Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

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.

I don't know exactly what you mean here by "clinical," but its connotations for me suggest a certain objectivity and impartiality in analysis. As I said far upthread, I think an ideal of such impartiality cannot quite be achieved because we are always analyzing something from a particular point of view and with particular questions/goals in mind; for example, the goal of how to be a "better" GM ("better" being defined by some set of subjective criteria). Thus, imo, the kinds of "criticism" one finds with respect to ttrpgs is usually confined to advice on the craft of GMing, one practitioner to another. Perhaps there is the perception that if one presents this kind of hobbyist chatting using abstract terms it will seem more disinterested and clinical, but, well, for me at least it just obfuscates and confuses the conversation.

This is compounded by the fact that there isn't a "dataset" per se when we have these discussions, but rather simply individual experiences occasionally conveyed through anecdotes largely detached from their full context. I know Forge-descendant discussion places a heavy emphasis on play reports, and perhaps they are the best we have, but here you are turning the experience of an hours-long play session into a clipped and fragmentary summary of events, all glossed by only one individual--an individual who might be providing this anecdotal summary for the sake of proving a point in an online argument, no less. More contemporary discussions make reference to video or audio actual plays, which do provide helpful glimpses but also present their own problems.

Think, for example, what an ethnographer would do if taking a ttrpg as an object of study. It would involve considerable participant observation, extensive interviews, coding of transcripts, examination of all ephemera (GM notes, etc). Moreover, the questions this research would ask would likely be broader in scope that simply evaluating the effectiveness in the games mechanics in producing a particular type of play experience, since there is a lot more to "what's happening at the table." For example, say one of the players spends most of the game drawing OCs and posting them to reddit; this might be irrelevant for the purposes of evaluating a system, since these drawings don't feed into the system in a way that 'matters,' but might be extremely relevant considering the broader social dynamics of the whole situation. And still, even in this case, this ethnographer would need to disclose their own positionally and situate their research within relevant critical paradigms in a rigorous way.

tldr: a critical appraisal of ttrpgs is difficult [on online forums] due the narrow scope of practitioner interests, complete lack of methodology, and most importantly a compromised and effectively non-existent dataset.

but we can talk about what games we like and share advice based on experiences
 

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So I realize you like to kind of argue both sides a lot, play devil’s advocate and what not… but here you’re defending the use of loaded terms for one group to express dislike of a technique… and for that same group to complain about the use of what most folks would consider a totally benign term?

Seems odd.

I consider both terms legitimate, and both terms having some loading. That's my point; any term that seems functional is unlikely to be completely neutral in terms of its semantic loading. I can go through both terms at hand and show why they're descriptive from the side using it, and why the side its directed at can see an (intended or not) subtle slight in its choice.

I've argued before in this thread that this is an almost impossible barrier to useful discussion across these divides; I'm not sure I see any way around it. The best I can see is to try and pick one the least offensive possible and hope no one poisons the well.
 
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I can definitely empathize with feeling frustrated and not having the right words to express that frustration. I think we should all show a little kindness there. I think we should also strive to find a way to accurately depict our frustrations and get the roots of them. Also realize that we can respect something even if we would not prefer it.

That's the biggest problem with all of this. Since people have gotten used to some people taking shots at style elements that they don't understand or don't like, they're just prone to seeing most discussion from people who don't share that style in the worst light. And one of the symptoms is an eternal chase for more acceptable terms to discuss those places that are different and why they may not be attractive to them without coming across as denigrating them for people who find value in them.
 

I find "Schroedinger's X" unhelpful because it uses "Schroedinger's" as an adjective of a component of the fiction - X - which is not an accurate description of that fictional element.

The obvious terms for the general technique, which is well established, is no-/low-myth. In the past I've also called it "just in time" GMing or "just in time" authorship of fictional elements.

I think the "no/low myth" formulation is too arcane for general use, but I'd buy the "just in time" formulation; but I think it doesn't necessarily represent what the process looks like to people uncomfortable with it. Now, doing that may not be a virtue for general discussion, but I think when expressing the discomfort they'd feel with it and why its somewhat evocative; the fact its an unset element is just what the problem is after all, and the fact that fiction is not "real" is not really relevant from that perspective.
 

I think the "no/low myth" formulation is too arcane for general use, but I'd buy the "just in time" formulation; but I think it doesn't necessarily represent what the process looks like to people uncomfortable with it. Now, doing that may not be a virtue for general discussion, but I think when expressing the discomfort they'd feel with it and why its somewhat evocative; the fact its an unset element is just what the problem is after all, and the fact that fiction is not "real" is not really relevant from that perspective.
I mean, calling play that I don't enjoy **** [expletive deleted] is pretty evocative too! But I wouldn't normally put that forward as a term of art to be used in a public-facing thread about analysing RPG techniques.
 

a critical appraisal of ttrpgs is difficult [on online forums] due the narrow scope of practitioner interests, complete lack of methodology, and most importantly a compromised and effectively non-existent dataset.
I personally think this significantly overstates the difficulty of the task.

Yesterday, while waiting for a friend to arrive, I was talking with another friend about the differences between Torchbearer and Burning Wheel. We made a few cogent observations - eg about the way characters can and can't develop, about the way artha can be earned in the different systems, in my case about the way BW supports a type of intense and almost intimate play that TB doesn't, based on the different approaches the two systems adopt towards PC build, framing and resolution.

For instance, one of my favourite moments in BW play is when my PC Thurgon persuaded his sidekick Aramina to mend his armour. This was resolved as a Duel of Wits. For this to really carry weight in a RPG, there have to be a number of system features:

*The system has to track and care about damage to armour;

*The system has to have a meaningful system for repairing that damage, where ability matters (in BW this is the Mending skill on the PC sheet);

*The system has to have a satisfactory way to resolve the argument about whether or not to mend the armour (in BW this is Duel of Wits);

*The whole discussion has to matter, in a thematic or emotional sense, so that it is meaningful rather than just indulgent or piddling around to spend time on it (in BW this heft is provided by the relevant Beliefs, which in this case weren't about armour or mending but each character's Belief about their relationship to the other).​

We can then see that Torchbearer has the first two, but downplays the prospect of PvP arguments by giving these a high cost in the game's action economy, and also doesn't have the fourth feature - TB doesn't encourage character-to-character relationship as the content of Beliefs, where as these are the bread and butter of BW.

Reflecting now on my conversation of yesterday, the only other RPG I can think of at the moment that would support the argument about armour repair is MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic, which can handle damage to gear (this is s stepped down trait), and has a system for repairing that damage (ie restoring a stepped down trait), and can resolve PvP easily enough (complications or emotional stress will do the job), and can make it matter in terms of character milestones.

The point of this post is to show that critical analysis of RPGs seems to me to be not that hard.
 
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By clinical I am mostly speaking of detaching from the act of play while discussing play. Basically, the way we should talk about this stuff when analyzing it should be different than the way we talk about and consciously think about it during play. I think it is especially important to be precise about the division between player/character and fiction/game at this level. As well as acknowledging the artifice involved in the act of play. During play acknowledging the full process can be detrimental to flow state, bleed and a number of other things, but outside of play if we are going to discuss/refine our processes we have to include the internalized bits.

The reason for this is pretty simple: It's precisely the conditioned responses and internalized bits where different playstyles live. We have to think about the things we normally try not to think about to understand the differences in approaches.
 

Which two do you think are the same? (I thought I'd put up four different methods, but maybe have drawn an artificial distinction?)

My guess is you think the last two are variations on a common theme? I've separated them because, in play, the difference between a Torchbearer Journey and a single Orienteering test in Burning Wheel seems pretty big. One makes resources and "tactics" important; the other doesn't.

Only three bullet points. Normally if you had four ideas you’d have four bullet points.
 


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