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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8498024" data-attributes="member: 42582">Are you referencing, here, <a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/599" target="_blank">Vincent Baker's clouds-and- boxes-and-arrows analysis</a>?Here's an early presentation of it: <a href="http://www.lumpley.com/archive/156.html" target="_blank">anyway: post a comment</a> -The fictional things and events and stuff in the game. The interactions of the players themselves. Dice, numbers, words, maps - real-world tokens, things, props, representations. Emily calls 'em "cues" and I think that's just right. If you can pick it up and hand it to another player, or change it with a pencil and eraser, it's a real-world cue. If it exists only in our heads and our conversation, it's in-game.Here's another fairly early presentation of it: <a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/427" target="_blank">anyway: 3 Resolution Systems</a> - The cloud means the game's fictional stuff; the cubes mean its real-world stuff. If you can point to it on the table, pick it up and hand it to someone, erase it from a character sheet, it goes in the cubes. If you can't, if it exists only in your imagination and conversation, it goes in the cloud. (If you remember <a href="http://www.lumpley.com/archive/156.html" target="_blank">this old post</a>, you'll be like "where are the smiley faces?" They're looking down from above; they're the ones who enact the arrows. They were messing up the pictures' clarity.)There are four elements of this model: they are (i) the fiction - the in-game stuff that's in our heads; (ii) the cues - real world stuff that is used in various ways to determine what it is that we are to imagine in our heads; (iii) the participants who do the imagining and handle the cues, in accordance with (iv) the rules of the game, which are represented by the arrows, and are enacted by the participants.Baker does not draw any contrast between the fiction and the game as you suggest - rather, the fiction is what the game generates, and is something referenced from time-to-time by the game rules.In terms of Baker's model, there are two ways of analysing this, which correspond to two different ways of playing D&D. The difference between them was a focus of much debate during the so-called "edition wars". From your couple of sentences I can't tell which way you have in mind.Here's one analysis - let's call it "wargame" or even "boardgame" D&D. The combat rules take us from cues (positions on maps) to action declarations (movement and/or attacks) to changing the cues (moving tokens on maps, rolling dice) to further interaction with cues (comparing numbers rolled to various other numbers written down in places, like ACs and hit point tallies) to further changes to cues (eg changes to hit point tallies). This continues until all the hit point tallies on one side drop to zero, at which point we now return to the fiction, where we collectively imagine one side as having bested the other side in combat.Of course, while playing a wargame like this the participants might imagine stuff - Magic the Gathering would be much less fun to play if there was no flavour text! But that imagining is mere colour - it is not something that the rules care about until we get to the end, and imagine one side as having bested the other.I think a lot of D&D play treats combat in the fashion I've just described. My evidence for that is the frequency with which one see combat described as an "interruption" in roleplaying or as something that is to be strongly contrasted with "exploration".But there is another way of approaching D&D combat, in which the rules require us to move from the cues to the imagined fiction as part of the process of play. The most common way in which this happens, at least in my experience, is when a player declares that they take cover (say by ducking beneath a table, or behind a shrub) and there is no way of moving from the cue (the tokens on the map) direct to the application of the cover rules without mediation via the shared imagining - eg how tall is the PC, how high is the shrub, is the PC prepared to drop prone to get the benefit of cover, etc. But it also comes up in many other contexts - eg the reason that the 4e wizard spell Icy Terrain can freeze a puddle, and hence turn it from one sort of terrain obstacle to a different sort of terrain obstacle, is because it is a Cold effect that can therefore freeze water. Here we have first an interaction of cues - the spell description includes the Cold keyword, and the rules tell us (4e PHB p 55) that Cold effects include "ice crystals, arctic air, or frigid liquid". And then in our imagination we - the participants - can all agree that arctic air and ice crystals are the sorts of things that might cause a puddle to freeze. Thus the rules permit, and maybe at some table are even understood to demand, that when a puddle is inside the AoE of an Icy Terrain spell it becomes frozen.(Many critics of 4e took the odd combination of views that (i) the second sort of approach to D&D combat is preferable to the first, but (ii) anyone playing 4D&D by way of the second approach was playing the game wrong. While an odd combination of views, it does remind us that this is all about the rules of the game - in Baker's model, what arrows does the game establish between imaginings and cues.)Again, assuming you mean Vincent Baker's model, you are mistaken. It does not draw any dichotomy between fiction and game. And for good reason! I don't understand how such a distinction is meant to work, given that - as Baker has also said - <a href="http://www.lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">roleplaying is negotiated imagination</a> and hence the whole focus of the game is on establishing and collectively "changing"/"manipulating" a shared fiction.I don't understand the difference between a "ludic" and a "dramatic" state. I mean, I read this from your post 867:The dramatic doesn't care about system-state because it is acausal. There is a seeming that when the troll strolled into the room, that the troll is in the room because it strolled there, but in asystematic narrative we learned the troll strolled, we learned it was in the room, in our minds we connected those phrases dramatically, but there were no systematic dynamics in play. I can as well say the troll is on the moon: nothing prevents it. There is no distance between room and moon. There is only the test of what we find allows us to suspend disbelief. What I am calling ludic concerns require that if the troll strolls into the room in this moment, in the game-world (which may be map, board, or models, or any consistently imagined space) then the room was within strolling distance and it is not possible for troll to stroll to the moon in this moment if that is too far for its defined means of travel.And also your post 866:  Ludic = game-world circumstances + character approach + more or less effective use of mechanics.But here is why I am confused. First, you refer to the "game-world" as a map (which is, in Baker's model, a cue) or as any consistently imagined space (which is, in Baker's model, not a cue). A map can be a cue that constrains the creation of a shared imagined space - this is quite common in some D&D play. Or it can be the product of a shared imagining, a cue generated to then feed into and perhaps constrain further imaginings - this happens a bit in my Classic Traveller play and was very common in my Rolemaster play. It hasn't been something I've done much of in my Burning Wheel play, but it is certainly something that Luke Crane talks about in his Adventure Burner, especially in the context of Range and Cover resolution.Therefore, and second, I don't know what you mean by game-world circumstance as a component of the "ludic". Do you mean what Emily Clare Boss (and, following her, Vincent Baker) calls fictional position? Or do you mean the state of some cue - say the position of a token on a map, or the number written on a page under the heading Tally of Hit Points Taken? Both can be important to resolution in most RPGs, but they are different things. (Though obviously related! The cues constrain the imaginings that establish a character's fictional position; and imaginings frequently dictate that certain cues be referred to or changed or created. The rules of the game tell us what these constraints and dictations are.)Third, no RPG I'm aware of invites players to engage in the effective use of mechanics to realise a character approach within a fictional position than Burning Wheel. It is an extremely technical game, in my view on a par with Rolemaster and moreso than RuneQuest. But the rules of the game do not issue that invitation every time a player says what their PC is doing. Because the rules of the game give the GM a permission to change the PC's fictional position in the way the player wants it to change - this is saying 'yes' rather than calling for a roll of the dice - but that permission is contingent on the dramatic/narrative stakes of the declared action. The dramatic/narrative stakes of a declared action are (as I think [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] has said) a property of the fiction considered not just as a set of things and events but as a story that includes protagonists who have dramatic needs, antagonists, moments of rising action, the possibility of climax, etc. The rules of a game can reference those properties of a fiction as much as they can reference such properties as the details of the imagined architecture, or the depth of an imagined river - say 'yes' or roll the dice, in its BW/DitV form, and in its 4e form, is an example of just such a rule.The difference between [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER]'s dungeon crawl, and [USER=6801845]@Oofta[/USER]'s preference for a GM-authored world, and my preferred approach in BW, Prince Valiant, and some other systems that I have mentioned, is not to be found in contrasts between the "dramatic" and the "ludic". It's to be found in the rules of the different games - in some they are expressly stated rules (eg BW has the clearest statement of its rule of any RPG I know) whereas the rules of Lanefan's game are to a significant degree implicit but can be inferred from his many normatively-laden statements about the responsibilities of the GM, etc. And it is to be found, in particular, in their different rules about when fiction is to be established, by reference to what sorts of properties of the fiction and what sorts of dispositions of the participants towards those properties, by which participants, at what stage during the action resolution process, etc.The function of that prep, in DW, is to provide content for subsequent GM moves. But the process of making moves - soft moves, hard moves - isn't affected by that prep. So the GM is never permitted, in DW, to tell a player, independent of a check, that a declared action that triggers a player move fails because of some hidden/unrevealed aspect of the PC's fictional position.That is a fundamental difference from the role of prep in (say) traditional AD&D. As I think I may have mentioned upthread, I GMed a couple of hours of White Plume Mountain a few days ago. Part of my job, as GM in that game, was to narrate results of declared actions without calling for checks by drawing upon the secret information about the fiction that I had but the player didn't (until they learned it via the process of me narrating those results).Setting out this difference between DW and classic AD&D doesn't need any elaborate metaphysics: it just needs us to clearly state the different rules that govern the negotiation of the shared fiction.A trap marked on a map is a cue. As I said above, there can be all sorts of different relationships between resolution processes and the production, consultation and alteration of cues. But I think what you have in mind is that someone - the GM, I guess - has, prior to play, prepared a map which has a trap marked on it. And I think you are imaging action resolution rules which say that if a player declares movement for their PC, and that movement - when traced out on the map - takes them over the place where the trap is marked, then the GM is to declare the triggering of the trap, or is to consult the trap-triggering procedure (eg in Moldvay Basic traps only trigger on a roll of 1 or 2 on a d6 : p B22).A game played according to those sorts of procedures - prep procedures, and the resolution rules that presuppose them - will produce one sort of play experience. I personally experienced that sort of play a few days ago, with White Plume Mountain.It is not impossible to use those procedures to generate narratively/dramatically stakes-oriented play, but my view is that they are not ideal for that.As far as the cliff goes, there are any number of ways to resolve the action declaration We ascend/descend the awful cliff. Particularly if it is being traversed for a second or subsequent time by the same group of protagonists. (Robin Laws has a nice discussion of this in HeroQuest revised, especially pp 72-74, 81-82.) There are approaches to action resolution that preserve its character in the fiction as an awful cliff, but don't call for a check to be made to traverse it: those sorts of approaches are not suitable for [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] given his goals of play, and may not be suitable for you, but they are readily available and well-known.</blockquote>

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