RPGing and imagination: a fundamental point

[pemerton]

This part seems a little off to me. If game mechanics are modeling the stuff of the game world then there is no real-world social negotiation needed.

Vincent Baker's point is that mechanics do not author fiction on their own. Everyone has to agree to imagine what it is that the mechanics "tell" them they should imagine.

(The above statement is sometimes called the "Lumpley principle" - after Vincent Baker's user name - or the "Care Boss principle" - after Emily Care Boss.)

the game rules can designate a referee that handles this aspect - in which case there is a final authority and real-world negotiation isn't required

Likewise for authorities, in voluntary leisure activities.

I'm not sure whether or not you clicked on the link, but here is the example that I elided:

So you're sitting at the table and one player says, "[let's imagine that] an orc jumps out of the underbrush!"

What has to happen before the group agrees that, indeed, an orc jumps out of the underbrush?

1. Sometimes, not much at all. The right participant said it, at an appropriate moment, and everybody else just incorporates it smoothly into their imaginary picture of the situation. "An orc! Yikes! Battlestations!" This is how it usually is for participants with high ownership of whatever they're talking about: GMs describing the weather or the noncombat actions of NPCs, players saying what their characters are wearing or thinking.

2. Sometimes, a little bit more. "Really? An orc?" "Yeppers." "Huh, an orc. Well, okay." Sometimes the suggesting participant has to defend the suggestion: "Really, an orc this far into Elfland?" "Yeah, cuz this thing about her tribe..." "Okay, I guess that makes sense."

3. Sometimes, mechanics. "An orc? Only if you make your having-an-orc-show-up roll. Throw down!" "Rawk! 57!" "Dude, orc it is!" The thing to notice here is that the mechanics serve the exact same purpose as the explanation about this thing about her tribe in point 2, which is to establish your credibility wrt the orc in question.

4. And sometimes, lots of mechanics and negotiation. Debate the likelihood of a lone orc in the underbrush way out here, make a having-an-orc-show-up roll, a having-an-orc-hide-in-the-underbrush roll, a having-the-orc-jump-out roll, argue about the modifiers for each of the rolls, get into a philosophical thing about the rules' modeling of orc-jump-out likelihood... all to establish one little thing. Wave a stick in a game store and every game you knock of the shelves will have a combat system that works like this.​

(That last sentence is hyperbole, although in 2003 - when this was written - it wasn't too much of an exaggeration.)

 

[FrogReaver]

Vincent Baker's point is that mechanics do not author fiction on their own.

Okay. Not sure why that even needs said, but okay. I agree.

Everyone has to agree to imagine what it is that the mechanics "tell" them they should imagine.

They typically do that when agreeing to the selected game and selected referee if one is needed.

But that brings us back to - if the negotiation happens at the start (which game to play) then the game rules primary purposes isn’t to aid in negotiation - they are to provide models.

 

[Manbearcat]

But that brings us back to - if the negotiation happens at the start (which game to play) then the game rules primary purposes isn’t to aid in negotiation - they are to provide models.

Since you're countering the point of "rules primary purpose is to aid in negotiation (which is about generating a particular sort of moment-to-moment gameplay content)," I have to assume you're referring to "physical" (imaginary physical) models used for extrapolation of the workings of a particular setting? Otherwise, I can't figure what work "to provide models" is doing here as a counterpoint? If I'm correct in my guess at your meaning....well, this is only true for a very specific subset of TTRPGs. Other games have rules that:

* Generate downward pressure upon play so player decision-space is more compelling in a particular way. Wandering Monsters in D&D are an example. The Grind and accruing/spending Checks in Torchbearer and the Camp procedures are another. There are plenty more.

* Provoke premise-based or theme-based action with an alignment of procedures, ethos, and incentive structures. Again, tons here from Milestones in D&D 4e to general situation-framing procedures, levers, and best practices in scene-based games (or action-snowballing-based games that are more freeform) of which there are too many to name.

These rules (first order and their integrated, cascading effects) aren't designed to provide a model to either extrapolate around/from or to operationalize a setting. The primary purposes of these game rules (and, typically, the macro ruleset you'll find them embedded within) are to generate content or to aid in the negotiation of content generation. They're about generating particular gameplay and the moment-by-moment experience of the participants who are undergoing that particular gameplay.

Any modeling is either (a) incidental or even (b) entirely unintended such that it might yield dysfunctional play that is co-opting the point of play and subbing in something else. I mean...we have a rich and varied history of this, but we don't have to even go outside of Gygax's lament in his DMG!

 

[FrogReaver]

Since you're countering the point of "rules primary purpose is to aid in negotiation (which is about generating a particular sort of moment-to-moment gameplay content)," I have to assume you're referring to "physical" (imaginary physical) models used for extrapolation of the workings of a particular setting? Otherwise, I can't figure what work "to provide models" is doing here as a counterpoint? If I'm correct in my guess at your meaning....well, this is only true for a very specific subset of TTRPGs. Other games have rules that:

* Generate downward pressure upon play so player decision-space is more compelling in a particular way. Wandering Monsters in D&D are an example. The Grind and accruing/spending Checks in Torchbearer and the Camp procedures are another. There are plenty more.

* Provoke premise-based or theme-based action with an alignment of procedures, ethos, and incentive structures. Again, tons here from Milestones in D&D 4e to general situation-framing procedures, levers, and best practices in scene-based games (or action-snowballing-based games that are more freeform) of which there are too many to name.

I'm really confused with why those wouldn't be considered models. I think you are reading my use of model far too narrowly.

These rules (first order and their integrated, cascading effects) aren't designed to provide a model to either extrapolate around/from or to operationalize a setting. The primary purposes of these game rules (and, typically, the macro ruleset you'll find them embedded within) are to generate content or to aid in the negotiation of content generation.

1. A mechanical model simply takes an input and yields a result that has meaning assigned to it.
2. I think Pemerton might take you to task for suggesting that anything other than the players generate content as he said "Vincent Baker's point is that mechanics do not author fiction on their own."
3. Take the D&D mechanic of encumbrance - there is no negotiation by the players as to whether a character is encumbered. The mechanic is clear. However, there might discussion about either a) it's obvious the DM is misremembering the rule or b) the player wasn't tracking weight of items correctly or c) their is some controversy about whether the DM is handling encumberance fairly. Say he only ever mentions Bob's PC as being encumbered while ignoring it entirely for his good friend Kyle. In all these cases there's never a negotiation of the shared fictoin - in cases 1 and 2 it's simply a fact finding mission - a) what was the rule we agreed to? b) what are all the items and their weights my PC is carrying? 3) might could be classified as a negotiation, but it's not one about the shared fiction, it's one about the DM applying the rules more fairly. In any event, the negotiation about what the fiction should say took place when deciding in session 0 to run this game with this DM - because that's where the rules/models were decided upon.

They're about generating particular gameplay and the moment-by-moment experience of the participants who are undergoing that particular gameplay.

Yes. I'd call that a model.

Any modeling is either (a) incidental or even (b) entirely unintended such that it might yield dysfunctional play that is co-opting the point of play and subbing in something else. I mean...we have a rich and varied history of this, but we don't have to even go outside of Gygax's lament in his DMG!

What's a model to you?

 

[aramis erak]

The Lumpley/Boss principle is not of need applicable to the player - see also Fighting Fantasy, Pick a Path to Adventure, Lone Wolf, 26 T&T official solos, 6 TFT ones...

The player fights the fights, makes the choices, but the imagination of the GM is fixed on paper, and there's no negotiation.

Further, that mechanics create no story is provably false for certain definitions of story. I'll use the following from Oxford dictionary of language...

1. an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.
   "an adventure story"
2. an account of past events in someone's life or in the evolution of something.
   "the story of modern farming"

If I play a game of Formula Dé, a boardgame of Formula 1 racing, a bunch of tokens move around a gridded track based upon throws of dice and the whims of the players, in accord with the rules. After play, retellings can impart the story generated by the mechanics. There's no need to focus play on story to have one. Remembered mechanics and outcomes thereof can result in a story in each player's mind, if not two per. one is the story of the play of the game - a mere recollection (or misrecollection) of the facts of play, while the other is the effect of pareidolia turning the mechanical events into a recognizable story.

Not much imagination needed, it's just events and memories being triggered and linked. If one watched the movie Cars recently, they may conflate that in or not; it doesn't matter. The game generated events which the players controlled a car or 2 each through and resulted in a winner and at least 1 loser. (Due to game mechanics, ties are supremely rare.)

Humans tend to create stories from events, the same way they see faces in random image noise.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

To me one function of RPG rules is to tell us something about the game world. But everyone doesn't see that as an important function of the rules, and I think this difference in opinion is a reason behind several arguments on these forums.

 

[clearstream]

@clearstream

Yes, that was Vincent Baker's observation here:

Roleplaying is negotiated imagination. In order for any thing to be true in game, all the participants in the game (players and GMs, if you've even got such things) have to understand and assent to it. When you're roleplaying, what you're doing is a) suggesting things that might be true in the game and then b) negotiating with the other participants to determine whether they're actually true or not. . . .​

​

(Plenty of suggestions at the game table don't get picked up by the group, or get revised and modified by the group before being accepted, all with the same range of time and attention spent negotiating.)​

​

So look, you! Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table. That's their sole and crucial function.​

That post, from 2003, is a prelude to his subsequent analysis of exactly what it is that the use of mechanics (and of rules more broadly) offers that cooperation, improvisation etc don't. (That is, rules don't just ease negotiation, but also create the space for introducing options that otherwise wouldn't be arrived at via vigorous creative agreement.)

I was thinking of Baker's observation as I wrote, although what I am interested in above is the vague, unassigned or general nature of our core mechanic. What I am looking at is that at the heart of most TTRPG is a stochastic mechanic that is unspecific enough to apply to nearly anything.

[imagine] --> [roll] --> [imagine]​

I've described this in the past as selecting between worlds. [Roll] becomes heroic only when we're prepared to list things we don't want to happen among the outcomes. So that the world we arrive in is one that can only be reached by those willing to risk outcomes they don't want. @FrogReaver I agree with Baker on differentiating general roll from mechanics that model stuff, and about its easing and constraining of the negotiation, but I do not agree that it is its "sole and crucial function." As @pemerton intimated, Baker later wrote

if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better. . . .​

​

As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction.​

This isn't in direct contradiction, although rolling and following the result is surely a rule. It develops the earlier idea to go on to answer just why agreement might be problematic to reach (or more accurately, why we might like to reach agreement on that which we do not wish to agree to.) I recast that in a slightly different light, to suggest that when we wish to feel heroic (fraught, or tested) while performing a decidedly unheroic, non-testing activity (gathered around a table, rolling dice) it is essential that among the outcomes are things we don't want. @Campbell often speaks of taking creative risks, which puts at stake real psychological, emotional or social investments: [roll] is palpably enlisted in that process.

So, again, my interest above is that [roll] itself is mechanically uncommitted. It's not shaped to model some detail of the game world. It's the generic nature of the mechanic that makes it work. I can [roll] to perform brain surgery just as well as I can [roll] to land a space shuttle, stove in a door, or cast out a vengeful ghost. One can consider the now vast number of PbtA moves in this light... all able to take a 2d6 roll indexing just three (or sometimes four) outcomes.

 

[clearstream]

The Lumpley/Boss principle is not of need applicable to the player - see also Fighting Fantasy, Pick a Path to Adventure, Lone Wolf, 26 T&T official solos, 6 TFT ones...

The player fights the fights, makes the choices, but the imagination of the GM is fixed on paper, and there's no negotiation.

Further, that mechanics create no story is provably false for certain definitions of story. I'll use the following from Oxford dictionary of language...

1. an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.
   "an adventure story"
2. an account of past events in someone's life or in the evolution of something.
   "the story of modern farming"

If I play a game of Formula Dé, a boardgame of Formula 1 racing, a bunch of tokens move around a gridded track based upon throws of dice and the whims of the players, in accord with the rules. After play, retellings can impart the story generated by the mechanics. There's no need to focus play on story to have one. Remembered mechanics and outcomes thereof can result in a story in each player's mind, if not two per. one is the story of the play of the game - a mere recollection (or misrecollection) of the facts of play, while the other is the effect of pareidolia turning the mechanical events into a recognizable story.

Not much imagination needed, it's just events and memories being triggered and linked. If one watched the movie Cars recently, they may conflate that in or not; it doesn't matter. The game generated events which the players controlled a car or 2 each through and resulted in a winner and at least 1 loser. (Due to game mechanics, ties are supremely rare.)

Humans tend to create stories from events, the same way they see faces in random image noise.

I think the best answer or at least a good perspective on that is to grasp that play is process, not product. So while indeed stories can be a product of boardgame play, they are not part of their process. I need not conjure a narrative of my knight's passage across the chess board in pursuit of its desired romantic liason with the opposing king, in order to parse the board state and make a good move.

(Thus, for clarity, it is that story - or more generally imagination - is a core component of play (playing with story) that is distinctive of TTRPG.)

 

[FrogReaver]

I was thinking of Baker's observation as I wrote, although what I am interested in above is the vague, unassigned or general nature of our core mechanic. What I am looking at is that at the heart of most TTRPG is a stochastic mechanic that is unspecific enough to apply to nearly anything.

[imagine] --> [roll] --> [imagine]​

Right! To me whatever mechanics exist to determine the meaning of that roll or rolls like that - that's a model.

I've described this in the past as selecting between worlds. [Roll] becomes heroic only when we're prepared to list things we don't want to happen among the outcomes. So that the world we arrive in is one that can only be reached by those willing to risk outcomes they don't want. @FrogReaver I agree with Baker on differentiating general roll from mechanics that model stuff,

I agree there's a differentiation there. I wouldn't attribute it to 'modeling' vs 'not modeling' though. Encumbrance is a model. So is the scaling proficiency bonus by level. But so is the Athletics check, the attack roll, the perception check. Etc. I think you nailed the difference in describing it as willingness to risk outcomes they don't want. That to me seems the fundamental difference in those types of mechanics.

and about its easing and constraining of the negotiation,

Yea - I think whatever you all are meaning by 'constraining the negotiation' isn't what I mean by negotiation. When the player rolls his athletics check to jump over the obstacle, there isn't a negotiation happening IMO. The DM determines the difficulty of jumping over the obstacle, the player rolls and if the DC is met then he jumps over the obstacle. *In a game like Blades in the dark there is explicitly negotiation up until the roll - so it's not that negotiation cannot ever happen in this process - it's just not present in the process of many RPG's.

but I do not agree that it is its "sole and crucial function." As @pemerton intimated, Baker later wrote

if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better. . . .​

​

The definition of model I gave was -

1. A mechanical model simply takes an input and yields a result that has meaning assigned to it.

To me the act of assigning meaning is exactly what you are talking about. Different rules structures assign meaning differently

As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction.​

I agree that creating the unwelcome and unwanted in the game's fiction is (at least from the PC's perspective) an absolutely essential part of RPG rules. I still would go with the purpose is to model - its just inherent that in some of those models there must be an engine that creates unwelcome and unwanted fiction.

This isn't in direct contradiction, although rolling and following the result is surely a rule. It develops the earlier idea to go on to answer just why agreement might be problematic to reach (or more accurately, why we might like to reach agreement on that which we do not wish to agree to.) I recast that in a slightly different light, to suggest that when we wish to feel heroic (fraught, or tested) while performing a decidedly unheroic, non-testing activity (gathered around a table, rolling dice) it is essential that among the outcomes are things we don't want. @Campbell often speaks of taking creative risks, which puts at stake real psychological, emotional or social investments: [roll] is palpably enlisted in that process.

So, again, my interest above is that [roll] itself is mechanically uncommitted. It's not shaped to model some detail of the game world. It's the generic nature of the mechanic that makes it work. I can [roll] to perform brain surgery just as well as I can [roll] to land a space shuttle, stove in a door, or cast out a vengeful ghost. One can consider the now vast number of PbtA moves in this light... all able to take a 2d6 roll indexing just three (or sometimes four) outcomes.

IMO. All a roll is - is randomization. It's the specific mechanics behind the roll and what they model and the resulting meaning that has true value and impact.

 

[clearstream]

Right! To me whatever mechanics exist to determine the meaning of that roll or rolls like that - that's a model.


I agree there's a differentiation there. I wouldn't attribute it to 'modeling' vs 'not modeling' though. Encumbrance is a model. So is the scaling proficiency bonus by level. But so is the Athletics check, the attack roll, the perception check. Etc. I think you nailed the difference in describing it as willingness to risk outcomes they don't want. That to me seems the fundamental difference in those types of mechanics.

Let's use the term predefined versus unspecified modeling then. Encumbrance is predefined and specific: it's shaped to capture lifting, carrying etc (to the extent it succeeds in its goals as a model.) Roll isn't like that: further below I will put the difference in your terms

Yea - I think whatever you all are meaning by 'constraining the negotiation' isn't what I mean by negotiation. When the player rolls his athletics check to jump over the obstacle, there isn't a negotiation happening IMO. The DM determines the difficulty of jumping over the obstacle, the player rolls and if the DC is met then he jumps over the obstacle. *In a game like Blades in the dark there is explicitly negotiation up until the roll - so it's not that negotiation cannot ever happen in this process - it's just not present in the process of many RPG's.

If the player succeeds on their Athletics check, others agree not to say they failed to jump the obstacle. Thus, negotiation on that score is constrained by roll.

The definition of model I gave was -

1. A mechanical model simply takes an input and yields a result that has meaning assigned to it.

To me the act of assigning meaning is exactly what you are talking about. Different rules structures assign meaning differently

Coming back to the earlier point, the following "models" can be constrasted

• takes a predefined range of inputs and yields results that have predefined meanings assigned to them
• takes an open-ended range of inputs and yields results that have meanings defined during play

There can be a spectrum of models between those poles. What I'm saying about [roll] is that we leverage its open-endedness and assign meanings to its results to drive our process of play. It sits at the heart of TTRPG not because of its specificity (although it certainly can and very often is prespecified), but because of its inspecificity.

I agree that creating the unwelcome and unwanted in the game's fiction is (at least from the PC's perspective) an absolutely essential part of RPG rules. I still would go with the purpose is to model - its just inherent that in some of those models there must be an engine that creates unwelcome and unwanted fiction.

Hence my thinking about putatively heroic play. It is not normally heroic to pick up a d20 and roll it upon the table (nor is it skillful, for that matter, as to exercise any skill in that act would be to cheat!) What then makes the worlds our characters find themselves in "heroic" (or challenging, testing, whatever adjectives one likes)?

What does that come down to, if not the possibility of being forced to say what we do not wish to say? We can more often invoke (or avoid invoking) a model with predefined inputs/outputs when we desire to. That puts us in an awkward position, because if we genuinely do not wish to say the things it means, then surely we would not invoke it! [Roll] neatly settles that conundrum.

IMO. All a roll is - is randomization. It's the specific mechanics behind the roll and what they model and the resulting meaning that has true value and impact.

Sure, but why is randomisation important?!