Torchbearer 2nd ed: first impressions

[clearstream]

I don't understand this.

Fictional positioning is normally used to refer to one of two (related) things:

(1) A player's position, in the game, that results from what everyone agrees about their PC and their PC's potential for action in the shared fiction. (I take this from here.)​

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(2) What everyone agrees about a character and that character's potential for action in the shared fiction.​

When used the second way, the term refers to the underpinning (in the shared fiction) of what is referred to when it is used the first way. The first usage is cognate with the general notion of a player's position in a game, but particularised having regard to the significance of the shared fiction in RPGing. The second usage is cognate with a person's position or circumstance in the world, but applied to an imagined person's position or circumstances in an imagined world.

My reason for spelling all this out is that I don't see how either (1) or (2) is a model: both usages are references to reasonably straightforward states of affairs. Thus I don't see how the notion of prediction comes in: talking about a player's, or a character's, fictional position is a way of describing some current aspect of the play of a game, not a way of predicting or modelling anything.

And I don't see how the notion of intention or motivation comes in either. To explain by way of example: used the first way, Dro's fictional position at step 2 (as per the last bit of my post just upthread) includes that Harguld is at the cave mouth with a loaded crossbow ready to shoot Gnolls. This is not a statement about Dro's intention or motivation. Used the second way, Harguld's fiction position at step 2 includes that he is at the cave mouth with a loaded crossbow ready to shoot Gnolls. This is a statement about (inter alia) Harguld's intention or motivation, but not about Dro's. When we get to step 3, and the GM introduces the emergence of a Gnoll scout into the tunnel not to far from Harguld, fictional position changes - Harguld is at the cave mouth with a loaded crossbow ready to shoot Gnolls and a Gnoll scout has just emerged from the shadows - but nothing has changed about Harguld's (imagined) intention or motivation, nor about Dro's (actual, real world) intention or motivation.

I'm spelling all this out to explain why I don't understand what you mean by your idea of fictional positioning.

Thank you for a detailed response. I'll dig into this part first. When I say model I mean it in the normal sense of a simplied description that has explanatory value. The series you link to is Baker's evolution of his model of fictional positioning. The fictional positioning construct is a simplified description: it doesn't capture every detail and dynamic... such a thing would be impossible!

One might just feel fictional positioning is simply a definition of a thing, but if you follow the series of essays from your link, you'll come to examples like this one. There Baker puts it that - "Fictional positioning is how the fictional timeline touches the real timeline." This is descriptive and Baker uses it to arrive at and explain his ideas. There is no real, parallel timeline containing fiction: that's descriptive.

When it comes to prediction, you quote two definitions containing the word "potential"? By definition, potential is "having or showing the capacity to develop into something in the future." For everyone to agree about the potential for action, they must be agreeing as to what the fictional positioning predicts.

You say that "Dro's fictional position... includes that Harguld is at the cave mouth with a loaded crossbow ready to shoot Gnolls." You add that, "Harguld's fiction position... includes that he is at the cave mouth with a loaded crossbow ready to shoot Gnolls." These descriptions are replete with intentionality! We have no way of agreeing what the potential for actions must include in the absence of our intuitive sense for intention. If Dro says next that H removes one of his boots and examines it for discolorations, and the GM responds that the gnolls individually weigh the pebbles, stones, or handfuls of gravel they collect from the cave floor, the bare facts of the fictional position - sans intentionality - support that perfectly well. We can object that this would be unsatisfying and players would lose interest in the game. Yes, that is certainly one reason why we must include intentionality in fictional positioning, but for me there is a far more important reason. The set of actions that follow from a fictional position in the absence of intentionality is vastly large, and we're disinterested in almost all of the contents of that set. What we are interested in is an extremely tiny subset. When we say what is in a fictional position - just as you have - intentionality brings that subset into focus so that all can agree that what follows equates with (could be predicted by) the potential for action.

 

[clearstream]

I’m not really participating in the thread as I haven’t the time nor initiative to digest the various takes and respond.

But can I ask to clarify the following @clearstream ?

After only a skim (I admit), it looks like your series of posts bear all the hallmarks of the 4e take of “Immediate Interrupts are destructive to play because they retcon established fiction.”

No, that's entirely off the mark. I'm not objecting to retcons, I'm observing that there are fewer of them.

That premise is both (a) not a truism about TTRPGs and (b) therefore an “opt-in.”

It's "opt-ins" all the way down.

Finally, If that is your position, then you’re going to have a pretty entangled time resolving the relationship of shared imagined space every time you (i) reroll dice and (ii) deal with the constrained negotiation phase that is the post-Conflict Compromise (which is this interesting “Story After becomes Story Now” procedure because you’re in-filling a lot of abstracted intraConflict detail which you’re required to leave open-ended in order to functionally facilitate the Conflict procedures - particularly the Regrouping aspect of them).

What I would suggest contemplating here is the veracity of two timelines. Are there really two timelines? Specifically, is there a real second timeline paralleling our physical one that contains fiction? Suppose we were to agree that there is only one real universe in which our play occurs, and anything that happens must change the state of that universe; on the grounds that in the absence of such change we can't possibly attest to anything happening.

Then consider how the game must be played in just one timeline, so as to produce the experiences that a simplified description pictures as two timelines with information exchanges between them. As (in the way that) the fictional timeline informs the real timeline, we can call the fictional positioning. To reiterate, there is no such second timeline and there is no possibility of an event that we can know about that causes no change at that moment on our single timeline*.

FitM enables us to do some useful retconning to reconstruct the fictional positioning, but think too about my signet of fostering quickness and bloodiness. (I would like to remark here that so much of @pemerton's narrating and naming is truly excellent, such as the outcomes he suggested for the ambush test.) Seeing as I include intentionality in my construct for fictional positioning, I don't exclude informing intentions from entailing potential actions sufficiently well without necessitating further commitment at that moment.

*I should be clear here that my actual thoughts on time are far more complex than simple acceptance of a single corridor of time. I would point to JME McTaggart and B Greene as starting points about that.

 

[pemerton]

Finally, If that is your position, then you’re going to have a pretty entangled time resolving the relationship of shared imagined space every time you (i) reroll dice and (ii) deal with the constrained negotiation phase that is the post-Conflict Compromise (which is this interesting “Story After becomes Story Now” procedure because you’re in-filling a lot of abstracted intraConflict detail which you’re required to leave open-ended in order to functionally facilitate the Conflict procedures - particularly the Regrouping aspect of them).

When it comes to Regrouping, they really just should have called it the "shout wounds closed" procedure!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I’m not really participating in the thread as I haven’t the time nor initiative to digest the various takes and respond.

But can I ask to clarify the following @clearstream ?

After only a skim (I admit), it looks like your series of posts bear all the hallmarks of the 4e take of “Immediate Interrupts are destructive to play because they retcon established fiction.”

That take is premised upon the idea that all conversation of play and every dice throw is immediately and irrevocably enfolded into the shared imagined space without exception or procedural exemption.

That premise is both (a) not a truism about TTRPGs and (b) therefore an “opt-in.”

Finally, If that is your position, then you’re going to have a pretty entangled time resolving the relationship of shared imagined space every time you (i) reroll dice and (ii) deal with the constrained negotiation phase that is the post-Conflict Compromise (which is this interesting “Story After becomes Story Now” procedure because you’re in-filling a lot of abstracted intraConflict detail which you’re required to leave open-ended in order to functionally facilitate the Conflict procedures - particularly the Regrouping aspect of them).

Right, TB2 definitely seems to involve a lot of this 'filling in' or as Pemerton called it, 'retcon'. I don't actually agree it is retcon, it may be out of order, but it is not generally, certainly not ideally, reversing anything already established. I DID take some 4e powers as doing that, though! At least implicitly. A lot of forced movement could fall into this category where MECHANICALLY the orc went 'over there' and then the Warlord made it slide 'over here', but in the fiction it was described as the Warlord inducing the orc to move 'over here' in the first place (granting that it is not always possible to color it that way in fiction, say if going 'over there' triggered some effect). We kind of discovered that about 4e in play, but with TB2 its more that you KNOW this kind of stuff is coming, and its all bound within a single obstacle, so you just learn the technique of being a bit nonspecific in the 'before the roll' part of the fiction.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Thank you for a detailed response. I'll dig into this part first. When I say model I mean it in the normal sense of a simplied description that has explanatory value. The series you link to is Baker's evolution of his model of fictional positioning. The fictional positioning construct is a simplified description: it doesn't capture every detail and dynamic... such a thing would be impossible!

One might just feel fictional positioning is simply a definition of a thing, but if you follow the series of essays from your link, you'll come to examples like this one. There Baker puts it that - "Fictional positioning is how the fictional timeline touches the real timeline." This is descriptive and Baker uses it to arrive at and explain his ideas. There is no real, parallel timeline containing fiction: that's descriptive.

When it comes to prediction, you quote two definitions containing the word "potential"? By definition, potential is "having or showing the capacity to develop into something in the future." For everyone to agree about the potential for action, they must be agreeing as to what the fictional positioning predicts.

You say that "Dro's fictional position... includes that Harguld is at the cave mouth with a loaded crossbow ready to shoot Gnolls." You add that, "Harguld's fiction position... includes that he is at the cave mouth with a loaded crossbow ready to shoot Gnolls." These descriptions are replete with intentionality! We have no way of agreeing what the potential for actions must include in the absence of our intuitive sense for intention. If Dro says next that H removes one of his boots and examines it for discolorations, and the GM responds that the gnolls individually weigh the pebbles, stones, or handfuls of gravel they collect from the cave floor, the bare facts of the fictional position - sans intentionality - support that perfectly well. We can object that this would be unsatisfying and players would lose interest in the game. Yes, that is certainly one reason why we must include intentionality in fictional positioning, but for me there is a far more important reason. The set of actions that follow from a fictional position in the absence of intentionality is vastly large, and we're disinterested in almost all of the contents of that set. What we are interested in is an extremely tiny subset. When we say what is in a fictional position - just as you have - intentionality brings that subset into focus so that all can agree that what follows equates with (could be predicted by) the potential for action.

This all seems to me to fall under PREMISE and how the premise in Story Now play drives the action. Yes, the player and the character do have wants and needs, which translate presumably into an intent to act, but that is DETERMINED BY THE PLAYER. That is Dro determined, unilaterally, Dro's intentions. NOTHING constrained him to make them thus, or such, except his own whim! I don't see how that is similar to the SHARED IMAGINING that is the the fiction, and thus produces the position. We could argue that, practically speaking successful play requires POST HOC that Dro exhibited some intention that was consonant with what the other participants agree they are all doing (IE playing adventurers in TB2). OK, but I still don't think that's fictional position, its premise and associated genre, and table culture, etc.

 

[pemerton]

One might just feel fictional positioning is simply a definition of a thing, but if you follow the series of essays from your link, you'll come to examples like this one. There Baker puts it that - "Fictional positioning is how the fictional timeline touches the real timeline." This is descriptive and Baker uses it to arrive at and explain his ideas. There is no real, parallel timeline containing fiction: that's descriptive.

What I would suggest contemplating here is the veracity of two timelines. Are there really two timelines? Specifically, is there a real second timeline paralleling our physical one that contains fiction? Suppose we were to agree that there is only one real universe in which our play occurs, and anything that happens must change the state of that universe; on the grounds that in the absence of such change we can't possibly attest to anything happening.

Then consider how the game must be played in just one timeline, so as to produce the experiences that a simplified description pictures as two timelines with information exchanges between them. As (in the way that) the fictional timeline informs the real timeline, we can call the fictional positioning. To reiterate, there is no such second timeline and there is no possibility of an event that we can know about that causes no change at that moment on our single timeline*.

<snip>

*I should be clear here that my actual thoughts on time are far more complex than simple acceptance of a single corridor of time. I would point to JME McTaggart and B Greene as starting points about that.

Vincent Baker doesn't seem to me to be making any commitment, in his blog posts, to any particular view about the metaphysics of fictions.

He is saying that there is an imagined world (clouds), with its sequence of (imaginary) events, and there is a real world, the world of cues (boxes). And there are rules - rules of RPGing - which mean that when certain things are imagined by everyone, certain things have to be done in the real world. This is where we get rightward arrows - the fictional timeline "touches" the real timeline.

In the story of Harguld shooting the Gnoll, there is no point at which the closeness of the Gnoll to Harguld - which is part of the fictional timeline - touches the real timeline. That is because it only becomes part of the fictional timeline - we only all agree to imagine it - as a result of a leftward arrow generated by Dro's use of his trait. Thus it is not part of the relevant fictional position.

Of course, now that it is established that the Gnoll got close to Harguld, that might inform future narration (eg if the GM gave my alternative successs-with-condition, where the Gnoll is killed rather than driven off, it is established in the fiction that there is a Gnoll corpse close to the cave mouth). But that did not inform the resolution of Harguld shooting the Gnoll.

When it comes to prediction, you quote two definitions containing the word "potential"? By definition, potential is "having or showing the capacity to develop into something in the future." For everyone to agree about the potential for action, they must be agreeing as to what the fictional positioning predicts.

When I say something is a seed, I am saying (inter alia and ceteris paribus) that it has the potential to germinate and grow. I'm not predicting that, however. Most seeds that I encounter are in the fruit that I prepare for cooking and eating, and they don't grow into plants.

On the rest, about intention, I basically agree with @AbdulAlhazred. You seem to be talking about various sorts of functional or non-functional interaction between participants in establishing fiction. That doesn't make it part of any player's (or, if you prefer my second usage, character's) fictional position.

 

[clearstream]

Vincent Baker doesn't seem to me to be making any commitment, in his blog posts, to any particular view about the metaphysics of fictions.

Show me where I say that he does, or my argument relies on him doing so?

He is saying that there is an imagined world (clouds), with its sequence of (imaginary) events, and there is a real world, the world of cues (boxes). And there are rules - rules of RPGing - which mean that when certain things are imagined by everyone, certain things have to be done in the real world. This is where we get rightward arrows - the fictional timeline "touches" the real timeline.

Indeed, and he says himself that he sees the clouds and boxes model as a simplification.

"THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT I THINK THAT WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO IS AS SIMPLE AS MY LITTLE DIAGRAMS OR AS SIMPLE AS A GAME'S RULES."

Which I agree with. One way that the model can be elaborated on and explored is in terms of information. Set aside for a moment any judgement about what counts as fiction. The information about the tie is immediately available to each participant, joining information in their cognitive space (which we can largely treat as private excepting their speech acts.) A player with my signet can't help having their picture of the situation changed in a way that matters to them.

One way to redress that in terms of fiction might be to suspend the situation and update it after all decisions and rolls. Another way might be to roll the situation forward in a relaxed manner, finding things out as we go. The second more closely matches what I observe my own and other groups doing. The other way seems more methodical to me: more concerned to maintain a preconceived abstraction.

When I say something is a seed, I am saying (inter alia and ceteris paribus) that it has the potential to germinate and grow. I'm not predicting that, however. Most seeds that I encounter are in the fruit that I prepare for cooking and eating, and they don't grow into plants.

As you show here, any prediction you want to make about seeds must be based on a description that includes what you intend to do with them. As much as they have the potential to grow, they have the potential to be eaten.

 

[pemerton]

@clearstream, I am struggling to follow your posts. A seed is a seed. It can be planted. It can be eaten. It can be glued to cardboard by a child i the course of making an illustration at childcare. And there are limitless other things that might be done with a seed. The fact that we can think of some things that can't be done with a seed - eg it can't be ridden on to the moon, not even if we were really small - doesn't mean the things that can be done with it aren't limitless.

Harguld's fictional position is that he is standing, in a cave mouth, crossbow cocked and loaded, waiting for Gnolls. Any number of things could follow from that. The GM decides on one: a Gnoll scout emerges from the shadows. Now any further number of things could follow (eg Harguld could shout a threat to the Gnoll; could offer a bribe to the Gnoll; could lose his nerve and run from the Gnoll), but Dro chooses one: Harguld shoots at the Gnoll. We can track these changes in fictional position without needing to invoke notions of intention, or latency, or anything else. The position is what it is, and in most cases can be very easily described.

But none of this will make the fact that Harguld waits too long, luring the Gnoll in, part of the fictional position at the moment Dro declares that Harguld shoots. Because that bit of fiction hasn't been authored yet. It is authored as part of the process of resolving the test that takes place in response to Dro's action declaration.

 

[clearstream]

@clearstream, I am struggling to follow your posts. A seed is a seed. It can be planted. It can be eaten. It can be glued to cardboard by a child i the course of making an illustration at childcare. And there are limitless other things that might be done with a seed. The fact that we can think of some things that can't be done with a seed - eg it can't be ridden on to the moon, not even if we were really small - doesn't mean the things that can be done with it aren't limitless.

Yes. It surprises me that you can see that it is limitless without seeing what that implies. The fictional position cannot be solely an enumeration of objects: there must be an aboutness or intentionality to know that we do/do-not agree what follows.

Harguld's fictional position is that he is standing, in a cave mouth, crossbow cocked and loaded, waiting for Gnolls. Any number of things could follow from that. The GM decides on one: a Gnoll scout emerges from the shadows. Now any further number of things could follow (eg Harguld could shout a threat to the Gnoll; could offer a bribe to the Gnoll; could lose his nerve and run from the Gnoll), but Dro chooses one: Harguld shoots at the Gnoll. We can track these changes in fictional position without needing to invoke notions of intention, or latency, or anything else. The position is what it is, and in most cases can be very easily described.

I feel that intentionality has to be included whether I like it or not because every example requires it. Perhaps take a look at the Stanford entry on Intentionality and come back to this question.

But none of this will make the fact that Harguld waits too long, luring the Gnoll in, part of the fictional position at the moment Dro declares that Harguld shoots. Because that bit of fiction hasn't been authored yet. It is authored as part of the process of resolving the test that takes place in response to Dro's action declaration.

Hence as I denoted, tied f differs from pursuit f. Agreement on what may follow is changed by the tie. It's consistent with the job being done by fictional positioning to describe that it has changed.

We might end up having to accept our versions as simply definitional. When I speak of fictional positioning it's my version that I mean, and that results in differences between our analyses.

 

[Fenris-77]

Hmm, let me throw out a situation here. My PC declares that he is going to shoot an arrow at the Gnolls in the above example. The game then moves into the mechanics and conversation of actions and adjudication. Personally, I think the idea of intentionality is at work there in some fashion. The PC hasn't actually fired the arrow yet, and yet in the midst of the mechanical bits they might decide to take a negative die for a trait working against them once they realize that the die pool isn't big enough to ensure success (or a bunch of other decisions that modify the original declaration in some way). There's a conversation there, a back and forth between the GM and the Player, that is bounded in some way by the intentionality of the action declaration. The objects and circumstances involved are all encompassed by that intentionality. If you took the same objects and circumstances but changed the action declaration, i.e. changed the intentional framework if you like, then the adjudication and whatnot changes - a decision to hide for example, or whatever.

I'm not at all sure that's what @clearstream is talking about however. Or even how useful the example is.