More DMing analysis from Lewis Pulsipher

[TwoSix]

Well, the /say/ it's made from SOY and LENTils....

"It's elves! Lembas is made of elves!!"

 

[Starfox]

But the mere fact that it is possible is an afront to purist-for-system play, because the fact of its possibiity shows that the game rules are violating ingame causality (on the premise that we know that, in game, the peasant railgun is in fact causally impossible).

If this is indeed the requirements for a purist-for-system player, then I think you're arguing for that purism-for-system is an impossible pipe dream. Much like Edwards (This is the Forge guy, right? I suck at names) claims that you cannot have player empowerment in a game with a plot (the impossible thing before breakfast).

Now, I don't agree with Edward's on that and I am the first to say that most imaginable kinds of play are possible. But I think what makes purist-for-system playable (and player empowerment in a plotted situation possible) is that the in-play application is not as absolute as you claim. Some situation produce weird results under any rules set. Each of us has to decide on a tolerance level. If your tolerance is very low, conflicting examples will crop up early. If it is high, it might never crop up except in theory (like the peasant rail gun). But constructing a game where it NEVER happens is IMO not possible. The only model of reality with 100% prediction ability is reality itself.

 

[Starfox]

"It's elves! Lembas is made of elves!!"

Puts the green in Soylent Green!

 

[Campbell]

In his latest series of blog posts Vincent Baker covers very similar ground.

Hey, some RPG theory, how about? While we're waiting for me to actually make something.

A game has procedures. Procedures are things like "on your turn, choose a legal card from your hand and play it," "when your character gets into a fight, roll 2d6 and add your Combat Value," and "to make your meeple on the screen jump, push the A button."

A game has components. Components are things like a deck of cards and scratch paper to keep score, a conversation and character sheets and dice, and a controller plus a meeple in a level full of stuff on a screen.

A game has an object, or more than one, or none. Objects are things like "at the end of any hand, if anybody's reached 100 points or more, the game ends, and the player with the lowest score wins," "make the imaginary world vivid, make the characters' lives exciting, and play to find out what happens," and "run your meeple all the way to the end of the level without dying."

Together, these three things are a complete game. When you're making a game, you create its procedures, its components, and its object-or-objects-or-none. Then you publish.

But a game also has strategy and style. Strategy and style are implicit in the relationship between the other three, emerge from the other three, or lay over the other three without changing them.

On your turn, which of your legal cards do you choose to play?

When the GM turns to you and asks you what your character does, what do you choose to say?

At every moment of play, do you choose to push the A button now? Or what?

Take my game Murderous Ghosts. Murderous Ghosts has:
- Procedures. Two little books full of almost nothing but procedures, in fact.
- Components. The two books, the deck of cards, the conversation between the players.
- An object. If the explorer escapes unmurdered, the explorer player wins.

The strategy of Murderous Ghosts is really fun. It is, at heart, a gambling game, and a string of bad luck might always see you murdered. But if you play well, you can time your draws so that you make your riskiest draws when the stakes are lowest and your safest draws when the stakes are high. Meanwhile, the ghost player is trying to mislead you about which draws are low-stakes and high-stakes, to make you misstep. But the game text doesn't include any mention of this, it leaves you to learn your own way forward.

And then tucked into the back of the ghost player's book, there are two short essays: "What Ghosts Do" and "What Ghosts Are." These are pure style. Their purpose is to inspire the ghost player to say scary and ever-scarier things. In fact, while they include some assertions and an instruction or two, they're both over 50% made of pointed questions: "Is this ghost reenacting the horrors that it inflicted on others in life, or will it inflict on others the horrors that it suffered?"

You could play the game, see its procedures fully through, win and lose, and even enact strategies to try to win more and lose less, without ever reading these two essays.

Everybody with me? Procedures, components, object-or-objects-or-none, strategy, and style?

Link

I prefer the way Baker puts it because it doesn't attach degree of meaningfulness to either strategy or style. That's pretty much on individual players to do. I'll have more thoughts once I've had time to really digest Baker's posts, but in the meantime I thought I'd throw it out there for consideration.

One last note: Baker's blog posts are about his perspective as a game designer and not squarely aimed at players' conceptions, but meant to start conversations amongst game designers.

 

[pemerton]

If this is indeed the requirements for a purist-for-system player, then I think you're arguing for that purism-for-system is an impossible pipe dream.

As I said upthread, I think it's a matter of degree.

In case it's not clear, I'm not here either to bury purist-for-system sim, nor to praise it, but to analyse it. I spent nearly 20 years GMing Rolemaster - thousands of hours of it - and so I think I have a pretty good understanding of the issues. Everything that Edwards says about it rings true for me, including the aspirations, the pleasures, and the potential sources of frustration.

My point of disagreement with [MENTION=6698278]Emerikol[/MENTION] and [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] is over the issue whether purist-for-system sim, and "realism"-oriented play, overlap. I think they do, because the conception of ingame causality that purist-for-system games are trying to capture through their mechanics is derived, overwhelmingly but obviously not exclusively, from intuitions about reality. When you actually look at the games that have been designed and played along these lines - RM, RQ, Classic Traveller, GURPS, etc, that is what they are going for. For the fantasy ones, in particular, their market has always been D&D players who like the fantasy tropes but don't like the non-sim resolution. (Especially the combat rules.)

It's because of my own experiences as a refugee from D&D mechanics to RM as a preferred system for playing out FRPG tropes that I don't really feel the force of those who put forward 3E as a serious sim system. The only respect in which it is more sim than AD&D is saving throws and skills. But on hp it's arguably worse (because hp disparities are even bigger in 3E, both over levels and across characters), and on PC and monster build, and action economy, I would say it is definitely worse.

 

[pemerton]

I prefer the way Baker puts it because it doesn't attach degree of meaningfulness to either strategy or style.

Can you elaborate on this?

 

[Ratskinner]

Again, I feel this is a demonstration of Gödel's incompleteness theorem - how a system cannot ever resolve all situations that appear in the system. You will ALWAYS have these phenomena, the question is just how convoluted rules you arr willing to accept for an incremental reduction in the frequency with which such inconsistencies appear.

Has anyone ever actually had a peasant railgun appear in play?

Ennh...I'm not sure RPG rules are the sort of thing that the incompleteness theorem _has to_ apply to. That is, many of the more low-resolution _or_ narrative/story-focused systems simply cannot create such an instance. Its the attempt to create some kind of physical model of the fictional world with a one-to-one correspondence of mechanic to event that causes the problem, AFAICT.

 

[Ratskinner]

Tolkien may well not have troubled himself about the matter, being concerned with literary rules, and roleplayers need not trouble themselves, either. But those who explicitly want to play in a defined game world are also free to assume that there exists some explanation of these matters. If you start from the point that Middle Earth must be consistent/coherent, then it follows that there must be some aspect of the world's physics that allows for faerie queens and lembas and elves living with no apparent agriculture or whatever.

A key feature to realise with this approach, though, is that it makes no sense to say that "the elves existing like this is impossible". Tolkien said they exist like this, ergo they must exist like this. Whatever the axioms of the literary/game world may be, they MUST be such as to allow th elves of Lothlorien. This occupies the same conceptual space as an observation in real science. In other words, if the "theory" (= game rules) disagree with the observed world (= as written by Tolkien) then it's the theory that is wrong. If this means that Middle Earth's axioms cannot be those of the real world, then so be it. Any set of "physical outcomes" rules for Middle Earth that allows everything that Tolkien wrote to be true could be used as game-world axioms for a Middle Earth RPG in PFS style. That is, of course, not the only way to roleplay in Tolkien's Middle Earth.

This is a good point. I have many times thought about how different people's fictional favoritism seems to drastically impact their choice of gaming style or system. In fact, I suspect that it goes even beyond just those who prefer "defined world" games and extends to those who prefer narrative games as well. They just see a different set of rules as important.

 

[Starfox]

Ennh...I'm not sure RPG rules are the sort of thing that the incompleteness theorem _has to_ apply to. That is, many of the more low-resolution _or_ narrative/story-focused systems simply cannot create such an instance. Its the attempt to create some kind of physical model of the fictional world with a one-to-one correspondence of mechanic to event that causes the problem, AFAICT.

Yeah, you're right. RPGs are firmly a part of the humanities, while Gödel's theorem applies to natural science. So, at most, there can be a parallel. That's why I used expressions like "I feel like". It's a thought experiment, no more. Still, I do support the conclusions of my thought experiment.

 

[Campbell]

Can you elaborate on this?

Sure. Strategy and style are both emergent features of play that come from utilizing the procedures of play to realize the objective(s) of the game. They actually exist in tandem and feed off of one another. In any good game there are going to be multiple successful strategies which is where stylistic choices come into play. Style is all about making aesthetic choices and form a basis of self expression. There can be some conflict between style and strategy - see the Magic player who is focused on killer combos when it hurts their chances of winning the match, but its not guaranteed to conflict.

I just realized I meant to bring this up in the Wish Fulfillment thread.

On an unrelated note one of the things I enjoy about the way Vincent Baker talks about role playing games is that he talks about them without trying to create the sense that they are meaningfully different from other games in a way that makes them somehow more meaningful. It's always about if you want this play experience here's a way to do it rather than classifying and categorization in a way that legitimizes one set of games as the real hobby. For instance when he mentions his time at The Forge he basically says the point was to set out to prove that you could make games with emotionally meaningful content that are still successful as games. No ists or isms to be found.