RPGing and imagination: a fundamental point

[FrogReaver]

I don't have time to get to everything in this post nor @FrogReaver and @Crimson Longinus ' posts. I'm about to head out for most of the evening and then I'm running The Between when I get home so I'm going to be time-crunched to re-involve myself.

I'll do my best to read FR's, CL's posts and respond tomorrow and respond to the rest of this post.

However, I do want to insert one very important piece of information what engages with the bolded above.

When it comes to me personally, none of my gaming nor ideas about gaming comports with your ideas of received norms. No pedagogy formal or informal, no received wisdom, no cultural assimilation, no peddled influence over me, no received norms. I was a boy of 7 who was totally self-taught on D&D. I was never apprenticed to a GM nor played under one (though I did watch many GMs games in order to understand what people were doing in the wild; often this was about the rejection of what I saw being done...sometimes it was ambivalence...sometimes it was mere curiosity at why my games were being accused of "roll-playing not role-playing" by particular GMs) nor went to Cons or any of it.

The same thing goes for every TTRPG space I've been involved with. Some ideas I think are excellent. Some (like Edwards' original conception on incoherency which I believe he's moved off of a bit and is more amenable to the idea of Gamism and Narrativism being able to functionally integrate like in Torchbearer, Blades in the Dark, and D&D 4e) have enough countervailing evidence that I've never been fully onboard (case-by-case, yes).

So I didn't look at 4e through the lens of "received norms." Many of the thoughts I had about a conceptual 4e were formed deep in my past (early to mid 90s); long before The Forge, Burning Wheel, Dogs in the Vineyard (etc) and the actual D&D ruleset that emerged in 2008. Perhaps others looked at it in terms of "received norms." I did not. I don't look at any game I play through "received norms." My viewing field is very specific to each game I read and run (or choose not to run); "what is it trying to do", "how well does it do it", "do I even like the what or the how"? "Received norms" don't weigh into it. Games are neither cultural artifacts nor cultural cache nor cultural identity to me. My engagement with them (or my opt-out) is strictly "do the thing and then we're done with each other."

Sometimes, independent verification (particularly at scale and across time and space with little to no opportunity for touchpoints) is signal of an actual, undergirding phenomenon.

Since you are already pressed for time I’ll give one quick thought. There is one fundamental theme I challenge here - that you were able to engage in a social activity without any norms. I don’t believe that’s possible. Your groups had to have them, whether realized or not or everything comes grinding to a halt.

Perhaps you mean more previous edition baggage - which can rightly be called norms, but I mean the term ‘norms’ much more broadly than just that.

 

[Manbearcat]

Since you are already pressed for time I’ll give one quick thought. There is one fundamental theme I challenge here - that you were able to engage in a social activity without any norms. I don’t believe that’s possible. Your groups had to have them, whether realized or not or everything comes grinding to a halt.

Perhaps you mean more previous edition baggage - which can rightly be called norms, but I mean the term ‘norms’ much more broadly than just that.

I do have a quick moment to respond to this. I think (or at least I hope), we're talking about different things here.

I'm referring to "digesting a ruleset, or not, through the lens/sieve of received norms, pedagogical instruction, cultural cache/artifact/identity (as in governing priors via culture)". I'm not speaking to "norms governing social contract and interactions at the table."

If a person looks at a piece of ruleset tech and/or how it is integrated into the whole, they can look at it through a cultural lens, through their personal identity (whether they identify with a game itself or with the culture that has accreted around the game; D&D and its brand identity and cultural touchstones is the poster child here)...or not.

However, its impossible to not have social norms governing individual interactions at a gaming table and the throughline of those interactions (culture). To smash cut back to the lead post, both intrasystem and extra-system negotiation of the details of a play loop will be invested with this.

 

[pemerton]

Sure. Though how much decision making actually happens based on this imaginary space varies a lot. For example in D&D combats with a detailed map game often becomes more "board gamey," with people primarily using codified powers and moves and the terrain conditions, obstacles etc are defined by the map. (I think this was particularly prevalent in 4e, with its detailed powers that practically required it to be played this way.) And I think that in these days a lot of people play using virtual tabletops with detailed maps (where GM can position individual furniture or even smaller details) even outside of the combat, making that experience too less reliant on shared imagination. And of course what also affects things is how codified things are in the rules. With more relaxed rules you need a lot of interpretation based on the imaginary situation, whilst more codified rules might have less need for such judgement calls.

Even in battle-map resolution, as soon as someone asks "How high is the hedge?", with an eye to taking cover behind it while shooting over it, they have moved the space of resolution into the fiction. (This is the combat analogue of my example, upthread, of the tall PC carrying the short PC through the pool of water.)

A game with no fiction mattering to resolution is not a RPG. That's all the OP is saying.

I don't think it's a radical claim in itself, but it has implications for design, and for the analysis of play, that are not always recognised.

 

[pemerton]

I would argue that assent is necessary even in boardgames where physical cues are abundant. The cases that stress assent aren't identical, of course, but it can easily be tested. Just put in place for yourself alternative rules for some of the pieces. Or consider what it means to cheat.

You are talking about assent to rules. But the location of the pieces in chess is a geometric state of affairs, which can be described independently of the rules for making moves.

I am talking about assent to the fictional position. This is distinct from assent to the rules. I can describe my fictional position without us knowing what the resolution rules are. (Here's a blog post where Vincent does that, and then works through some implications of this being possible.)

 

[pemerton]

I’m not seeing competing conceptions of fiction as being necessary to generate conflict.

‘The goblins attack the tavern you are in’ is quintessential d&d play and doesn’t require competing conceptions of fiction’.

It also doesn't establish any conflict.

The conflict arises when the players declare We try and stop them!

Now we have two competing conceptions of the fiction: (i) the goblins sack the tavern; (ii) the PCs defeat the goblins before they can sack the tavern. Which prevails? If that is done simply by assertion and counter-assertion - say, as per round-robin storytelling - then I don't think we will get very exciting play.

 

[pemerton]

Would it be fair to say that discussion in order to establish the ‘board state’ in Ttrpgs serves the same purpose as the physical cues of a board game? (To anchor everyone into the same ‘game space’)

That is one thing it does. It also bridges from the fiction to the cues and back again - eg what is the bonus to attack for being on high ground? What happens in the fiction when I fail my skill check? Etc.

 

[pemerton]

This blog post from Chris Chinn seems relevant to the discussion:

Playing With Immeasurables

Today I’m thinking back again to the things that make tabletop RPGs unique compared to other games. Boardgames, card games, and videogames all have very well developed design and theory, and…

bankuei.wordpress.com

May I tentatively suggest that its relevance consists in broadly reiterating Baker's point as cited in the OP of this thread?

 

[niklinna]

May I tentatively suggest that its relevance consists in broadly reiterating Baker's point as cited in the OP of this thread?

You may indeed! We seem to be doing a lot of reiterating of Baker's point(s).

 

[FrogReaver]

A game with no fiction mattering to resolution is not a RPG. That's all the OP is saying.

The OP said quite a bit more than that. Thus, why we are still here in this thread disagreeing about it.

I 100% agree with this statement. I think everyone does.

 

[FrogReaver]

You are talking about assent to rules. But the location of the pieces in chess is a geometric state of affairs, which can be described independently of the rules for making moves.

The concepts:
Assent to the rules about the location of the pieces on the chess board geometry.
Assent to the rules about changing board states via moves.

While I agree we can differentiate those 2 concepts, the difference is not in whether one is a rule and the other isn't.

I am talking about assent to the fictional position. This is distinct from assent to the rules. I can describe my fictional position without us knowing what the resolution rules are. (Here's a blog post where Vincent does that, and then works through some implications of this being possible.)

Yes, one can talk about fictional position without even needing a TTRPG to do so. But when talking about TTRPG's, players aren't just assenting to any fictional position. They assent to any fictional position that is derived via rules and norms.