Be a GAME-MASTER, not a DIRECTOR

[pemerton]

I think everyone is missing the most important part of an RPG Beyond the Rules. Where gamers close the rule book and have fun without following some words scribbled on a page by someone years ago. This is the true improv. The rules say "The. Door. Has. Ten. Hit. Points.", so "by the rules you must do ten damage to destroy the door". And the type of gamer that are lost in the rules...and AI...will only have door destroyed if it takes ten points of damage by the rules. Of course, by Improv, there are a lot of ways pass the door. But for a lot of gamers, if it's not in the rules, it is "impossible". Like any dumb video game where you "can't" cross a river or go past a hedge, or climb in a window because it is not programed into the game.

<snip>

As, above, this is the best thing about RPGs: The fact that you can (try) to do anything. Even if the game does not have a rule on page 11 that you must use. When a character needs to get past a guard, the player does not just sit there and roll a skill check to do it....they close the book and improv some role playing acting.

The fact that your example of a situation is trying to get past a door, and that your example of resolution is deal hit points of damage, suggests an exceedingly narrow conception of what RPGing might be, and what RPG rules might be.

So far from others missing "the most important part of an RPG", it seems that you're not really familiar with any developments in RPG design post about 1980.

I would count the way a DM can alter game reality on a whim as editing. No matter what is said, by anyone, the GM can change, alter and "edit" it on a whim.

That is not editing. That's just writing more stuff.

 

[bloodtide]

The fact that your example of a situation is trying to get past a door, and that your example of resolution is deal hit points of damage, suggests an exceedingly narrow conception of what RPGing might be, and what RPG rules might be.

So far from others missing "the most important part of an RPG", it seems that you're not really familiar with any developments in RPG design post about 1980.

Yea, I don't really know what someone wrote about something. And I'm not the type of person that obsess over something just as someone wrote it down.

But my point stands: You don't need rules to play the game all the time. You can close the book, ignore the scribbles, and do whatever you want.

That is not editing. That's just writing more stuff.

Well, it is "writing"...but when you change something that is all ready "written", that is called "editing".

 

[pemerton]

You can close the book, ignore the scribbles, and do whatever you want.

Sure, freeform RP is a thing. A lot of posters in this thread have been discussing it. And I already made a post, in this thread, that you replied to, that had something to say about that:

Well, as a great designer of, and thinker about, RPGs once said (I've omitted the footnotes),

if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better. . . .

As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction. The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted - you want things that no vigorous creative agreement would ever create. And it's not that you want one person's wanted, welcome vision to win out over another's - that's weak sauce. No, what you want are outcomes that upset every single person at the table. You want things that if you hadn't agreed to abide by the rules' results, you would reject.

If you don't want that - and I believe you when you say you don't! - then live negotiation and honest collaboration are a) just as good as, and b) a lot more flexible and robust than, whatever formal rules you'd use otherwise.

The challenge facing rpg designers is to create outcomes that every single person at the table would reject, yet are compelling enough that nobody actually does so. If your game isn't doing that, like I say it's interchangeable with the most rudimentary functional game design, and probably not as fun as good freeform.​

That's putting the point pretty strongly, but does set out a clear contrast between a RPG and improv/freeform.

So I don't know why you think that people are forgetting about or missing this possibility.

Well, it is "writing"...but when you change something that is all ready "written", that is called "editing".

Not if both things are experienced by the audience. Which is what is happening in your case.

 

[clearstream]

I "draw the line" around the shared fiction.

I guess people can try and incorporate by reference - the whole of that tome's content is part of our shared fiction - but in practice that won't work, because not everyone can hold the whole of the tome in their head at once. So what people actually agree on will prevail over what is in the tome, where the two come apart. This can cause issues in games that aspire to adhere to some prior canon - it's necessary to make notes about the game's departure from the canon, or perhaps down the track for everyone to agree to change their mind about what happened in the shared fiction.

Yes. This would be the use of a cue. I mean, it's not as if Vincent Baker hadn't noticed this back in 2003:

What has to happen before the group agrees that, indeed, an orc jumps out of the underbrush? . . .​

​

sometimes, lots of mechanics and negotiation. Debate the likelihood of a lone orc in the underbrush way out here, make a having-an-orc-show-up roll, a having-an-orc-hide-in-the-underbrush roll, a having-the-orc-jump-out roll, argue about the modifiers for each of the rolls, get into a philosophical thing about the rules' modeling of orc-jump-out likelihood... all to establish one little thing.​

If a table is being used as a mechanic "to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table", then we would expect that referring to it makes a difference to what is said next. Otherwise it would be a failed mechanic!

I don't even know what the question is!

We can draw technical distinctions here, if you like.

For instance, the shared fiction is - in some sense - asserted jointly by the game participants. (Though the assertion is in some sort of fictional rather than doxastic mode.)

Whereas an entry on a table is not asserted. It is presented by its author as mere possibility.

And while a tome of lore is asserted by its author (again, in some sort of fictional mode), that assertion is not part of any other table's shared fiction. If you like, we could index the fictions and say that the tome of law is asserted as a component of fiction L (the tome-author's fiction) but not as a component of fiction T (the table's shared fiction). Only when some gameplay procedure leads the table to consult a cue and adjust its fiction in response - including, say, by reiterating something from fiction L within the context of fiction T - does it become part of the shared fiction.

To follow on from my preceding paragraph, one doesn't make a cue part of the fiction. I mean, there's no harm in speaking in that way as a matter of casual description, but it won't do for technical analysis.

The assertion found in the cue is asserted as a component of fiction L. The assertion found in gameplay is asserted as a component of fiction T. The two assertions may be the same item at a certain level of linguistic abstraction (eg they are lexically and syntactically identical), but they are not the same item considered as speech acts, in part because they are indexed to different fictions. Failure to notice that point causes needless confusion - eg it causes confusion in explaining how I can run a Greyhawk game, and you can run a Greyhawk game, yet not everything in your table's fiction is part of my table's fiction, and not even everything in Gygax's gazetteer is part of my table's fiction. Whereas maintaining a clear sense of what fiction we are indexing some particular fictional-mode-assertion to makes this fairly easy - and to say that I am running a Greyhawk game is not to say anything, directly, about the content of my table's fiction; but rather is to say something directly about what is included in my cues, which might then suggested some further (defeasible) inferences about what my table's fiction might include.

I assume that your word "feasible" is meant to be an instance of the sort of normativity you refer to? I think the use of "normative" here has the potential to be misleading, because all fiction and indeed probably all speech is normative in that sense (maybe absurdist literature is an exception?) and so it doesn't point to any distinctive feature of RPGing.

Likewise the implied elements. If I go into my kitchen and reach for a mixing bowl, then - everything else being equal - that implies the possibility of a cake or some other prepared food item. If I pick up some dice and start shaking them, then - everything else being equal - that implies the possibility of generating a random number and paying some attention to it in my ensuing activity. And if I identify a particular thing - say, a character sheet - as a cue for my RPGing, then that implies the possibility of drawing on that cue in the course of my RPGing.

These are just ordinary features of deliberate human behaviour, aren't they?

I assume that "signifier" as used in narratology comes from Sausurrian linguistics. It means something like "meaning-bearing item". What is useful about the terminology of cues, in my view, is that it enables us to achieve more precision in our consideration of the sorts of meaning-bearing items that figure in RPG play, and also of the way in which they bear meaning and contribute to the activity.

I largely agree with the discussion above, and want to expand on a few details. First, noting that the literal meaning of "cue" is helpful

a signal for someone to do something​

​

used when saying that you expect a particular thing to happen next​

As described there is an L series (cues) that propel, provoke or inform a T series (conversation). The L series does not become part of the T series, but rather urges assertions along indicated lines. Here is an example that could be thought to challenge that phrasing, from B3.1 Palace of the Silver Princess

The boxed information should be read to the players by the DM.​

​

[The entrance way seems to be impassable. A massive and foreboding double portcullis blocks the entryway of a 30’ wide corridor. A breeze is gently blowing from the palace corridor and it carries with it the dust of decayed stone and the smell of decaying bodies. Occasionally sounds of pain, fright, and hunger can be heard, but they are far away and sometimes muffled, so that all that may be heard is a short piercing scream and then total silence.]​

It could be felt that the boxed text when read by DM becomes part of the conversation. One option is that it does not stop being a cue so long as it is put in mind just as it appears in the module: a cue can't impact the conversation until it is 'read into it' so this simply acknowledges a cognitive parsing. Another option is to observe what happens more precisely - does the DM read the whole text? do they emphasise any particular part? how do they answer play questions about it? what does each player in fact envision... surely something slightly different in every case?! A third option is that I proposed earlier, which views ludonarrative as a hybrid of cues + conversation. Here I find the first option appealing because so much else follows the same pattern, like reading the number rolled on a d6: there is an intermediate series of cue-analogues in operation when cues are promoted to impinge the conversation (rather than merely possibly doing so).

The reason I feel the above worth writing is to call further attention to this general idea of an L series (cues) and T series (conversation.) It has an obvious similarity to a play script and the performed play. Dialogue will be voiced with nuance of intonation, timing, gesture, movement. Stage directions will guide and in other ways add to that enactment. Although actors and directors may adjust a script to suit their take on it, I don't think that happens continuously as part of the play. It might be done substantially before embarking on a run of a play, but not as part of a given performance.

Leading to the thought that it may be distinctive of the relationship of game cues to conversation that on top of the L series informing the T series, the T series continuously and by intent manipulates the L series. The sort of manipulation I am thinking about includes elevating or deprecating cues so that some become more and others less likely to impact play, settling, changing or nuancing a cue's meaning to produce the table's version or variant of that cue, erasing cues so that they are gone from play, creating cues so that they can affect subsequent play, and adjusting relationships between cues so that causal chains play out differently. Per the Bakerian diagrams, the L series (cues) can cause the same to itself.

Possibly that necessitates that work is done by cues to encourage or in some sense authorize rule- or cue-analogues within the conversation... for example any that regulate the described manipulations. Along with what may be called exogenous cues (after Bjork and Holopainen's exogenous rules). Say where a participant knows to manipulate a cue in a way that other participants accept even while not being explicitly signified by a cue. Alternatively that works via the intermediate series I suggested above, which fits better with the observation that cues can directly affect cues... that is, that players perform activities that are not part of the conversation, but rather operations needed for play. Tying this back to Baker's "three things" that "an RPG's rules coordinate"... implying that rules are something other than cues, even though rules in a game text fit the requirement that "you can pick it up and hand it to another player, or change it with a pencil and eraser". There's probably an aspect of being addressable (alterable) as part of play that matters here.

 

[clearstream]

nvm

 

[bloodtide]

Not if both things are experienced by the audience. Which is what is happening in your case.

Does some RPG have a requirement of an audience? Either way, things can still be edited.

 

[prabe]

Does some RPG have a requirement of an audience? Either way, things can still be edited.

Everyone at the table is, among other things, the audience. Even if someone can, in principle, go back and edit (retcon) a thing that's been established, the people at the table see the edit in ways that someone reading a novel or watching a movie probably wouldn't.

 

[pemerton]

Does some RPG have a requirement of an audience? Either way, things can still be edited.

If the GM isn't playing solo, then they have an audience - ie the players - for everything they say.

If they say X to the players, and then say Y to the players, they haven't edited X in to Y. They've just said two things to the players.

EDIT: See also my reply to @prabe just downthread.

 

[pemerton]

Everyone at the table is, among other things, the audience. Even if someone can, in principle, go back and edit (retcon) a thing that's been established, the people at the table see the edit in ways that someone reading a novel or watching a movie probably wouldn't.

Right. And it's not like there aren't more-or-less avant garde books, films etc that play with this sort of thing. (Blazing Saddles is the first that comes to my mind, which probably betrays something about my own aesthetic sophistication!)

But the mainstream way of doing a film or novel is to do all the edits "in secret" from the audience, and then to release it as a "perfected" thing.

In a RPG, most of what is said is made-up as it is presented, and is not redone or rewritten. Takebacks are contentious at best at many tables, and even if a takeback occurs, the participants all experienced the first go around as well.

Good RPG design will recognise this lack of editing in what is presented, and factor that into its theory of how aesthetic satisfaction is to be obtained. The best-known way of doing this is the following: someone (the GM, Hickman, whomever) writes up the adventure in advance, thus getting the benefits of editing, and then - at the table - the GM delivers that pre-authored adventure as faithfully as possible, thus getting the full aesthetic benefit of the advance prep.

But there are other ways too.

 

[clearstream]

Everyone at the table is, among other things, the audience. Even if someone can, in principle, go back and edit (retcon) a thing that's been established, the people at the table see the edit in ways that someone reading a novel or watching a movie probably wouldn't.

Perhaps in that sense like acting in or being audience to a live performance of a play, which will not be edited during the performance. Where that performance is shaped by a script comprising dialogue and stage directions, TTRPG is shaped by a text comprising rules, cues, and descriptions. I mean "text" here in the broad sense of game-as-artifact that can be critically analyzed, so description may include illustrations etc. I'm not sure if the parameterization ought to be counted separately from cues, as the same set of cues can form substantially different instances depending on the tuning of their parameters. Above I used the term "signifiers" which I would revert to here for the meaning-carrying content of the text, which includes cues as a subset.

the mainstream way of doing a film or novel is to do all the edits "in secret" from the audience, and then to release it as a "perfected" thing.

In a RPG, most of what is said is made-up as it is presented, and is not redone or rewritten. Takebacks are contentious at best at many tables, and even if a takeback occurs, the participants all experienced the first go around as well.

Good RPG design will recognise this lack of editing in what is presented, and factor that into its theory of how aesthetic satisfaction is to be obtained. The best-known way of doing this is the following: someone (the GM, Hickman, whomever) writes up the adventure in advance, thus getting the benefits of editing, and then - at the table - the GM delivers that pre-authored adventure as faithfully as possible, thus getting the full aesthetic benefit of the advance prep.

But there are other ways too.

I feel like playtesting and tuning could serve purposes for games analogous to editing for film or novel. So game texts of various sorts (beyond typical adventure paths) will still have benefited from those common best practices. An example is where I author a rule, play that rule with various groups, and then substantially revise or cut it... which seems analogous to making editorial choices over other media. A game text can also go through editing of the same sort as other media, such as when an "editor" is appointed to direct wording, layout and arrangement, with generally some say over content.