D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[pemerton]

Where the balance could lie between a vivid game-world that players inhabit, and pure shared authorship?

Why is the notion of "balance" being deployed here? The players helping to author a setting doesn't make it less vivid, or less amenable to being inhabited.

 

[clearstream]

IMHO, when most people talk about "world-building," much like the particular poster that @Manbearcat quotes, they are advocating in favor of high myth, story before worldbuilding that is heavily pre-fabricated by the published setting or the GM. The GM/writer has authored everything about the setting. The perspective tends to come across more as high myth or nothing.

The world-building in Stonetop, in contrast, is fairly light. It was very much designed with drawing maps, sketching out the area, but leaving blanks. Deities exist in Stonetop, but are these the only deities of the setting? Strandberg doesn't say; he says that these are the deities enshrined at Stonetop. Some of the playbooks lean into these deities, but this represents piety embodied in the character playbooks rather than the sort of pre-authored world-building featuring theological treatises, back stories of holy days, mythologies, and the like. Helior and their place in the world is left for the player of the Lightbringer to define. The Lighbringer player does not ask the GM about Helior in Stonetop; the GM asks the Lightbringer player about Helior in Stonetop.

The quoted poster would likely have a pre-authored answer for the question "Where did the forest folk go?" Strandberg, however, refuses to answer and, instead, insists that this can only be answered in play. Strandberg, for example, writes in Stonetop:


I'm fairly certain that this approach to "world-building" would give the poster whom @Manbearcat quoted an aneurysm.

It feels like it is the contingency of the world that is at stake, right? There should be questions without answers, e.g. the answers to tensions being explored should not be provided.

World building itself may not really be at issue. To contextualise that, the Stonetop Wider World is detailed over 229 pages. Draw maps / leave blanks - know that the world is contingent.

 

[clearstream]

Why is the notion of "balance" being deployed here? The players helping to author a setting doesn't make it less vivid, or less amenable to being inhabited.

Just to note that in asserting a quality in one place I normally will not mean that I deny it in others unless I call that out. Here I mean that a vivid game-world might be pre-established (with blanks, known to be contingent) using Stonetop and the Wider World as an example.

By "pure player-authorship" I mean invention on the fly from a literal tabula-rasa*, which I believe isn't what anyone precisely intends. (It's a literal point that presented an obstacle to @Crimson Longinus.) Perhaps it is the orientation of the group to the world, rather than its pre-establishment, that is most at issue?

[EDIT *So I am supposing that one can ask - might Strandberg's inspired and carefully considered world be worth playing in, compared with what we come up with on the fly? It will very likely be a differentiable experience, one worth exploring. Does its 229 pages of detail forestall Story-Now?]

 

[Aldarc]

It feels like it is the contingency of the world that is at stake, right? There should be questions without answers, e.g. the answers to tensions being explored should not be provided.

World building itself may not really be at issue. To contextualise that, the Stonetop Wider World is detailed over 229 pages. Draw maps / leave blanks - know that the world is contingent.

In the case of Stonetop, I'm not sure if it's the contingency of the world that is at stake, but, rather, it is the contingency of the player characters that is at stake. There is certainly overlap between these two concerns; however, I think that Stonetop prioritizes the player characters and their dramatic needs.

 

[Manbearcat]

I must misunderstand your meaning. Frex Stonetop, I feel like Strandberg has done a ton of worldbuilding for us. To give you an idea of what I am thinking of


Frex Book II, the Flats


Frex Book II, the Stream


Perhaps the North Manmarch? Not exactly kingoms in Stonetop, but ambitious chiefs...


Frex the Lightbearer, appointed servant of Helior the Day-bringer...

Then too, I think about Middarmark in TB2. These are two highly detailed, opinionated worlds put in place by game designers as worldbuilders. Middarmark seems optional in TB2. Stonetop is Stonetop and the Wider World, though... it's not clear to me that one would play Stonetop without availing of that worldbuild.

I'm just wondering what you are thinking of? Where the balance could lie between a vivid game-world that players inhabit, and pure shared authorship? I'm thinking about the draw maps / leave blanks suggestion in DW.

On Torchbearer

I have Middarmark but I don’t use it. I made a map with topography and a Norway orientation (and broad Nordic heritage/myth and apocalyptic tropes) with some numbered sites, only a few of which have been fleshed out to a degree only necessary to fadcilitate our opening play (like 9ish sessions?)

On Stonetop

Despite using the maps and broad brush thematic parts and geographical orientations of Stonetop and a few times using their tables when disclaiming decision-making (eg weather), (a) how much of Strandberg’s setting material do you think has informed (note I’m not even using “defined” here, which is the default orientation to the D&D usage of FR setting and metaplot material or meticulously built home worlds) the Notable Personages, Threats, Opportunities, Expeditions, PCs (their relationships and dramatic needs in particular), my soft and hard move-space, their individual and collective decision-space? (b) If your answer is “very little” or “only vaguely” (hint hint!), do you think that is intended by Strandberg or am I “going rogue?” The fact that your asking the question in the first place almost feels like you’ve answered the question before I’ve asked (but I figured I’d ask).

EDIT - Ninja’d by @Aldarc ! Great post. And I’ll see your aneurysm (lawl by the way) and raise you a “this thing can’t possibly work…the whole thing will fall apart…you’re not even playing an RPG!”

 

[Aldarc]

EDIT - Ninja’d by @Aldarc ! Great post. And I’ll see your aneurysm (lawl by the way) and raise you a “this thing can’t possibly work…the whole thing will fall apart…you’re not even playing an RPG!”

I'll raise you with the party finding a coin minted with an unknown personage.

 

[Manbearcat]

Apologies, my line of thought was interrupted by external events. My motive for asking/testing all the above is that I feel that space needs to exist for something like this

Four dissidents are staying overnight in a small apartment: two rooms - bedroom/kitchen/lounge and bathroom. In the morning, their contact is going to lead them to safety... or betrayal. The world build here is going to be very specific: the contents of the rooms are preestablished, right down to what is in the cupboards. The political situation in the wider world is pre-specified. Let's suppose that game systems exist for moves likely to be relevant, interesting, driving, and metagame systems for commitments.

Is Story Now still possible, even with a claustrophobically pre-specified world? If I decide that genuine powerful player-authored drama cannot play out in that context, then what must I say about many plays (i.e. theatre)? Say, The Burial at Thebes, which can be performed on a narrow set, and yet Antigone's choices could very well be those authored by a player in her sandals, even if that player does not decide anything beyond themselves about the game-world. Is the set at issue for the conflict inherent in their or Creon's choices?

Time is limited but let me fire off these points for consumption:

* Story Now is murdered in cold blood by metaplot and it’s imposition.

* Story Now is imperiled by high resolution, pre-authored setting material that is PC dramatic need disconnected (Stonetop nor Blades in the Dark is this).

* Stonetop is “hearth fantasy” much like Dogs in the Vineyard. What matters to Stonetop-specific Story Now play are the people (the Notable Personages of Stonetop), the Assets (of Stonetop), the structured questions asked and answered in the lead-up to play, PC build (including the thematic Background), Instincts and connections/relationships, the Threats and Opportunities they pursue and resolve, Expeditions they undertake + the people and things they Requisition (or choose not to and why) and the result of that move (and all of the other Steading moves), the answers to the questions I ask them during play, the relationship of my framing + their decision-space + their moves made…and the fiction that accretes during play and the feedback loop it inculcates subsequent play with.

 

[Manbearcat]

It feels like it is the contingency of the world that is at stake, right? There should be questions without answers, e.g. the answers to tensions being explored should not be provided.

World building itself may not really be at issue. To contextualise that, the Stonetop Wider World is detailed over 229 pages. Draw maps / leave blanks - know that the world is contingent.

Contingent, mutable, not binding/never an answer to player decision-space, overwhelmingly informing only thematically/obliquely (sufficiently to help inform some framing/soft moves and zoomed out spatial relationships).

EDIT - Again, I invite you to take a look at that thread if you haven’t. There is a fair amount of subsequent play that isn’t covered in there, but what is in there is plenty sufficient to answer these questions pretty emphatically.

Stonetop and Blades in the Dark’s setting material does exactly the same work; the work that collectively developing “The Master” in MLwM through the game’s structure and Town creation/prep for Dogs in the Vineyard does.

 

[pemerton]

Just to note that in asserting a quality in one place I normally will not mean that I deny it in others unless I call that out. Here I mean that a vivid game-world might be pre-established (with blanks, known to be contingent) using Stonetop and the Wider World as an example.

By "pure player-authorship" I mean invention on the fly from a literal tabula-rasa*, which I believe isn't what anyone precisely intends. (It's a literal point that presented an obstacle to @Crimson Longinus.) Perhaps it is the orientation of the group to the world, rather than its pre-establishment, that is most at issue?

[EDIT *So I am supposing that one can ask - might Strandberg's inspired and carefully considered world be worth playing in, compared with what we come up with on the fly? It will very likely be a differentiable experience, one worth exploring. Does its 229 pages of detail forestall Story-Now?]

My post wasn't responding to the proposition in your first paragraph, nor to your edit. It was responding to this:

I'm just wondering what you are thinking of? Where the balance could lie between a vivid game-world that players inhabit, and pure shared authorship?

That question only make sense if there is some sort of balance between (i) a vivid game-world that players inhabit, and (ii) pure shared authorship. And I am expressing doubt about that premise: I don't see any particular reason to think those things are in balance.

Perhaps some pre-authored settings are vivid game-worlds. Perhaps some others are not. (So it may be true that a vivid game-world might be pre-established in the way you suggest Stonetop does. That wouldn't tell us anything about there being a "balance", though.)

Perhaps some pure shared authorship creates vivid game-worlds. Perhaps some others are not.

As I posted, I don't see why the notion of "balance" is being deployed here. I have played RPGs in which the setting was authored by the participants in the course of play. There have been examples of that where that setting - the game-world - was vivid.

In your edit to your reply to my post, you ask a different question - does 229 pages of setting detail forestall "story now"? I haven't read the Stonetop pages, so can't comment on them. There are more than 229 pages of detail written by JRRT about Middle Earth, and I have done "story now" RPGing set in Middle Earth (using Cortex+ Heroic). Paying HeroWars/Quest in Glorantha might involve engaging with a fair bit of pre-authored setting. But not all pre-authored material is conducive to story now play. Consider Edwards's remarks about Over the Edge, which begin with a quote from the rulebook:

The first time I [ie Jonathan Tweet] played OTE, I had a few pages of notes on the background and nothing on the specifics. I made it all up on the spot. Not having anything written as a guide (or crutch), I let my imagination loose. You have the mixed blessing of having many pages of background prepared for you. If you use the information in this book as a springboard for your own wild dreams, then it is a blessing. If you limit yourself to what I've dreamed up, it's a curse.​

All I see, I'm afraid, is the curse. The isolated phrases "mixed blessing" and "(or crutch)" don't hold a lot of water compared to the preceding 152 extraordinarily detailed pages of canonical setting. I'm not saying that improvisation is better or more Narrativist than non-improvisational play. I am saying, however, that if playing this particular game worked so wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming during play . . . and since the players were a core source during this event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play . . . then why present the results of the play-experience as the material for another person's experience?​

In the same edit, you ask yet another question: might Strandberg's inspired and carefully considered world be worth playing in, compared with what we come up with on the fly? Presumably the answer to that depends at least on (i) what we feel like doing and (ii) what we might come up with on the fly. I don't see any reason to think there would be a unique answer to that question even for a single group of RPGers, let alone the RPG community in general.

 

[pemerton]

Story Now is murdered in cold blood by metaplot and it’s imposition.

Edwards talks about that too; he begins with a quote from his own RPG book Sorcerer and Sword:

The solution most offered by role-playing games is a supplement-driven metaplot: a sequence of events in the game-world which are published chronologically, revealing "the story" to all GMs and expecting everyone to apply these events in their individual sessions. These published events include the outcomes of world-shaking conflicts as well as individual relationships among the company-provided NPCs involved in these conflicts.

Metaplot of this sort, whether generated by a GM or a game publisher, is antithetical to the entire purpose of Sorcerer & Sword. Almost inevitably, it creates a series of game products that pretend to be supplements for play but are really a series of short stories and novels starring the authors' beloved and central NPCs. The role of the individual play group in those stories is much like that of karaoke singers, rather than creative musicians.​

Metaplot is central to the design of several White Wolf games, especially Mage; all AEG games; post-first-edition Traveller; AD&D'2, beginning with the Forgotten Realms series; as well as others. Nearly all of them are perceived as setting-focused games, and to many role-players, they 'define role-playing with strong Setting.

However, neither Setting-based Premise nor a complex Setting history necessarily entails metaplot, as I'm using the term anyway. The best example is afforded by Glorantha: an extremely rich setting with history in place not only for the past, but for the future of play. The magical world of Glorantha will be destroyed and reborn into a relatively mundane new existence, because of the Hero Wars. Many key events during the process are fixed, such as the Dragonrise of 1625. Why isn't this metaplot?

Because none of the above represent decisions made by player-characters; they only provide context for them. The players know all about the upcoming events prior to play. The key issue is this: in playing in (say) a Werewolf game following the published metaplot, the players are intended to be ignorant of the changes in the setting, and to encounter them only through play. The more they participate in these changes (e.g. ferrying a crucial message from one NPC to another), the less they provide theme-based resolution to Premise, not more. Whereas in playing HeroQuest, there's no secret: the Hero Wars are here, and the more everyone enjoys and knows the canonical future events, the more they can provide theme through their characters' decisions during those events.

In designing a Setting-heavy Narrativist rules-set, I strongly suggest following the full-disclosure lead of HeroQuest and abandoning the metaplot "revelation" approach immediately.​

So to summarise: the problem with metaplot is that (i) it is sole-authored (ie by the GM, or a publisher whose work the GM uses), (ii) it is secret from the players until they encounter it in play, and (iii) it is used to resolve, or generate consequences of, actions that players declare for their PCs. Because of (iii), it is further the case (iv) that those resolution and consequences, being independent of the players, cannot express players' responses to and judgements on whatever thematic questions play might be generating. Any answers to those questions follow from the unilateral pre-authorship.

There are multiple ways metaplot can be avoided.

One is to avoid pre-authorship. This is the "no myth" approach. It's fairly popular for "story now" play.

The other is to avoid secrecy from the players. This can be done by sharing authorship, but needn't be eg Glorantha, which Edwards discusses. An alternative is simply for the author to share their work. This happens in DitV, although the "setting" in DitV is really more like conflict-charged situation. Edwards discusses richer session-focused "story now" play in his "setting dissection" essay that I wayback-linked upthread. He emphasises sharing, and the fact that the participants all have to buy into the setting.

Elaborating a bit on that last point: once, in responding to a Forge poster who was having trouble with their scene-framing, Edwards gave this advice:

It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the SIS are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.​

In other words, the real problem confronting that poster wasn't who had authority over scene-framing, nor what principles governed its exercise (such as taking suggestions), but rather that their scenes weren't any good. Edwards's advice: work on framing interesting scenes! (Of course a game can help with this: see my post upthread about using my powers, as a player, to steer BW play towards more interesting scenes than what the GM seemed to have in mind.)

The same thing applies to setting-based "story now" play: it won't work if the setting isn't engaging for everyone who is expected to be using it as the material for their play.

I think we also need to be clear about what it means to use a setting when RPGing. As some participants in this thread know, I use the GM maps and basic backstory (the Suel empire, Suel nomads in the Bright Desert, knights in Furyondy, etc) in my Burning Wheel and Torchbearer play. This doesn't push towards high concept simulationism. The goal of play isn't to explore the setting - it is a backdrop, to which we add as needed, and whose main function is to provide some organising coherence for things like Where do Elves come from? and Where do we wash up when our boat sinks? When I played a session of Wuthering Heights, my knowledge of London (plus a Google map) performed the same function. I've used Washington DC, and the US east coast more generally, in exactly the same fashion playing MHRP. And I've used Europe, North Africa and West Asia in the same way for Prince Valiant. In all these cases the setting is basically just colour and a bit of geographic and historical coherence.

This contrasts markedly with the role of the pre-authored setting in my 4e D&D play. This basically resembled what Edwards suggests for Glorantha: the setting information (the cosmological conflicts, the history of the Dawn War and the pending possibility of the Dusk War) was shared. It provided context - informed, meaningful context - for the players' decisions. Eg because they know who Kas is, and who Vecna is, they know what they are doing when they return Kas's sword to him, or when they implant the Eye of Vecna in an imp familiar.

And of course for this sort of play to work, it needed the players to buy into the setting, and the themes/conflicts it presents, so that they can use those as fodder for their decision-making during play. Which they did.

Story Now is imperiled by high resolution, pre-authored setting material that is PC dramatic need disconnected

Hence the need for player buy-in to a setting that has been shared and is not secret. The connection to dramatic needs is established by the players picking up what they like in the setting (the Raven Queen, the good Primordials, the fall of Nerath, the sundering of the Elves, or whatever else it might be) and running with it.

I don't know if Stonetop is more like "setting as colour", or more like "setting as material" that the players need to buy into, or even if it has some of the problems Edwards sees in Over the Edge, of being "setting as karaoke" (in which case one can disregard it and thereby avoid the "curse)". But I assume it doesn't rely on metaplot, and that it works in play by being shared rather than secret.