Prep situation to create plot

[pemerton]

You see three interesting phenomena crop up in a lot of trad games.

A player thinks his character would leave the party but doesn’t for the sake of continued play.

A player thinks his character would attack another member of the party but doesn’t, for the sake of continued play.

A player doesn’t think his character would be interested in the ‘mission’ but goes along with it for the sake of continued play.


My interest is in what’s happening here on an aesthetic level. There is obviously an impulse the player has about the character that is then subordinated towards another goal.

One thing that, back in the 90s, made us regard our Rolemaster game as more "sophisticated" than the typical D&D of that period was that we would have PCs leaving the party or attacking other party members or not going on the mission.

Not all the time: there was some author-stance retconning in of motivations, or subordinating of initial impulses. But it wasn't all author-stance all the time either. Conflicts between PCs happened, and sometimes one PC would kill another. (Or manipulate another. Or bully another. Or etc.)

In our 4e play, the players deliberately took steps to keep the conflict among the PCs within tolerable limits. There were only a couple of occasions that I remember of out-and-out splits among the party. So to an extent it was not as "authentic" as the RM play; but also the way the fiction was presented and resolved probably didn't create as much pressure on the relationships between the PCs.

I mention all this to indicate that I'm aware of the phenomena you describe, and have engaged with them in my own play, in different ways at different times and with different systems.

The ‘problem of sim’ is that this is often framed in an ontological way. Which is stupid because the obvious retort is that there is no ‘what would actually happen', there is no character. This is further exacerbated by the 2E approach to the hobby that exploded in the 90's. White Wolf games being the paradigmatic example.

Why did old sim players hate playing with World of Darkness storytellers? The world of darkness story teller is explicitly told to cultivate an attitude toward the fiction that subordinates the sim impulse in favour of a dramaturgical one. It doesn’t matter if the results are the exact same. What matters, on the social aesthetic level, is that we’re doing the same creative process to get to the results.

To the extent that PbtA principles tell you to sub-ordinate, then the type of constraint they’re going for is a different type of constraint than the ‘sim impulse.’ Whether and how much Apocalypse World does that is an open question My thesis, as shown by my exchanges with @pemerton , is that it admits orchestration is necessary to undergird the sim impulse but the sim impulse is still central to resolving situation.

As (I think) you know the ontological framing of the "sim impulse" and the resolution that follows from it drives me nuts! Because it imputes causal power to non-existent (because imaginary) things.

Upthread I've referred to an "aesthetic intuition" but haven't tried to analyse it. Following from your post, one thing I can say about it is that it involves setting aside certain sorts of pressures - pressures to subordinate - in arriving at a view of what to do or say next.

Another thing: I think it's not an accident that it focuses on character (as opposed to, say, impersonal causal processes within the imagined world). The idea of having an authentic (in some sense) intuition as to what a character would do is more plausible (at least most of the time) than having an authentic intuition as to (say) what the weather will do.

One feature of Fantasy For Real that I haven't really engaged with to date is the interaction of magical effects. The rules make quite a big deal of this, and clearly the GM is expected to have strong intuitions as to how wacky magical effects will interact. I'm curious as to whether I will, if and when the time comes.