Playing in the Blank Spaces of the System

[Wolfpack48]

The reality is that there's always some jumping between describing your actions, doing a bit of (bad) acting/voices, and rolling dice to resolve things. I just prefer to spend most of my focus on the first two. I would prefer to spend zero time debating and discussing rules -- that can be done away from the game table.

 

[Pedantic]

I think it's pretty clear that Brennan and co in WBN and elsewhere have a system for character and social interactions and narrative arcs, it's just that the system is "extensive improv experience, a shared sense of story development and deep seated comfort with each other as performers." In other WBN material, Aabria and Erica talk a lot about their "writer brain" and "director brain" being routinely engaged alongside their decision making as players.

Aabria's character in particular in WBN is making painful, self-defeating decisions based on a flawed, imperialistic worldview without the aid of a mechanical system guiding her to make them. That's entirely down to a set of extra-system skills she's deploying as a performer, and it makes complete sense she and the other players would want to retain creative autonomy to make those decisions, instead of handing it over to a game system.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The ultimate example of the empowered DM! When will the rest of the TTRPG world catch up and realize they should purge the rules from their game? They only serve as shackles to the nirvana that is DM judgment!

This is a heck of a strawman argument. No one, not even Ben Milton, is saying this is how all games should be run.

 

[Reynard]

This is a heck of a strawman argument. No one, not even Ben Milton, is saying this is how all games should be run.

There is no middleground.

 

[Celebrim]

I've talked about this before and I think it's a bit of a misdirection to talk about this as the blank spaces in the system as if they are more fun.

The real question is what you are trying to simulate? And a narrativist game, for the most common sense understanding of what it means to be a narrativist game, is a game that is trying to simulate being in and partaking in a story.

And the trouble that "nar" games run into is that nar mechanics are typically terrible for actually doing that.

The fundamental issue (in this specific case) is that in a tabletop RPG what we are really doing is sitting together and talking. RPGs are a conversational game. And it turns out that conversation is a very bad simulation of things like combat. If we want to simulate combat whether taking place in the framework of a story or not, we need a lot of props and algorithms to generate that other than conversation.

But, if we are wanting to simulate a social encounter, well, do you know what simulates a social encounter really well? A conversation. And it turns out that if you are simulating dialogue and social interaction, that more mechanics makes that simulation feel less real compared to less mechanics.

And this is particularly true from the perspective of an observer, and well, he's doing productions designed to be observed.

The truth is that it's not enough for the rules to have an intention. The actual outcome of the rules matters. And most "nar" rules hitherto aren't very good at creating story.

 

[Reynard]

I've talked about this before and I think it's a bit of a misdirection to talk about this as the blank spaces in the system as if they are more fun.

The real question is what you are trying to simulate? And a narrativist game, for the most common sense understanding of what it means to be a narrativist game, is a game that is trying to simulate being in and partaking in a story.

And the trouble that "nar" games run into is that nar mechanics are typically terrible for actually doing that.

The fundamental issue (in this specific case) is that in a tabletop RPG what we are really doing is sitting together and talking. RPGs are a conversational game. And it turns out that conversation is a very bad simulation of things like combat. If we want to simulate combat whether taking place in the framework of a story or not, we need a lot of props and algorithms to generate that other than conversation.

But, if we are wanting to simulate a social encounter, well, do you know what simulates a social encounter really well? A conversation. And it turns out that if you are simulating dialogue and social interaction, that more mechanics makes that simulation feel less real compared to less mechanics.

And this is particularly true from the perspective of an observer, and well, he's doing productions designed to be observed.

The truth is that it's not enough for the rules to have an intention. The actual outcome of the rules matters. And most "nar" rules hitherto aren't very good at creating story.

I'm not sure what that has to do with the subject, which is explicitly about doing this in spaces where there aren't rules to get in the way. The issue isn't bad rules for a thing, it is using systems that lack rules for a thing BECAUSE that system lacks rules for that thing.

 

[Umbran]

And the trouble that "nar" games run into is that nar mechanics are typically terrible for actually doing that.
...

The truth is that it's not enough for the rules to have an intention. The actual outcome of the rules matters. And most "nar" rules hitherto aren't very good at creating story.

If this was so important that it needed to be said twice in the same post, maybe it deserved something else in the post in terms of support? Like, even a general characterization of "nar" mechanics (and really, who says "nar" and why is it important to use their lingo?) and an indication of why, at least for you, they don't work to help build story?

 

[Celebrim]

I'm not sure what that has to do with the subject, which is explicitly about doing this in spaces where there aren't rules to get in the way. The issue isn't bad rules for a thing, it is using systems that lack rules for a thing BECAUSE that system lacks rules for that thing.

No one I've ever heard of chooses a RPG to handle combat specifically because it lacks rules for combat, but lots of people choose an RPG to handle story driven play and social driven play specifically because the RPG lacks rules for those things.

That there isn't symmetry here is my point and is what it has to do with the subject. Social and mental attributes are fundamentally different than physical attributes and failure to recognize that has led to a lot of symmetrical designs that poorly serve their intended goal. Too many rule systems look at the support for combat, make the assumption that social interaction is just combat and make a symmetrical system intended to cover both things.

Brennan says, "Combat is the thing I'm least interested in simulating through improvisational story telling so I need a game to do that for me." That is exactly point here. Brennan is primarily interested in doing improvisational story telling. But he doesn't need a game to define for him how to do improvisational story telling. He doesn't need rules for that. He needs rules for the parts of the play that improvisational story telling doesn't work for. Improvisational story telling as no surprise works well for improvisational storytelling. I think you have it backwards here. The game is improvisational story telling. The blank space in that is combat, and so he's filling it in with rules that fill in the blank space which is combat.

 

[Reynard]

. I think you have it backwards here. The game is improvisational story telling. The blank space in that is combat, and so he's filling it in with rules that fill in the blank space which is combat.

I don't think I'm the one that has it backwards.

Again, Brennan doesn't say he doesn't want combat, he says he doesn't want to improvise it and expend a bunch of mental energy on it. So, he wants rules for it.

By saying that the blank space is where the rules are, you are twisting the argument into something that doesn't make much sense from the perspective of the instigating thought, specifically that if rules get in the way of the thing you care about, you are better off not having rules for that thing.

 

[Celebrim]

By saying that the blank space is where the rules are, you are twisting the argument into something that doesn't make much sense from the perspective of the instigating thought, specifically that if rules get in the way of the thing you care about, you are better off not having rules for that thing.

But you aren't addressing the question of why the rules would or wouldn't get in the way.

The rules don't really get in the way of combat in the game. In fact, they do the opposite. The rules of combat are more abstract than the combat itself, but they are much less abstract than doing combat as improvisational theater at any level less than combat focused LARPing. The rules of combat are more abstract than combat, but they are much less abstract than having the players talk out the combat. As Brennan put it, he needs some mechanism to tell him about the flight of the arrow. He doesn't want the rules for the flight of the arrow to be abstract because he doesn't care about the combat. He wants the rules about the flight of the arrow because they are more concrete than talking out how the arrow flies. The more rules we add, the less abstract the combat becomes. We might choose a rules light combat game because we don't really care about combat.

But the opposite happens with a social play. The least abstract way to play out a social interaction is to play out the social interaction as improvisational theater. The more rules we would add to that situation the more abstract it becomes and the less like the thing itself it becomes. So for a tabletop roleplaying game that restricts itself to not getting out actual weapons and trying to hit each other with them (and for which that wouldn't be a very good abstraction of a hero fighting a dragon anyway), the least abstract system is one that is crunchy in combat but rules light in social play.

It's not at all arbitrary that you are better off not having rules for social play as compared to combat. If that thing was combat that you wanted to be the focus of the game, you would not be better off without rules - unless well you really wanted to limit yourself to HEMA inspired LARPing with swords and armor and therefore didn't need dice mechanics because those would be more abstract.

We can take this argument further and ask, "Why might a stealth system be more abstract than talking it out?" or "What is different between stealth and combat?"