A "theory" thread

[AbdulAlhazred]

Can I ask you to reread what I wrote? I am speaking there of a relating or retelling: the game process yielding a linear narrative. I point that out in order to get at the exact "fiction" that the OP is concerned with, which I believe is closer to the "fictional positioning" that VB describes as "a feature that some games have and others don't". It is that latter technical feature - fictional positioning - that I think your discussion of arrows rightly relates to.

Vincent opens that blog post with



He goes on to point out that many features that might be thought to be unique to roleplaying (making them putatively exceptional) are found in other games. However, he is comfortable saying that fictional positioning is a distinct technical feature of RPG. I'm saying that "fiction" in the common sense of a linear narrative yielded by some process, is not unique (among games) to RPG. But only as I say, to better get at the OP's theory.

EDIT And note here some consequences of Vincent's opening sentences. RPGs are fundamentally games. Different RPGs are different games.

Yeah, I'm not really saying EITHER of those things. RPGs are not all fundamentally the same, EXCEPT (and here Vince and I agree IMHO) they must involve an interaction between fiction and mechanics/state in which both MATTER (IE different fiction or different state would result in a different outcome and thus differences in following fiction, etc.). Beyond that @pemerton enumerated a few possible 'Processes of Play' as I call them, or distinct STYLES of process of play. There are deep differences between games using different ones. Likewise when discussing what Vince is calling 'exceptionalism', I don't think he is meaning to say that RPGs are JUST LIKE other kinds of games. He's saying they ARE games, and thus what we understand about games in general applies to RPGs. Nothing I am saying is in contravention to either of those positions, as I understand them.

As I said before, in reference to fiction and games in general, it may well be an interesting area of study "the fiction of games." I personally am not that interested in it when it doesn't integrate with play (IE when it is definitionally not an RPG). Anyway, the upshot is that we can say "these games are board games" and "this games are card games" and we can say "these games are RPGs" and I think there are fairly clear cut ways to decide how to apply those labels. That doesn't mean we should focus EXCLUSIVELY on those labels, card games and board games surely share elements, and so do RPGs.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I've only read it, but I would love to play it!

I think its definitely one of those games where the GM better be pretty deeply knowledgeable about how to employ scene framing and riff off of what the players bring to it. I mean, I'm sure @Manbearcat or @pemerton could handle it quite well, amongst others. I found it was hard to get trad players to stop trying to treat their character attributes like skills and expect pass/fail kind of results. That may just have been the group I ran those games for though, lol.

 

[niklinna]

I think its definitely one of those games where the GM better be pretty deeply knowledgeable about how to employ scene framing and riff off of what the players bring to it. I mean, I'm sure @Manbearcat or @pemerton could handle it quite well, amongst others. I found it was hard to get trad players to stop trying to treat their character attributes like skills and expect pass/fail kind of results. That may just have been the group I ran those games for though, lol.

Pass/fail gameplay can be surprisingly hard to unglue oneself from! I often wonder why.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Pass/fail gameplay can be surprisingly hard to unglue oneself from! I often wonder why.

I think its just plain a very obvious concept. MANY games reflect elements of reality, albeit usually with low fidelity. Monopoly has banks, money, property, improvements, etc. You model the things and interactions of the real world in a fairly one-to-one way, and you get traditional RPGs, basically. Once people have latched onto that concept, its not necessarily easy to move on to other ways of thinking about it.

I mean, I was very aware of the limitations of existing RPGs, even back as early as 1980. I can remember we would sometimes talk about it and you could find plenty of discussion, some even in places like Dragon Magazine. Certainly we all understood that, conceptually it wasn't possible to do simulation of the real world in a convincing way. Yet, the sorts of approaches, which can avoid these problems, didn't REALLY occur to us at all! Fundamentally the "model things and interactions of the real world one-for-one" conceptual framework was so omnipresent in gaming of that era that even when things like 'plot coupons' or resources that were awarded based on goals or in accordance with conforming to genre or whatever were developed, nobody ever thought to rebuild the WHOLE PROCESS OF PLAY around that.

I can remember wanting EXACTLY WHAT PbtA or other similar games can deliver, but with absolutely no idea how to get there whatsoever. We tried all sorts of things, 'better' simulation, super detailed settings with special embedded rules to make things happen in a 'natural way', etc. etc. etc. and yet we never ever once thought of basing the fundamental 'unit of action' of play, the move, on the character's/players intent, or making a check mechanism reflect a choice of possible variations of plot instead of reflecting something inside the fiction (IE whether you hit someone or not).

I cannot entirely answer the WHY, but I have 25 years of having learned the hard way how tough it is to move beyond that paradigm. Now, maybe if I'd been lucky and had been tapped into the right part of the RPG community in the early-to-mid '90s I might have gotten in on the solution then. Instead it was maybe more like 2009 after I was doing a lot of reading posts about playing 4e that it really clicked.

 

[niklinna]

I dunno, I think it might spring from the original "action tests" in D&D being pretty much restricted to combat, in which a swing of the sword either hits or misses. I'm not familiar enough with the early history to know if they did special failures on a natural 1, but even most natural 20s were often just treated as MOAR damage. Once you get fixed on that, it's like blinders when you try to extrapolate to anything else.

But, like, if I imagine having to make a test to run across a busy street, I do not at all think that missing the die roll means I simply stand there as the cars go by. The result of a failure is a serious consequence: getting hit by a car! Or maybe a bus. Or, less serious for me personally, causing a driver to swerve and hit another vehicle, leading to a pileup that does prevent me from cross the street—at least quickly. Once the pileup is piled up, I can just climb over some cars and be on my merry way!

Edit: Moved a badly placed comma.

 

[clearstream]

Yeah, I'm not really saying EITHER of those things. RPGs are not all fundamentally the same, EXCEPT (and here Vince and I agree IMHO) they must involve an interaction between fiction and mechanics/state in which both MATTER (IE different fiction or different state would result in a different outcome and thus differences in following fiction, etc.). Beyond that @pemerton enumerated a few possible 'Processes of Play' as I call them, or distinct STYLES of process of play. There are deep differences between games using different ones. Likewise when discussing what Vince is calling 'exceptionalism', I don't think he is meaning to say that RPGs are JUST LIKE other kinds of games. He's saying they ARE games, and thus what we understand about games in general applies to RPGs. Nothing I am saying is in contravention to either of those positions, as I understand them.

As I said before, in reference to fiction and games in general, it may well be an interesting area of study "the fiction of games." I personally am not that interested in it when it doesn't integrate with play (IE when it is definitionally not an RPG). Anyway, the upshot is that we can say "these games are board games" and "this games are card games" and we can say "these games are RPGs" and I think there are fairly clear cut ways to decide how to apply those labels. That doesn't mean we should focus EXCLUSIVELY on those labels, card games and board games surely share elements, and so do RPGs.

Unfortunately I seem to have drawn your focus to matters that relate to "Different RPGs set different rules for what the players are allowed to tell us about their characters; and for what the GM is allowed to tell us about the situation/context" but that are peripheral to the comments of mine that you were responding to.

My post aimed to draw attention, solely, to the technical meaning of the term "fiction" as it appears in for e.g. "The fiction matters." Whereas, @pemerton rightly advanced concepts such as "shared imagination" and (of participants) "how they contribute to the fiction and how they engage with the fiction" I wanted to add a specific technical definition.

1. Consider another poster's comment about "getting the magic lamp, based on what is relevant to the story". Historically, and perhaps even today for most folk, a "story" is a prescripted linear narrative. One can have a prescripted linear narrative of a chess game just as readily as one can have a prescripted linear narrative of a band of heroes encountering a lich. This possible definition of fiction is worth having in mind in contrast to the technical definition of fiction that fits the OP's theory.

2. What's described in 1. clearly encompasses recipients of a prescripted linear narrative, and can be extended to include the relater of a prescripted linear narrative. This definition of fiction still does not fit OP's theory.

3. The "fiction" that fits the OP's theory is a technical feature distinct to RPG's that Vincent Baker labelled "fictional positioning." (I spell that out for others who might not be aware of his 2012 discussions.) It has properties that are critical to roleplaying. As you and the OP called out, it must be addressable by the participants during play. Much is made of divisions of authority, but the crucial feature is ongoing authorship of a common fiction, through a continuous process of drafting and revising, that all participate in. (Notice the way in which the foregoing wording recognises solo-RPG as RPG!)

That has a multitude of vital consequences for RPG, and up to here the OP is on solid ground that I believe isn't really in dispute. Notwithstanding, a technical term I propose we have in mind relating to that word "fiction" coming right after "ongoing" is "fictional position" as that makes it more accurate and meaningful.

 

[clearstream]

I want to pull out part of my reply above, to highlight it.

The "fiction" that fits the OP's theory is a technical feature distinct to RPG's that Vincent Baker labelled "fictional positioning." (I spell that out for others who might not be aware of his 2012 discussions.) It has properties that are critical to roleplaying. As the OP called out, it must be addressable by the participants during play. Much is made of divisions of authority, but the crucial feature is ongoing authorship of common fiction, through a continuous process of drafting and revising, that all participate in. (Notice the way in which the foregoing wording recognises solo-RPG as RPG!)

Addressing the OP, I believe it is this - ongoing authorship of common fiction, through a continuous process of drafting and revising, that all participate in - that is at the heart of RPG. The distinct technical feature that enables it is fictional positioning. As games, another technical feature of RPG is to have regulatory and constitutive rules. Notice how the phrasing I have chosen steps back one level from the assumptions in -

And I'm assuming mainstream RPGing in which there are two distinct participant roles: the GM, and the other players. Games like AD&D, Classic Traveller, Rolemaster, Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, etc, etc are all examples of this.

The heart of RPG (as I rephrased it) makes no assumptions about number of players or the way powers of authorship are divided. In this light, much heated argument over the years has been had over something that is no big deal.

EDIT In order to be abundantly clear, I am saying that an RPG is that which has at least

1. ongoing authorship of common fiction, through a continuous process of drafting and revising, that all participate in
2. regulatory and constitutive rules

And I am suggesting that number of players and division of authorial power between them is not at the heart of RPG. It may be that once one gets to those particulars, one is discussing different games and it will in some ways confound theorising to lump them together. (I'm also saying, as an aside, that games other than RPGs may well have story - KOTOR had story - but I point that out only in order to make clearer the vital contention. It's also worth acknowledging that in any attempted ontology of games or a subset thereof, one finds the categories are blurred around the edges.)

 

[pemerton]

But, like, if I imagine having to make a test to run across a busy street, I do not at all think that missing the die roll means I simply stand there as the cars go by. The result of a failure is a serious consequence: getting hit by a car!

Even this is a conceptual challenge within the framework that @AbdulAlhazred has described - because the boundary between (i) I, the player, failed my check and hence I, the PC, failed to dodge the cars, and (ii) I, the player, failed my check and hence that NPC, the driver, failed to dodge me, the PC, is a narrow one. And (ii) is not consistent with the sort of simulationism-by-default that Abdul Alhazred has described.

So should running across the street be a saving throw (to dodge cars)? A check made on the reflexes of the NPC drivers - but who's got all of them statted out? Something else?

 

[niklinna]

Even this is a conceptual challenge within the framework that @AbdulAlhazred has described - because the boundary between (i) I, the player, failed my check and hence I, the PC, failed to dodge the cars, and (ii) I, the player, failed my check and hence that NPC, the driver, failed to dodge me, the PC, is a narrow one. And (ii) is not consistent with the sort of simulationism-by-default that Abdul Alhazred has described.

So should running across the street be a saving throw (to dodge cars)? A check made on the reflexes of the NPC drivers - but who's got all of them statted out? Something else?

It should be an action roll à la Blades in the Dark, which encompasses all that and more (and which may lead to a resist roll, that game's very rough analogue to a saving throw)!

I may be just a little infatuated with that system at the moment. I'm sure the honeymoon will end soon and precipitously.

 

[pemerton]

It should be an action roll à la Blades in the Dark, which encompasses all that and more (and which may lead to a resist roll, that game's very rough analogue to a saving throw)!

Sure, so once you crack that nut you can break out of the limiting paradigm! (Sorry about the mixed metaphors.)