That Thread in Which We Ruminate on the Confluence of Actor Stance, Immersion, and "Playing as if I Was My Character"

[pemerton]

When he gets to asserting the "sole" function is this negotiation, that's philosophy.

You put it in quotes, so you obviously know you just subbed in a term that made this a strawman. Why do this?

RPGs are about shared fiction, and how that fiction is created is a negotiation. We use game systems to operationalize and codify these negotiations with mechanics, but that doesn't really change that what's happening is a discussion and negotiation about what we're going to all pretend together.

RPGing involves the creation of shared fiction; that's the main thing that distinguishes it from a boardgame.

Because the fiction is shared, there needs to be a means of establishing agreement about its content. This is what Vincent Baker calls negotiation - the process whereby a group of humans reaches agreement. If anyone prefers another word for that process, I don't think it's a big deal. The point is that, for RPGing to work, the participants need to reach agreement in respect of the content of the shared fiction. Vincent Baker summarises that as negotiated imagination.

@hawkeyefan gave some clear and simple examples upthread: by declaring that my PC attacks the Orc, I am putting it up for grabs that the shared fiction includes an Orc defeated by my PC in combat. How do we decide if the fiction actually changes in that way? Different systems have different answers, but a widely-shared one is to invoke combat resolution mechanics.

EDIT: I think the tangent in which @S'mon, @prabe and @Ovinomancer discuss whether processes of reaching agreement by deferring to authority count as negotiations or not is largely unproductive. The key point that Vincent Baker is making is that agreement has to be reached, and that this is what game mechanics facilitate.

I think there is probably a second, more sub-textual point, which is that in the context of RPGing whatever authority there is is granted quite immediately by the participants and can be revoked largely at will - which is a marked difference from (say) a judicial tribunal and some arbitral tribunals. But that seems orthogonal to a discussion about the relationship between player experience and (imagined) character experience.

 

[pemerton]

A further comment on the role of authority:

Here is what Vincent Baker says (as per my post 121 upthread): Mechanics . . . exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table.

I would say that one well-known function of authority is to ease and constrain negotiation between the various parties. Including the authority and those subject to it.

 

[Campbell]

So the way I look at is there is this sort of natural state of what roleplaying looks like as an activity before we layer on the structures that sit on top of it. That things like defined roles for certain players and distribution of roles (responsibilities, rights and authorities) are part of the structure we layer on top. When talking broadly about roleplaying games we address that underlaying primal form of roleplaying.

I mean all of us involved in this discussion play and run games with a strong GM role. Vincent designs games with extraordinarily strong GM role. What that role looks like from game to game is different, but regardless it's layered on top of an unstructured experience we give structure to.

 

[Ovinomancer]

In this context, a strawman is a misrepresentation of someone else's position. Here, I was stating the events from my own perspective, and made no claim on anyone else's. So, no strawman. Not at the start of this nonsense (when I was really just expressing an opinion on where the practical stops and philosophy starts), and not now.



My assertion was and is that I (and implied, folks in general) shouldn't be accused of strawman arguments for such things. As for expectations - I saw my original comment as an aside or footnote, so my expectation was that folks who didn't find it valuable would ignore it, honestly.

This mountain from that molehill.

With all due respect, I may have played the music, but you chose to dance.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yeah. I thought I remembered that English was not your native language. English has stolen too many words from too many languages to be a perfectly clear tool for communication; it's a shame it's the only language I really have.

??? I'm guessing someone has me blocked and you're responding to them, here, because this is completely without context for me.

 

[prabe]

??? I'm guessing someone has me blocked and you're responding to them, here, because this is completely without context for me.

There was quoted text in that post. If you don't see it, then you are probably correct. Um ... sorry?

 

[Ovinomancer]

But the arbitrator or judge does not need the other party to agree to their ruling. The other party may be seeking to negotiate with the arbitrator or judge, but the arbitrator or judge is not negotiating. They are not 'trying to reach an agreement'. That's what mediators do.

I don't know why you are so hung up on defining a huge area of social interaction as 'negotiation'. My suspicion is it may be something to do with hostility to GM authority - if people come to see the GM as 'negotiating', then they are not acting as a referee or judge, their decisions are no longer authoritative. The alternative explanation, that you simply do not understand what the word means, is still possible but becoming less likely. But maybe you've been blinded by some theory gobbledegook that got you really excitted - it can happen to all of us.

Yes, they do, in that they cannot make a ruling unless invoked by the parties to begin with. Parties that have already started a negotiation, failed to reach a conclusion, and turned to arbitration to help settle the negotiation.

Again, people are jumping to narrow points, like the fact that an arbitrator has authority, and ignores what came before that point and what can come after (arbitration can be voided by the parties reaching a different negotiated settlement, although this is rare because usually the breakdown in the ability to reach a conclusion is what results in arbitration). The power disparity and position of the arbiter doesn't preclude negotiation, and the entirely of most proceedings are exactly this -- attempts to negotiate an agreement amenable to that party.

And I don't have any hostility to GM authority. I'm running a railroad right now, hard and fast, Descent into Avernus AP. I'm the GM, running 5e, and so am expected to fulfill that role, which requires the use of significant GM authority. I'm not adverse to it at all. I do recognize that my "authority" is actually limited, though, and not the all powerful, my say goes version, because I have a table of players and our social contract has requirements of me that supersede any granted by the system.

 

[Ovinomancer]

There was quoted text in that post. If you don't see it, then you are probably correct. Um ... sorry?

No problem, it seemed from left field, so I guessed as much -- also nothing for you to apologize for, it's not a well thought out feature set. I mean, you can absolutely use it to prevent a blocked person from seeing anything you post while you can still freely quote and respond to them.

 

[Manbearcat]

Why is there negotiation?

Because TTRPGs aren’t “conch-passing story time”

There will be collisions of “this happens...no this other thing happens.”

There will be Skilled Play priorities that require some thing (procedure/dice/person) outside of the player who declared the action to sort out how the action changes the gamestate.

Disputes require navigation toward consensus. Whether there are assymetric power relationships doesn’t matter and whether that dispute > navigation > consensus loop is called negotiation or MMMMMTACOS doesn’t matter.

EDIT - Also, it is CRAZY the irrelevant nothingburgers that we can spend pages and pages arguing over.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Why is there negotiation?

Because TTRPGs aren’t “conch-passing story time”

There will be collisions of “this happens...no this other thing happens.”

There will be Skilled Play priorities that require some thing (procedure/dice/person) outside of the player who declared the action to sort out how the action changes the gamestate.

Disputes require navigation toward consensus. Whether there are assymetric power relationships doesn’t matter and whether that dispute > navigation > consensus loop is called negotiation or MMMMMTACOS doesn’t matter.

Absolutely! 100% correct! But, it's negotiation.