Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, although I would counter that avoiding some of those constraints places some additional constraints on the scope of play and which sorts of characters/situations are appropriate. Albeit most of those constraints are pretty widely accepted in adventure gaming. That's really the subject of another thread though.

I absolutely agree. There are a lot of people who passively assume that the setting and as such events should only be responsive to the aims and nature of the PCs in what some might call a naturalistic way (i.e. in a way that does not address those things in any sort of a narrative way, but what, if you'll allow me the term, is sort of a simulationist way), and a smaller number that are adamant about it. I can't follow them there, because I've spent too much of my gaming career running superhero games where, even if trad in other ways, were very up-front that such things are too much of the genre to ignore, whether you put it in structurally or manually.

(Which doesn't mean I don't understand the attraction of a more simulationist campaign--I used to lean-in to that much more strongly in my youth--but it simply doesn't cover the full range of oppropriate RPGing.)

 

[clearstream]

You quote Vincent Baker referring to roleplaying as pretending to be someone. You also mention "common fiction".

A person writing down their imagined facts about imagined times and places is not pretending to be anyone. And there is no shared fiction.

In my phrasing I used "common" rather than "shared" purposefully, so that it would include games like Ironsworn when played solo. There is a fiction common to the players, even where the number of players is one.

The same goes for solitaire PC gen. There is no pretending. There is no shared fiction.

I have a copy of Ironsworn but haven't looked at it's solo rules. I don't know much about how they work. Perhaps it's a non-paradigm case (although clearly there is no shared fiction in solitaire play). An obvious difference between solo Ironsworn and what you're describing is that the point of solo Ironsworn is not to prepare material for later use in RPGing, whereas that is what GM prep, or player PC building, is ostensibly all about.

In the past, I and other posters have suggested that one feature of railroad-y play is that the players are essentially an appendix to the GM's authorship, a type of chorus adding a bit of colour and a few suggestions to what the GM has written. I've always regarded this as part of the diagnosis of why railroading is not the best that RPGing can aspire to be. You seem to be agreeing with the analysis but endorsing it as "just another type of RPGing".

That mistakes what I am proposing. I'm saying that for the participant(s) in the play covering the map and key invention (it need not be solo, as in the case of multi-GM campaigns) they can be drafting and revising a common fiction. A fiction they know others will revise, and that they will redraft (and revise, etc), on an ongoing basis.

But if someone invited me to come and watch their RPGing, and I turned up and got to watch them silently imagining and writing notes, I'd be a bit non-plussed.

I hadn't supposed there were spectators, and I hadn't supposed that the purpose of the play was to please them. I think you must mean here - turned up at T0 or T2 by mistake, thinking the session was to be that at T1.

And if I was asked to join in a RPG and learned that my job was to have someone bounce ideas off me while they write down what they're imagining about their solitaire fiction, again I'd be pretty non-plussed. Where's the shared fiction, the negotiated imagination?

Suppose you prepare a map and key for your TB2 campaign, and then you play a session with others. The shared fiction and negotiated imagination takes place in those latter moments. Ordinarily, they do not take place in the former moments. If that works there, why the objection here? What forbids a GM from being playful when developing their map and key?

Ugh, I hope I do not sound fractious! One thought - looking at your theory of RPG (and changing shared to common as I have) - can you say why adjusting the number of participants and what they are inventing at different moments is excluded?

 

[Thomas Shey]

...except I didn't. I had to make this lengthy circumlocution about narrative sense. I didn't have direct specific vocabulary that would allow me to dispense with the too-generic terms I had already used. That's what I'm asking for. A way to talk about what I'm talking about directly, without having to spend three paragraphs explaining what I mean every single time I want to say something.

That's simultaneously fair and difficult, because it narrows the use of a term, and the more you do that, the more terms you need, and that's often what leads to a discussion feeling jargon-laden (and of course multiplies the issue of getting agreement on all the terms in the first place).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Why?

Because they feel very connected with "what die rolls they make" and "what their character does". I'm not saying if you come in from another part of the hobby where what I'm about to say isn't as true that it'll be so, but if you come from an at all trad background you make almost no die rolls that don't represent character action and ability to one degree or another. Players are very much not used to making die rolls that don't represent that (in contrast to GMs who, to one degree or another, do them all the time).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That's simultaneously fair and difficult, because it narrows the use of a term, and the more you do that, the more terms you need, and that's often what leads to a discussion feeling jargon-laden (and of course multiplies the issue of getting agreement on all the terms in the first place).

I certainly recognize that it's difficult (if it were easy I probably would've done it myself.) But I don't agree that developing jargon is an inherently bad thing. Almost all fields of study develop jargon. I consider game design to be a field of study--indeed, I consider it to be a technology. Hence, developing some jargon is inevitable. We just happen to be people who live at a time where most of that jargon is yet to be defined.

No one would want to have to constantly explain what bildungsroman means or spend a paragraph explaining what a "motif" is every single time they wanted to say anything about novels or music respectively. Yet those are jargon terms.

It is, of course, important to recognize that jargon can be a barrier to entry and address those issues. Actual research mathematics can be practically incomprehensible even to someone with a relatively high level of math education (e.g. someone with a physics or engineering degree) because so many terms go unexplained, but that doesn't mean the jargon is bad for mathematics. It means that there's a lot of it and mathematicians don't really put that much effort into explaining what "rings" and "fields" and "manifolds" etc. are to non-mathematicians. Given there is no such thing as an academia of game design yet, I think we are reasonably protected from that level of impenetrability, but it never hurts to keep in mind that it can happen.

 

[FrogReaver]

One thing I’m thinking of today is what kind of system would work best for a rpg focused on comedy.

For this purpose let’s think in the context of comedy that treats its narrative seriously but has over the top characters and situations that cause humor in the real world.

I’d mentioned earlier that about mechanical consequences typically being tied to fictional consequences - and this might be the perfect illustration of a type of game that would most benefit by departing almost fully from that paradigm.

Thoughts?

 

[hawkeyefan]

I'd revisit the common argument "but its all fiction" when assessing this. If that's not to argue the objection is nonsensical, its not clear what argument it is supposed to be making.

It's a counter to the assertion that trad play is the default. That making such decisions at the time of play instead of ahead of time is somehow less valid. It's not saying either is nonsensical, just that each is a preference, and both are equally valid.

 

[clearstream]

One thing I’m thinking of today is what kind of system would work best for a rpg focused on comedy.

For this purpose let’s think in the context of comedy that treats its narrative seriously but has over the top characters and situations that cause humor in the real world.

I’d mentioned earlier that about mechanical consequences typically being tied to fictional consequences - and this might be the perfect illustration of a type of game that would most benefit by departing almost fully from that paradigm.

Thoughts?

A game I would call attention to regards comedy is "Paranoia". In our plays of that game, comedy was largely achieved through exaggeration, irony, and overt catch-22s. Tropes exaggerated to a darkly ironic place. Ridiculous catch-22s.

Such as floors with coloured tiles indicating security clearance needed to stand in that section, with long higher-clearance stretches between the clones and the next red-section they needed to get to. And the inevitable torturously funny questionnaires. Or being delivered a tank through a 1/2' x 3' delivery slot.

I mention that, because mechanical consequences in "Paranoia" are still very much tied to fictional consequences. What you describe sounds to me more in the realm of the surreal. (Or possibly I am failing to properly grasp what you describe!)

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't think that you seemed harsh!

I will ask you to indulge me in more autobiography (hopefully to a more generally applicable point):

A breakthrough I had in my thinking, somewhere around 10 to 12 years ago, was to realise that if all the map and key is doing is to serve as a type of index or checklist for encounters, with the players' choices of where to go and what to look at activating the encounters, but that being either arbitrary (as per @Hussar's posts) or pre-determined (as per the linearity that I think @niklinna mentioned upthread), then why bother with the map and key?

Why not, instead, manage the encounters through some more systematic framework like a skill challenge, and/or just have the GM make a non-arbitrary decision about which encounter to activate now, in light of the current trajectory of play?

(I realise that I'm not the first RPGer to have worked this out! What I've described in the previous paragraph is directly influenced by Burning Wheel, and clearly also has some basic similarities to AW prep of threats and fronts. And in practice I was doing it as long ago as 35 years, but it took me a long time to work out what was working in my practice, and what elements of received technique - like map-and-key - were just a burden or a fetish.)

It took another development in my thinking, in the past 5 years, to work out how map-and-key could be used as a framing device - basically for anchoring the fiction about a detailed bit of geography - that was different from the hidden gameboard approach I was raised on (see my post upthread about Classic Traveller).

To me, a lot of D&D play seems to want to use the map-and-key as a type of anchor of the fiction, and to do this with it serving as a hidden gameboard in the classic sense. I think there may be an aspect of "tradition" here that is not necessarily fully reasoned. I think there is also the element of hidden stuff being revealed is fun.

I'm sympathetic to your view that the less of it, the better - or (hoping that my rephrasing as I flip it around isn't losing your meaning) that if there is going to be a hidden gameboard, then the players should have the opportunity to uncover its secrets in a non-arbitrary way. But I think this may be a minority preference, or at least just one among a range of preferences, in the current RPG milieu.

I meant harsh toward @Hussar , which wasn't my intent. I think the reason he was getting push back on his description was for those reasons I shared... I know that's not how I think of map and key play. However, as you say, there's a range of preferences in this regard, and clearly such games do exist.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

in the way I just described - yes, absolutely yes.

*It seeming strange doesn’t make it incorrect.

I mean, it kind of does make it incorrect, because it's absolutely not a cultural norm that something being bad means people who like it are bad - almost everyone likes some stuff they consider "bad". There is a small group of weird aloof people who say they don't, but they're essentially just being difficult, because they inevitably do.