitate game play, maintain party cohesion, etc. And sometimes I would frame situations that were intended to engage a different PC, and then the player of
this PC had to retroactively decide what his character thought about those things.
But to me, the thought that
if actor stance depends on rich motivations than it's hard to do suggests a lack of familiarity with the relevant techniques, whether setting or scene-framing based. Most of the history of post-D&D RPGing, and even elements of D&D RPGing (eg some of the 2nd ed era approaches to setting) is an attempt to develop and give effect to these techniques which will enable actor stance!
