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

[Ovinomancer]

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.

I do not know what you mean by "valency" here. It's a word that has meaning to me, both chemically and linguistically, but I'm not at all clear on how you think it's representative of a concept here. You seem to be using it in the sense of positive correlation or attraction?

As for your last, your summation of @pemerton's arguments here is badly skewed, as that's not at all close to the entirety of what he's been saying but rather a single bit out of context. Cues help focus fiction, yes, but that doesn't mean that cues are the fiction or that manipulation of the fiction requires manipulation of a cue or vice versa. For example, I might have a cue in the form of a miniature of my character. This miniature can be closely representative of how my character appears or it could be a penny. The actual fiction of how my character appears isn't tightly related to the token I'm using, nor does a manipulation of the token mean a manipulation of my character's fiction. For example, my character can lose an arm in the fiction and yet the figure retains both arms. Or, the figure might become damaged and lose an arm, yet my character doesn't lose an arm in the fiction. Cues are there to help share complex constructs that are hard to accurately share and hold in your head, but they're suggestive to the fiction at best, and there's no required one to one manipulation from one to the other. Yes, a given ruleset might have more use for cues than another, but the scale that this rest upon doesn't require that cues be directly representative of the fiction or vice versa. Cue exists to help share imaginations, they are not part and parcel of them.

In 5e, I can have a combat run with a grid and miniatures, and I can require that all miniatures be representative to some degree or another, but in doing so, in creating a detailed and modeled combat space with minis that were hand painted and sculpted to match the fictional descriptions of the participants, I'm still not to the point where the cues completely define the fiction. They represent general locations (within a 5' space) and don't mimic the thrusts of spears, swipes of claws, roars and screams of battle, etc. They cue me to imagine certain details, yes, but I still must imagine them, and I must imagine more than the cues provide. And this is at the high level of detail, because I could also run a 5e combat with none of these cues, or one where it's a hand drawn sketch and we use pocket change to get a general idea of what's where.

 

[clearstream]

As for your last, your summation of @pemerton's arguments here is badly skewed, as that's not at all close to the entirety of what he's been saying but rather a single bit out of context. Cues help focus fiction, yes, but that doesn't mean that cues are the fiction or that manipulation of the fiction requires manipulation of a cue or vice versa. For example, I might have a cue in the form of a miniature of my character. This miniature can be closely representative of how my character appears or it could be a penny. The actual fiction of how my character appears isn't tightly related to the token I'm using, nor does a manipulation of the token mean a manipulation of my character's fiction. For example, my character can lose an arm in the fiction and yet the figure retains both arms. Or, the figure might become damaged and lose an arm, yet my character doesn't lose an arm in the fiction. Cues are there to help share complex constructs that are hard to accurately share and hold in your head, but they're suggestive to the fiction at best, and there's no required one to one manipulation from one to the other. Yes, a given ruleset might have more use for cues than another, but the scale that this rest upon doesn't require that cues be directly representative of the fiction or vice versa. Cue exists to help share imaginations, they are not part and parcel of them.

The point of contention to which I refer is that I say that game as artifact (perhaps most easily understood as that which exists when game is not played) provides tools or a mechanism for systematically producing a progressive fiction, leveraging a form of analogical reasoning, while you and @pemerton contend that there is no such machinery in play.

Is it correct to summarise that you understand the cues to serve as memory aids and a way to communicate fiction one player has in mind to another? I don't disagree with this point of view, so it is not in contention.

Fundamental to our disagreement is that I say that facts about game as artifact in play are productive of facts in the fiction (and vice versa). While you deny the possibility of connection between the domains that this would require.* By valency I mean that there is a productive connection or correlation between facts in one domain and facts in the other.

My notion of productivity is analogous to plausibility in analogical reasoning. Not all the items in the domains need to stand in correspondence. I won't expand on that here, but there are satisfactory answers in my view to all concerns raised about story, reference, and incompleteness. (Although it strikes me that it might be better to think in terms of inference than reference.)

Your reading of the Brindlewood Bay critique seems respectably consistent with a thorough-going denial of game as mechanism as relates to story-focused RPG. When I enumerate story-focused RPGs, and given my position, I notice the many game elements retained, and are sympathetic with a view that for there to be any point having such elements they must do worthwhile work: meaning that they must have productive consequences for the fiction (and vice versa.)

[NOTE For now I am keeping rules together with "cues" although I'm aware you might not do so. We might need to tease that out at some point.]

[*On rereading your post I noticed hedging (bolded) that may put our views closer together. I'm not arguing for direct or complete representation. I am arguing for a meaningful and productive correlation.]

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

And yet words clearly exist, both literally as physical objects when written down, and in a logical sense. Ask any software developer, we manipulate text all the time! Cutting edge software does much more, discerning the structure within the text, creating representations of that, and manipulating them according to rules which were generated by repeated feedback, so called 'machine learning'. Clearly there is meaning inhered into the sequence of words, but the words, absent any specific meaning, can still be manipulated, merely by understanding the rules of grammar, which don't reference meaning at all. I'd also note that, to the extent that we can train ML algorithms to manipulate by reference to meaning, we have to INSTILL THAT UNDERSTANDING in them, it isn't 'just there'.

Likewise if you write a story about a chess game, the story wasn't inherent in the chess game. It isn't like LotR, you had to bring the meaning, ENTIRELY from outside, and it could have been anything. I could tell 100 contradictory stories about a single chess game, none of them is canonical. It isn't fiction itself, and that is FUNDAMENTALLY because it isn't self-referential. No part of what happens on the chess board reflects a fictional interpretation of previous moves, which is totally unlike D&D.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.)

Yeah, this is where I got lost, and what you can say distinguishes intellect from true genius. Arneson/Gygax were able to envision the RPG. I was able to SEE what they did and understand it instantly, but I never made that leap myself from playing board games and such to 'D&D'.

Likewise, I could instantly grasp the nature and value of abstractions like hit points, but it took someone else to point out that a game could function COMPLETELY with such abstractions! I am not clever enough to completely make that leap, even after playing some games which featured larger scale abstractions, like meta-game constructs (IE MSRP's points that can be used both as experience and 'fate').

Clearly making a game also requires a conceptual framework to work from. D&D is pretty naive here, but it certainly exists, just explicated mostly post-hoc after other frameworks were devised, again by people smarter than me... lol.

Oh well, I guess it is part of life, you realize you're one of the clods of earth, not one of the eagles! lol. Maybe that should be the theme of an RPG!

 

[Ovinomancer]

The point of contention to which I refer is that I say that game as artifact (perhaps most easily understood as that which exists when game is not played) provides tools or a mechanism for systematically producing a progressive fiction, leveraging a form of analogical reasoning, while you and @pemerton contend that there is no such machinery in play.

Is it correct to summarise that you understand the cues to serve as memory aids and a way to communicate fiction one player has in mind to another? I don't disagree with this point of view, so it is not in contention.

Fundamental to our disagreement is that I say that facts about game as artifact in play are productive of facts in the fiction (and vice versa). While you deny the possibility of connection between the domains that this would require.* By valency I mean that there is a productive connection or correlation between facts in one domain and facts in the other.

My notion of productivity is analogous to plausibility in analogical reasoning. Not all the items in the domains need to stand in correspondence. I won't expand on that here, but there are satisfactory answers in my view to all concerns raised about story, reference, and incompleteness. (Although it strikes me that it might be better to think in terms of inference than reference.)

That's not what valency means, though. Your use of this word here is counterproductive to understanding -- it's downright confusing.

As for my or @pemerton's argument, I have no idea where you've come up with this conjecture, as I've said nothing to that effect. @pemerton's points, which have been explaining Edward's model, don't align to this, either, because Edward's model is a cohesive one that includes all parts discussed -- cues, rules, fiction, etc. The point I gather you're making is that the cues are functionally creating a "progessive" fiction. Here, I can only surmise that you mean that it creates some fiction that follows itself because this is an ill-formed or ill-described concept so I have to guess what you mean. That this is true -- cues by themselves, as physical pieces, do not create any fiction that then grows or expands. They cannot. I can stare at the tokens and map on my table for hours an no fiction emerges from them. Even when you add rules this doesn't happen. I have have rules for how to move tokens and how to do combats in 5e, and also the tokens and the battlemap and still nothing happens, no matter how long I stare at them. No fiction is being produced, here. I need player imagination to make that happen, at which point the cues and rules provide structure to how and what and when we imagine. They can be important to a game -- nothing I or @pemerton has said says anything otherwise! In fact, a large part of @pemerton's posts have been showing how cues interact to help create fiction. No, rather, the point has been that I can separate a cue from the fiction because they are different things. The cue isn't the fiction, just like the token on the gridmap isn't the character. And just like the character sheet isn't the character. And cues cannot be as responsible as you're claiming because I can forgo them and still have an RPG!

The arguments you're making seem to be more aligned to you having a very specific RPG in mind, played a specific way, with specific agendas, and then claiming that the general model allows for things that the specific idea you have does not.

Your reading of the Brindlewood Bay critique seems respectably consistent with a thorough-going denial of game as mechanism as relates to story-focused RPG. When I enumerate story-focused RPGs, and given my position, I notice the many game elements retained, and are sympathetic with a view that for there to be any point having such elements they must do worthwhile work: meaning that they must have productive consequences for the fiction (and vice versa.)

No, it's saying that the game isn't built to do story the way that the reviewer and their players tried to play the game. They tried to play Risk on a Monopoly board and blamed the Monopoly board for why it was so easy to get out of jail. Do you have any experience with Brindlewood Bay mechanics? I do. And that review, especially part 4 (you linked to part 5), is pretty much fully of the same set of misunderstanding and usual boogeymen that crop up from anyone taught and only used to games where the GM is the only allowed storyteller when they try games that forsake this approach.

[NOTE For now I am keeping rules together with "cues" although I'm aware you might not do so. We might need to tease that out at some point.]

The model you've cited and the one @pemerton has been discussing separates this. If you're lumping things together in the discussion of a model that explicitly separates them, yes, this is a big issue and needed to be "teased out" long ago. You've cluttered the discussion, although, in the end, I don't think it makes that much of a difference as your approach is a flawed understanding of the model anyway.

I think it might be a very good idea for you to produce your own model, and do so with exaggerated clarity, because you've referenced a model, and are arguing from/towards it, but have already abandoned that in favor of an as yet unexplained model you have. It makes for poor discussion to do this.

[*On rereading your post I noticed hedging (bolded) that may put our views closer together. I'm not arguing for direct or complete representation. I am arguing for a meaningful and productive correlation.]

If you're describing "productive" as you've done above -- we're still largely apart. If you mean it in the clear sense of how the Lumpley model describes it (which I feel is a useful model, but not the only one possible), then I'm utterly confused as to this entire discussion and what you're aiming for at all.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Eh, its an attempt to mirror the terminology of physics, in which a 'phase space' represents a mathematical artifact which maps all the free parameters of a system and relates them to the measurements we can make of the system. "given certain mass and momenta and forces acting between two bodies the system they form (as a closed system) will occupy some area of phase space."
I think its intended though to mean "all the possible stories" that could be derived from a given set of rules, but there is no such closed set. Thus the analogy fails immediately in a serious way.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@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.

I don't know about the 'specter' part, I don't perceive RPGs that way, or rules as some sort of 'specter of the wargame', because I don't see them as being descriptive or prescriptive of the RULES OF THE GAME WORLD.

But what I mostly observe is that you have your history backwards. Dave Arneson, the inventor of D&D, didn't start from fixed rule tabletop games. His starting point was the 'Braunstein', which was an outgrowth of late-stage 'free' Kriegspiel. The characteristics of playing a specific character already existed. They simply took figurines and such cues, along with some process arbitration, from games like Chainmail and applied it to their Braunstein-like play. I'd note that this wasn't even a great leap, as Kriegspiel itself originated as referees applying heuristics to actions described by military officers during training exercises to adjudicate how their actions played out. That is, they would consult tables and whatnot which indicated the effectiveness of firepower, various logistical and morale factors, etc. Tabletop wargaming grew out of this as well! So what Arneson did was pretty much taking these existing elements, long existing, and remix them into a game about crawling around in a dungeon after treasure.

So the actual mechanics of how the PCs work in D&D was taken, partially, from Chainmail (with an admixture of some rules from an ironclads table top game). The concept of playing individuals in a free-form way was however ancient tradition. What was invented in 1974 was basically just dungeon crawling and the other elements of D&D that went with it (IE classes, races, ability scores, specific monster descriptions, and the trappings of the dungeon).

This did create a paradigm with a GM who was in total charge of the 'board', which then evolved into the fiction (Braunsteins already had rich fiction, so maybe 'evolve' is even giving it too much credit). That is the 'town' and the 'wilderness' and more complicated interactions with PCs were added, but the rules took on the character of mostly arbitrating how actions took place, as a GM-aid to deciding what happened when a PC did X, just as in the Kriegspiel they told the referee how many casualties the battalion took when it rushed the enemy trench in a frontal assault.

I don't believe games like DW or FitD based games are 'haunted' by anything here. They have fully shed the idea of rules which arbitrate real-world style outcomes and replaced them with rules which fully arbitrate the fiction creation process and how the characters fit into it, what the participant roles are, etc. It may be that people familiar with older RPGs are CONFUSED by this point, but it isn't particularly a problem. Beyond that many games have fairly comfortably mixed paradigms to an extent, though it takes a bit of cleverness. 4e for example has pretty trad combat rules, but it is still a story game at heart. As @pemerton has pointed out though, that means the numbers and such in 4e don't REALLY represent some kind of 'reality of the game world', they instead reflect a reality of the storytelling. Again this gets confusing to people who aren't versed in it.

 

[clearstream]

Eh, its an attempt to mirror the terminology of physics, in which a 'phase space' represents a mathematical artifact which maps all the free parameters of a system and relates them to the measurements we can make of the system. "given certain mass and momenta and forces acting between two bodies the system they form (as a closed system) will occupy some area of phase space."
I think its intended though to mean "all the possible stories" that could be derived from a given set of rules, but there is no such closed set. Thus the analogy fails immediately in a serious way.

It's simpler than that. Non-linear systems can be described in terms of their phase-space: a topological mapping of every state of the system.

As for there being no such closed set for RPGs, what comprises the game artifacts is continuously added to and taken away from by participants. A frank boardgame like Descent possibly does have a bounded phase-space: does traversing it tell any stories?

 

[clearstream]

I need player imagination to make that happen, at which point the cues and rules provide structure to how and what and when we imagine. They can be important to a game -- nothing I or @pemerton has said says anything otherwise!

So why the fervent disagreement!? Game provides structure to the RP. Implying that the structure of game has a relationship with the structure of RP.

In fact, a large part of @pemerton's posts have been showing how cues interact to help create fiction. No, rather, the point has been that I can separate a cue from the fiction because they are different things. The cue isn't the fiction, just like the token on the gridmap isn't the character. And just like the character sheet isn't the character. And cues cannot be as responsible as you're claiming because I can forgo them and still have an RPG!

What RPG in fact forgoes them? You may have RP, but not RPG.

The arguments you're making seem to be more aligned to you having a very specific RPG in mind, played a specific way, with specific agendas, and then claiming that the general model allows for things that the specific idea you have does not.

That's incorrect. It's the dissonances and lacunae I notice in enthusiastic claims that lead me to question. Debate on whether games might be a new form of non-linear narrative is not settled. If games are a form of narrative, they might narrate in ways that are different from preexisting mediums.

I can't tell if you agree with me or not that RP+G is distinct from RP - ie that G has some consequence for RP - because you seem so determined to find fault and disagree.

What ways do games produce narrative? Approach that as a question about games, and not stories.

The model you've cited and the one @pemerton has been discussing separates this. If you're lumping things together in the discussion of a model that explicitly separates them, yes, this is a big issue and needed to be "teased out" long ago.

The question I have in mind is whether it is possible to separate rules from pieces the way Baker supposes? You've raised objections to points that haven't been argued for.

Whether your figure exactly matches your character is beside the point. Just as it is missing the point to say that there is much about a character that isn't on the sheet.

Once the figure is conferred with the property of a token in the game system, or once the character sheet has an XP track that matters, I am interested in the productive flow between them. Does it matter that one game relates the figure to this and that other component? How do the rules address the figure?

If you think these are settled questions then you may like to read more of the literature on games.

I think it might be a very good idea for you to produce your own model, and do so with exaggerated clarity, because you've referenced a model, and are arguing from/towards it, but have already abandoned that in favor of an as yet unexplained model you have. It makes for poor discussion to do this.

Yes, I was aiming to do that... but distractions abound.

If you're describing "productive" as you've done above -- we're still largely apart. If you mean it in the clear sense of how the Lumpley model describes it (which I feel is a useful model, but not the only one possible), then I'm utterly confused as to this entire discussion and what you're aiming for at all.

I'm not interested in telling stories with a few bits and pieces of game as conveniences. I'm interested in how stories might emerge from game as game. If you and @AbdulAlhazred cannot see the possibility of this, then it is not my aim to persuade you.

 

[clearstream]

I don't believe games like DW or FitD based games are 'haunted' by anything here. They have fully shed the idea of rules which arbitrate real-world style outcomes and replaced them with rules which fully arbitrate the fiction creation process and how the characters fit into it, what the participant roles are, etc.

Would you agree that very often such games share out the job of establishing facts about the game-world. If so, why do you think that is?

And why don't games that focus on arbitrating real world outcomes typically do so, in your view?