D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[EzekielRaiden]

I agree with pretty much everything you're saying here.

It's certainly not that hard to just say, "You can only get things we agree are reasonable," and it is, in fact, necessary to do so. That does leave me a bit confused, though, as to why you won't accept this exact same kind of agreement to not abuse a potentially wide-open loophole in other types of games,

You're literally talking about giving and receiving the benefit of the doubt now, and how the game requires this as a fundamental "bedrock" (ie, it's right there at the starting point), while not that long ago you were railing against people who were telling you the exact same things about their own style of play. This being the case, I can understand why someone might not assume you are taking a bedrock of trust as a given.

But the huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge difference:

In this, no party is keeping a massive store of knowledge that cannot even in principle be acquired by the others, all parties know the rules which bind their own action and others, and all parties ARE in fact bound by rules.

In the things you speak of, one side DOES have a massive store of knowledge that cannot even in principle be acquired by the others, all other parties do not know the rules which bind even their own actions let alone others', and the first party isn't bound by any rules whatosever, as has been repeatedly insisted across this thread.

That's why benefit of the doubt is granted in one case and not granted in the other. There's an actual level playing field, and everyone has rules they need to abide by. This is not so under the "traditional GM" model, sandbox-y or otherwise. Any and every rule may be broken, for any reason, or for no reason at all, and the "traditional GM" is under no obligation whatsoever to inform the players of this--indeed, they are often quite obliged to conceal this from the players as much as possible.

 

[pemerton]

That the house is on fire might even be the reason I can't get the front door open but isn't a consequence of my failing to open it; had I gone somewhere else instead of coming straight home it still would have burned. Ditto the ringing phone, it would ring at that moment whether I opened the door, didn't open the door, or had stopped at the pub for a beer: it's not related to my failed task of opening the door.

Are you actually reading the examples?

So if you failed to get into the burning house and then someone inside burned, you would consider that "unconnected" to your attempt to unlock the door? Really?

suppose you could hear the phone ringing inside - now you've missed that phone call.

 

[clearstream]

Perhaps. Just from that very first principle, however, I find something to at least raise my eyebrows at. "If, at any point, any aspect of the game begins to clash with the veracity and truth of the fictional world, change it." That means, even if everyone at the table agrees that something being true in the fictional world is a less enjoyable experience, the less-enjoyable experience MUST be enforced, no matter what. I don't believe anyone, even "new simulationism" fans, sincerely believes that something genuinely agreed to be antagonistic to enjoyment should remain true, and that instead the understanding of the world needs to change so that the players will actually enjoy playing in it, even if that requires a little bit of light rejuggling.

The idea seems to be that everyone at the table has signed up for this because what counts as enjoyable for them is adhering to what is true in the fictional world. The proposal that they won't count that enjoyable mischaracterizes them. It would be unenjoyable for them if they failed to enforce it.

 

[pemerton]

Baker supplies a cautionary note -- it's easy to mistake or overstate the connection of a technique with afforded play (to suppose it necessary for that play, or limited to producing that play)

A lot of the accidental details of the games we made came to be associated with narrativism, wrongly.​

​

For instance, narrativism requires the GM not to plan out a storyline in advance, but people have come to associate it with various forms of player empowerment beyond that. Player narration, crossing John Harper’s line, “director stance” or “writer’s room” play, whatever. Some narrativist games use those techniques but narrativism itself doesn’t require them or refer to them.​

​

Ron Edwards made the same point over 20 years ago:

1. The number of textual rules involved, as well as how much the rules must be consulted during play, are irrelevant. "Narrativist? Must be rules-light!" is just one of those little humps to get over.

2. Focusing on single Techniques to define Narrativism will not yield understanding. For instance, Drama resolution is not in and of itself Narrativist. Nor are the common use of improvisation, trading of narration, and overt Director stance, in and of themselves, Narrativist play.​

He said some other true things too:

3. Issues of "consciousness" in terms of Premise are collectively a complete red herring. People daily address Premise without self-reflecting, both as audience and authors. There's no special need to say to one another, "This is the Premise" in order to be playing Narrativist. Laws' term "conscious" and my "mindful" only refer to the attention to and social reinforcement of the process - not to self-analytical or abstract discussion about the content.

4. Narrativist play doesn't force a "separation" from the imaginative commitment to the role-playing. As the whole medium of Creative Agenda is Exploration, you don't have to diminish Exploration at all during Narrativist play. It is instead focused and heightened as the mechanism for addressing Premise.

5. Depth and profundity of the Premise and/or theme are false variables. The key issue is whether participants care enough to produce a point, not whether the point is deep.​

The only place I regularly see trading of narration and overt director stance regularly adduced as markers of "narrativist" RPGing are on ENW, mostly by people who don't play Apocalypse World, Burning Wheel, Sorcerer or other quintessentially "narrativist" RPGs.

 

[pemerton]

If a game is based around resolving intent rather than task, declaring "I pick the safe open in order to steal the Desert Rose ruby" is, on success, going to put that ruby in the safe to be stolen unless previously-established fiction has put it somewhere else.

Are you going to tell us what rules you use to establish valid action declaration in the intent + task RPGs that you play? Or in any of those whose rules you're familiar with?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The idea seems to be that everyone at the table has signed up for this because what counts as enjoyable for them is adhering to what is true in the fictional world. The proposal that they won't count that enjoyable mischaracterizes them. It would be unenjoyable for them if they failed to enforce it.

But again that makes point 7 completely irrelevant. If everyone agrees that making the "veracity and truth" of the world inviolate is what is enjoyable, then point 7 is not only not needed, it is actively antagonistic to point 1. It creates a method by which the players can destroy their own enjoyment.

There is no world in which what you say is true, and point 7 is not therefore a major problem (and one backed up by point 10). If the world is inviolate, you not only don't need a mechanism to change it, you don't WANT a mechanism to change it; such a mechanism can only serve to make things worse, not better. Yet points 7 and 10 explicitly indicate that that isn't the case. That there can be situations where we discover that continuing to stick to an inviolate "veracity and truth of the fictional world" would in fact conflict with the enjoyment of the participants:

If you decide as a table of players to change your game, step away from play and change the world together. Decide what matters and what doesn’t to your play, and change the world based on those desires.​

This explicitly says that the players could want something different from the current "game" they have--where they are using "game" in the same way you have, "game-as-artifact". Then the entire text of point 10 is:

In all senses, the people you play with are more important than the game. Your play community is the foundation of play. Nothing matters more.​

So how can the world be supreme, meaning, more important than anything else, if the people are actually--explicitly--more important? If it's truly the case that nothing matters more than the players, then the players are more important than the "veracity and truth of the fictional world". Their desires are not presumed to be in 1:1 lockstep with the "veracity and truth of the fictional world"--that is the ideal, yes, but point 7 explicitly lays out the process for correcting a situation where those two don't match up. In that process, it is "the veracity and truth of the fictional world" that yields, not the players.

 

[clearstream]

But again that makes point 7 completely irrelevant. If everyone agrees that making the "veracity and truth" of the world inviolate is what is enjoyable, then point 7 is not only not needed, it is actively antagonistic to point 1. It creates a method by which the players can destroy their own enjoyment.

There is no world in which what you say is true, and point 7 is not therefore a major problem (and one backed up by point 10). If the world is inviolate, you not only don't need a mechanism to change it, you don't WANT a mechanism to change it; such a mechanism can only serve to make things worse, not better. Yet points 7 and 10 explicitly indicate that that isn't the case. That there can be situations where we discover that continuing to stick to an inviolate "veracity and truth of the fictional world" would in fact conflict with the enjoyment of the participants:

If you decide as a table of players to change your game, step away from play and change the world together. Decide what matters and what doesn’t to your play, and change the world based on those desires.​

This explicitly says that the players could want something different from the current "game" they have--where they are using "game" in the same way you have, "game-as-artifact". Then the entire text of point 10 is:

In all senses, the people you play with are more important than the game. Your play community is the foundation of play. Nothing matters more.​

So how can the world be supreme, meaning, more important than anything else, if the people are actually--explicitly--more important? If it's truly the case that nothing matters more than the players, then the players are more important than the "veracity and truth of the fictional world". Their desires are not presumed to be in 1:1 lockstep with the "veracity and truth of the fictional world"--that is the ideal, yes, but point 7 explicitly lays out the process for correcting a situation where those two don't match up. In that process, it is "the veracity and truth of the fictional world" that yields, not the players.

This appears to me defanged by considering how often and in what circumstances these are to be used. 7 involves stepping away from play. It's an interruption, a disjuncture. 1 is what the group is doing during play.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This appears to me defanged by considering how often and in what circumstances these are to be used. 7 involves stepping away from play. It's an interruption, a disjuncture. 1 is what the group is doing during play.

I mean, I guess?

But doesn't that rather poke a hole in your claim that "game" is something that actually integrates all the stuff? You now have world being genuinely separate from "game", because world gets changed outside of play, and then game--if necessary--changes to match. That seems to recognize that your "game-as-artifact" has to be missing something, as the artifact has been disassembled, altered, and then reassembled.

 

[pemerton]

This appears to me defanged by considering how often and in what circumstances these are to be used. 7 involves stepping away from play. It's an interruption, a disjuncture. 1 is what the group is doing during play.

Agreed. I have my own views about this manifesto, but @EzekielRaiden's objection is, in my view, groundless.

 

[pemerton]

But doesn't that rather poke a hole in your claim that "game" is something that actually integrates all the stuff? You now have world being genuinely separate from "game", because world gets changed outside of play, and then game--if necessary--changes to match. That seems to recognize that your "game-as-artifact" has to be missing something, as the artifact has been disassembled, altered, and then reassembled.

Is the chess board a component of the game chess? Until you tell me what the context is for your question - are you stocking a game shop? theorising about the nature of rules? undertaking an anthropological study on game play? - there is no answer to your question.