RPGing and imagination: a fundamental point

[hawkeyefan]

This is an example of how clarifying leads into negotiating depending on the mode of play. Traditional DM ownership of what the rules entail mean that player asks for clarification and accepts the given ruling. Negotiation during play is discouraged. But in other modes of play it would be open to discussion how participants feel it should work, most importantly the player possessing the trait. I've observed such conversations many times in our Avatar sessions over the last few weeks.

What mode of play was my 5E game played in? And in what mode of play is the game of The Between that @Manbearcat is currently running?

By modes here do you just mean different rules sets? Or something more?

 

[FrogReaver]

Ok. So determining whether my attack hits a goblin by comparing a dice roll to the goblin's AC is a negotiation. Now what? What does calling everything negotiation achieve beyond confusing people?

By that definition people have to negotiate what the score in a pickup basketball game is (no scoreboard). The rules of pickup basketball just ease and constrain that negotiation! *People will even argue about what the score is.

Correct me if I’m wrong (anyone), but that is a valid use of negotiation as others are using the term, right?

If that isn’t right then I’m not understanding the use. If that is then I find that statement very peculiar.

That’s where my confusion is coming in. I kinda get it but probably don’t because I anticipate this non-rpg example will be deemed incorrect, but I want to make sure before continuing.

 

[Umbran]

which is fairly safe to say now fueled by the egos of people* mostly trying to score points against each other, is moot.

Mod note:
If the discussion is fueled by such... that probably means it is time to leave the discussion, as statements like this read rather like passive-aggressive, deniable, attempts to dismiss folks who don't agree with you.

The issue seems less rooted in it "confusing," but, rather, that usual people who come ot these threads with axes to grind wanted to find any wrong doing in what Baker wrote precisely because of his association with the Forge. In this case, these people seem to have landed on quibbling the use of "negotiation."

And again, with the assertion that folks who disagree with you are doing so for reasons you feel you could dismiss in aggregate, rather than address in substance.

If you don't want to address in substance, that's fine. You aren't required to. But that's your choice. Make it , and accept it, rather than trying to publicly justify it as a character flaw on their part, please and thanks.

 

[clearstream]

What mode of play was my 5E game played in? And in what mode of play is the game of The Between that @Manbearcat is currently running?

As you said that

My attempt to use my Folk Hero quality to gain shelter/protection from the commoners worked sometimes, but not others. Depended very much on GM whim.

it sounds like one in which GM has ownership of the interpretation of rules. That sounds like what we've often labelled a "trad" mode of play to me. I observe that rule sets targeting that sort of mode often encourage participants to resolve negotiation on rules outside of play. I've observed groups counting attempts to negotiate what rules entail during play as disruptive.

I made the assumption that Manbearcat's is storynow, due to the choice of a PbtA rule set and based on his descriptions of play. But obviously I could be mistaken: it would be better to ask them.

By modes here do you just mean different rules sets? Or something more?

I mean approaches to play that we've been able to label, such as storynow, trad, neo-trad, sim, neo-sim, OSR, FKR. Each mode comes with a set of normative lusory goals and attitudes. In fact I don't see the modes as having hard boundaries. My picture is more one of there being a number of instrumental lusory goals, attitudes, and means, which are commonly found in certain arrangements, but that can be arranged in an unlimited number of ways. That said, it appears that some arrangements offer better affordance to play - or perhaps just fit what we've been interested in attempting so far - than others.

 

[pemerton]

Taking negotiation as "discussion aimed at reaching an agreement" one rhetorical consequence I have noticed - in part through our debate in this thread - is an implication that such agreement is contingent.

It's contingent on the discussion.

One purpose of perceptual systems - speaking roughly - is to produce shared cognition of real states of affairs. That is, when you and I look at a thing, we both see the same thing and form - in some rough sense, at least - the same belief about what we are seeing. (Of course there are optical illusions and other tricks of the light - it's not a surprise that chess boards and pieces, playing cards, dice, etc are generally designed to minimise such problems by using crisp designs, clearly contrasting colours, etc.)

The Australian philosopher David Armstrong used to say that to perceive is to come to believe by way of the senses. Whatever one thinks of this as a philosophical account of perception, it captures the notion that when perception is going well, the resulting cognitive process and content is constrained by something "external" and hence not voluntary.

Imagination is, by its very nature, not apt to produce the same sort of convergence of belief, precisely because imagination is "active" or "creative" in a way that perception is not. What I choose to imagine is up to me. Suppose I imagine a situation or a series of events - how I imagine what comes next is up to me.

From the above, it follows: the way to get two people to agree on the state of a chess game is to show them the same board with the same pieces. Notice that they can do this themselves, without the need for any third party, by manipulating their own pieces on their own board.

(Cue someone mentioning blindfold chess. Blindfold chess is like mental arithmetic or mental geometry: it is the generation of logical consequences from starting premises plus the periodic introduction of new geometric propositions ("Knight to ab3"). We don't need to solve the philosophical problem of the difference between (i) logic and mathematics and (ii) empirical knowledge to notice that, having read the first four chapters of LotR, you can't work out what happens next simply by using geometric or arithmetic reasoning.)

How do you get two people to agree on what happens next, after the first four chapters of LotR? You can introduce a third person who tells them what to think: ie JRRT, who has written the fifth chapter. But now we have a storyteller and an audience, not a RPG.

In a RPG, how do we get two people to agree on what happens next? They talk about it; and sometimes they use rules and other mechanics. They regulate their talk by principles of "ownership" and authority that are sensitive - often in quite subtle or idiosyncratic ways - to what is being talked about, or to what just happened in the fiction, or to what just happened in the real world such as a die throw.

The preceding paragraph captures what is at stake, and the reason for using the word "negotiate" to describe it. There is no implication that agreement is hard to reach; or will not be reached. Though obviously sometimes it is not - RPG play seems prone to "bust up" in ways that chess play does not, and understanding the different ways in which the two forms of game play establish and resolve position makes it fairly obvious why this difference obtains.

If you or anyone else wants to introduce a more nuanced vocabulary for describing the different ways in which conversation between RPG participants generates agreement on the shared fiction, based on phenomenological or other principles, go for it! Though personally I don't at this stage see how that will have much bearing on the sorts of design questions Vincent Baker is interested in addressing.

 

[pemerton]

We're actually have a lumping/splitting disagreement, not a semantic one, though we got here from semantics. Baker is asserting a bunch of things belong in the category "negotiation" and are fundamentally the same. The disagreement is that some things do not belong in that category and are not the same. His usage of the term is perfectly clear, but the reason for his usage of the term and the rhetorical purpose it serves is the point of contention.

No one in this thread has explained what is at stake in the anti-lumping.

I mean, Baker gives illustrations -his (1) to (4) - of different ways in which agreement on the shared fiction might be reached. And to me, it seems obvious enough why he has broken out these four cases: there is (1) an ownership/authority case, (2) a talk-a-bit-about-the-fiction-until-we-get-on-the-same-page case, (3) a roll-the-dice-to-toggle-yes-or-no case, and (4) a complex resolution system case. And he deliberately presents these cases by reference to a common example ("Does an Orc leap out of the underbrush to attack the PCs?") which is slightly less intuitively going to be boxed into one of the cases (at least by most readers) than would, say, a combat example.

So to me, the point of Baker's examples and analysis is clear.

What extra insight do I get by "splitting" that Baker has not already given me. I mean, suppose that you or @clearstream say that discussion in the context of strong ownership should be called "clarification", not "negotiation". What extra knowledge about the process of RPGing do I get from adopting your terminology, that is worth the cost of having yet another bit of jargon to keep track of?

 

[pemerton]

Ok. So determining whether my attack hits a goblin by comparing a dice roll to the goblin's AC is a negotiation. Now what? What does calling everything negotiation achieve beyond confusing people?

For starters:

What sort of rules, principles and mechanics will produce the shared imagination that is pleasing to us? (Which may not be exactly the same as what we want or what we would choose if unconstrained.)

Also: what allocation of "ownership", and of responsibilities for deciding what to say, will be satisfactory in the course of play?

 

[pemerton]

if the point was that this reliance on imagination is what defines roleplay, then I don't agree.

I feel this ground has already been trodden in this thread:

In a RPG, imagination is not just something you while playing the game. Shared imagining is the core of the play of the game. The other parts of the game - character sheets, stat blocks and maps; making dice rolls and noting their results; mechanics and other rules that explain how to interpret and apply dice rolls, how to make changes to character sheets and maps, and how to change the fiction - are all in service of the shared imagining.

The Arneson-Gygax game, and all the games descended from it, are different. The "gamestate" is an imagined, imaginary state of affairs, which includes people ("characters"). The non-referee/GM/MC participants control some of those characters, and say what they do. And the core of gameplay is working out what happens, in the shared fiction, as a result of those characters doing those things.

There are bells and whistles: in the Arneson-Gygax game, as originally presented, the imaginary state of affairs is a treasure-and-monster filled "dungeon" that the characters are exploring and looting. In Torchbearer, there are rules that set limits on how one character alone can change the situation: the party must camp, and enter town, together or not at all. When I play Classic Traveller, all the characters are humans. Etc, etc.

But the core of the gameplay is the creation, and transformation via characters doing things, of a shared fiction. It is not a mere artefact of play. It is the play of the game.

I don't think anyone has asserted that having imagination at the core is sufficient, as well as necessary, for a game to be a RPG.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

For starters:

I don't see how this confusing language that just obfuscates what's actually happening is helping to answer any of the things you mention.

 

[pemerton]

Imagining being an another person doesn't require sharing that imagination.

Now, suppose that you are going to play a game with others in which the game moves are all about your imagined person doing things.

You would need some way of (i) establishing what is permissible or not for your person to do (@Manbearcat called this "credibility testing" not far upthread), and (ii) establishing what the situation is in which your person finds themself. And because you're doing this with others, you would need a way to have everyone agree on what has been established via (i) and (ii).

Now suppose, further, that you want your imagination about your person to be exciting, and/or suspenseful, in the sense that your person is confronted by challenges or obstacles or conflicts, and you get the thrill of finding out whether and how they cope with them. So the ways you establish what happens next, when your person engages the situation (ie (ii) above) via their capabilities (ie (i) above), need to be different from just you making it up yourself or even you talking it through with your friends.

Now, at least in a rough fashion, we have set out the core problem of RPG design.