Authenticity in RPGing

[AbdulAlhazred]

In my experience, players don't want to play themselves as anything less than a super hero...
So authenticity is already flown out the door do to their own lack of self-honesty.

If you're talking FGU's 1978 Starships & Spacemen, it's not got anything that describes player-intended behavior (IE, no psych nor alignment) other than class and species; it does indeed have some odd encounters, some of which are more like the original Lost In Space than Star Trek. It only prescribes behavior by reward - XP awards differ by class. What a security officer gets XP for isn't the same list as the Doctor or Engineer. It's also not labeled as Trek, even tho' it was intended as a trek RPG.

I don't recall S&S being much like Star Trek, though honestly I have not really seen it played in practice. It was a rather obscure game.

If you're talking the 1984 licensed one, Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game, that's by FASA, and again, has no player-intended behavior indications other than species. Nor does it even have XP to shape behavior. The only behavioral restrictions are by species.

This game was the first really significant Star Trek RPG and the one I'm discussing. While it is, in fairly classic early '80s RPG tradition, lacking in highly explicit character motivation/direction/restriction there is a VERY strong setting and it is abundantly clear in this game that Star Fleet doesn't put up with monkey business. Should your character go off the rails and do 'whatever', they will certainly be court martialed and face dismissal from the service, at the very least. There was some provision for playing non-Star Fleet characters, IIRC but not a lot. So basically, given that the rest of the party is probably still on your ship, you basically become an NPC at that point. That's assuming you don't get dropped on that psycho rehabilitation penitentiary world! So, I don't really agree with you, though it isn't perhaps spelled out in explicit mechanical terms, you are one of the good guys in FASA ST, or else!

The first license I'm aware of was Heritage Models' Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier... 1978, same time frame as FGU.
It lacks any significant story suggestions; it's sample mission is essentially a refluff of The Galileo Seven. It's rules are almost purely ground combat; no encounter tables, no ship rules. (yes, I'm looking at it. I have not run it.)

The Heritage game was rather poorly known. I really have not even seen a copy of the thing, and I was pretty into that stuff. Gamescience actually put out quite a bit of early Trek stuff, including the first star ship combat rules, and there were some semi-official RP rules associated with that. I forget all the details. Anyway, Heritage's ST game didn't even cover ships, all action takes place on a planet or using the ship/shuttles/etc as plot devices only, and the rules are basically "D&D in Space" with 3d6 based 6 attribute characters. IIRC the game was really intended to have the players run the bridge crew of the Enterprise. It wasn't a particularly successful or innovative game, and thus the FASA Star Trek is really the first complete usable RPG set in that milieu.

Also, FASA Star Trek was published in 1982, so it is still a fairly early game and there wasn't much of a gap between the Heritage and FASA versions. I'm pretty sure we played it a good bit in college when we got bored of AD&D.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't see any reason the GM can't say "This campaign is going to be about playing X type characters; if you do things to move outside of what would put you in the category of X (whether that's getting you ejected from a group that X defines or simply move away from where X is going on) I'm not going to bother to keep following your character."

So in practice, having and sticking to a premise may not dictate behavior directly, but it does say that you're not going to reposition the spotlight of the campaign if you move out of it.

This doesn't necessarily mean that there's extremely sharp lines on how the characters can think about things, but there can be sharp lines on what they can do and, effectively, still stay in the campaign.

As an example, if you're got a group of characters who are a member of a particular organization and do some kind of task (enforce laws, fight enemies, investigate anomalies, whatever) the organization is going to have some rules. You may be able to get away with bucking some of those rules subtly for a while, but the chances are you won't get to indefinitely, and when you're done it doesn't matter what the character does (whether he's ejected from the organization or imprisoned), he's effectively no longer operating in the context of the campaign, even though he at least theoretically still exists in the setting.

(There's a potential case of a character who leaves the organization and still interacts with the other characters still within it, but I think that's a borderline enough case that it can mostly be ignored).

Right, the FASA Star Trek game came up. There are no rules dictating character behavior in the game, per se, but the PCs are definitely Star Fleet starship crew, so they are rather constrained by the conception of such. If your character fails to adhere generally to that ethos they will quickly become an NPC, effectively. Of course, as TOS amply demonstrates, there is wide latitude for ship's officers to interpret those rules, and positive results can go a long ways towards making transgressions which can be explained in those terms OK. So the PCs definitely have a lot of freedom to act and the intent seems to be that their ability to succeed and ability to uphold those values will be put in conflict (certainly the adventures try to do that, as I recall).

 

[Umbran]

Sure. As I said, I’m not saying that it must be so. And I don’t think of the three-clue rule as being as severe as railroading.

So, the three-clue rule, in my experience, has diddly to do with railroading. It has to do with information flow. The three clue rule can be stated simply as, "The party will typically miss two out of every three clues as to what is going on."

Having a thing be true in the world (like, "The Duke Killed the King,") is as much a railroad as the very much sandboxy bit - "There's a dragon living in the Dragontooth Mountains (go figure)."

I’ve never played Ashen Stars, though, so I have no experience with it. How do the published adventures function? How do they work without forcing things a certain way?

So, in Ashen Stars, mysteries are handed to the PCs as jobs they can take on and get paid. They are told, in essence, "Something bad (insert some details) happened in the Foo System. Go find out who or what is responsible, and deal with it, and you'll get paid."

A major problem with many seemingly railroady mysteries - there's a chain of clues, and one clue leads to the next specific clue, and the final clue leads to the answer. And that makes it a railroad. Ashen Stars avoids that by having a large web of information, and many routes through that web to get to the actual answer of what the devil is actually going on. So, when the characters show up, there's a whole slew of places to investigate and people to talk to to get information, not one specific path.

Then, at the end, by design there's always a big ethical conundrum of what to do with the truth. The situation always has political, moral, or ethical complications, for which there is no one right answer. So, while anyone playing the adventure goes through that one point of The Truth, how they get there is up to them, and what they do after that is also up to them. So, no railroad.

Writing one of these does take some effort, as you can't lay down a straight line of clues to the result. If you crib from some famous mystery (like, say, a Sherlock Holmes story) you'll have the issue that the story is the result of Sherlock taking his path through the web, and it will look like a linear story, and if you just replicate that, you're on a railroad. You have to fill out the rest of the web that Sherlock *didn't * go to, to create a non-railroad experience.

 

[hawkeyefan]

There is I think a very good discussion to be had on alignment. I am not fully seeing the authenticity issue here though. In the real world there are constraints and even things people might call cosmic injustices. You can still be your authentic self by going against the grain. There are consequences but I think having a price to staying authentic is somewhat more interesting anyways

I think it depends, and I'm trying to avoid any absolutes... I don't think any of this must always be the case or anything.

So I ran a campaign of Blades in the Dark using the Flame Without Shadow playtest, which has the players playing Bluecoats and Investigators... the cops of the setting.

So that's a constraint, right? But it's one about which each player may have something to say. They may have good ideas about cops, they may have bad ideas about cops (and probably more importantly just societal power structures and classism and so on, in general), or very likely, they may have a mix of good and bad ideas. What they have to say about that premise and the concepts involved is up to them.

If I say "the premise is that you're all good cops", then I've limited what they have to say. Does that mean they can't have something authentic to say? No. But it's more narrow. Now, instead of being about law enforcement in general, it's more likely to be something like "what's it like to be the one good cop amongst a corrupt department" or similar.

We need an initial premise for there to be even a topic about which players may have something to say. Then we can further constrain that topic or not. If we do, we're narrowing the band of what the players may have to say.

Again, I don't think it's a matter of "all the authenticity, or none!" or anything so severe. But I do think that some methods we use in play are going to promote or limit this authenticity.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Even within the milieu of classic Star Trek there's far more that would make sense than simply playing super upstanding regulation characters! I mean, consider Captain Merrick from the Roman Empire planet episode. Granted he's portrayed as washing out of Star Fleet, but he's not exactly made of Kirk-like material. Even Spock goes off the reservation in The Managerie. The original (FGU?) Star Trek RPG had the characters being fairly 'cut and dried' out of the gate, but even there you'd always get hit by some weird scenario straight out of TOS that was going to make you have to figure out how to bend the rules into a pretzel, just like Jim Kirk!

I would have thought so, too! Not least because I used a lifepath generator offered by the makers of the game to come up with my character's backstory and history in the Federation. I have no idea about the specific examples you've offered, but I didn't expect that I was doing anything that really contradicted the setting. And I'm sure that with other GMs who were perhaps not so stringently devoted to the setting, it would not have been an issue.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think it depends, and I'm trying to avoid any absolutes... I don't think any of this must always be the case or anything.

So I ran a campaign of Blades in the Dark using the Flame Without Shadow playtest, which has the players playing Bluecoats and Investigators... the cops of the setting.

So that's a constraint, right? But it's one about which each player may have something to say. They may have good ideas about cops, they may have bad ideas about cops (and probably more importantly just societal power structures and classism and so on, in general), or very likely, they may have a mix of good and bad ideas. What they have to say about that premise and the concepts involved is up to them.

If I say "the premise is that you're all good cops", then I've limited what they have to say. Does that mean they can't have something authentic to say? No. But it's more narrow. Now, instead of being about law enforcement in general, it's more likely to be something like "what's it like to be the one good cop amongst a corrupt department" or similar.

Sure but they may also not be trying to say anything with their choices as well. A player who plays a crooked cop for example, might be making no commentary on law enforcement or the morality of law enforcement whatsoever, they could just be doing a character study with their character, or simply taking a kind of character they saw in a movie who interested them.

But this isn't really what I meant by constraints in this particular post (I did talk about focused premises elsewhere though so it is a fair subject). Here I was thinking more how in the face of external pressures (i.e. you having your own conception of the good, or of what is just, but all the people in the setting, or even the gods of the setting, being against you, yet you can still make the authentic choice to defy those forces.

I think that applies to examples where alignment can have the effect of taking away a class ability, not making a particular magic item work for you, or, like the Ravenloft example I pointed to, where the setting itself responds to your actions and physically and spiritually changes you. If you authentically believe the Dark Powers are evil, that the GM is buying into a bogus dichotomy of good and evil (for instance that your choices were all for the greater good or were the most good you could choose in the moment), you can continue down that path in defiance and I think that really does recast the whole experience.

Where I would agree is systems where a player is told by the GM they have to behave a certain way. I can see the gray area here. In D&D, even if the GM isn't forcing a player to do or not to do something, but are enforcing alignment restrictions in other ways: taking away a paladin ability for example, it feels like the GM has more authority. But I think one can disagree with the GM and allow that to be played out through their character if they seeking authenticity in play. I also think in most groups I have been in GMs will rarely not try to build some kind of consensus around what the various alignments mean (in some cases that means the group arrives at its own understanding, in others it may mean you have players who are willing to participate in the thought experiment of a world that has the GMs understanding of the morality as cosmic forces even if they think the description of Neutral Good falls flat and doesn't work.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't see any reason the GM can't say "This campaign is going to be about playing X type characters; if you do things to move outside of what would put you in the category of X (whether that's getting you ejected from a group that X defines or simply move away from where X is going on) I'm not going to bother to keep following your character."

There's no reason a GM can't say that. It's perfectly fine to do so. It just means that whatever potential there may have been for the players to bring Y to the table is now gone, and whatever they bring must be about X. Which may or may not be a problem for any given group, or any given case of X and Y.

So in practice, having and sticking to a premise may not dictate behavior directly, but it does say that you're not going to reposition the spotlight of the campaign if you move out of it.

This doesn't necessarily mean that there's extremely sharp lines on how the characters can think about things, but there can be sharp lines on what they can do and, effectively, still stay in the campaign.

As an example, if you're got a group of characters who are a member of a particular organization and do some kind of task (enforce laws, fight enemies, investigate anomalies, whatever) the organization is going to have some rules. You may be able to get away with bucking some of those rules subtly for a while, but the chances are you won't get to indefinitely, and when you're done it doesn't matter what the character does (whether he's ejected from the organization or imprisoned), he's effectively no longer operating in the context of the campaign, even though he at least theoretically still exists in the setting.

(There's a potential case of a character who leaves the organization and still interacts with the other characters still within it, but I think that's a borderline enough case that it can mostly be ignored).

Sure! I think it all depends. If the premise of play is to be cops or whatever, then there is the potential that if a character stops being a cop, then they may no longer be in play. Or at least, not in the same capacity or to the same extent. I think there are a number of factors that matter here, with the primary being if this applies to one character or all, how the game plays and if it supports rotating focus and/or player characters who are not strictly working together as a team. There are other factors for sure, but those are the ones that immediately spring to mind.

In my campaign of Spire, the characters all began play as members of the Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress, a clandestine revolutionary organization that resists the rule of the High Elves (this is the default assumption of the game). They collectively form a cell of this organization, and answer to a magister, who is their handler. By the end, one PC was effectively excommunicated and the other two were tasked with eliminating him. This was an element of play for enough sessions that I wouldn't classify the game as not supporting this kind of play.

I wouldn't say that would be true of all RPGs. The D&D game I'm playing in currently wouldn't really support that because the focus of the action is on the location the party is exploring, and there is very little reason for us to split up for more than a short period. This doesn't mean that it can't be done in D&D, just that given the focus of our specific D&D game, these kinds of elements simply aren't on the table. The methods the GM is using, the nature of the game, the focus of play, and importantly, the expectations of the players... none of these are being used that way.

As a player in that game, I'm not saying much about anything in the way that @pemerton has described in this thread. But that's not a bad thing... I'm not really looking to do so.

 

[Bedrockgames]

There's no reason a GM can't say that. It's perfectly fine to do so. It just means that whatever potential there may have been for the players to bring Y to the table is now gone, and whatever they bring must be about X. Which may or may not be a problem for any given group, or any given case of X and Y.



Sure! I think it all depends. If the premise of play is to be cops or whatever, then there is the potential that if a character stops being a cop, then they may no longer be in play. Or at least, not in the same capacity or to the same extent. I think there are a number of factors that matter here, with the primary being if this applies to one character or all, how the game plays and if it supports rotating focus and/or player characters who are not strictly working together as a team. There are other factors for sure, but those are the ones that immediately spring to mind.

I recently finished up a campaign where my players were constables and I gave them full freedom to set their own moral course. They started out pretty righteous but by the end they had effectively become drug kingpins. In this campaign had they fully abandoned their posts, we would have just shifted the focus of the campaign to their new direction.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I like this, and can agree to the use of “authentic.”

But it’s also how I GM and play every RPG, so using it distinguish between RPGs, instead of just play styles, seems odd to me. But maybe the OP just meant that some games more actively support…through guidance and/or mechanics…this style?

Sure... that's why I think the focus has been on methods used rather than specific games.

I get that argument, and yet it’s one thing to be specific/insistent about how a specific race would react to a specific situation, and another to have general guidelines of behavior (regardless of lineage/background).

Is it inauthentic to ask that players don’t engage in torture and human trafficking? I mean, maybe by some definition it is. But I don’t think wanting to run a campaign where players are expected to play (potentially flawed) heroes is categorically different.

I’m coming at this topic as somebody who has always been very uncomfortable with evil players/campaigns. I can’t even choose the evil path when playing solo RPG video games.

No, I don't think that having specific topics like torture or human trafficking banned is a bad thing. The only exception would be one where the game was about something connected strongly to those topics. So I can see an international spy type game may touch on ideas of torture and its efficacy, and the toll that it may take on those who engage in it, and so on. Do I think any spy game must include this? No, of course not. It depends on the vibe that's being sought and what the point of play is.

The topic of torture came up in my Spire campaign. We didn't focus on it in detail and we kind of just did the fade to black type thing, but it was a pretty important thing and it took a toll on one of the characters (he gained the Fallout: "Haunted- you've been deeply affected by a traumatic experience. Whenever faced with a similar experience, take 1d6 Mind stress to be able to act.").

It all depends on what game and the genre and premise. For my Spire game, I knew that the players were okay with the topics that were likely to come up, and I think those topics are kind of complicated and difficult, and I was interested to see what they'd have their characters do. It is a very different game than our D&D game.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But certainly some premises imply some sort of morals? Why is this any more of a problem than implying character occupation or a setting tech level?

It's not a problem. I think if we take away the negative connotation and instead just look at it without the good/bad lens, it's pretty easy to see that "cops" is a premise, and "incorruptible cops" is also a premise, but it is more narrow.

That's it, really.

I don't think it is necessarily needs to be simplistic, though I agree that the usual D&D "no evil alignment" is simplistic, due the alignment in itself being simplistic.

I mean simplistic in the way that the morality of many super-hero stories are... they boil down to right or wrong, good or evil. I don't say simplistic as a negative. Just that they avoid or remove the morally gray areas.

Again, not all super-hero stories do this... they are many exceptions.

What happened was a miscommunication about the premise. You note that I especially said "TNG inspired Star Trek" i.e. about elite Starfleet personnel on a ship during the height of "evolved future humans" thing. That is different than more deconstructionist approach like for example DS9. Now it is perfectly possible that not everyone cares for such nuances, and thus it is unwise to set the premise so tightly. But premise is more than the setting; it can say something about what sort of people the characters are, and to explore certain premises authentically it must.

Our game was a starship right after the beginning of TNG. I don't know all the setting particulars.

There certainly was a miscommunication about the premise, but I don't know if I'd say that's the exact problem. I think the players all accepted the general premise that was presented to us initially. I don't think any of us expected for this friction to come up. None of us were doing anything beyond what we'd expect to see in Star Trek. But the GM felt differently, and had very strong feelings about what Star Trek means as a genre and so on.

I don't think the GM was expecting us to kind of approach things the way we did, and I don't think we thought that would be a problem, especially having used the lifepath character generator to craft the PCs. This wasn't something that was obvious until we began play.