RPGing and imagination: a fundamental point

[FrogReaver]

To me it matters if consensus is active in the moment, preagreed, or down to norms, as it tells me that game designers can design for such things, and I can make choices about them in my play.

Indeed!

At a high conceptual level a game (any game) is a pre-agreement about how to navigate ‘board states’.

Some pre-agreements may explicitly say we need to agree on some specific details at a later moment (monopoly trades). Others may establish an authority to decide some specific details at a later moment (sports contact fouls). Most games decide most things up front. Some decide everything up front (chess - well maybe not who is white and who is black).

The structure of these pre agreements can make games feel drastically different. Then there’s also the issue of disagreements about how particular rules work, what the particular game state is. We see more of these disagreements in ttrpg’s because of the mental nature of most play, but the same kinds of disagreements occur, albeit less frequently in games with physical tokens (physical game board and pieces) or logical processes (like score keeping).

As an example, lines and veils, and similar means of raising consensus from unspoken norms to spoken preagreements; articulating it up front and providing mechanisms for checking it in the moment if it becomes stressed. Lines and veils aren't ideally established through negotiation: each participant simply asserts theirs.


I can observe play proceeding through assertion, and think about the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. And so on.

Exactly. Whatever we want to call it, there’s something different between group discussion about what the next board state should be and individual assertion granted by pre-agreement about what the next board state is.

I read @FrogReaver to be providing an example of its materiality to them. It helps them identify a kind of play that they find they enjoy. That's not promoting one set of norms over another. It's just suggesting that having the language to describe play you enjoy can help you find it. I liked your post as I took your closing sentence to align with that suggestion.

Thanks. Helps to know I’m not wording things so badly that no one understands me. I just want rpg theory that can be used to describe and design games like d&d. If we can unify that theory to adequately do that for D&D and Blades in the Dark, etc then I’m all for it, but Im not open to the only theory being one that inaccurately describes d&d play.

Otherwise I’m good having story now design theory and a separate d&d-like design theory. It only has to be zero-sum if it’s insisted there can only be one theory and that having the theory accurately describe both d&d and story-now is impossible. I don’t think anyone actually agrees with both of these premises. Maybe one or the other, but not both.

 

[niklinna]

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

There's a link to an earlier post toward the top that's also worth reading.

 

[clearstream]

I also think required assent is broader than RPGs. It’s every board game, every cooperative social activity. Even contrary to @clearstream it’s even present in computer games - it’s just that computer program logic serves as the arbiter regarding most rules interactions. The participants still have to choose that game and then assent to no house rules within the interactions they have control over - (think as an example the agreement of no rush X minutes in real time strategy games).

I was thinking of assent to apply the rules to ourselves in accord with interpretations in common, but you are right that there is the matter of how they are employed even given enforcement.

For instance, many games have a win condition but no rule requiring players to try to win. Such rules are fraught as can easily be seen from the FIDE laws of Chess.

Article 1.2 The objective of each player is to place the opponent’s king ‘under attack’ in such a way that the opponent has no legal move.

This cannot be the only objective of players, for what of objectives such as controlling the centre, castling, or gaining initiative? And what of permission to err (to make mistakes that take one away from "the objective"). But if we allow players their own objectives and mistakes, how do we rule out acts falling into the fascinating category of "griefing" - i.e. playing a game according to its rules but in a deviant fashion.

Bad sportsmanship (e.g. your case) lives in the same space: again the question not of what the rules mean, but how we employ them. Received norms and handshakes abound, and it is in this space that written principles and agenda exist, too. Huizinga deemed the spoilsport even more destructive to play than the cheat.

Still, with computer games we don't need player assent to follow rules: barring implementation errors, rules take effect as designed. Your comment applies to a connected and possibly more important set of norms, which govern how players go on to employ the rules. How they play, in other words. It might be right to associate this with the separation between lusory-means and lusory-attitude.

What's interesting here - and I want to leave this open - is the question of how it is possible to design for the latter, given that any written rule can then itself be employed not as intended. An infinite regress.

 

[Manbearcat]

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

There's a link to an earlier post toward the top that's also worth reading.

You forgot about this one!

RPGs and definitions

I got a chance to listen to the Geek Nights Podcast interview of Luke Crane & Jared Sorensen it’s a fun listen- it’s good to hear folks just talking about games and play in general.…

bankuei.wordpress.com

"A better definition would be this:

Roleplaying games are games where imaginary fiction is the focus of play and influences choices and outcomes of play.

That fiction might force you to do the suboptimal thing (“We are not robbing the dead! We bury them with honor!”), but it also affects optimal things as well (“No, they’re actually right, we’re trespassing on their territory. Let’s see if we can perform a deed or task for them in exchange for the right to pass through- after all, we’re outnumbered 20 to 1.”)"

Topical. And spot on I'd say.

Also this:

"Mostly, it comes down to clear examples pointing to exactly how you carry the fiction to mechanical choices (which, generally isn’t so well done in a lot of games) and then lots of repetition. There’ll always be some amount of folks with really poor reading skills, but this seems to be the best way so far to helping people familiarize with the idea.

I see it a lot with crunchy games like Burning Wheel or D&D 4E, where, folks see the rules, but fail to see how and where fiction makes an impact in the rules (for Burning Wheel, it’s embedded in to skills, Helping Dice, FORKs, and Advantage Dice, for D&D4E, it’s all in Skill Challenges, Quests, and pg. 42 on the DMG)."

This is such a weird take on D&D 4e! Its like I've heard it somewhere before! Its so odd to get independent verification (for the probably 50th time) of something I've been assured is totally not true and anyone who derives that from the 4e texts and play experience is smuggling in ideas and techniques that aren't inherent to the game!

EDIT - As an aside, can I humbly ask a favor?

I get complained at for bringing The Forge OMG into play routinely. I find that the percentage of times I bring up The Forge's fundamental ideas to be quite low, particularly compared to the number of times threads and other posters (who have antipathy for The Forge) get preoccupied by the Forge and its ideas (or ideas they think are from The Forge). My sense of the preoccupation with The Forge bogeyman is overwhelmingly not coming from my offerings.

Baker isn't The Forge. He hasn't been affiliated with it for a very, very long time and has ideas that are entirely his own. He also likes (and designs) simple, challenge-based games. Further, the blogger linked to directly above isn't The Forge. Can we not get bogged down by Forge bogeymen and Forge ideas (there are a few very specific, Forge-exclusive ideas...none of which are involved in this conversation) that aren't involved in a conversation?

The ideas that the shared imagined space is constantly indexed for resolution, for situation/obstacle-framing, for consequence-telegraphing-and-meting? As a result, the participants at the table are constantly updating their individual and collective UIs and the process of doing so could trivially be called "negotiating," especially during the communal exploration of "spaces undefined which are essential to a player's decision-tree work. These aren't Forge-exclusive ideas. I had these ideas when I was a young person, long before The Forge. That was during a period where I was 100 % exclusively running Pawn Stance D&D of the dungeon-crawl and hex-crawl variety...when Story Now ideas (or even generic metanarrative ideas) weren't even a primordial ooze of thought in the back of my lizard brain.

 

[niklinna]

You forgot about this one!

RPGs and definitions

I got a chance to listen to the Geek Nights Podcast interview of Luke Crane & Jared Sorensen it’s a fun listen- it’s good to hear folks just talking about games and play in general.…

bankuei.wordpress.com

I said there was a link near the top of the first blog post, and that is the link. What, you want me do all your link-chasing for you?

This is such a weird take on D&D 4e! Its like I've heard it somewhere before! Its so odd to get independent verification (for the probably 50th time) of something I've been assured is totally not true and anyone who derives that from the 4e texts and play experience is smuggling in ideas and techniques that aren't inherent to the game!

Funny, that marriage of fiction and mechanics was so blatantly apparent to me with Torchbearer 2, even though it didn't go to great effort to call that out. Not so much in my play experience of 4e skills, but then I had a pretty traditional DM for 4e, and he didn't run many skill challenges (it was a fully homebrewed campaign). Also, Torchbearer 2 binds fiction and mechanics in several ways and in both directions (direct use of skills, needing to both "succeed" and "fail" in order to advance them and to get rest checks, Ob factors, Belief/Creed/Goal/Instinct).

It might be interesting to compare to Dramatic Skill Resolutions (DSRs) in Torg Eternity, which look a lot like skill challenges, but often end up being button-pressing exercises of just rolling skill tests. Most DSRs in prescripted adventures specify the skill needed to pass each step (there are always four steps that must be done in order), and they also describe the action that must be taken, making it look like there is exactly one correct solution, no creativity needed. There's little room for players to say "hey how about we do this thing?" and the GM responding with the appropriate skill.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The ideas that the shared imagined space is constantly indexed for resolution, for situation/obstacle-framing, for consequence-telegraphing-and-meting? As a result, the participants at the table are constantly updating their individual and collective UIs and the process of doing so could trivially be called "negotiating," especially during the communal exploration of "spaces undefined which are essential to a player's decision-tree work. These aren't Forge-exclusive ideas. I had these ideas when I was a young person, long before The Forge. That was during a period where I was 100 % exclusively running Pawn Stance D&D of the dungeon-crawl and hex-crawl variety...when Story Now ideas (or even generic metanarrative ideas) weren't even a primordial ooze of thought in the back of my lizard brain.

The confusion/objection arose from the fact that in games there are genuine moments of negotiation (i.e. participants discussing/haggling on meta level about the what direction the game should take), and different games have differing frequency of it. Some games are intentionally designed to avoid it, some encourage it. So lumping this with pre-agreed use of authority and even following the agreed upon rules just seems weird, and I feel is counterproductive for understanding what's actually going on.

 

[clearstream]

You forgot about this one!

RPGs and definitions

I got a chance to listen to the Geek Nights Podcast interview of Luke Crane & Jared Sorensen it’s a fun listen- it’s good to hear folks just talking about games and play in general.…

bankuei.wordpress.com

Topical. And spot on I'd say.

Also this:

Clear examples help circumvent the regress I described above. Showing how it plays implies both the effect and the use of a mechanic. Its intended meaning for play, in other words.

This is such a weird take on D&D 4e! Its like I've heard it somewhere before! Its so odd to get independent verification (for the probably 50th time) of something I've been assured is totally not true and anyone who derives that from the 4e texts and play experience is smuggling in ideas and techniques that aren't inherent to the game!

It seems clear at this point that folk read those same words to have differing import. And I think this is related to the above because examples rely on folk taking something like but not identical to what they are doing right now, and understanding that what they should do right now is something like that. Received norms, in other words.

The ideas that the shared imagined space is constantly indexed for resolution, for situation/obstacle-framing, for consequence-telegraphing-and-meting? As a result, the participants at the table are constantly updating their individual and collective UIs and the process of doing so could trivially be called "negotiating," especially during the communal exploration of "spaces undefined which are essential to a player's decision-tree work.

I've laid out my differences of opinion in various posts above, and won't rehearse them here. Suffice to say that participants' grasp of the fiction can observably be updated in multiple ways.

The contention that player decision-tree work necessarily utilizes negotiation seems new (or I overlooked it earlier.) The first objection would be just to wonder why it must be communal? I think you mean to focus on that however, so will give cases that are communal some thought.

 

[FrogReaver]

EDIT - As an aside, can I humbly ask a favor?

I get complained at for bringing The Forge OMG into play routinely. I find that the percentage of times I bring up The Forge's fundamental ideas to be quite low, particularly compared to the number of times threads and other posters (who have antipathy for The Forge) get preoccupied by the Forge and its ideas (or ideas they think are from The Forge). My sense of the preoccupation with The Forge bogeyman is overwhelmingly not coming from my offerings.

Baker isn't The Forge. He hasn't been affiliated with it for a very, very long time and has ideas that are entirely his own. He also likes (and designs) simple, challenge-based games. Further, the blogger linked to directly above isn't The Forge. Can we not get bogged down by Forge bogeymen and Forge ideas (there are a few very specific, Forge-exclusive ideas...none of which are involved in this conversation) that aren't involved in a conversation?

The ideas that the shared imagined space is constantly indexed for resolution, for situation/obstacle-framing, for consequence-telegraphing-and-meting? As a result, the participants at the table are constantly updating their individual and collective UIs and the process of doing so could trivially be called "negotiating," especially during the communal exploration of "spaces undefined which are essential to a player's decision-tree work. These aren't Forge-exclusive ideas. I had these ideas when I was a young person, long before The Forge. That was during a period where I was 100 % exclusively running Pawn Stance D&D of the dungeon-crawl and hex-crawl variety...when Story Now ideas (or even generic metanarrative ideas) weren't even a primordial ooze of thought in the back of my lizard brain.

One can object to an idea while also noting one objects to many ideas from the same source without objecting to the idea because it came from a particular source. If the Forge said the sky is blue you wouldn’t see disagreement - ‘well it’s the internet so someone will, but you catch my drift’.

‘Source’ meaning a strong proponent of a particular idea, even if not the originator.

The question I typically have is why do I disagree with so many of the ideas from these sources. Maybe they just talked a lot - easy to disagree with alot then. Or maybe there’s some underlying theme to their thoughts that I just don’t agree with, causes me to disagree with much of what they say.

Also, I take offense at the idea that people like me treat the forge as some kind of boogeyman.

Anyways, I’d be happy if it wasn’t brought up again so I’m with you. Just not the way you portrayed it.

 

[Manbearcat]

Clear examples help circumvent the regress I described above. Showing how it plays implies both the effect and the use of a mechanic. Its intended meaning for play, in other words.


It seems clear at this point that folk read those same words to have differing import. And I think this is related to the above because examples rely on folk taking something like but not identical to what they are doing right now, and understanding that what they should do right now is something like that. Received norms, in other words.


I've laid out my differences of opinion in various posts above, and won't rehearse them here. Suffice to say that participants' grasp of the fiction can observably be updated in multiple ways.

The contention that player decision-tree work necessarily utilizes negotiation seems new (or I overlooked it earlier.) The first objection would be just to wonder why it must be communal? I think you mean to focus on that however, so will give cases that are communal some thought.

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.

 

[FrogReaver]

The confusion/objection arose from the fact that in games there are genuine moments of negotiation (i.e. participants discussing/haggling on meta level about the what direction the game should take), and different games have differing frequency of it. Some games are intentionally designed to avoid it, some encourage it. So lumping this with pre-agreed use of authority and even following the agreed upon rules just seems weird, and I feel is counterproductive for understanding what's actually going on.

Right. Like if someone had said - in ttrpg’s all participants must imagine the same ‘board state’ or the same ‘important bits of fiction’ im good with that. *Said this way because we can imagine unimportant details differently with no detriment. **Also, At some point in the future imagining those things may not be required due to technological advances.

It’s the details of how participants arrive at imagining the same fiction that there is disagreement around. My conception is there are 3 important parts. Pre agreement on the game (rules). Norms outside the rules. Clarification about the rules or the current fictional state. Unless any/all of that’s negotiation, I don’t believe the fiction is being negotiated. *Note some game rules or norms may require negotiation to determine the fiction - which is the difference you talk about in your post.