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Players establishing facts about the world impromptu during play
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<blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8265498" data-attributes="member: 6801252"><p>Well to begin with, I'm unclear on where you're trying to drive this conversation? It sounds like you have a bit of a mission and want me to smooth the way for you to feel as if you've accomplished it, your objective appears to be affecting some kind of change in me.</p><p></p><p>But putting that aside...</p><p></p><p>I'm not concerned with whether the material is improvised or heavily prepared, I'm concerned with the methodology of its design rather than its timing, as influenced by the role of the person creating it. When one person, improvising or not designs something, they develop a plan for the elements and how they fit together, the authorial intent of the piece as a whole. You may have heard the term 'Creative Vision' in the past, and heard the adage "Too many cooks spoil the stew." My experience of player establishment of fiction is that it lacks, or sharply reduces, the patterns that run through the text of the game world and deplete its meaning as a literary work in its own right. This is actually twofold though--</p><p></p><p>For a useful example of how intentionality, authorship, and collaboration collide consider SCP, where individuals draft stories and containment entries about a fictional facility dedicated to securing, containing, and protecting the supernatural to add to the wiki. One of the coolest things about the work, is that many of the articles take place in the same interconnected canon, mysterious elements of one story might be references to others, or speak to a metaplot hinted at through a variety of articles. As a reader it can be especially fun to sort through these interconnected canons. But for the most part, those interconnected articles are the work of single individuals or small groups, or planned collaborations-- when reading articles its important to keep in mind whose articles you're reading because it gives you a good idea of which patterns you're looking for, what is likely or unlikely to be a reference to some other work-- these become miniature canons of their own.</p><p></p><p>1. The first point relevant to what you're asking me is the presence of intentional, referential, and hidden interconnections in the text of the game world. Collaboration can still accomplish this, but it typically requires a 'writers room' where the overall pattern is actively discussed so everyone is on the same page about what is being hinted at, or at least that they're hinting at something unestablished. In the context of player establishment in a TRPG, establishment is usually public (especially, but not exclusively, in Story Now games where 'establish' is an active verb used to refer to information being said outloud, and accepted into everyone's picture of the situation) to the same audience who would have the opportunity to pick up the hints as part of their explorations of the game world, speculate on them, and potentially leverage that information as a reward for their observational skill (or have narrative questions answered for them, anyway). The useful element of traditional player boundaries, in this context, is not the timing of the content creation, or the singular mind, but the presence of the 'screen' between the person creating the content and the person 'reading' it-- the GM (or GMs!) can have information hidden from the players that is still canon to the game world itself, allowing the dissemination of that information to become an element of explorative play. Someone needs to be hiding somehing FROM ME for it to be a mystery to me, and that thing needs to exist before me finding out about it to be meaningfully hinted at. You can kind of reconstruct that process from the other end, as a GM without knowing the 'unestablished' information, (it'll be kind of hard, having done it myself) and it'll just be how well you can carry off the illusion and its eventual transition into something concrete, since it still relies on their conviction something specific is there. Exercises in building a mystery where no one knows the secret until its established logically from the clues are fun, but they play differently.</p><p></p><p>2. The second is the 'too many cooks' portion where not only is getting everyone on the same page about what you're trying to create <em>hard</em>. But the addition of fictional elements has the potential to overwrite, not the established fiction around the table, but the unestablished fiction some of those elements may have been building to. In other words John may start building an NPC off the premise that their dead wife in their backstory was killed by them (but that hasn't been established in the fiction) but Susan might introduce to the fiction that there were actually killed in this other circumstance. Any 'hints' in the NPCs behavior up to Susan's establishment of that fiction are now 'unmoored' from the piece of fiction intended to have caused them, which can be frustrating if you can feel the undercurrent of hints and other people can't. Now, the systems we're discussing do allow the GM to have a final say about what elements make it into the fiction, which helps, but then the player attempting to unravel these hints probably needs to mentally parse who added what to the fiction to figure out what 'hints' came from someone who could posses hidden information. Alternatively, the need to keep the unestablished information fluid can make it far more difficult to engage in this kind of game play at all, I actually had an experience with this for a piece of major hidden lore recently where I had an idea I intentionally reminded myself wasn't canon unless it worked out, then that piece of information ended up in a chain of cause and effect and I 'established' it by telling the other GM about it, and why I thought I'd accidentally established it (a hard frame happened where the things would have to be true for X to have happened, so it wasn't said, but hole of its shape was carved into the fiction.)</p><p></p><p>This is what I meant by <em>definitionally</em>. it has to do with what the play I'm yearning for actually consists of, and how that relates to player establishment.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="The-Magic-Sword, post: 8265498, member: 6801252"] Well to begin with, I'm unclear on where you're trying to drive this conversation? It sounds like you have a bit of a mission and want me to smooth the way for you to feel as if you've accomplished it, your objective appears to be affecting some kind of change in me. But putting that aside... I'm not concerned with whether the material is improvised or heavily prepared, I'm concerned with the methodology of its design rather than its timing, as influenced by the role of the person creating it. When one person, improvising or not designs something, they develop a plan for the elements and how they fit together, the authorial intent of the piece as a whole. You may have heard the term 'Creative Vision' in the past, and heard the adage "Too many cooks spoil the stew." My experience of player establishment of fiction is that it lacks, or sharply reduces, the patterns that run through the text of the game world and deplete its meaning as a literary work in its own right. This is actually twofold though-- For a useful example of how intentionality, authorship, and collaboration collide consider SCP, where individuals draft stories and containment entries about a fictional facility dedicated to securing, containing, and protecting the supernatural to add to the wiki. One of the coolest things about the work, is that many of the articles take place in the same interconnected canon, mysterious elements of one story might be references to others, or speak to a metaplot hinted at through a variety of articles. As a reader it can be especially fun to sort through these interconnected canons. But for the most part, those interconnected articles are the work of single individuals or small groups, or planned collaborations-- when reading articles its important to keep in mind whose articles you're reading because it gives you a good idea of which patterns you're looking for, what is likely or unlikely to be a reference to some other work-- these become miniature canons of their own. 1. The first point relevant to what you're asking me is the presence of intentional, referential, and hidden interconnections in the text of the game world. Collaboration can still accomplish this, but it typically requires a 'writers room' where the overall pattern is actively discussed so everyone is on the same page about what is being hinted at, or at least that they're hinting at something unestablished. In the context of player establishment in a TRPG, establishment is usually public (especially, but not exclusively, in Story Now games where 'establish' is an active verb used to refer to information being said outloud, and accepted into everyone's picture of the situation) to the same audience who would have the opportunity to pick up the hints as part of their explorations of the game world, speculate on them, and potentially leverage that information as a reward for their observational skill (or have narrative questions answered for them, anyway). The useful element of traditional player boundaries, in this context, is not the timing of the content creation, or the singular mind, but the presence of the 'screen' between the person creating the content and the person 'reading' it-- the GM (or GMs!) can have information hidden from the players that is still canon to the game world itself, allowing the dissemination of that information to become an element of explorative play. Someone needs to be hiding somehing FROM ME for it to be a mystery to me, and that thing needs to exist before me finding out about it to be meaningfully hinted at. You can kind of reconstruct that process from the other end, as a GM without knowing the 'unestablished' information, (it'll be kind of hard, having done it myself) and it'll just be how well you can carry off the illusion and its eventual transition into something concrete, since it still relies on their conviction something specific is there. Exercises in building a mystery where no one knows the secret until its established logically from the clues are fun, but they play differently. 2. The second is the 'too many cooks' portion where not only is getting everyone on the same page about what you're trying to create [I]hard[/I]. But the addition of fictional elements has the potential to overwrite, not the established fiction around the table, but the unestablished fiction some of those elements may have been building to. In other words John may start building an NPC off the premise that their dead wife in their backstory was killed by them (but that hasn't been established in the fiction) but Susan might introduce to the fiction that there were actually killed in this other circumstance. Any 'hints' in the NPCs behavior up to Susan's establishment of that fiction are now 'unmoored' from the piece of fiction intended to have caused them, which can be frustrating if you can feel the undercurrent of hints and other people can't. Now, the systems we're discussing do allow the GM to have a final say about what elements make it into the fiction, which helps, but then the player attempting to unravel these hints probably needs to mentally parse who added what to the fiction to figure out what 'hints' came from someone who could posses hidden information. Alternatively, the need to keep the unestablished information fluid can make it far more difficult to engage in this kind of game play at all, I actually had an experience with this for a piece of major hidden lore recently where I had an idea I intentionally reminded myself wasn't canon unless it worked out, then that piece of information ended up in a chain of cause and effect and I 'established' it by telling the other GM about it, and why I thought I'd accidentally established it (a hard frame happened where the things would have to be true for X to have happened, so it wasn't said, but hole of its shape was carved into the fiction.) This is what I meant by [I]definitionally[/I]. it has to do with what the play I'm yearning for actually consists of, and how that relates to player establishment. [/QUOTE]
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