What is the point of GM's notes?

[pemerton]

All fiction is constructed by one or more authors. All RPG play operates within a fiction. Ergo, the fictional space of RPG play is constructed.

The game world doesn't exist independently as an externality, it's constructed. Even if the construct is generated for particular purposes, needs, and agendas (usually good ones), it doesn't change its nature as a construct.

<snip>

But setting apart the "game world" from the rest of the shared fiction doesn't make it less fictional, it just means that I-as-GM have privileged that part of the fiction more than other parts.

<snip>

I have zero problem with you wanting to privilege the game world fiction for your own play. Just don't turn it into a category error.

As far as I can tell, @Bedrockgames agrees with what I have quoted just above:

it isn’t a category error and calling it fiction missed the point of play in this style. Look, I can imagine a small town in my head with residents, a layout and geography. This place exists in my mind external to the players. And the players can explore it in the game. The point of contact is what I and others are calling the energy, the synergy. You seem to be using a term to invoke that and the town in question (ie you are folding the world into the fiction). But these can be two distinct things: one the shared experience the group has as they play in the town together, the other the mental model of the town in the GM’s mind.

The shared fiction, by which I assume to mean that which is occurring at the table in the setting and more broadly the setting itself, is far up wide a category because you make it impossible to distinguish between the shared reality being established at the table and the world created by the GM that is informing that reality.

No one is saying it is a thing in the real world. What people are saying is you can map out a world, run a world, so it exists outside the players as an idea that is explorable.

You could easily replace fiction with 'game worlds', and reach the conclusions that the game world is constructed. The game world being constructed doesn't preclude it from existing outside the players. In fact if the game world is the domain of the GM to control, it naturally would exist outside the players.

In these posts Bedrockgames distinguishes two instances of imagination:

* The GM imagines something, makes it up, constructs it: this is the game world.​

​

* The players at the table imagine something, make it up, construct it: this is the shared fiction.​

He also states that the relationship between these is not symmetrical:

* The GM informs the shared fiction that is created at the table, using the world that s/he has created;​

​

* The world that the GM has created, which is used to inform the shared fiction at the table, is a mental model in the GM's mind that exists independently of the non-GM players' minds;​

​

* The players "explore" (= learn about, from the GM) the GM's mental model - the process of play includes transmission of information from the GM (drawing on his/her mental model) to the players.​

I don't think anything that Bedrockgames has said here is particularly controversial or revelatory. I believe that everyone participating in this thread has played in RPGs that fit what Bedrockgames describes. Including @innerdude.

For reasons that are opaque to me Bedrockgames objects to anyone actually explicitly stating what he very strongly implies but doesn't quite state, namely, that the process of play involves the players learning what the GM's mental model is. He will talk about the GM's mental model informating the players' shared fiction, and he will talk about the players exploring a place that exists in the GM's mind. But as soon as one joins the dots using a verb like learning or discovering (to describe the cognitive relationship between players and GM's imaginative construct) or a verb like telling or transmitting (to describe the communicative relationship between the GM, as possessor of the imaginative construct, and the players) one is apparently saying an improper thing.

 

[Manbearcat]

This isn't a big part of how I approach RPGing.

“Understatements of the Year for $500, Alex!”

 

[pemerton]

we have provided plenty of alternatives. My preference is living world

no one is saying notes aren’t a factor but you have the metaphor upside down: the notes are there to track the world created by the GM and consulting notes is only one way of checking on matters like secret doors (recollection, instinct, improvising, being guided by logic—-would the master of this keep have a secret door here?—-these are all ways the GM manages bringing the world to the table)

Upthread I suggested GM's conception of the fiction and you rejected that too.

In the example you give in the post I have just quoted, the GM decides if a secret door is present. The players, in learning that there is no secret door, learn the GM's conception of the fiction. Don't they?

 

[pemerton]

The difference is that the players have a direct and immediate interest in authoring a secret door right here right now as its presence will bail their asses out of some sticky situation. This puts them in a conflict of interest: gaining an immediate advantage in play vs long-term setting integrity.

Do you extend this objection to players trying to declare other action that will get them out of sticky situation, such as (say) attacking the trolls that are trying to kill and eat them? That will also change the setting - if the players succeed it now contains dead trolls and live PCs instead of live trolls chowing down on roasted PCs.

 

[Bedrockgames]

As far as I can tell, @Bedrockgames agrees with what I have quoted just above:

I do. I object strongly to the way 'fiction' and 'the fiction' and 'shared fiction' are being used and equivocated upon to blur the line between 'setting the GM creates' and 'stuff that happens in that setting at the table' in order to reduce the game to shared fiction at the table.

 

[pemerton]

Assuming deftness of play and that the chemistry between the participants isn't inherently bad, do you think its that energy, pacing, and flow (and the way the mechanics are tightly integrated as a feedback loop -feeding into and emerging from play) that do the heavy lifting of the immersive quality of play?

Put another way, do you think folks that feel they would be distracted by all of this stuff would inherently find their distractions falling away because its impossible not to get swept up by this?

And again (back to the 4e Warlord), I wonder if these trad D&D predilections were (as would be with Blades) one of the issues that a certain subset of the D&D culture had with 4e (where team thematic and tactical synergy are collected rather than distributed).

I think getting swept up in play is important. Related but not identical is a visceral sense of what is going on.

Two examples I thought of reading your posts:

* In our Prince Valiant game, the PCs had ridden north of the town of Castle Hill to confront a knight - "the best in all Britain", Sir Lionheart - who was blocking the road north, not letting anyone pass who was unable to beat him in battle. The two PC knights were defeated. The third PC asked for a joust, but the proud Sir Lionheart declined to joust with a mere squire. To which the PC responded, "Fine, I'll just continue on my way then!" and tried to pass Sir Lionheart and continue along the road. This called for a Presence vs Presence check, which the PC won - and so Sir Lionheart knighted him so that he could joust and perhaps succeed where the others had failed. The new knight then defeated Sir Lionheart (mechanically, by spending a certificate to Kill a Foe in Combat - the player chose killing and not merely knocking senseless because he intuited, from Sir Lionheart's personality as portrayed by me, that Sir Lionheart would which to continue the fight on foot if unhorsed, and the player knew that his PC had no chance of winning that fight).​

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* In our 4e D&D game the PCs in their flying Thundercloud Tower were assaulted by a dragon-riding frost giant. At one point the dragon, temporarily blinded, was hiding beneath the tower so that it couldn't be attacked by the PCs. The PC magic-user (played by the same player as the squire in Prince Valiant) conjured his imp (minor action), had it fly down to the base of the tower (move action), activated his third eye (another minor action: the imp has the Eye of Vecna in it, though now no longer under Vecna's influence, and when the invoker activates his 3rd eye he can see through his imp's eyes and has LoS and LoE from there) and then spent an action point to attack with Thunderwave (encounter power as a multi-class wizard), the plan being to blast the dragon out from beneath the tower, so the ranged strikers could attack it, and to blast its giant rider off the back of his mount so he would take 25d10 or so falling down to the bottom of the Glacial Rift. The plan didn't work, because the to hit rolls failed despite pumping multiple reroll and roll-boosting resources into them.​

One of these is a mechanically simple game. The other is mechanically intricate. But both produced compelling and vivid fiction. The participants get swept up in it. Patterns of "possibility" (ie sensible ways for the story to unfold) emerge, and are crystallised through action declarations and resolution. For me, this is what RPGing is about. It's highly immersive, in my view. But I wouldn't say that exploration (or learning, discovering, etc) the gameworld are very big parts of it. But there is definitely discovery of the fates of the protagonists!

 

[Bedrockgames]

As far as I can tell, @Bedrockgames agrees with what I have quoted just above:





In these posts Bedrockgames distinguishes two instances of imagination:

* The GM imagines something, makes it up, constructs it: this is the game world.​

​

* The players at the table imagine something, make it up, construct it: this is the shared fiction.​

He also states that the relationship between these is not symmetrical:

* The GM informs the shared fiction that is created at the table, using the world that s/he has created;​

​

* The world that the GM has created, which is used to inform the shared fiction at the table, is a mental model in the GM's mind that exists independently of the non-GM players' minds;​

​

* The players "explore" (= learn about, from the GM) the GM's mental model - the process of play includes transmission of information from the GM (drawing on his/her mental model) to the players.​

I don't think anything that Bedrockgames has said here is particularly controversial or revelatory. I believe that everyone participating in this thread has played in RPGs that fit what Bedrockgames describes. Including @innerdude.

For reasons that are opaque to me Bedrockgames objects to anyone actually explicitly stating what he very strongly implies but doesn't quite state, namely, that the process of play involves the players learning what the GM's mental model is. He will talk about the GM's mental model informating the players' shared fiction, and he will talk about the players exploring a place that exists in the GM's mind. But as soon as one joins the dots using a verb like learning or discovering (to describe the cognitive relationship between players and GM's imaginative construct) or a verb like telling or transmitting (to describe the communicative relationship between the GM, as possessor of the imaginative construct, and the players) one is apparently saying an improper thing.

This isn't a fair characterization of what I am trying to say or of my conclusions (or my thoughts on the concept of 'shared fiction'----a term I don't myself embrace at all).

 

[pemerton]

I object strongly to the way 'fiction' and 'the fiction' and 'shared fiction' are being used and equivocated upon to blur the line between 'setting the GM creates' and 'stuff that happens in that setting at the table' in order to reduce the game to shared fiction at the table.

This is not an accurate description of what @innerdude said in his post. I quoted the part of his post that is relevant, and requote it here:

But setting apart the "game world" from the rest of the shared fiction doesn't make it less fictional, it just means that I-as-GM have privileged that part of the fiction more than other parts.

Like you, he sets apart the setting the GM creates from the stuff that happens at the table. And like you he agrees they are both fiction.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Like you, he sets apart the setting the GM creates from the stuff that happens at the table. And like you he agrees they are both fiction.

No because what he was saying was in service to this idea:

Until it finally clicked that there is no "world," there are only conceptions of the fiction.

That is the kind of equivocation I am talking about. Moving from 'the setting is fictional' to 'there is only the fiction, there is no world'.

But I am not interested in fighting you point by point over each little post and statement (I don't have the time). What I will say is the point where we still disagree is on whether this can be characterized as 'discovering the GM's notes'. Like I said, this is reductive, it has the metaphor upside down and I don't think it would lead to better player (I think it would lead to worse play) if you conceive of it in this way. For me, living world is a much better and more accurate model for understanding how to run this kind of game. Playing to discover the notes would just lead people to focus entirely on the notepad prep, not try to bring that material to life in a meaningful way IMO. And as I have said countless times, it is dismissive and insulting. It isn't a label anyone on my side is embracing and there is a reason for that. We've disagreed on that characterization long before this thread. I am not going to be lawyered into adopting your language.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Upthread I suggested GM's conception of the fiction and you rejected that too.

Yes, because I don't like the term 'the fiction' since it tends to blur the world with what is going on at that moment during play. I don't accept 'the fiction' a my terminology for what is going on in this kind of campaign. I accept it is fictional. But I reject 'the fiction'. Like I said, Living World is my preferred term. Others have expressed theirs. You insist on characterizing what we are doing with your own language. You can do that. But we don't have to adopt it if we dislike it.