"Oddities" in fantasy settings - the case against "consistency"

[Alzrius]

Yes it is.

No, it's not.

I mean, someone who has hundreds of hours experience (say) cycling generally has more, and more useful, things to contribute to our understanding of cycling as an activity than someone who just learned to ride last weekend and who still wobbles crazily as they get their bike moving.

You see the assumption you just made here? You've compared two extremes, instead of people with "relatively" comparable amounts of experience who've come to different conclusions. Now try to define "relatively" in the previous context in any objective way (i.e. by attaching a number, percentage, ratio, etc. to it). It should become obvious why that's not a helpful line of dialogue.

For instance, I can infer that, if I said I had hundreds of hours playing storytelling games, you'd quiz me on which games, how their mechanics work, how long those campaigns lasted, etc. Which is otherwise known as gatekeeping. But that's my inference leading me to pass judgment on you as a person, rather than letting you speak for yourself, and is a good reason not to decide that you know some aspect of someone because of what you've "inferred" about them.

Of course there are exceptions: some people are prodigies, and others are hacks whose hundreds of hours have taught them little or nothing. But in this particular discussion, are you asserting that you are a prodigy? If not, are you denying @hawkeyefan's conclusion, inferred from your posts, that you have little experience with the collaborative approach that he has described? And if not - so you are neither a prodigy in respect of that approach, nor particularly experienced with it, what is the basis on which you assert that it is not viable? What distinguishes that assertion from mere speculation or conjecture?

No, I'm asserting that the inferences that you've admitted to making are your own judgments, which bare little experience to my own reality, and that then turning around and comparing what you think you know about me to what you know about @hawkeyefan and their experiences only says something about you, not me. I've repeatedly talked about my own experiences, and the futility of someone saying that they have X hours more experience than me, and so I should sit back and accept what they say as truth (in a matter of personal opinion, no less). Telling someone else that their opinion is facile, and they should sit down, be quiet, and learn from people who know better isn't useful when the issue is one of personal opinion and preference.

 

[Alzrius]

I find very curious this turn in language, from I don't like it (a statement of preference) or even I haven't successfully done it (an autobiographical statement about attainment) to It isn't viable.

Don't read too much into it. There have been multiple people talking about why this approach doesn't work for them, and if we presume that they're not all just suffering from a "lack of experience," then we need to talk about how it doesn't work for them, for which shorthand is useful. It's no different than calling consistency "the enemy" of imaginative play.

I personally find it a rather obscurantist usage. And I don't think it is widely used even in other RPG contexts.

I think that's too focused on semantics, personally. RPGs tend to have issues of agreed-upon terms and definitions, and this is such a case.

Eg suppose I started a thread saying "OSR play is not viable", and appended a footnote saying "I've not had good experience with OSR play." Do you really think that most OSRers would treat my footnote as synonymous with, or as otherwise justifying, my thread title?

To the extent that you can compare one word in a multitude of posts with the title of an entire thread, I'd say that it's the enemy of reasoned, engaging debate.

 

[Alzrius]

Most worthwhile human activities are learned skills. Running a Gygaxian dungeon is a learned skill - I know, as I don't have it (or at least don't have much of it).

Which leads us to ask why you don't have it. Why haven't you worked to develop it? Why not put in the time and effort when people with more experience than you say it's rewarding? Now turn around and put those questions toward the types of learned-skill games that you like, and you can see why they're not questions that can be used to prove much of anything.

Writing a scenario in the traditional "storytelling" style is also a learned skill; as is GMing them. I've played with GMs who are masters at it, and others who are terrible.

Which goes to show that people have preferences, as well as inclinations that make certain things easier and more fun for them to learn that others. There's a lesson in that.

These days, when I mostly play with my long-time friends, there is one of them who GMs me. The only RPG he has ever GMed is Burning Wheel. And so yes, he did start out being able to "do that", ie to GM as conversation rather than as script.

As you noted, you'll run into the occasional prodigy, but you likewise noted that most human activities are learned skills. Given that not everyone wants to learn every skill, and sees equal reward for doing so, we can dispense with the idea that one person's greater experience is instructive to someone with less experience (particularly if they still have a considerable amount on their own).

 

[billd91]

while i mostly agree with your statement this one line i bolded specifically sticks out to me, in that it somewhat implies that the pitch is what should always be the thing reconsidered, i mean yes, accomodate the whole group as best you can but does this means if one player doesn't want a particular type of game the entire rest of the table doesn't get to have it either?

I think it should always be reconsidered. But there has to also be room for the group dynamic. If you have most of your players enthusiastically on board, maybe it is appropriate to stick to the pitch and pick the objecting player up on the next game. If you're not willing to go without the one player, then you're kind of stuck having to reconsider the pitch to find something everyone can agree on.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

As for collective world building, as I have said before, I have somewhat mixed experiences about it.

I think it works well when done within some already established framework, like building your gang in the Blades or your tribe in Glorantha etc. It connects the characters in the setting and gives them established relationships.

My experiences about building the whole world from scratch are not that good. Unless one person has a strong vision and keeps pushing things into their preferred direction, it often ends up as some sort of designed-by-committee generic kitchen sink mess. And many published settings are like that, so perhaps that is good enough. But it definitely is not my preferred approach.

As for the games I run, I don't do collective world building. I could do the limited establishing the connections within the world I have built, but not building the whole world. World building simply is too important and too much fun for me, that I would want to give it up, and usually the reason I want to run the game in the first place is that I have some setting idea I want to use.

 

[Manbearcat]

Did they start out being able to do that, or did they have to work to learn how to do so (and do so artfully, so that they were able to react immediately in a way that kept the game going without disruptions)? Because all of the GMs that I know needed to work on being able to do this.

Speaking for myself in the subject (as I’m one of the people pemerton discusses these things with), the way I learned to GM these games was very much Karate Kid like. I was learning and repping the fundamentals and I didn’t even know.

At 7 I started creating and GMing Basic dungeoncrawls. When Wandering Monsters “hit,” that is sort of like GMing a “Twist” in BW/MG/TB parlance. You’ve got to ground the situation with compelling backstory/provocative material for players to engage with in-situ. If NPC Reaction Roll simultaneously “hits” an unorthodox reaction for the creature/situation? Well, that is “this Twist goes to 11” territory. Those types of things demanded a type and amount (and, through repping that, grooms it within the GM) of cognitive agility that would serve me tremendously later.

I’d recommend that starting point for anyone to be honest. I’d also remove the Jedi/Padawan relationship that D&D was known for at that time as the significant amount of “Jedi GMing instruction” (+ castigating and persecution…don’t forget that!) that I was getting at that time would have been actively harmful if I would have onboarded and operationalized it for both the kind of dungeon/hexcrawling I was doing back then (and wanted to keeping doing and improving at) and the later Story Now games I would be running.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Forgive me if this has been asked before - and maybe point me in the direction of some discussion surrounding it; I don't normally participate in playstyle threads, although I might dip a toe occasionally.

If we consider:

• The referee proposes a Dragonlance game. One of the players wants to be a cleric.
• The referee proposes a Hobbit-centric game using The One Ring rules. One of the players wants to be a Noldo.
• The referee proposes a Foundation-esque Traveller game, set in a human-only far future. One of the players wants to be a Vargr
• The referee proposes a Call of Cthulhu game involving the gradual revelation of themes which are Best Left Unknown (TM). One of the players would like to start well-versed in the Cthulhu mythos.

You get the general idea. Is there any difference between these propositions (beside authorship, and the possibility that players are already familiar with the source material), and a conformity to a world/theme devised by the referee, or are these all accommodations which can/should be met?

Can? Sure. Should? That depends.

I personally don't see a reason not to allow most of the above. If that's what the players are into, then I'm generally going to try to accommodate it. But it also depends on other details, and how the group feels about everything. If there's a compelling reason not to allow something, then that should be considered and discussed until everyone's on the same page.

I think the point of the OP... and one I've largely been making... is that there's no need to dismiss these ideas out of hand simply out of some sense of setting fidelity or purity. Exceptions abound in fiction... some might say that most fantasy fiction is filled with them.

What are players excited about? What will make for interesting play? What will create opportunities for the characters and their players? Ultimately, the play experience is the primary goal.

 

[hawkeyefan]

If we can ignore setting conventions at our leisure then what's the point of having setting conventions? (or is that your end point, that we shouldn't have them; that setting conventions shouldn't exist?)

Who's talking about "at our leisure"? I'm talking about before play begins... when the setting and the characters are being created.

See? You've just claimed that you know better than me, right after saying that it's not about that. Hence why pointing to your own experience as a comparative for "I know better" is not only pointless, but detrimental to the conversation.

I literally am asking you to share your experience. I said that perhaps I'm wrong, and you're a guru of collaborative world building. If so, please elaborate.

Except, as I noted, this isn't a matter of who has more experience with something. I've already posted about my own experiences multiple times over the course of this thread. Yet you don't seem to be aware of them, which in turn showcases the futility of saying "but you don't really know what you're talking about, whereas I do," which is what this particular approach boils down to.

Those posts don't shed much light on what we're talking about. One appears to be about a spotlight-hungry player and the second is about a player who was interested in a setting element.

I'm asking you what is your experience with collaborative world building? What games have you played that involve it? How did they promote it? How did it work? How did it not?

You're not answering these questions. Those examples don't address these questions.

To the extent that no one is born knowing how to GM, yes. World-building is also a skill. That said, I'm of the opinion that it's a skill that's easier to develop, if for no other reason than you can work on that one in private to a greater extent than you can work on dealing with surprises on your own (which, make no mistake, you can do, but putting it into practice requires those situations to occur, and by their very nature they're unexpected and unpredictable).

I think the amount you can work on world building on your own is a bit overstated. While true, I think that the primary way to learn if you've built an interesting/dynamic setting for an RPG is to see it in play.

Sure, but this ignores that people tend to gravitate to different styles (and games) for a reason. For some people, the alternatives that you're championing aren't going to be palatable, and while there's certainly issues in trying out new things, there's also an argument to be made that recreational activities are about staying in your comfort zone, since that's where you're comfortable.

I'm not ignoring it at all. Yes, people will gravitate toward different games or styles for a variety of reasons.

I think that there's a reason why the most popular games are the most popular, in terms of why they've become the main points of entry into the hobby. Not all of that has to do with the style of gaming (arguably, a lot of it has nothing to do with that), but at the same time I think that the style can't be completely discounted either.

There are many reasons. Setting aside things like brand recognition, market presence, and popularity... I've commented on some of them myself. Personal preference is of course a significant one. So is inertia and familiarity. So is comfort. So is fear.

Another big one is false impressions based on underinformed assumptions made by others. The idea that a given style is difficult, hard to learn, or not viable.

 

[Umbran]

It is. Are you unaware that I've repeatedly said that? Because it sounds like you are.

I'm responding to one post, and what it appears to say, in and of itself.

Which is kind of the point; claiming that your stance is more valid because of experience is just another way of invalidating someone else's opinion. Maybe, you know, don't do that?

I made a point based on statistical relevance, and how none of us really have it. That isn't about my personal experience, it is about what math tells us about data.

Likewise, talking about who has more experience with something isn't a valid reason for saying why someone else's opinion on a topic (with which they themselves have experience) carries less weight.

My argument is largely that the idea of opinions based in personal experience "carrying more/less weight" is faulty in the context of a broad discussion of playstyles.

Of course, if you are having a discussion limited to what you do at your own table, then the personal experiences of the people at that table carry weight, and those of folks not at the table ought to carry less. But when speaking about whether a style is viable in general, personal experience is, by basic statistics, not a solid foundation.

We might gain some understanding from digging down into why each person had those personal experiences, but even that won't generalize on its own.

 

[Umbran]

You get the general idea. Is there any difference between these propositions (beside authorship, and the possibility that players are already familiar with the source material), and a conformity to a world/theme devised by the referee, or are these all accommodations which can/should be met?

I'd say that all those are things that can be discussed. Maybe the player will get exactly what they want. Maybe the GM will say no. Maybe there can be a viable compromise. But there's nothing so dangerous there it can't even be talked about.

I mean... the very first thing on the list is Goldmoon, the basis for the Dragonlance Chronicles, so clearly the idea has some legs, if you want to stretch them.