Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9209706" data-attributes="member: 42582">When Baker says that RPGing is negotiated imagination what he has in mind is that (i) the fiction is a shared one, and therefore (ii) the participants in the activity have to converge on that fiction, and that (iii) the play of the game consists in various participants advancing conceptions of the fiction that can't all be true (eg "I killed the Orc" vs "The Orc escaped from you"), and therefore (iv) there has to be a process for selecting among those various proposals as to the content of the fiction.The process whereby a group of people, engaged in a voluntary activity, choose among various proposals and settle on one is what Baker calls negotiation.In the passage that I quoted, he identifies various ways to ease the negotiation, via rules and mechanics: eg give a particular participant "ownership" over a particular topic (You own the weather, I own what Thurgon says); have a rule for how a participant gets to make their contribution (eg When everyone looks at you to see what happens next, say something that falls within one of these dozen or so rubrics); roll a die and look on a chart; roll a die and then apply a rule that translates the outcome of that role into an allocation of authority; plus all the ways these various possibilities can be combined.The rules and mechanics are not substitutes for negotiation, in the way that (say) a tram is a substitute for walking, or a computerised billing system is a substitute for book-keepers and writers of letters. Because the mechanics and rules won't do their job if they don't actually produce convergence on a shared fiction.Baker has a nice example of a breakdown in this respect - which plays especially on the issue of who owns which bits of the shared fiction - with his "smelly chamberlain" example: <a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/460" target="_blank">http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/460</a></blockquote>

Verification