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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9461435" data-attributes="member: 71699">I largely agree with the discussion above, and want to expand on a few details. First, noting that the literal meaning of "cue" is helpfula signal for someone to do something used when saying that you expect a particular thing to happen nextAs 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 PrincessThe 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.</blockquote>

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