Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[Campbell]

I would love to hear more about this. I had never even considered a distinction between "game world" and "setting".

A game world implies a certain sort of tangibility or permanence. Basically, something with an independent existence that you can freely move around in and explore. It's something that is created either before or at the start of play that we then play within.

The way a sizeable portion of the games I run approach setting is to only define as much of the setting and characters as needed for play. The idea is to keep this as flexible as possible so that scenarios and characters remain as compelling as possible, tailored to the ongoing events of the game. The setting by and large is treated as a background element with the player characters and their connections to the setting being foregrounded. It's not really a thing to be explored for its own sake. Rather player characters are supposed to be going about the business of pursuing their personal and group goals.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Isn't that what the Forge tried to do?

Once upon a time on EnWorld you couldn't even complain about sorcerers being underpowered, or have an important discussion about whether you can use a lance two-handed from horseback, without someone re-phrasing into Forge-ite terms that no one else understood, or (even worse) into terms that other people thought they understood but actually didn't.

Yet how many of those terms have stuck with us?

I do find "Fiction First" quite useful as an explanation for how we are playing our first ever game of Fate wrong - our players can't get out of the habit of saying "Can I make an x check to do y?", and that's even after me pre-emptively removing the Notice / Perception skill (which is responsible for 75% of such conversations in our Pathfinder games). However, nobody else in our group knows what Fiction First means, and I'm not even sure I'm using it correctly myself.

It wasn't due to lack of effort on the Forge's part. Did they get stuck in their own echo-chamber, or was the task impossible in the first place?

I had a quick look at Board Game Geek and, from an extremely unscientific sample of 1 review, came across "a 1-4 player campaign game about adventures, exploration and fierce battles with giant monsters. It’s a co-operative, choice-driven boardgame experience played over multiple sessions" (emphasis mine).

I don't know much about board games, but that seems like a great, jargon-free summary to me.

No one is going to complain that the game can't be finished in one session, and forces the players to co-operate in order to succeed; if that's not what they are looking for then they'll simply play something else instead. And the entire (admittedly short) review never once referenced any other board games.

Can you summarise 5th edition D&D in the same way? "A 2-6 player plus 1 neutral GM, long-form campaign game about heroic adventures; involving the frequent risk of combat but also with exploration, puzzle-solving and role-playing. It's co-operative, driven by the choices of the players, the GM or both, but with a strong random element determining the outcome of conflicts. It is intended to be played for many sessions, with characters growing significantly in power as they face ever-escalating threats."

I have never seen D&D formally described in this way. It's something that "everybody knows", yet paradoxically as soon as you write it down someone will come along to remark "that's not how we play D&D". It's also useless as a definition, since it applies to pretty much any edition of D&D and so doesn't allow you to demonstrate why <Your Favourite Edition> is the best edition.

I see what you mean. Looking at that description, the first thing I noted was that "heroic adventures" are in no way a requirement for D&D.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Definitely, and I think @Umbran also makes a good point about using theories as tools to obtain some understanding rather than looking for them to provide “the truth”.

For example, I have found some of Edwards’s ideas useful when working on my homebrew system, but I don’t find his taxonomy of creative agendas very useful at all. I could tell you which one it is, probably; but that doesn’t really tell me what things I should include in my game. I would add Baker, Harper, and even Justin Alexander to the list of people whose ideas I’ve found helpful.

What would be nice is if more tabletop RPG designers talked about the nuts and bolts of the games they are designing and why they made certain design decisions—like you see video game developers do at e.g., GDC. It would go a long way towards normalizing discourse about game theory and help to establish a vocabulary organically that people would use.

Well agreed. More designer commentary!

 

[amethal]

I see what you mean. Looking at that description, the first thing I noted was that "heroic adventures" are in no way a requirement for D&D.

Absolutely not a requirement, but arguably the way D&D is "supposed" to be played from AD&D 2nd Edition onwards.

What does it say on the back of the 5th edition Players Handbook? Genuine question, since I don't know.

Pathfinder 1st edition says "The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game puts you in the role of a brave adventurer fighting to survive in a world beset by magic and evil. Will you cut your way through monster-filled ruins and cities rife with political intrigue to emerge as a famous hero laden with fabulous treasure, or will you fall victim to treacherous traps and fiendish monsters in a forgotten dungeon?"

I'm taking it to mean "heroic" in the traditional sense, which doesn't necessarily imply that the hero is a good person, but as soon as we start using words we end up arguing about what we meant by them!

I suspect 5th edition D&D does describe itself as a game for heroic adventurers. I included it in my description in the hope of distinguishing it from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, LotFP and the like.

 

[pemerton]

I read several of Snarf's proposed academic essays from his post last year decrying the state of RPG critical theory. And truthfully I came away thoroughly unimpressed with the "scholarship" I read. In very few ways did the texts consider or capture what I consider to be fairly fundamental "normative structures" around RPG play

<snip>

Any sort of RPG critical theory should start with Robin Laws, Vincent Baker, and yes, Ron Edwards, because at least they addressed RPG play from the ground level.

Agreed - I read some of them and had the same response. They added nothing I could see to the authors you mention, and in some cases were clearly weaker in their accounts of the activity (eg making unanalysed assumptions about participant roles and procedures of play).

 

[The Shadow]

A game world implies a certain sort of tangibility or permanence. Basically, something with an independent existence that you can freely move around in and explore. It's something that is created either before or at the start of play that we then play within.

The way a sizeable portion of the games I run approach setting is to only define as much of the setting and characters as needed for play. The idea is to keep this as flexible as possible so that scenarios and characters remain as compelling as possible, tailored to the ongoing events of the game. The setting by and large is treated as a background element with the player characters and their connections to the setting being foregrounded. It's not really a thing to be explored for its own sake. Rather player characters are supposed to be going about the business of pursuing their personal and group goals.

Interesting. I think I agree that my group doesn't tend to explore the world for its own sake, and that PCs go about pursuing their own goals.

Nevertheless, we do at least sketch out the world, or at least the parts of it that seem likely to be relevant. Part of that is that my group genuinely enjoys worldbuilding. (For us, it isn't a solo activity of the GM.) But also because that sketch tends to inform play.

If I don't know what the neighboring lands to the starting area are like and what their relationships are, I can't create character goals involving them. And if they're created on the fly as we visit new areas, we're likely to introduce inconsistencies and I'd guess things would feel a lot less organic. Not that any of that has to matter to you or your group, of course.

 

[MGibster]

I guess this is a good illustration of the difficulties. We can't even agree on what's a game world/setting.

 

[Emoshin]

I guess this is a good illustration of the difficulties. We can't even agree on what's a game world/setting.

To be even more meta, we can't even agree on defining what are the correct ways of discussing the correct ways of defining things.

One person will say X is not a good discussion to have and Y is, and another person will say X is a good discussion but Y is not.

It's very confusing!

 

[JAMUMU]

To be even more meta, we can't even agree on defining what are the correct ways of discussing the correct ways of defining things.

One person will say X is not a good discussion to have and Y is, and another person will say X is a good discussion but Y is not.

It's very confusing!

This is no different from the way criticism works in the Humanities, to be fair. Different methodologies and approaches, a heirarchy of texts, competition and rivalry along the lines of: You're doing it wrong and Blah isn't worth studying, No you're doing it wrong and Yaddayadda isn't worth studying.

Definitions wise it's much the same. People argue and debate and sometimes, sometimes, a common term is found. Then someone redefines that definition and so on.

e.g. What Campbell calls "game world" I call "setting". To me, they are closely related but separate concepts. Campbell uses a barebones setting with more blank space than filled space (and more power to them, it's a great way to work). The "game world" is then that shared fictive area where "the ongoing events" of his game are "foregrounded". That is, the "game world" is the "setting" in action.

And no doubt someone will come along and shred my attempts at defining the two terms. That's criticism, baby!

 

[billd91]

Criticism, discussion, and argument are three different things, useful for different ends. When you muddle them up, of course the result isn't terribly useful.

If one comes to criticism and analysis with the idea that one particular theory is supposed to yield Teh TRVTH, then you end up thinking that they are all BS. If you come to criticism and analysis with the idea that each theory may produce some understanding, then you see the theories as tools to help increase your understanding. And well-constructed tools are not BS.

I've been thinking about whether or not I even want to get involved in this thread for a couple of days and, having decided to do so, I want to emphasize these points.
It's entirely possible to approach criticism with a variety of different frameworks, each of which focuses on different things and will give you different results. And this is OK. There's nothing wrong with it. You just have to accept that not everyone will agree with the framework you used and anyone listening to you has to similarly accept that no single framework is ideal or is superior in all instances, not even the one that's their personal favorite.

When I was a senior in college, I finally decided to take a course in the English department to round out my liberal arts credit requirements. I took Literary Criticism - an intro class for the department and an important one for setting expectations for majors. The professor taught it as Five Flavors of Literary Criticism to emphasize that there are multiple approaches - the important thing was to understand how they operate and to gain some practice in using and understanding a variety of them, not to emphasize any one of them as TRUTH. I can't remember the 5th but we looked at Classical, Marxist, Feminist, and Deconstructive approaches to literary criticism. Any work can be put through them with differing results, some of which will yield more grist for the intellectual mill than others depending on the work under analysis.

This may seem like BSing around if you aren't part of the process. And sometimes it does seem like noodling about with an intellectual toy since it's not building bridges, bolstering public infrastructure, growing the crops that feed people, and directly improving people's lives. It's never going to be practical enough that you're putting the literary critic in the bunker over the physician when the bombs come falling down. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some value in applying some intellectual rigor in a critical fashion, using a variety of approaches, and interacting with the results - and, importantly, keeping our minds open to a variety of ways of doing this.