D&D 5E Roleplaying in D&D 5E: It’s How You Play the Game

[Krachek]

I agree it take a few questions by players after the DM place a scene to get him out of its prepared notes! And it will get even worse if players can interact with Npc.
Players don’t even have to try to influence the fiction, simply by asking questions and describing their intent, they are already playing inside the DM head to mess with his fiction!

 

[clearstream]

You recount of a chess game is not a story, for the same reason that a chemistry textbook or a recipe book or my shopping list or my published essays are not stories. They lack protagonists, they lack antagonists, there is no rising action, there is no climax, and there is no fiction - no imagined situation in which those other elements I've mentioned might emerge and unfold.

This seems to me a narrow definition of story. That doesn't mean it isn't a good definition of the kind of stories people might find most significant for them. I can imagine a story of a river. When I asked someone for a short story without protagonists or antagonists they told a simple tale about a leaf. It seemed like a story.

[NOTE I see that I am thinking of a narrative as what happens. Not a shopping list - not a disconnected sequence - but a meaningfully connected sequence. Meaning being very broad: if one were only interested in protagonists etc, then it could mean that, but as a foundational concept any meaning will do: because White moved here, Black was forced there...]

You now seem to be positing that the story is not something that the game itself generates, but rather something that is generated by recounting the events of playing the game. The film ET tells a story, and part of that story is about some kids playing a RPG and doing things with their cues. But Spielberg was not RPGing while filming ET.

Yes, a game is a typewriter of sorts [one with opinions]. Leaning on our human ability to think by analogy, we can accept the symbols and symbolic relationships and systematically create novel representations. If we can be bothered, a traditional linear narrative can be captured. A game phase space contains all possible such narratives. RPGs are a special case because they adhere fuzzy or undefined imaginative elements to defined elements.

In the TV show Red Dwarf, there's an episode where Rimmer starts reading from his "Risk diary" which records all of his moves in all of his games of Risk. Within the fiction, this combines both of my points above: first, the diary is not a story - it's just a list; and second, even if it were a story, it wouldn't show that the game Risk itself is a story-generating or story-oriented game, because Rimmer recounting his play of Risk is not Rimmer actually playing Risk.

Risk spins out fictions about global war. Next game, a new fiction. When architecting abstract systems we sometimes add a symbol for an incompletely defined subsystem and manipulate it according to the system rules. We learn things that we did not know about the system by manipulating symbols standing for parts of the system.

(2) The cues clearly don't always symbolise the fiction. In my RPG play the most constant cues are dice and the results of their rolls. And these don't symbolise anything in the fiction. They perform the same basic function as the coin toss at the start of a cricket match, though in a much more complex way: the coin toss determines which team gets to choose to bat or bowl; the dice rolls determine - as per the game rules - which player gets to have their conception of the fiction's trajectory prevail.

The value on the die is taken in as a parameter. The system is designed to accept all the values on the die. At the moment in time the value is used, it is akin to a static cue: one set at the value that will be used.

I'm not sure what you mean by games as artefacts. Normally I would think of an artefact as a concrete particular - eg a chair or a hammer or a built structure - but a game is not a concrete particular. It's a type of practice, maybe a convention, which involves the use of artefacts (like dice, various drawings, various bits of writing, etc).

I mean Senet, rather than the (lost) rules of Senet. The [rules,] board and pieces. In RPG, each parameter of a character for example. The game when it is not played. Game as tool.

[NOTE I see I am still indecisive about rules. Let's assume written rules are included, for now.]

 

[clearstream]

The point of separateness can be made more simply, without explaining in technical terms how it works: even if every copy of LotR in the world was destroyed, I could still imagine it. And when I imagine Frodo and you imagine Frodo, there is a sense in which we are imagining the same thing, which is not just a word but a (fictional) person.

What I am referring to is the valency between symbol and object (for the given interpreter) that unites them so that the symbol has its meaning, and we can go beyond what is known by manipulating the symbols.

I am not aiming to get into linguistics or language, but rather drawing attention to our learning about and imagining Frodo passing through Moria given just the symbols on the page. A disconnect between symbol and fiction defies experience.

The shared fiction is the thing we imagine together. What makes it the same for the two of us, in the case of LotR/Frodo, is the canonical text. (This creates questions - eg if you've read the original version of the Hobbit, and I've read one of the later revised versions, are we imaging the same fiction? Dunno - until we know why the question is being asked we can't set criteria for "same fiction", and without those identity criteria we can't answer the question. By analogy: my cat and your cat are the same animal if we're talking about species individuation, but not if we're talking about vetinary records.)

In the case of a RPG, there is no canonical text - unless the game is a total railroad. (Worst example I personally know - the Planescape module Dead Gods.) But there are the cues that - when responded to/followed as the rules prescribe - ensure that all of the group imagine the same thing.

And this is closer to what I am interested in: the role of game as tool in producing a novel narrative. I say, simply, that the narrative produced using game-artifact is not identical to that which would be produced otherwise. Some of the features of the dissimilarity might be plausibly characterised as systematic and progressive.

We can see that when the rules have gaps or break down, we get the shared fiction breaking down.

We must expect that, given the role of game as game in producing the narrative.

In AD&D this seems to happen every ten minutes of play! (Eg a non-thief tries to climb a steep but non-vertical slope, while wearing studded leather armour - what happens in the fiction? The rules don't tell us!) But modern, well-designed games have few of these sorts of breakpoints. This can include having clearer rule on how to respond to the cues (for me AW and BW are paradigms of this; but D&D has always been pretty clear at least in the combat portion of its rules), which might include having clear rules on how cues are to be used to derive the fiction by way of representation (eg 4e's movement rates expressed in squares).

That's a great observation. On the one hand, rules evolved. Discoveries were made and effective methods found. On the other hand, designers got better at focusing the rules on things that matter, and avoiding a simulationist trap (trying to detail everything, and falling short, in SOD-breaking junctures.)

 

[clearstream]

I know you've had some replies to this from other posters. Here's mine.

You recount of a chess game is not a story, for the same reason that a chemistry textbook or a recipe book or my shopping list or my published essays are not stories. They lack protagonists, they lack antagonists, there is no rising action, there is no climax, and there is no fiction - no imagined situation in which those other elements I've mentioned might emerge and unfold.

I'm prepared to accept that there are corner cases here - eg I've seen Waiting for Godot performed live once, and found it very moving - but a record of a chance game is in my view unlikely to be one of them.


You now seem to be positing that the story is not something that the game itself generates, but rather something that is generated by recounting the events of playing the game. The film ET tells a story, and part of that story is about some kids playing a RPG and doing things with their cues. But Spielberg was not RPGing while filming ET.

In the TV show Red Dwarf, there's an episode where Rimmer starts reading from his "Risk diary" which records all of his moves in all of his games of Risk. Within the fiction, this combines both of my points above: first, the diary is not a story - it's just a list; and second, even if it were a story, it wouldn't show that the game Risk itself is a story-generating or story-oriented game, because Rimmer recounting his play of Risk is not Rimmer actually playing Risk.


Three things:

(1) Typically, X symbolises Y entails that X is not the same thing as Y. So if the cues do symbolise the fiction, that is sufficient to show that the fiction is one thing and the cues another.

(2) The cues clearly don't always symbolise the fiction. In my RPG play the most constant cues are dice and the results of their rolls. And these don't symbolise anything in the fiction. They perform the same basic function as the coin toss at the start of a cricket match, though in a much more complex way: the coin toss determines which team gets to choose to bat or bowl; the dice rolls determine - as per the game rules - which player gets to have their conception of the fiction's trajectory prevail. This is Vincent Baker's point about easing and constraining negotiation over what it is that we are to collectively imagine; this is what the cues are doing.

(3) Where the cues do symbolise the fiction they can be aides memoire - for the purposes of framing - as much as constraints on resolution. The former is the role maps generally play in my RPGing. But when I played White Plume Mountain using AD&D-type rules earlier this week, the maps played the second role. The fact that in this case the cues symbolise the fiction is a necessary condition of them playing the role that they do, but it does not dictate that role.


No one disputes that. When the coin-toss comes up one way rather than another, that drives the play of the cricket game. In both cases, it is because of a rule that the "driving of change" takes place. But in cricket the toss of the coin is not, and does not represent, any play of any ball. And in a RPG, typically the roll of the dice is not a part of any fiction, and it need not represent any part of any fiction.



I don't think I follow all this.

I'm not sure what you mean by games as artefacts. Normally I would think of an artefact as a concrete particular - eg a chair or a hammer or a built structure - but a game is not a concrete particular. It's a type of practice, maybe a convention, which involves the use of artefacts (like dice, various drawings, various bits of writing, etc).

And at the bigger picture level, I don't see what you're trying to add to what Baker has said. For example, here is Baker on PC sheets:

Imagine Thatcher's London. Imagine a person in Thatcher's London who has everything to lose.​

​

That's a character. That's a whole, playable, complete character. If I ask you to speak in that character's voice, you can; if I present some threat or challenge, you can tell me easily how that character will react; if I describe a morning and ask you what that character will do in it, you'll know. Take ten minutes to think and that character's as real as can be.​

​

Character sheets are useless when it comes to creating, describing, defining, realizing characters. Totally pointless, valueless, toss 'em in the recycling. A notebook is helpful for remembering things, or 3x5 cards or post-it notes, let's use those instead. Or let's use nothing at all, if we can remember what we need to remember! Probably we can. . . .​

​

I can't teach you anything useful about RPG design if you persist in thinking that mechanical character creation or the character sheet have anything to do with the character at all. It's a misleading historical mistake to call the process and the paper "character-" anything. If you want to get anywhere, if you want to understand, if you want to create anything at all, you have to let that old error go.​

​

So we start right here at this point: the character exists only in our minds. If we write something down about the character, it's only to remind us, to help us keep the character in our minds. The character cannot be touched by rules or game mechanics at all, under any circumstances, no exceptions. The character is pure inviolate fiction. This is fundamental and inescapable.​

​

And from there we build. . . .​

​

<Baker describes a simple resolution system>​

​

Let's add a wrinkle. Let's say that over the course of the whole game, each of us is allowed 10 rerolls, no questions asked. Just in case we want another shot at our preferred outcome. Now we need a "character sheet," except that of course it's really a player sheet. We need to keep track of how many of our rerolls we've spent. . . .​

​

<He discusses resolution some more>​

​

Come to think of it, when do I get to decide if my character has access to an antique revolver, has a weak heart, is an excellent driver? Do I get to decide on the fly or do I have to declare it up front?​

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Either way, I should write all this stuff down on my player sheet, as I establish it. That way I know what I'm allowed to propose as possible outcomes.​

​

See how this goes? The "character sheet" isn't about the character. Maybe - maybe - it refers to details of the character, if that's what our resolution rules care about. But either way, even if so, the "character sheet" is really a record of the player's resources. "Character creation" similarly isn't how you create a character, but rather how you the player establish your resources to start.​

​

If you like, you can design your game so that the player's resources depend wholly on details of the character.​

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Or you can just as easily design your game so that the player's resources don't refer to details of the character at all.​

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Or a mix, that's easiest of all.​

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Whichever way, you need to establish what resources the player has to begin with, and you'll probably want to write 'em down. That's what's really going on.​

The PC sheet is an aide-memoire for the fiction (to the extent that some player resources depend on details of the character) as well as a record of player resources that may be independent of the fiction (eg Baker's example of a tally of spent re-rolls).

You can see Baker's clarity of thought here manifesting itself in the following statement from the Apocalypse World rulebook (p 178):

The players’ character sheets, like your front countdowns, are both prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive: changes to the character’s sheet mean changes to the character’s fictional circumstances and capabilities; that’s the game’s experience and improvement rules, following. Descriptive too: when the character’s fictional circumstances or capabilities change naturally, within the character’s fictional world, the player can and should change her character sheet to match.​

There are RPGs where players have much more control over the change of their PCs, and hence the "descriptive" aspect of the PC sheet: 4e D&D and MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic are the two that I think of in this regard, though in my group in our 4e play we pushed things a bit further in the AW direction than I believe is canonical (eg changes in race, class and paragon path, loss of daily powers, etc to reflect events that had occurred to the PCs in the fiction). That higher degree of player control makes the whole thing less "gritty", I think.

But we can't talk about these features of different RPGs, and their differences, if we don't keep the fiction/cue distinction clear.

"As long as you don't think of any of the mechanical cues as representing the fiction or vice versa, you're fine. Instead, recognize that the players can manipulate the cues according to what's in the fiction, they can manipulate the fiction according to what's in the cues, but representation isn't what's truly happening in either direction."

"If I take the piece of paper that represents my character, hand it to another player who's familiar with the game, and that other player is able to discern the important elements of who that character is in the story, then how does that sheet not represent the character?"

 

[Ovinomancer]

"As long as you don't think of any of the mechanical cues as representing the fiction or vice versa, you're fine. Instead, recognize that the players can manipulate the cues according to what's in the fiction, they can manipulate the fiction according to what's in the cues, but representation isn't what's truly happening in either direction."

"If I take the piece of paper that represents my character, hand it to another player who's familiar with the game, and that other player is able to discern the important elements of who that character is in the story, then how does that sheet not represent the character?"

Is the character you imagined the same as the character the other player imagined? Not similar, but the same? Will the choices made be the same? No, they are not and will not. I experienced this myself by handing out pregens to multiple groups and being very intrigued by the differences in portrayal of the same characters and how different choices regarding them are. When the game is played, the character sheet cue the character in the fiction, but it isn't the same thing at all. Cues exist to aid everyone in imagining similar things, but they aren't the fiction imagined at all -- they are cues. It's right there in the name.

 

[pemerton]

@clearstream, there is a lot going on in your replies, and I don't think I am always fully following the trajectory of your thought.

My replies are probably becoming more repetitive, as I don't feel that I am being pushed beyond elaborating aspects of Baker's account of RPGing (which in various ways builds on Edwards'). To try to make my replies as coherent as I can, I have grouped together and sequenced bits and pieces of your posts that seem to me to speak to the same basic issues.

I think my TL;DR reply would be - by merging fiction and cues you seem to present one approach to RPGing (what I would typically call map-and-key, which has its paradigm in classic D&D but has been taken up by a pretty wide range of RPGs) as universal. I don't know if this is a deliberate feature of your account, or a byproduct, or something you don't agree is a consequence of your account.

This seems to me a narrow definition of story. That doesn't mean it isn't a good definition of the kind of stories people might find most significant for them. I can imagine a story of a river. When I asked someone for a short story without protagonists or antagonists they told a simple tale about a leaf. It seemed like a story.

[NOTE I see that I am thinking of a narrative as what happens. Not a shopping list - not a disconnected sequence - but a meaningfully connected sequence. Meaning being very broad: if one were only interested in protagonists etc, then it could mean that, but as a foundational concept any meaning will do: because White moved here, Black was forced there...]

<snip>

Risk spins out fictions about global war. Next game, a new fiction. When architecting abstract systems we sometimes add a symbol for an incompletely defined subsystem and manipulate it according to the system rules. We learn things that we did not know about the system by manipulating symbols standing for parts of the system.

That may be so. We could quibble, I think - did the leaf in the simple tale figure as a protagonist in some structural sense? - but I don't think the quibbling is really necessary in the RPG context, because I've never heard of a RPG about being a leaf floating down a river. RPGs that I know of that are self-consciously set out to produce character and story - I'm thinking of AW, BW, HeroWars/Quest, MHRP/Cortex+, Over the Edge, Prince Valiant, The Dying Earth - are working with a pretty conventional notion of what makes a character a protagonist and what makes a sequence of imagined events a story.

Although I was doing utterly mainstream RPGing in Australia while Edwards and Baker and Czege and Clare Boss were doing all sorts of RPGing, including avant garde RPGing, in America, the Forge trajectory fits my experience pretty well:

* I am hoping to get an experience from RPGing that closely resembles a story in that narrow/conventional sense;

* "traditional" RPG systems - D&D, its offshoots, and the simulationist engines that emerged in reaction to it (RQ and RM are the two classics for me; * C&S, HERO and GURPS seem like they also deserve a mention though) - don't reliably deliver this, at least without significant departure from their canonical approaches;

* WW golden rule/D&D 2nd ed "storytelling"/"railroading" sucks because it deprives the players of a genuine role in the game;

* Therefore, new systems - new techniques, new approaches to establishing the fiction, new mechanics, taken as a whole new rules - are needed.​

I achieved the last step to an extent on my own, in fits and starts, over 20 years from around 1985 to around 2004; and then got a big boost from reading and reading about, and subsequently playing, new games.

Part of understanding, developing and applying those new rule and new techniques and new approaches involves seeing how the fiction can be divorced from cues - so (as just one example) while in Rolemaster a PC's skill bonus or stat bonus corresponds to (represents, symbolises) a definite thing about the PC, in 4e D&D it is a mechanical component in a cue-oriented process (rolling dice and adding bonuses) but need not, and often does not, correspond to any one particular thing in the fiction. Rather, it is used in a process that generates a shared fiction, without any part of that shared fiction necessarily being in any is represented by relationship with any part of, or even the whole of, the process. (It turns out that some of these ideas are old in RPGing - eg Gygax articulates them in relation to hit points and saving throws in his DMG - but I had never really seen them taken seriously back then; perhaps because I was caught up in the simulationist reaction.)

My point in the preceding few paragraphs is to try to link my personal RPGing biography to what is a recognisable larger trend in RPGing, that is connected both to the narrow concept of "story" and to the fiction/cue relationship.

What I am referring to is the valency between symbol and object (for the given interpreter) that unites them so that the symbol has its meaning, and we can go beyond what is known by manipulating the symbols.

I am not aiming to get into linguistics or language, but rather drawing attention to our learning about and imagining Frodo passing through Moria given just the symbols on the page. A disconnect between symbol and fiction defies experience.

The value on the die is taken in as a parameter. The system is designed to accept all the values on the die. At the moment in time the value is used, it is akin to a static cue: one set at the value that will be used.

I don't see how we can talk about how the symbols in the page give rise to us learning about and imagining Frodo without getting into linguistics or language. What I've italicised is the problem (philosophical, theoretical, whatever you want to call it) of representation and semantics.

But let's put that to one side, and imagine this: JRRT and CS Lewis are playing a game together. Each narrates a paragraph - about Frodo or Aslan or some other character of choice - and then they toss a coin, twice. Whoever wins the first toss has to narrate the next paragraph. And whoever wins the second toss gets to stipulate, as a constraint on that narration, that things go well for the protagonist or go poorly.

That seems to me like a viable game to play, if not the best ever. When played by those two persons at least it might produce somewhat worthwhile stories, in my narrow sense. The coin tosses don't represent anything in the shared fiction. They are not symbols vis-a-vis the fiction. (Of course an anthropologist can come along and talk about the symbolic nature, in early-to-mid-twentieth century England, of the coin toss as a way of resolving a dispute or settling a question by chance, and contrast that with the use of lotteries or dice rolls or wrestling or duels; but that isn't the sort of symbolic significance of cues that is at issue in our discussion, as best I can tell.)

Those coin tosses are paradigms of cues in Baker's sense.

I agree that the result of the coin toss (heads or tails), like the value on a rolled die, is a parameter. It is a parameter that feeds into the derivation of an outcome from a rule. I've described my imaginary rule for JRRT and CS Lewis's game; a simple RPG rule that takes a rolled value on a die as a parameter comes from BitD: if one or more of your dice come up 6, you succeed. But just as for the result of the coin toss, so for the result of the die roll when RPGing: that value needn't represent anything in the fiction. In Rolemaster, it often does. In MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic it never does. There's no way, in that system, for a particular thrown die to symbolise anything in the fiction - it is only when the whole dice process is resolved that we can then narrate a new/changed fiction, in accordance with the rules that tell us how the dice results constrain and/or mandate elements of that narration. Although I've never played it, I suspect that BitD is closer in this respect to MHRP/Cortex+ than to RM.

As per Baker's quote about mechanics - where he notes that they might do things other than their essential function - so RPG rules may call upon the cues to do further things - eg to represent the fiction in certain ways. But that is not fundamental to the nature of a cue as a cue, nor to the nature of a parameter for a rule as a parameter.

this is closer to what I am interested in: the role of game as tool in producing a novel narrative. I say, simply, that the narrative produced using game-artifact is not identical to that which would be produced otherwise.

a game is a typewriter of sorts [one with opinions]. Leaning on our human ability to think by analogy, we can accept the symbols and symbolic relationships and systematically create novel representations. If we can be bothered, a traditional linear narrative can be captured. A game phase space contains all possible such narratives. RPGs are a special case because they adhere fuzzy or undefined imaginative elements to defined elements.

I struggle with the second of these quotes. I don't know what it means to say that the game phase space contains all possible narratives. That doesn't sound like literal mathematics, but I don't quite get it as metaphor either.

I mean, a typewriter doesn't contain all possible stories to be written in English, any more than a pen or a piece of chalk or a bit of rock (that might be used to scratch another, softer bit of rock) does. A typewriter is not even metaphorically a vessel for stories. It's a tool for creating instances of graphemes.

I am not a mathematician and only a very amateur logician; but I assume it is true that, given the rules of chess (that include the starting positions for the pieces, and the layout of the board) one can - in principle, at least - construct a space that contains all possible games of chess. I think this is also true for the play of bridge. But I'm not sure that it is true for the auction phase of bridge, because I'm not persuaded that there is a definable space of possible bidding conventions. And I'm pretty sure that it is not true for Pictionary, because I don't see how there is any definable space even of possible drawings of (one that always defeats my kids)the FA cup - at least beyond the basic space of possible markings of the pen on the paper, which is not different from one clue to another - let alone a definable space of the the play of the game as generated by the interaction between clues, drawings, guesses, and changes to drawings.

And a RPG is less definable, in this respect, than bidding conventions in bridge or the play of Pictionary.

I think the first quote is true in the following sense: if the rules of the game are being followed, and those rules take various cues as inputs/parameters to the process of creating a shared fiction, then the shared fiction that results from the play of the game will be different from some arbitrary fiction not created via that process.

But I think the first quote is false in this alternative sense: it will not change the story (in narrow or broader sense) of a D&D game just to change the randomiser in D&D from rolled dice to chits drawn as a lottery (which I believe was how some Holmes boxes shipped?) or to a series of coin tosses that replicate the same odds (I've done this for a non-D&D boardgame, where me and my daughter had coins but no dice - it's frustrating because you can do 1d8 with a coin toss but then, if you're trying to simulate 1d6, you get annoyingly many results that you have to redo in what is already a cumbersome process). Yet that would be a change in the game artefact - a new set of cues.

There are interesting corner cases - AD&D is a bit wonky on its face and spacing rules, and I resolved this issue when GMing White Plume Mountain a week ago by the following utterly ad hoc process: I had drawn up a particular room on a bit of paper - plain paper, not lined or graph paper - including the 3 x 3 squares, and then I placed tokens for the PCs (a different colour for each) and then different, generic token for the ghouls they were fighting. The tokens are all old boardgame or similar tokens and so an utterly arbitrary size relative to my drawing, but the physical size of the token seemed to me near enough to what might be feasible for spacing of ghouls fighting with all their limbs against a couple of warriors wielding large-ish weapons - and so I used that physical size, ie how many of my ghoul tokens will fit into these arbitrarily-drawn squares on my bit of paper - to resolve the issues of spacing and facing. Which turned out to matter quite a bit to the resolution of the fight!

So that's a case where an arbitrary/ad hoc feature of the cues was also given representational significance, and fed back directly into the fiction in a representational fashion, even though no formal, express or even implicit rule of the game said it should do so!

But I don't see this as undermining the distinction between fiction and cues. If anything I see it as validating that distinction, because it is only by taking the distinction as a feature of my explanation that I can explain what happened and why it's a quirky corner case.

"As long as you don't think of any of the mechanical cues as representing the fiction or vice versa, you're fine. Instead, recognize that the players can manipulate the cues according to what's in the fiction, they can manipulate the fiction according to what's in the cues, but representation isn't what's truly happening in either direction."

"If I take the piece of paper that represents my character, hand it to another player who's familiar with the game, and that other player is able to discern the important elements of who that character is in the story, then how does that sheet not represent the character?"

I'm not sure whether you see these two statements as complementary or contrary. I'm guessing the latter?

I think @Ovinomancer's reply to this is one reasonable one: in what sense is it the same character (as opposed to, perhaps, the same game piece) when played by someone else relying simply on the cues?

But instead of getting into the identity criteria for characters in RPGing, I want to think through some of the RPGs I know and play. Which ones have

So, thinking through some RPGs I know, which ones have character sheets that would enable another player to discern the important elements of what that character is in the story?

AD&D: only if the important elements of who a character is in a story are confined to class, race and magic item functions as constrained by alignment. That's how Gygax seems to have seen it (see eg his PHB, pp 18, 106; and his DMG p 86) but that was not how AD&D was generally being played in my University club by the mid 90s. It was how we played White Plume Mountain a week ago, but shameless pawn stance seems not to be held in high regard these days!

4e D&D: the character sheet has more information than the AD&D one - at least in principle it might record the PC's quests. But it typically won't include the PC details/motivations that underlie those quests and give them a narrative/dramatic logic.

Rolemaster: this is a surprisingly nuanced case, given the general reputation of RM. When played in full skill list mode, the RM PC sheet is very "total" - practically everything the PC might do is documented on the sheet with an appropriate capability rating. And this tells you a surprising amount about the character, and drives subsequent play a certain way: eg a PC with +60 Amiability and +10 Lie Perception suggests a different personality from one with +10 Amiability, +70 Duping and +65 Lie Perception - and given the incentives to play to a PC's strengths, that difference is likely to be maintained in subsequent play even by a new player. But there will be aspects of character that are not captured: in particular, a key feature of RM play in melee combat and spell casting is the risk vs possible effect trade off, and while a character's state set the parameters for this it is the actual player decisions moment-to-moment that determine how much risk is taken. And that feature of a PC's play of a character, which is fairly important to how that PC is then realised in the fiction, is not encoded in any fashion on the PC sheet.

Prince Valiant: although the stats are much "slimmer" than Rolemaster it has some resemblance at a basic level. But the PC sheet doesn't tell us the social position/role of the PC beyond the very basic Fame rating, plus what might be inferred from an equipment list, and so this important aspect of a character's realisation in the fiction is not encoded on the sheet unless the player has made ad hoc notes.

Classic Traveller: although this superficially resembles RM or Prince Valiant, the PC sheet is much less "total" (eg many fields of human endeavour, like being friendly or being a manipulative liar, are not directly represented in the stat/skill system). So it actually gets closer to AD&D, I think.

Burning Wheel: a bit like Rolemaster, and in addition there are Beliefs, Instinct, traits, Relationships, and other character elements recorded on the sheet. But what ultimately drives the realisation of a BW character, in play, is how they respond in circumstances where those various elements come into conflict; and its off the essence of the game that this is not dictated by the mechanics but is for the player to choose. So different players playing the PC will produce different dramatic trajectories for the character.

MHRP: I think this is the game which should produce the most uniformity of realisation across multiple players, because so much of the PC's "story" role is represented on the sheet via their Distinctions, their powers and special abilities, their MIlestones, etc. Most Milestones do have some choices, and the 10 XP Milestone capstone always does (eg Captain America gets 10 XP either for creating a new branch of the Avengers, or stepping away from the team), so the uniformity will not be total. But just as serial comic books are meant to preserve broadly the same hero even over multiple, changing writers and artists, so the RPG tends to preserve the same PC over changing players. Perhaps ironically, though, very little of what is on the MHRP sheet represents the character's fictional properties or trajectories. Rather, they are parameters that feed into resolution which - given those parameters plus the overall system processes - are apt to produce the fiction that is "proper"/"appropriate" for that hero.

 

[clearstream]

@clearstream, there is a lot going on in your replies, and I don't think I am always fully following the trajectory of your thought.

My replies are probably becoming more repetitive, as I don't feel that I am being pushed beyond elaborating aspects of Baker's account of RPGing (which in various ways builds on Edwards'). To try to make my replies as coherent as I can, I have grouped together and sequenced bits and pieces of your posts that seem to me to speak to the same basic issues.

I think my TL;DR reply would be - by merging fiction and cues you seem to present one approach to RPGing (what I would typically call map-and-key, which has its paradigm in classic D&D but has been taken up by a pretty wide range of RPGs) as universal. I don't know if this is a deliberate feature of your account, or a byproduct, or something you don't agree is a consequence of your account.


That may be so. We could quibble, I think - did the leaf in the simple tale figure as a protagonist in some structural sense? - but I don't think the quibbling is really necessary in the RPG context, because I've never heard of a RPG about being a leaf floating down a river. RPGs that I know of that are self-consciously set out to produce character and story - I'm thinking of AW, BW, HeroWars/Quest, MHRP/Cortex+, Over the Edge, Prince Valiant, The Dying Earth - are working with a pretty conventional notion of what makes a character a protagonist and what makes a sequence of imagined events a story.

Although I was doing utterly mainstream RPGing in Australia while Edwards and Baker and Czege and Clare Boss were doing all sorts of RPGing, including avant garde RPGing, in America, the Forge trajectory fits my experience pretty well:

* I am hoping to get an experience from RPGing that closely resembles a story in that narrow/conventional sense;​

​

* "traditional" RPG systems - D&D, its offshoots, and the simulationist engines that emerged in reaction to it (RQ and RM are the two classics for me; * C&S, HERO and GURPS seem like they also deserve a mention though) - don't reliably deliver this, at least without significant departure from their canonical approaches;​

​

* WW golden rule/D&D 2nd ed "storytelling"/"railroading" sucks because it deprives the players of a genuine role in the game;​

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* Therefore, new systems - new techniques, new approaches to establishing the fiction, new mechanics, taken as a whole new rules - are needed.​

I achieved the last step to an extent on my own, in fits and starts, over 20 years from around 1985 to around 2004; and then got a big boost from reading and reading about, and subsequently playing, new games.

Part of understanding, developing and applying those new rule and new techniques and new approaches involves seeing how the fiction can be divorced from cues - so (as just one example) while in Rolemaster a PC's skill bonus or stat bonus corresponds to (represents, symbolises) a definite thing about the PC, in 4e D&D it is a mechanical component in a cue-oriented process (rolling dice and adding bonuses) but need not, and often does not, correspond to any one particular thing in the fiction. Rather, it is used in a process that generates a shared fiction, without any part of that shared fiction necessarily being in any is represented by relationship with any part of, or even the whole of, the process. (It turns out that some of these ideas are old in RPGing - eg Gygax articulates them in relation to hit points and saving throws in his DMG - but I had never really seen them taken seriously back then; perhaps because I was caught up in the simulationist reaction.)

My point in the preceding few paragraphs is to try to link my personal RPGing biography to what is a recognisable larger trend in RPGing, that is connected both to the narrow concept of "story" and to the fiction/cue relationship.



I don't see how we can talk about how the symbols in the page give rise to us learning about and imagining Frodo without getting into linguistics or language. What I've italicised is the problem (philosophical, theoretical, whatever you want to call it) of representation and semantics.

But let's put that to one side, and imagine this: JRRT and CS Lewis are playing a game together. Each narrates a paragraph - about Frodo or Aslan or some other character of choice - and then they toss a coin, twice. Whoever wins the first toss has to narrate the next paragraph. And whoever wins the second toss gets to stipulate, as a constraint on that narration, that things go well for the protagonist or go poorly.

That seems to me like a viable game to play, if not the best ever. When played by those two persons at least it might produce somewhat worthwhile stories, in my narrow sense. The coin tosses don't represent anything in the shared fiction. They are not symbols vis-a-vis the fiction. (Of course an anthropologist can come along and talk about the symbolic nature, in early-to-mid-twentieth century England, of the coin toss as a way of resolving a dispute or settling a question by chance, and contrast that with the use of lotteries or dice rolls or wrestling or duels; but that isn't the sort of symbolic significance of cues that is at issue in our discussion, as best I can tell.)

Those coin tosses are paradigms of cues in Baker's sense.

I agree that the result of the coin toss (heads or tails), like the value on a rolled die, is a parameter. It is a parameter that feeds into the derivation of an outcome from a rule. I've described my imaginary rule for JRRT and CS Lewis's game; a simple RPG rule that takes a rolled value on a die as a parameter comes from BitD: if one or more of your dice come up 6, you succeed. But just as for the result of the coin toss, so for the result of the die roll when RPGing: that value needn't represent anything in the fiction. In Rolemaster, it often does. In MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic it never does. There's no way, in that system, for a particular thrown die to symbolise anything in the fiction - it is only when the whole dice process is resolved that we can then narrate a new/changed fiction, in accordance with the rules that tell us how the dice results constrain and/or mandate elements of that narration. Although I've never played it, I suspect that BitD is closer in this respect to MHRP/Cortex+ than to RM.

As per Baker's quote about mechanics - where he notes that they might do things other than their essential function - so RPG rules may call upon the cues to do further things - eg to represent the fiction in certain ways. But that is not fundamental to the nature of a cue as a cue, nor to the nature of a parameter for a rule as a parameter.



I struggle with the second of these quotes. I don't know what it means to say that the game phase space contains all possible narratives. That doesn't sound like literal mathematics, but I don't quite get it as metaphor either.

I mean, a typewriter doesn't contain all possible stories to be written in English, any more than a pen or a piece of chalk or a bit of rock (that might be used to scratch another, softer bit of rock) does. A typewriter is not even metaphorically a vessel for stories. It's a tool for creating instances of graphemes.

I am not a mathematician and only a very amateur logician; but I assume it is true that, given the rules of chess (that include the starting positions for the pieces, and the layout of the board) one can - in principle, at least - construct a space that contains all possible games of chess. I think this is also true for the play of bridge. But I'm not sure that it is true for the auction phase of bridge, because I'm not persuaded that there is a definable space of possible bidding conventions. And I'm pretty sure that it is not true for Pictionary, because I don't see how there is any definable space even of possible drawings of (one that always defeats my kids)the FA cup - at least beyond the basic space of possible markings of the pen on the paper, which is not different from one clue to another - let alone a definable space of the the play of the game as generated by the interaction between clues, drawings, guesses, and changes to drawings.

And a RPG is less definable, in this respect, than bidding conventions in bridge or the play of Pictionary.

I think the first quote is true in the following sense: if the rules of the game are being followed, and those rules take various cues as inputs/parameters to the process of creating a shared fiction, then the shared fiction that results from the play of the game will be different from some arbitrary fiction not created via that process.

But I think the first quote is false in this alternative sense: it will not change the story (in narrow or broader sense) of a D&D game just to change the randomiser in D&D from rolled dice to chits drawn as a lottery (which I believe was how some Holmes boxes shipped?) or to a series of coin tosses that replicate the same odds (I've done this for a non-D&D boardgame, where me and my daughter had coins but no dice - it's frustrating because you can do 1d8 with a coin toss but then, if you're trying to simulate 1d6, you get annoyingly many results that you have to redo in what is already a cumbersome process). Yet that would be a change in the game artefact - a new set of cues.

There are interesting corner cases - AD&D is a bit wonky on its face and spacing rules, and I resolved this issue when GMing White Plume Mountain a week ago by the following utterly ad hoc process: I had drawn up a particular room on a bit of paper - plain paper, not lined or graph paper - including the 3 x 3 squares, and then I placed tokens for the PCs (a different colour for each) and then different, generic token for the ghouls they were fighting. The tokens are all old boardgame or similar tokens and so an utterly arbitrary size relative to my drawing, but the physical size of the token seemed to me near enough to what might be feasible for spacing of ghouls fighting with all their limbs against a couple of warriors wielding large-ish weapons - and so I used that physical size, ie how many of my ghoul tokens will fit into these arbitrarily-drawn squares on my bit of paper - to resolve the issues of spacing and facing. Which turned out to matter quite a bit to the resolution of the fight!

So that's a case where an arbitrary/ad hoc feature of the cues was also given representational significance, and fed back directly into the fiction in a representational fashion, even though no formal, express or even implicit rule of the game said it should do so!

But I don't see this as undermining the distinction between fiction and cues. If anything I see it as validating that distinction, because it is only by taking the distinction as a feature of my explanation that I can explain what happened and why it's a quirky corner case.

I'm not sure whether you see these two statements as complementary or contrary. I'm guessing the latter?

I think @Ovinomancer's reply to this is one reasonable one: in what sense is it the same character (as opposed to, perhaps, the same game piece) when played by someone else relying simply on the cues?

But instead of getting into the identity criteria for characters in RPGing, I want to think through some of the RPGs I know and play. Which ones have

So, thinking through some RPGs I know, which ones have character sheets that would enable another player to discern the important elements of what that character is in the story?

AD&D: only if the important elements of who a character is in a story are confined to class, race and magic item functions as constrained by alignment. That's how Gygax seems to have seen it (see eg his PHB, pp 18, 106; and his DMG p 86) but that was not how AD&D was generally being played in my University club by the mid 90s. It was how we played White Plume Mountain a week ago, but shameless pawn stance seems not to be held in high regard these days!

4e D&D: the character sheet has more information than the AD&D one - at least in principle it might record the PC's quests. But it typically won't include the PC details/motivations that underlie those quests and give them a narrative/dramatic logic.

Rolemaster: this is a surprisingly nuanced case, given the general reputation of RM. When played in full skill list mode, the RM PC sheet is very "total" - practically everything the PC might do is documented on the sheet with an appropriate capability rating. And this tells you a surprising amount about the character, and drives subsequent play a certain way: eg a PC with +60 Amiability and +10 Lie Perception suggests a different personality from one with +10 Amiability, +70 Duping and +65 Lie Perception - and given the incentives to play to a PC's strengths, that difference is likely to be maintained in subsequent play even by a new player. But there will be aspects of character that are not captured: in particular, a key feature of RM play in melee combat and spell casting is the risk vs possible effect trade off, and while a character's state set the parameters for this it is the actual player decisions moment-to-moment that determine how much risk is taken. And that feature of a PC's play of a character, which is fairly important to how that PC is then realised in the fiction, is not encoded in any fashion on the PC sheet.

Prince Valiant: although the stats are much "slimmer" than Rolemaster it has some resemblance at a basic level. But the PC sheet doesn't tell us the social position/role of the PC beyond the very basic Fame rating, plus what might be inferred from an equipment list, and so this important aspect of a character's realisation in the fiction is not encoded on the sheet unless the player has made ad hoc notes.

Classic Traveller: although this superficially resembles RM or Prince Valiant, the PC sheet is much less "total" (eg many fields of human endeavour, like being friendly or being a manipulative liar, are not directly represented in the stat/skill system). So it actually gets closer to AD&D, I think.

Burning Wheel: a bit like Rolemaster, and in addition there are Beliefs, Instinct, traits, Relationships, and other character elements recorded on the sheet. But what ultimately drives the realisation of a BW character, in play, is how they respond in circumstances where those various elements come into conflict; and its off the essence of the game that this is not dictated by the mechanics but is for the player to choose. So different players playing the PC will produce different dramatic trajectories for the character.

MHRP: I think this is the game which should produce the most uniformity of realisation across multiple players, because so much of the PC's "story" role is represented on the sheet via their Distinctions, their powers and special abilities, their MIlestones, etc. Most Milestones do have some choices, and the 10 XP Milestone capstone always does (eg Captain America gets 10 XP either for creating a new branch of the Avengers, or stepping away from the team), so the uniformity will not be total. But just as serial comic books are meant to preserve broadly the same hero even over multiple, changing writers and artists, so the RPG tends to preserve the same PC over changing players. Perhaps ironically, though, very little of what is on the MHRP sheet represents the character's fictional properties or trajectories. Rather, they are parameters that feed into resolution which - given those parameters plus the overall system processes - are apt to produce the fiction that is "proper"/"appropriate" for that hero.

I recommend reading this critique of Brindlewood Bay. Here's a link to the conclusion

Brindlewood Bay, Part 5 – What was the point of all that?

I began this lengthy disquisition by saying that I didn’t particularly want to slam Brindlewood Bay or its author, but that reflecting on my actual play experience represented a platform for …

myonecontribution.wordpress.com

And I want to acknowledge your considerable help in developing a (my) theory, which I need to write up before posting. I'm on vacation and writing these on my mobile: the form factor gets in the way of decently presenting my argument.

 

[clearstream]

Is the character you imagined the same as the character the other player imagined? Not similar, but the same? Will the choices made be the same? No, they are not and will not. I experienced this myself by handing out pregens to multiple groups and being very intrigued by the differences in portrayal of the same characters and how different choices regarding them are. When the game is played, the character sheet cue the character in the fiction, but it isn't the same thing at all. Cues exist to aid everyone in imagining similar things, but they aren't the fiction imagined at all -- they are cues. It's right there in the name.

I want to acknowledge an adjustment to my position. In saying the cues represent the fiction, I am not saying they are the fiction. Rather I say they can (should) have a strong valency such that manipulating one, manipulates the other. [You could say "crucially informs" or "drives discoveries about" here, in place of "manipulates".]

That appears to be a central point of contention. I say that arrangements of symbols and rules for manipulating them has consequences for our fiction: is productive!

And where it is not productive I sincerely question the point of having them. @pemerton might say they help us remember, and I say they help us remember and (via thinking by analogy) systematically produce a progressive fiction.

 

[clearstream]

@Hriston to tie things back to your concerns, a fable.

In the unlit time before, a group of wargamers were playing a tabletop armies wargame. As they played, they told themselves stories about their white metal miniatures. This officer was impetuous, that allied detachment that broke early was in the pay of their enemy.

One day they tried a skirmish level tabletop battle, and noticed that it was even easier for them to tell stories to themselves about the individual figures as they played. When this first happened those figures were still not much more than Chess pieces. In a way, they were making a a story for each piece as it traversed the board. The bold Pawn, who hoped to discover himself really a Queen. The dashing Knight. (Later, across the sea, some other wargamers made much gold from writing expansive stories for each figure.)

The wargamers enjoyed their stories so much that they came to play only skirmish games, and shifted their settings into the pretend worlds that they had loved to read about. Being wargamers, they came up with detailed parameters for their figures, that were mostly about fighting... and doing some of the other things heroes did in the stories they had read.

Several of their number set out on great quests to make the whole pretend world. Long years passed, and each returned with broken armour on lathered horses. But elsewhere, a new light was dawning.

Some players had become very interested in their characters. They hoped to get an experience from RPGing that more closely resembled a story in the sense studied in schools and drama. Protagonists, antagonists, emotion, inner progress.

The parameters and rules that had satisfied the wargamers got in the way of this, or at least didn't fulfil it. So they added bonds and flaws - things their characters would care about - that could change them. Behind them, however, was a dreadful spectre. A revenant of a wargamer in each group who had been crowned high-ruler.

The spectre saw that if it was high-ruler of everything wargamers cared about, and everything dramatists cared about, then it would control everything. It would say who did what, and why. But it was defied. Some dramatists saw that they could choose what the spectre controlled. The spectre had grown used to saying what was in the world, but the dramatists saw that they could share this power among themselves, so that even if they submitted to the spectre (in its many forms and proxies) on deep, moving, and personal change to their now dramatic characters, they might still play a crucial part in saying what happened.

The stories they could tell were no longer those of simple pretend battles, or vaster pretend worlds, but now of the dramatic spaces inside themselves. Those spaces had always been compelling to explore.

But it was a choice: they could not banish the spectre, because the spectre was also what made their stories into games, rather than pre-told, linear narrative, or theatric improv.

Some asked if this land they had reached was the last land, or might there be other lands beyond? And they were rightly reviled, for what good had ever come of defying that which is known.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I recommend reading this critique of Brindlewood Bay. Here's a link to the conclusion

Brindlewood Bay, Part 5 – What was the point of all that?

I began this lengthy disquisition by saying that I didn’t particularly want to slam Brindlewood Bay or its author, but that reflecting on my actual play experience represented a platform for …

myonecontribution.wordpress.com

And I want to acknowledge your considerable help in developing a (my) theory, which I need to write up before posting. I'm on vacation and writing these on my mobile: the form factor gets in the way of decently presenting my argument.

The example of play being discussed in that review is degenerate -- the players are ignoring the intent of play (and it appears so is the GM) and so they have a bad example of play and then base a conception of how the game is flawed instead of looking at how they played the game being flawed. The reviewer's main point seemed to be that the players decided to manipulate the game and that the GM had no tools inside the game to control this outside the game decision and approach to play. It's a bad player argument being blamed on the structure of the game. And I can say this because the point of play in Brindlewood is to generate fiction, and not, as the writers says, hand out coupons to retcon things that did happen in play. When players are taking actions in Brindlewood, the clues generates should be flowing from and contingent upon those actions. It doesn't sound like this was so. It's absolutely true that you could make the sherrif the bad guy, but you'd need to be taking actions to discover clues to support that, and those actions will carry risks, and if the GM is softballing those risks, then you get the kind of free association game that the reviewer (who's name I cannot discover) is complaining about.

And, yup, reading his post on Actual Play, it very much appears that he doesn't grasp this concept at all for play.