What is the point of GM's notes?

[Aldarc]

I know you think this. However, your arguments about how "fiction" will be misconstrued do not show up in the wild, even after more than a decade of it being something not uncommonly used. If we go by the metric of "does your idea have evidence to back it" and "is there a large body of evidence where it would show up," those answers are no and yes respectively. So, lots of opportunity, no evidence. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, however, but at some point, it's pretty convincing. How long do we need to keep checking to see if your concern comes true to lay this to bed, and remember, I cannot prove a negative, just show there's no positives.

Again, I have also been looking for citations among OSR and sandbox community regarding the term "fiction" as a taboo word associated too closely with "story," and I'm not having any luck. The evidence appealed to is entirely anecdotal conversations. I can find resistance to the word "story" and "storytelling," though typically these circles prefer using "emerging story" instead.

My understanding of equivocation is it is merely the shifting from one meaning to another of a word in an argument, which produces a conclusion that just doesn't follow. It is a problem of logic, not a problem of intention. Obviously it is often going to be used intentionally. But I can't get into the head of people equivocating in their arguments. The end result is the same whether the intention to do so is there. You see people equivocate on multiple uses of a word all the time without even realizing they are doing so.

A key point of equivocation is that the shift in meaning produces a conclusion that doesn't logically follow from the premises. A key word simply being lexically ambiguous, with conversation clarifying that ambiguity is not an informal logical fallacy.

What has not been demonstrated or proved "ripe for equivocation" in the case of 'fiction' is that it has been, is, or will be used in a way that does not produce logically coherent conclusions. That a term can mean different things (as lexical ambiguity is highly prevalent in language) is not the same as "the term will be used to mean different things to obfuscate discussion or reach illogical conclusions in a hypothetical conversation that hasn't happened yet." This is mainly why your sense of the problematic in regards to "fiction" is much closer to the simple "ambiguity" side of the spectrum rather than the "equivocation" side.

No a term on its own can't be an equivocation. My objection was it is a term people tend to equivocate on, and that it is pretty obvious to me, it will lead to lots of the kind of equitation I am talking about.

So why call it a "highly equivocal term" then? That only adds to the confusion.

I said the fiction is equivocal (which just means having more than one meaning), and specifically I said things like "highly equivocal" because it carries so many terms that can be problematic in RPG discussions.

This is equivocating on what "equivocal" means, switching between a possible a synonym for "ambiguity" (more than one interpretation, albeit ignoring that equivocal often connotes duplicitous or evasive language) and an adjectival version of equivocation (switching between meanings in an argument to reach incoherent conclusions).

I am just giving my honest opinion Omnomancer. You guys are the ones who have spent nearly ten pages of the thread going after me over this one little point.

Simple Solution: Then don't make it a key point of your argument.

and also, frankly because I find the phrasing 'the fiction' to be a little snooty as well).

If anything, to me it's an incredibly plebian and natural one. As I said before, it describes the fiction of the game as "the fiction."

 

[Aldarc]

Meh - there's various terms that get chucked around here (usually by the same few people) that are pretty loaded, but IMO "fiction" ain't one of 'em.

...he says, 20 pages later...yikes, has this thing gone nuts in the last few days!

It's loaded. It's snooty. It's highly equivocal. I can't tell you how, but it is. You'll have to trust me on that, Lanefan. But more important than all that: the intellectual snobs who engage in badwrongthink I dislike are using it so it must be wrong.

Reading the argument over the word "equivocation", a stray thought wandered by:

Could the difference in how the word is viewed be culture-based?

From what I recall of where some posters are in the world and looking at their takes in this thread, I'm starting to wonder if in the USA the word "equivocation" carries much more of a sense of malicious-intent-to-deceive than it does in the UK.

This is a good thought that shows awareness of cultural variability with connotations, but I don't think that this is the case with "equivocation." Here are several separate lexical definitions that I found in Oxford and Cambridge online dictionaries:

The use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself; prevarication.

to talk about something in a way that is deliberately not clear in order to avoid or hide the truth

a way of speaking that is intentionally not clear and is confusing to other people, especially to hide the truth

The intent to deceive or evade is also often included in US-Canadian understandings of the term as well as for the related words "equivocate" and "equivocal." Now this is also, let it be said, about equivocation, in general use, rather than in regards to an equivocation fallacy, a fallacy of informal logic.

 

[Lanefan]

It's loaded. It's snooty. It's highly equivocal. I can't tell you how, but it is. You'll have to trust me on that, Lanefan. But more important than all that: the intellectual snobs who engage in badwrongthink I dislike are using it so it must be wrong.

You forgot pompous. It's pompous too, don't'cha know.

Never forget pompous.

 

[Aldarc]

Might I ask how long (as in, how many sessions) those games/campaigns lasted?

Reason I ask is that if the game's only expected/designed to last a few sessions or sort out one story arc (this would include a typical hard-line AP as well) the underlying setting doesn't have to do nearly as much work as if the game's expected to last for many years and have many adventuring parties tromping around in not-always-predictable directions; meaning the shorter game requires massively less (or even no) setting prep, and on a much smaller scale, than does the long one.

I think a separate issue that you inject in here in a discussion of time and duration, namely "have many adventuring parties tromping around." Because I believe the issue of time has been discussed before in regards to these sort of story now games. I believe pemerton and a few others have said that their campaigns have lasted for multiple years, and there isn't reason to doubt their claims. I don't think that time or duration is really a problem with this method, because any fiction added to the game must be accounted for later once it has been introduced into the game. Once the fiction of a castle appearing on a hill has been introduced in the game, the castle is now an established part of the fiction that will not be moved, unless David Xanatos buys the castle, disassembles it, and then rebuilds it to sit atop his skyscraper in New York.

But I'm not sure if many PC adventuring parties being in the same world as other PC parties has really been discussed. I'm not sure if that means it's incompatible with these techniques though. I vaguely recall mention on Twitter of Steven Lumpkin (Silent0siris) working on a West Marches hack of Blades in the Dark, though I'm not sure of his progress on that project.

 

[Lanefan]

I think a separate issue that you inject in here in a discussion of time and duration, namely "have many adventuring parties tromping around." Because I believe the issue of time has been discussed before in regards to these sort of story now games. I believe pemerton and a few others have said that their campaigns have lasted for multiple years, and there isn't reason to doubt their claims. I don't think that time or duration is really a problem with this method, because any fiction added to the game must be accounted for later once it has been introduced into the game. Once the fiction of a castle appearing on a hill has been introduced in the game, the castle is now an established part of the fiction that will not be moved, unless David Xanatos buys the castle, disassembles it, and then rebuilds it to sit atop his skyscraper in New York.

From the sound of it, then, you end up with much the same amount of work being done in terms of note-taking; only it's mostly being done after the sessions are played rather than before.

But I'm not sure if many PC adventuring parties being in the same world as other PC parties has really been discussed. I'm not sure if that means it's incompatible with these techniques though. I vaguely recall mention on Twitter of Steven Lumpkin (Silent0siris) working on a West Marches hack of Blades in the Dark, though I'm not sure of his progress on that project.

I've got anywhere between two and five PC parties active at any given in-game time, meaning geography and time in particular become relevant as I need to know who is where when in case they bump into each other or try to arrange such. This can be a delicate juggling act sometimes, when one group gets ahead of another in time (we can only play one group at a time) and I've as yet no idea where/when any others might pop up.

In any case, having a solid setting underneath it all sure helps with this.

 

[Aldarc]

From the sound of it, then, you end up with much the same amount of work being done in terms of note-taking; only it's mostly being done after the sessions are played rather than before.

I suspect hence "story now" rather than "story before." I guess another less glamorous way of putting it is "notes later." From what I gather part of the idea behind this, though not all of it in its entirety mind you and me both, is since note-making/taking doesn't occur before play, the GM has less reason or even resources to coerce outcomes and/or player agency using those notes.

Going back to the OP, if we were to think again about "play to discover the GM's notes" (and for sake of conversation, let's gloss over the controversy), we could also ask more generally: "how, when, and by whom are 'notes' generated in different games?"

Some games will say, "the GM should prep notes for play." Some games will say, "the GM should use these notes and keep players focused on them." Some games will say, "here are guidelines/procedures for GM note generation." Other games will make note generation mostly an exclusive task of the GM. Other games are more liberal with player note generation.

I've got anywhere between two and five PC parties active at any given in-game time, meaning geography and time in particular become relevant as I need to know who is where when in case they bump into each other or try to arrange such. This can be a delicate juggling act sometimes, when one group gets ahead of another in time (we can only play one group at a time) and I've as yet no idea where/when any others might pop up.

In any case, having a solid setting underneath it all sure helps with this.

I can see how that would be a potential issue. A lot of this, IMHO, will vary between the actual games that are being played, as myth vs. no myth will vary even between PbtA/FitD/etc. games. But again, I'm not sure if it's necessarily as incompatible as one would imagine, since I could easily see a FitD game work for a West Marches style campaign, especially since every "gig," adventure site, or dungeon basically exists as a "heist" scenario. Instead of trying to take over territory in a city, you are trying to expand territory from your point of light in the frontier. Instead of law enforcement, the pressure comes from other oppositional forces that are competing for similar grounds and resources (e.g., BBEG, hordes of monsters, chaos cultists, etc.).

In other PbtA games, this won't be possible. For example, if one were running Stonetop (a Dungeon World-modified game), you are all residents of a vaguely Celto-Germanic iron age village called "Stonetop." There can't really be multiple parties or multiple PCs of the same "class" because your playbooks establish that you are THE Heavy (fighter), THE Marshal (warlord), THE Ranger (ranger), THE Fox (rogue), THE Would-Be-Hero, etc. of the village of Stonetop. One could definitely run the Stonetop game such that other parties are inhabitants of other settlements (e.g., Marshedge, Gordin's Delve, etc.).

 

[Umbran]

From what I recall of where some posters are in the world and looking at their takes in this thread, I'm starting to wonder if in the USA the word "equivocation" carries much more of a sense of malicious-intent-to-deceive than it does in the UK.

Edit: Never mind, Aldarc beat me to it

For the US, we can use Merriam-Webster.com
Definition of equivocation
: deliberate evasiveness in wording
: the use of ambiguous or equivocal language
: an ambiguous or deliberately evasive statement

On the British side, we can use Lexico, the free face of the Oxford English Dictionary:
Equivocation: The use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself; prevarication.

Or perhaps the Cambridge dictionary:
Equivocation: a way of speaking that is intentionally not clear and is confusing to other people, especially to hide the truth, or something said in this way

Unless you want to toss aside the OED and Cambridge dictionaries, the intent to obfuscate seems present in the word on both sides of the pond.

 

[Emerikol]

Is it? The Phoenix on the Sword is pretty compelling as far as fantasy stories go. And yet REH was pretty much making it up as he went along.

Yes. That is why I said "on average". If you read books that are teaching author's how to write they all suggest you get to know your world well before writing about it.

And I am taking for granted that I'd agree that "Phoenix on the Sword" is an entertaining book. I suspect in many cases we'd tend to disagree. But when I say "on average" I am leaving open the fact there are outliers.

 

[Emerikol]

This is why I think the use of "living world" as a style of game rather than a goal is kind of useless except by those who have accepted is as shorthand for something more specific. Because it applies to a game like Blades in the Dark or Apocalypse World as readily as it does to D&D or more traditional sandbox games. And I expect that is not its intended use.

A living world is a world that changes without PC stimuli. It will of course also change due to PC stimuli but that alone doesn't make it a living world.

Think of a dead body. if I pick up the corpse arm and move it, the corpse is still dead. If the arm starts moving all by itself then it's not dead. (Maybe in D&D it's undead but that's not what I mean here ;-)).

How it changes without PC stimuli can vary of course but I would absolutely dismiss the idea that it can be done as just in time response to PC action. That is a PC stimuli. A living world will over time have events that occur and are never seen by the PCs and never reacted to by the PCs. I achieve that affect within the sandbox by using a calendar. I map the movements and actions of my NPCs based upon those NPCs personalities and agendas. When the party interacts with an NPC in some significant way, I change the calendar for that NPC. If the party interacts with the entire sandbox in some significant way, like burning down the entire village, then of course I have a lot of calendar changes to make. Many of those might just be marking NPCs as dead who lived in the village.

So the key is that events happen that do not always affect the PCs. That is a living world. If you try to make it look like the world was changing but it really wasn't, then I'd say that is similar to what a novelist does to simulate a living world in his writing but it would not be a living world.

 

[Emerikol]

Something like, "If I can just keep the players from trying to do all of the scene and history extrapolating, and keep that behind my curtain, it will make it easier for them to mentally envision/enmesh/insert their consciousness into the world. They're not having to jump out from their segmented character mindset to worry about the 'dynamism' of the setting, or feel pressure to make things work...

This is likely true. I think though the primary goal of being in character is that we find that the funnest way to play the game. Maybe it's funner for us because of what you say but the fun came before the analysis for us.

....Furthermore, it's too easy for external inputs that I-as-GM haven't envisioned to disrupt the balance/harmony of the ur-state 'external model' I've already spent so much time building.

Well, of course if you have players able to change wholesale any fiction that is not established by the GM pretty much destroys the ability to have a living world (as I defined it elsewhere). You can't have truth apart from the players knowledge of things if by definition the only truth is the players knowledge of things. When Story Now defines truth as only what is known to the group, it runs counter to off camera truth.

"If we can just keep the characters immersed 'playing as their character', I can more fully enable and maintain the fine balance of managing the verisimilitude of the SIS, while also having the secondary benefit of reducing distractions in getting the players into our desired 'immersion flow.'"

If you mean that changing from character to player and back frequently is dissociating then yes. We would want to escape into a world and become the character in the same way we escape into a novel and become the protagonist. Becoming an author and a character at the same time would be conflicting for us.

Is there any accuracy to this?

So I think you've hit close to the truth.

*Side note: I've mentioned it already, but the biggest paradigm shift (and I mean that in the absolute, literal sense of the world) for me came when I finally let go of the notion of there being an "objective external model" of the SIS. As soon as I could lay that conceit aside, and recognize that the "objective external model" was just as much a constructed fiction as everything else, my entire mindset changed.

I get that. To me though the value of that constructed external model is higher given it's been carefully prepared than something done off the cuff. That valuation though may not hold true for you. In fact, I've asked myself recently if perhaps another genre might fit Story Now better than my play. I'm very much a fantasy player and I think I am because it preserves a lot of the style I prefer.

For example, I wondered if a super heroes game might be a Story Now fit. Skill challenges for supers often seems to not be a good fit. Also advancing levels and gaining powers does not seem very super hero like. But I'm not sure. I was just mulling over such thoughts.

I also wondered that it is likely there is far less note taking, mapping, etc... going on in Story Now so would it fit situations where you don't have a table and are playing theatre of the mind exclusively. Like a roadtrip across country.

For me, when I'm going to play once a week for three or four hours, for perhaps a few years, the commitment level is so high timewise that I just don't want to waste it on what FOR ME would be a less than optimal approach.