Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[clearstream]

If this is true, then analysis of games is legitimately impossible. It would be like two different audiences changing whether a film is a documentary or a comedy.

Yes, that's the essence of a philosophically skeptical position. A repudiation of knowledge. I am indeed proposing that what we might not be able to know the things about games that in performing analysis we set out to know. Foreseeably, interlocuters end up talking at cross-purposes: theories that are meaningful for one group turn out to be disruptive to meaning in the paradigm of another. We speak, in the end, within bubbles of experience.

The reason this is more plausibly the case in RPG than for film, is that at the heart of RPG is an ongoing drafting and revising of the script by the participants, according to their grasping and upholding of the game rules. Thus, the "film" is very possibly a documentary for one group, and comedy for another. (With an obvious contrast available to be made here between "audience" and "players".)

 

[Micah Sweet]

I know you are trying to be helpful but I really don't think this is the part he doesn't get about it.

Correct. I know what it literally means, but I was struggling to understand the wider uses, and was vaguely annoyed that it just "magically" appeared as a seemingly viable term. Like you, I also object to the description as "guessing"; it definitely sounds pejorative, which is generally not a built-in implication you want in fair criticism.

 

[hawkeyefan]

To elaborate-

Nope, hexcrawl is also a term those that enjoy that style use to describe their own games.

What does hexcrawl include that map and key does not? What does it leave out that map and key does not?

Why do you assume map and key is a pejorative? Orthat those who used it don’t like that style of play? I quite like it. Currently I’m playing through the Temple of Elemental Evil. It’s pure map and key gaming.

In the best case it's leaving out important details, in the worst its a lie by omission.

What details does it leave out? What is it omitting.

You’re not being very specific.

 

[Campbell]

@FrogReaver

I think many people in our hobby are profoundly hesitant to speak on the play experience in a clinical manner. That they feel something is lost when the artifice is acknowledged. The thing is we cannot meaningfully acknowledge the real differences in playstyle without a willingness to be clinical about it.

I personally run and play more traditional games than I do indie games, but I find acknowledging that artifice in my prep and how I go about addressing play has really helped firmed up my own GMing. For instance, I never really understood how to run a good sandbox game, but Kevin Crawford's more clinical descriptions in Stars Without Number really drove the point home for me.

Map and key as a metaphor for prep really works for me personally, although in my case it's generally a relationship map (some of our games stretch into 40+ named NPCs).

 

[Campbell]

I also don't think you can get a more clinical description of play than the Apocalypse World play loop I described above. Generally, I think the terms of art used by most indie games (kicker, GM Move, strings, scene framing) are profoundly clinical.

 

[Micah Sweet]

@FrogReaver

I think many people in our hobby are profoundly hesitant to speak on the play experience in a clinical manner. That they feel something is lost when the artifice is acknowledged. The thing is we cannot meaningfully acknowledge the real differences in playstyle without a willingness to be clinical about it.

I personally run and play more traditional games than I do indie games, but I find acknowledging that artifice in my prep and how I go about addressing play has really helped firmed up my own GMing. For instance, I never really understood how to run a good sandbox game, but Kevin Crawford's more clinical descriptions in Stars Without Number really drove the point home for me.

Map and key as a metaphor for prep really works for me personally, although in my case it's generally a relationship map (some of our games stretch into 40+ named NPCs).

Then why don't you just say, "GM Prep"? Map & Key sounds like the entire style literally involves a map and key, when you clearly mean something larger. That term is limiting, and makes the style it proposes to describe feel lesser than it is.

 

[clearstream]

@FrogReaver

I think many people in our hobby are profoundly hesitant to speak on the play experience in a clinical manner. That they feel something is lost when the artifice is acknowledged. The thing is we cannot meaningfully acknowledge the real differences in playstyle without a willingness to be clinical about it.

I personally run and play more traditional games than I do indie games, but I find acknowledging that artifice in my prep and how I go about addressing play has really helped firmed up my own GMing. For instance, I never really understood how to run a good sandbox game, but Kevin Crawford's more clinical descriptions in Stars Without Number really drove the point home for me.

Map and key as a metaphor for prep really works for me personally, although in my case it's generally a relationship map (some of our games stretch into 40+ named NPCs).

One thought I had about these battles over labels recently was - why do we allow them to stymie productive conversation so? Like, if a label really is neutral for one party, and pejorative for another, why not go with a different label that is neutral for both parties?

 

[ClusterFluster]

I think this echoes part of what you are saying here -

One thing I noticed with my play of Blades in the Dark was that despite it's mechanics pushing away from traditional map and key play - there were still many places where map and key showed up - often a bit hidden but still there. For example, when in Blades when I as GM need to determine the consequences of a failed roll (full failure or partial success), I am looking at the 'map' of all the established fiction and picking a result that makes sense to me within the framework of that established fiction. That's not really different than what a D&D DM does when determining the consequences of a players actions, albeit in D&D not all established ficiton is player facing. This same consideration happened when players were considering actions as well. They would pick one that made sense or followed from the established fiction. Outside of consequences - the setting of position and effect also tended to require a map and key as well.

-by the way, i really hate the name 'map and key'

I'm only hearing of this phrase now. It seems matter-of-fact as a descriptor, but clearly it is intended with undue derision towards what I can only guess to be aimed at sandboxes. Drawing on the example you've given, this is primarily the strength of sandbox design, because the narrative depth is scalable to a group's tastes from any starting conditions. Otherwise, you wouldn't see it just beneath the surface of the game's fiction-derived mechanics.

I have arguments with pure sandboxers about the validity of planned game narratives, as they think that the introduction of any goal beyond "amass gold from random encounters" is railroading, but they're missing the inherent flexibility of sandboxes: you can adventure on your first few levels without any story involved, adventure for a few more levels for a plot that must reach a specific climax, and then continue to adventure after that last story's end for another few levels without any story involved, just like at the start of the game. Or, invert that possible formula to be played as a story, then no-story, then a story again. Any combination works, including 20 levels of no story at all, just a sequence of epic tales to tell, which is fine. You can add a campaign setting, or withhold one in favour of a selection of thematic random tables, throughout all of that.

One thing I dislike about the term map and key as a criticism of mainstream play is that mainstream play treats 'finding things (people, items, locations)' as an obstacle to be overcome via roleplay and not via guessing as the criticism presupposes.

I don't think that's the case of mainstream play at all, this probably has to do with individual player motivations, but I'm not sure what you mean by "guessing" here, and "mainstream" is probably D&D and such. If you mean "look for the fun" as in a sandbox game with a "fog of war," (territory unknown before exploration) I don't see why that's a bad thing; if there's no immediate indications as to where that fun is, there's no real pressure to find anything right away, it'll find you. If you'd rather, just take as practice adventuring to sharpen your narrative/lateral and strategic/tactical thinking.

I don't agree with this last paragraph. Mainstream play works by having a reason for all characters to work together. The style @pemerton references doesn't require the PC's to necessarily act in concert. In such games the DM can easily pit your characters goals against mine. A big part of those games is seeing what happens in such situations.

A heroic oligarchy working as a small team would be a set of "Great Men." The odd rivalry and misunderstanding between them doesn't really change that principle, especially if they can repair the bonds later. The Avengers and the Justice league are perfect examples: there's no defined leader, but collectively, they alone have the powers and resources needed to save the world from evil and destruction, not the average citizen otherwise.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

One thing I dislike about the term map and key as a criticism of mainstream play is that mainstream play treats 'finding things (people, items, locations)' as an obstacle to be overcome via roleplay and not via guessing as the criticism presupposes.

Well, let's dive into that then.

I find the "map and key" phrase reasonably constructive. In many cases, the play is rooted in what the DM already, secretly, knows to be true, but which the players are ignorant of. They must provide inputs until they, too, know what is true and can thus make a properly informed decision. Since they cannot know how much they don't know, this is analogous to making a map of an area as one explores it. Just as with an actual map, there is both a fact of the matter (the territory which the map summarizes) and a range of relevance (one does not need the whole globe to navigate a single ruined city or spelunk a single cave.)

To add further interest, there are elements which are not what they superficially appear to be. The players cannot simply coast on GM narration; they must ask good, probing, effective questions and gain a full understanding of the place being mapped, not just a superficial awareness thereof. This is why the key is relevant, the coded parts of the map that grant full understanding of the location. Without the map, the key is useless, just symbols that don't point to anything; without the key, the map is incomplete, just a superficial description.

The great strength of this approach is also its great weakness: player ignorance, and the process of changing that to player knowledge, is the driving force of play. Firstly, it is dependent on players enjoying this back-and-forth process of figuring out what the right question(s) to ask would be for each case, and then making wise decisions based on the answers. (To be clear, I think lots of people DO enjoy this; I'm not trying to imply that that's weird or a bad expectation. Just that it is a prerequisite, and is not always true.) Secondly, and more relevantly for my above "look at technique and execution" post, "map and key" play depends on striking the right balance between discoverability (figuring out the right questions to ask must be practically achievable by the players) and difficulty (the right questions cannot be trivial.) This is a tricky line to walk! That it can easily fall prey to either extreme is one reason why designers might look to other approaches.

And we can again use video games as a good guide here for places where execution can be better or worse. Classic adventure games, e.g. Sierra and LucasArts adventure games, are effectively map-and-key games played with a preprogrammed story and automated DM. Some of these games are overall really, really well-made, e.g. King's Quest VI, The Dig, or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Some of them are notoriously bad either with specific puzzles (e.g. the TVTropes "Soup Can Puzzle" page examples) or with their general structure (relying on "Moon Logic" or even "Insane Troll Logic.") By examining these things, we can learn what techniques or features are shared by effective examples (or at least what considerations matter for building them), and how ineffective examples fall short.

Yes, that's the essence of a philosophically skeptical position. A repudiation of knowledge. I am indeed proposing that what we might not be able to know the things about games that in performing analysis we set out to know.

And yet, as I said, we have what clearly appear to be knowledge claims regarding the effectiveness of game design decisions. We have (for instance) the widespread recognition that GP=XP achieves the "fantasy heist" intent of early D&D in a particularly deft way, or the less widespread but still common appreciation for how elegant and effective 13A's Escalation Die is for addressing the known issue of "nova" strategies being excessively dominant. How do we reconcile these (seemingly) blatant knowledge claims with the idea that it is impossible to achieve even the smallest amount of knowledge regarding game design? If it is truly impossible to learn anything at all about game design, why is it so like things we can make knowledge claims about?

 

[Campbell]

One thought I had about these battles over labels recently was - why do we allow them to stymie productive conversation so? Like, if a label really is neutral for one party, and pejorative for another, why not go with a different label that is neutral for both parties?

If we could find those, I would love to use them. I am just not sure if any terminology which acknowledge the artifice of play would be acceptable to those who take an issue with the current set, we have been using. If there is, please point me to it.