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A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7583968" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>Again, you may have misunderstood my point. I'm not talking about the meanings of words. I'm talking about how certain human decision-making processes work.</p><p></p><p>The decision-making process that is inovlved in <em>actor stance</em> is the following: a real person, sitting at a game table, makes a decision/choice for a character in that game <em>by reference not to real world priorities</em>, but rather to <em>that character's knowledge, perceptions, motivations etc</em>.</p><p></p><p>This simply can't happen if there is not sufficient richness in respect of those fictional mental states.</p><p></p><p>For instance, sometimes school students are given the task of "finishing a story" which is provided to them, incomplete. Suppose the "story starter" is noting more than the following sentence: <em>Spot rany yapping to the front door!" And suppose the instruction to the student is <em>Write what Spot did next."</em></em></p><p><em><em></em></em></p><p><em><em>I assert that it is impossible to complete that writing task adopting <em>actor stance</em> with respect to Spot. We know nothing about Spot's motivations (does Spot yap when his/her owner comes home? When s/he hears a burglar? Both?), circumstances (is Spot at home? on the loose in the veterinarian's surgery?), etc.</em></em></p><p><em><em></em></em></p><p><em><em>The student who completes that writing task will have to adopt <em>author stance</em> with respect to Spot - fill in details of situation and behviour as the student thinks will show of his/her writing skills, and then impute (retroactively, as it were) the appropriate motivations and beliefs to Spot.</em></em></p><p><em><em></em></em></p><p><em><em>The same applies in RPGing. Suppose that we have a character who is defined as <em>Throngor the 1st level NG dwarven warrior</em>, and the situation is the referee's narration at the start of B2 - which is a description of arrival at the Keep, a last outpost on the borders of civiisation. Now the GM turns to Throngor's player and asks <em>So, what do you do next?</em> This is the same as the writing exercise above: there is simply not sufficient fictional detail about Throngor's mental states for the player to make a decision in actor stance. Is Thronger inclined to seek hire as a man-at-arms? To forswear violence and join a monastic order? To seek to be knighted by the Czstellan? Suppose Throngor learns about the Caves of Chaos, is Throngor inclined to ignore them, on the grounds that they seem to have caused little harm so far? To try topersuade the Castellan to lead an expedition against the Caves? To persuade the local peasants to labour to build additional fortifications to provide protection aginst possible assault?</em></em></p><p><em><em></em></em></p><p><em><em>We all know that, in fact, B2 really only works as a module if Throngor's player (i) has Throngor seek out "adventure", which in classic D&D terms means a dungeon to assault, and (ii) when Throngor's player learns from the GM about the Caves of Chaos, decides to mount a persoanl assault on the Caves. But none of that can be extracted from the fiction of <em>Throngor, 1st level NG dwarven warrior</em>. It's all pawn stance or perhaps author stance if Throngor's player writes in some backstory motivation to do with Throngor's hatred of goblins and personal desire to seek revenge against them.</em></em></p><p><em><em></em></em></p><p><em><em>As I've mentioned a couple of times upthread, the desire to enable actor stance by enriching both PC psychological details and the external gameworld social details was one significant driver of the early "simulationist" FRPGs like RQ and C&S. (Of course they don't use Edward's terminology; it hadn't been invented yet. But designers can respond to states of affairs they don't have labels for.)</em></em></p><p><em><em></em></em></p><p><em><em>Christopher Kubasik, in <a href="https://playsorcerer.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/the-interactive-toolkit-part-two-why-do-modules-suck/" target="_blank">his <em>Interactive Toolkit</em> essay</a>, notes the tension between pre-packaged adventure design and actor stance (again, he doesn't use the "stance" terminology because it hadn't been invetned yet; but he's talking about the phenomenon nevertheless):</em></em></p><p><em><em></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>The basic plot form of a story is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition, and arrives at a win, lose or draw. All roleplaying games involve this basic plot in one form or another.</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>Dungeon & Dragons fulfilled this requirement brilliantly and simply. Characters wanted experience points and wanted to gain levels. Any other want they might have had – social, political or personal – was subsumed within the acquisition of levels. Did you want social recognition? A greater understanding of the ways of magic? Influence over people as a religious leader? Pretty much anything your character might have wanted was acquired by gaining levels.</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>Dungeon modules worked for this very reason. A D&D character who wanted to become a lord didn’t go off and court a princess. He became a lord by wandering around dungeons, killing monsters and overcoming traps. The game offered no rules for courting a princess, but did provide rules for becoming a lord at 10th level . . .</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>Modules disintegrated the moment a player got the bright idea of having his character become a lord by courting a princess. . . .</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>The motivation behind hitting on the princess rather than crawling through a series of traps is obvious. First, and perhaps most importantly for some, the idea of wooing a princess was more fun than hanging out in a dungeon. Second, just because the rules didn’t say anything about wooing didn’t mean you couldn’t do it. As we all know, the minute an idea pops into a player’s head, he’s going to try it. Third, the goofiness of acquiring the title of lord by looting holes grated against the sensibilities of many players. They wanted to become lords in ways that made sense. . . .</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>Games released since the advent of D&D have wildly opened up the narrative possibilities of adventures. The dungeon vanished, replaced by the settings of AD&D’s Forgotten Realms, Traveller’s Imperium, Star Wars’ Empire and Vampire’s World of Darkness.</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>Unfortunately, characters in many games still have to stick it out as a group. Since dungeon crawling no longer provides a focus for group activity, characters are often hired, as in Traveller or Shadowrun, or wait around for something bad to happen that they can put an end to, as in most super-hero games. . . .</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>Scene-based modules engage characters in a goal from the start (steal the money, stop Dr. Dread’s Doomsday Ray, get Mr. Johnson his data, make peace with the Prince of Chicago) and offer a set of options of where to go and with whom to speak to fulfill the goal.</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>The problem with scene-based modules is that characters may go anywhere and do anything. Unlike location-based adventures, where it’s understood that everything needed to succeed is geographically at hand, a story-based game suggests that the next vital Clue/person/conflict could be anywhere. This often leads characters to visit places and talk to people (or make assumptions of any kind) not explicitly covered in the module. The GM who bought the module (so she wouldn’t have to make up maps and NPCS) suddenly has to make up both on the spot. . . .</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>[N]o pre-generated adventure can be complete because characters have different motivations.</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>Remember the adventurer who left the dungeon to woo a princess? Before he did that he assumed that if he trashed enough dungeons, a princess would be his once he got to 10th level. His motivations and desires were subsumed within the group activity of exploring dungeons.</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>Let’s say this guy – Charise d’Amor, a lovable rake who’s trying to marry a rich princess – is your character. You arrive at the gaming table and see the GM crack open a new pre-generated adventure, “The Quest of Tallian’s Orb.”</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>A busy wizard hires your group of adventurers to steal back a magical orb that keeps the fair land of Tallian safe from terrible monsters. He tells you what he knows about the theft of the orb. You’re on the doorstep of a scene-based module. You know the goal, the clues and the options of what to do next.</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>Let’s assume the author has done a good job. The clues presented are intriguing, not obvious. The characters encountered are amusing and full of life. The scene descriptions help the GM evoke the proper mood. Every, thing is going fine.</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>And then the princess shows up. The module’s author just put the princess in because she was a fun character who would have some information about the orb’s location. You see, the guy who wrote the module didn’t know your character is Charise d’Amor.</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>Suddenly your character doesn’t care about finding the orb. The only reason he’s out searching for an orb in the first place is to pull together enough cash for a suitable set of clothes and an introduction to royalty. But now he’s got a princess right in front of him. You could play “out hours of flirting with the princess. The story suddenly fractures into tiny pieces.</p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em></p></em></em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><em><em>Does everybody wait around for Charise to woo the princess? Do the others leave your character behind? Do you blow the princess off to stay with the group, even though your character’s motivation is right in front of him?</p><p></em></em></p><p><em><em>The flipside of Kubasik's observation is that when B2-type adventures are working (and there are a <em>lot</em> of adventures of that sort), it's precisely because the players are not making decision in actor stance but rather are making decisions on the basis of real world priorities like <em>keep the group together</em>, <em>don't cause badl blood with the GM by ignoring the adventure</em>, <em>earn XP</em>, <em>have an exciting rather than a boring session</em>, etc.</em></em></p><p><em><em></em></em></p><p><em><em>Some of this doesn't quite make sense, For example, both <em>ability checks</em> and <em>exploration</em> require action declarations, which correpsond to choices/decisions made by the character. Players who declare such actions at the start of B2 are declaring those action in pawn stance - that is, they have real world priorities (namely, to learn what the GM's adventure set-up is) and because of thsee priorities they declare actions for their PCs (like "We hang out at the tavern to collect rumours") which will help them with those priorities.</em></em></p><p><em><em></em></em></p><p><em><em>Perhaps because of [MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION]'s misunderstanding about the relevance of Edwards's account of <em>stance</em> to your concerns about "metagaming", you think that there is some important connection between stance and metagaming,. But there is not. Stance is about the basis on which, and method whereby, players make action declarations for their characters. And D&D adventures depend upon the players making those decisions on the basis of certain well-known real world priorities.</em></em></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7583968, member: 42582"] Again, you may have misunderstood my point. I'm not talking about the meanings of words. I'm talking about how certain human decision-making processes work. The decision-making process that is inovlved in [i]actor stance[/i] is the following: a real person, sitting at a game table, makes a decision/choice for a character in that game [i]by reference not to real world priorities[/i], but rather to [i]that character's knowledge, perceptions, motivations etc[/i]. This simply can't happen if there is not sufficient richness in respect of those fictional mental states. For instance, sometimes school students are given the task of "finishing a story" which is provided to them, incomplete. Suppose the "story starter" is noting more than the following sentence: [i]Spot rany yapping to the front door!" And suppose the instruction to the student is [i]Write what Spot did next." I assert that it is impossible to complete that writing task adopting [i]actor stance[/i] with respect to Spot. We know nothing about Spot's motivations (does Spot yap when his/her owner comes home? When s/he hears a burglar? Both?), circumstances (is Spot at home? on the loose in the veterinarian's surgery?), etc. The student who completes that writing task will have to adopt [i]author stance[/i] with respect to Spot - fill in details of situation and behviour as the student thinks will show of his/her writing skills, and then impute (retroactively, as it were) the appropriate motivations and beliefs to Spot. The same applies in RPGing. Suppose that we have a character who is defined as [i]Throngor the 1st level NG dwarven warrior[/i], and the situation is the referee's narration at the start of B2 - which is a description of arrival at the Keep, a last outpost on the borders of civiisation. Now the GM turns to Throngor's player and asks [i]So, what do you do next?[/i] This is the same as the writing exercise above: there is simply not sufficient fictional detail about Throngor's mental states for the player to make a decision in actor stance. Is Thronger inclined to seek hire as a man-at-arms? To forswear violence and join a monastic order? To seek to be knighted by the Czstellan? Suppose Throngor learns about the Caves of Chaos, is Throngor inclined to ignore them, on the grounds that they seem to have caused little harm so far? To try topersuade the Castellan to lead an expedition against the Caves? To persuade the local peasants to labour to build additional fortifications to provide protection aginst possible assault? We all know that, in fact, B2 really only works as a module if Throngor's player (i) has Throngor seek out "adventure", which in classic D&D terms means a dungeon to assault, and (ii) when Throngor's player learns from the GM about the Caves of Chaos, decides to mount a persoanl assault on the Caves. But none of that can be extracted from the fiction of [i]Throngor, 1st level NG dwarven warrior[/i]. It's all pawn stance or perhaps author stance if Throngor's player writes in some backstory motivation to do with Throngor's hatred of goblins and personal desire to seek revenge against them. As I've mentioned a couple of times upthread, the desire to enable actor stance by enriching both PC psychological details and the external gameworld social details was one significant driver of the early "simulationist" FRPGs like RQ and C&S. (Of course they don't use Edward's terminology; it hadn't been invented yet. But designers can respond to states of affairs they don't have labels for.) Christopher Kubasik, in [url=https://playsorcerer.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/the-interactive-toolkit-part-two-why-do-modules-suck/]his [i]Interactive Toolkit[/i] essay[/url], notes the tension between pre-packaged adventure design and actor stance (again, he doesn't use the "stance" terminology because it hadn't been invetned yet; but he's talking about the phenomenon nevertheless): [indent]The basic plot form of a story is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition, and arrives at a win, lose or draw. All roleplaying games involve this basic plot in one form or another. Dungeon & Dragons fulfilled this requirement brilliantly and simply. Characters wanted experience points and wanted to gain levels. Any other want they might have had – social, political or personal – was subsumed within the acquisition of levels. Did you want social recognition? A greater understanding of the ways of magic? Influence over people as a religious leader? Pretty much anything your character might have wanted was acquired by gaining levels. Dungeon modules worked for this very reason. A D&D character who wanted to become a lord didn’t go off and court a princess. He became a lord by wandering around dungeons, killing monsters and overcoming traps. The game offered no rules for courting a princess, but did provide rules for becoming a lord at 10th level . . . Modules disintegrated the moment a player got the bright idea of having his character become a lord by courting a princess. . . . The motivation behind hitting on the princess rather than crawling through a series of traps is obvious. First, and perhaps most importantly for some, the idea of wooing a princess was more fun than hanging out in a dungeon. Second, just because the rules didn’t say anything about wooing didn’t mean you couldn’t do it. As we all know, the minute an idea pops into a player’s head, he’s going to try it. Third, the goofiness of acquiring the title of lord by looting holes grated against the sensibilities of many players. They wanted to become lords in ways that made sense. . . . Games released since the advent of D&D have wildly opened up the narrative possibilities of adventures. The dungeon vanished, replaced by the settings of AD&D’s Forgotten Realms, Traveller’s Imperium, Star Wars’ Empire and Vampire’s World of Darkness. Unfortunately, characters in many games still have to stick it out as a group. Since dungeon crawling no longer provides a focus for group activity, characters are often hired, as in Traveller or Shadowrun, or wait around for something bad to happen that they can put an end to, as in most super-hero games. . . . Scene-based modules engage characters in a goal from the start (steal the money, stop Dr. Dread’s Doomsday Ray, get Mr. Johnson his data, make peace with the Prince of Chicago) and offer a set of options of where to go and with whom to speak to fulfill the goal. The problem with scene-based modules is that characters may go anywhere and do anything. Unlike location-based adventures, where it’s understood that everything needed to succeed is geographically at hand, a story-based game suggests that the next vital Clue/person/conflict could be anywhere. This often leads characters to visit places and talk to people (or make assumptions of any kind) not explicitly covered in the module. The GM who bought the module (so she wouldn’t have to make up maps and NPCS) suddenly has to make up both on the spot. . . . [N]o pre-generated adventure can be complete because characters have different motivations. Remember the adventurer who left the dungeon to woo a princess? Before he did that he assumed that if he trashed enough dungeons, a princess would be his once he got to 10th level. His motivations and desires were subsumed within the group activity of exploring dungeons. Let’s say this guy – Charise d’Amor, a lovable rake who’s trying to marry a rich princess – is your character. You arrive at the gaming table and see the GM crack open a new pre-generated adventure, “The Quest of Tallian’s Orb.” A busy wizard hires your group of adventurers to steal back a magical orb that keeps the fair land of Tallian safe from terrible monsters. He tells you what he knows about the theft of the orb. You’re on the doorstep of a scene-based module. You know the goal, the clues and the options of what to do next. Let’s assume the author has done a good job. The clues presented are intriguing, not obvious. The characters encountered are amusing and full of life. The scene descriptions help the GM evoke the proper mood. Every, thing is going fine. And then the princess shows up. The module’s author just put the princess in because she was a fun character who would have some information about the orb’s location. You see, the guy who wrote the module didn’t know your character is Charise d’Amor. Suddenly your character doesn’t care about finding the orb. The only reason he’s out searching for an orb in the first place is to pull together enough cash for a suitable set of clothes and an introduction to royalty. But now he’s got a princess right in front of him. You could play “out hours of flirting with the princess. The story suddenly fractures into tiny pieces. Does everybody wait around for Charise to woo the princess? Do the others leave your character behind? Do you blow the princess off to stay with the group, even though your character’s motivation is right in front of him?[/indent] The flipside of Kubasik's observation is that when B2-type adventures are working (and there are a [i]lot[/i] of adventures of that sort), it's precisely because the players are not making decision in actor stance but rather are making decisions on the basis of real world priorities like [i]keep the group together[/i], [i]don't cause badl blood with the GM by ignoring the adventure[/i], [i]earn XP[/i], [i]have an exciting rather than a boring session[/i], etc. Some of this doesn't quite make sense, For example, both [i]ability checks[/i] and [i]exploration[/i] require action declarations, which correpsond to choices/decisions made by the character. Players who declare such actions at the start of B2 are declaring those action in pawn stance - that is, they have real world priorities (namely, to learn what the GM's adventure set-up is) and because of thsee priorities they declare actions for their PCs (like "We hang out at the tavern to collect rumours") which will help them with those priorities. Perhaps because of [MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION]'s misunderstanding about the relevance of Edwards's account of [i]stance[/i] to your concerns about "metagaming", you think that there is some important connection between stance and metagaming,. But there is not. Stance is about the basis on which, and method whereby, players make action declarations for their characters. And D&D adventures depend upon the players making those decisions on the basis of certain well-known real world priorities.[/i][/i] [/QUOTE]
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