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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8499530" data-attributes="member: 42582">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, <a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/14" target="_blank">here is Baker on PC sheets</a>: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? 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. 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. Or a mix, that's easiest of all. 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.</blockquote>

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