What is the point of GM's notes?

[Bedrockgames]

If you subbed “content” for “fiction”, you have “the content.”

Now you sub “content generator” for “author.” You lose economy of word as you have to chew on 3 more syllables every time you voice/write it, but it works well enough for generically capturing “writer of song” and/or “painter of portrait” (which, for the record, I don’t understand why “author” - or “fiction” are problems especially given that Oxford English is good with it; “be the originator of-create” and “imagined events/invention”).

As above, I don’t understand the language issue, but, for a moment putting on the “this language is a problem” hat, would “content generator” and “the content” put this to bed?

I don't think it is as simple as putting it to bed by using different words. I think my problem is the fold here: the language, the level of zoom and the issue of the world versus what occurs in it. We are zooming in so much, that the process is being reduced to a binary and it isn't one. I suppose you could talk about content generators for almost anything, and it would mean something. But then you are moving beyond the idea of an author. A content generator doesn't have to be one individual, it doesn't need to be human. Everything in this world is generated by something, correct?

But I think the reason I am really pushing this point is the fundamental disagreement really seems to be centered on whether you can draw a distinction between the stuff going on in the game and the world in which that game is set. Pemerton's language, to me at least, seems to steer us towards the conclusion that there is only the stuff (what he calls the fiction). That the world is just part of that fiction. I think what we are saying is no, the world is a separate concept and the stuff is occurring in that world or being overlaid on it (at least in something like a living sandbox----there are certainly approaches where the world and the fiction become one).

This is why I fight so much over the language, because so much of the language is already loading the conclusion IMO.

 

[Bedrockgames]

How did the players in my Classic Traveller game learn that, in the complex their PCs were exploring, there was a nearly 100 metre deep shaft with a great pendulum swinging in it? Because I told them. How did I know? Because I read it in the module.

How do the players in your game learn about the setting that you as GM have created?

No, because they decided to go into the complex in the first place, and then they decided to examine the complex enough, to make choices that eventually led them to that deep meter shaft. And there are two approaches here: one in which you have a model in your mind of the complex and the players are genuinely exploring a space (however fictional) with clear parameters that matter, versus you just decide there is a shaft. Most games and campaigns are going to lean toward one or the other of these (and there will certainly be blending-----as I pointed out, sometimes the GM never even thinks if there ought to be a shaft, and the players asking about it will cause him or her to conclude 'yes, there ought to be one here'. Again, what you are doing here is zooming in so much we only see the binary of players ask what they see, the GM tells them....but anyone who has played an RPG knows the process is so much more organic and involved than that, and what drives the GMs 'decision' is going to be predicated on things like choices the players have made, what details the GM has established about the world, what ways the system constrains the GM's choices, etc.

 

[Bedrockgames]

How do the players in your game learn about the setting that you as GM have created?

By exploring it

 

[Bedrockgames]

Now you sub “content generator” for “author.” You lose economy of word as you have to chew on 3 more syllables every time you voice/write it, but it works well enough for generically capturing “writer of song” and/or “painter of portrait” (which, for the record, I don’t understand why “author” - or “fiction” are problems especially given that Oxford English is good with it; “be the originator of-create” and “imagined events/invention”).

The reason I think author is a problem is it puts us in a literary frame of mind, and results in literary analogies. This is why I keep pointing to music as an analogy because when you hop mediums you see the logic doesn't pan out the same. An author of a book is not making the same kinds of choices that a composer is, and a composer is not making the same kinds of choices a musician is improvising, and a painted is making very different choices from both. The constraints, the process, these are all quite different. The RPG medium, even more so. We are not generating fiction. We are experiencing some kind of shared imaginary event, but that is all built on stuff like setting, what leads up to the event, what choices the players make, what choices the NPCs make, etc. The problem I have is by forcing this literary analogy as an explanation (and particularly when that is paired with zooming in on one decision point in play), we are being reductive not just in what is going on, but we are reducing the scope of what RPGs are capable of.

The argument all just feels a bit like Zeno's paradox to me

 

[Bedrockgames]

Why's it matter? What's at stake? Call them the composer instead! The point is that there is imagined stuff (what I call fiction), and it's in the GM's head (at least that's how you've described a sandbox). Who put it there? And then it gets into the players' heads. How does that transmission take place?

I am not disputing that the model in the head of the GM must be conveyed to the players by words. The point is this is a very reductive description of what is going on (you are just focusing on the point of the GM transmitting a detail about the setting to the players, ignoring everything else that goes into that----which makes it much more of an organic, open process filled with exchange and with things that constrain the GM's choices: sometimes the GM is constrained by things the players choose to do, sometimes the GMs constrained by choices he or she made previously---like setting detail choices---sometimes the GM is constrained by system or die rolls). You are reducing it to a binary and it isn't. I will definitely concede, when you focus on that binary it is hard to refute. But like I mentioned in my previous post, I believe this is a lot like Zeno's paradox, where I know that I can walk to the end of a path, but by focusing in on the increments, the individual moments, Zeno makes it sound like getting anywhere is actually impossible.

 

[Campbell]

Fundamentally what we disagree on is the concept that play is an act of active creation. I do not believe that anyone is really experiencing what their character experiences or that fantasy worlds have an independent existence in anyone's minds. Actually I know that they do not and it is always something I am mindful of. We may want to feel like we are experiencing that imaginary situation, but it is a shared illusion maintained through a dramatic amount of effort on everyone's parts. Perception is not reality no matter how we might wish it to be so.

I contend that even the simple act of playing a character is an actively creative act throughout every moment of play. That there is no real version of the character that I am channeling or portraying. I am not making decisions as Ariel Matan when I play him. I am making decision for him. I want to feel like I am literally experiencing what he does, but I am not. I am sitting around a table or on a Zoom call with a group of friends and we are having a conversation where we construct a shared illusion of an imaginary place and time. Our perception, our shared illusion, and the reality are all very different things.

What I am interested in talking about when it comes to RPGs is how we really construct that shared illusion, what the conversation looks like at the table, and how that impacts our experience of the shared illusion. There are a significant number of people who want to only speak to the experience of that shared illusion and want to maintain their experience of it. I see that as a fundamentally limited conversation because it will never teach us how to do this thing or even acknowledge that how we actually do this thing matters a great deal.

 

[Maxperson]

All you said about their input is that they declare actions for their PCs. When I asked if you consider player intent as a factor in narration of consequences you didn't answer. Do you consider player intent as a factor in the narration of consequences?

So player intent wasn't a part of either #2 or #5. This is what you said.

"(2) GM unilateral (or close to unilateral) authorship in the moment of play, which is like an ad-libbed version of (1);"

When I DM, I have nothing like unilateral authorship. The players and I are both authoring the moment. The player through his actions and roleplay(which you seem to constantly ignore when responding about this), authors a significant portion of the moment. I through the NPCs and world author a significant portion of the moment. Often, the player side will be greater than mine, and often the reverse. Never is it anything close to unilateral unless no PCs are involved. The narration of results of the two sides' authorship is mine, though. Unilateral(or close to it) authorship would require me to not on DM, but also play the PCs.

You also said this.

"(5) GM authorship in the moment of play based on constraints that emerge (significantly, probably not exclusively) from the player's play of his/her PC;"

That sounds exactly like what I described above. Huge constraints are placed upon me by the player's play of his PC.

As to your moved goalpost question, sometimes. Sometimes the player's intent is a factor.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Fundamentally what we disagree on is the concept that play is an act of active creation. I do not believe that anyone is really experiencing what their character experiences or that fantasy worlds have an independent existence in anyone's minds. Actually I know that they do not and it is always something I am mindful of. We may want to feel like we are experiencing that imaginary situation, but it is a shared illusion maintained through a dramatic amount of effort on everyone's parts. Perception is not reality no matter how we might wish it to be so.

I contend that even the simple act of playing a character is an actively creative act throughout every moment of play. That there is no real version of the character that I am channeling or portraying. I am not making decisions as Ariel Matan when I play him. I am making decision for him. I want to feel like I am literally experiencing what he does, but I am not. I am sitting around a table or on a Zoom call with a group of friends and we are having a conversation where we construct a shared illusion of an imaginary place and time. Our perception, our shared illusion, and the reality are all very different things.

What I am interested in talking about when it comes to RPGs is how we really construct that shared illusion, what the conversation looks like at the table, and how that impacts our experience of the shared illusion. There are a significant number of people who want to only speak to the experience of that shared illusion and want to maintain their experience of it. I see that as a fundamentally limited conversation because it will never teach us how to do this thing or even acknowledge that how we actually do this thing matters a great deal.

you are putting words in our mouths. Obviously these things are created. I think what we are saying is there is an imaginary playing field and there is more going on than just the GM making things up (and there is more than simply what is happening in that moment of play: setting is established, history is established, etc. You are not 100% free to have your character behave and do whatever. The character may be fictional but they exist in the sense that you have established things about them that shape future behavior. For example the hulk doesn’t exist, but we have an agreed upon sense of what the hulk looks like, what happens when he gets angry, and what his personality is. further it isn’t simple creative choices about ‘the fiction’. Often we are acting through life’s in play (even the GM is doing so). And there are rules mediating the process

 

[Bedrockgames]

You also said this.

"(5) GM authorship in the moment of play based on constraints that emerge (significantly, probably not exclusively) from the player's play of his/her PC;"

That sounds exactly like what I described above. Huge constraints are placed upon me by the player's play of his PC.

As to your moved goalpost question, sometimes. Sometimes the player's intent is a factor.

pemerton may have meant something else by it but looking at this quote and your post, this is also very important in my sessions

 

[Bedrockgames]

What I am interested in talking about when it comes to RPGs is how we really construct that shared illusion, what the conversation looks like at the table, and how that impacts our experience of the shared illusion. There are a significant number of people who want to only speak to the experience of that shared illusion and want to maintain their experience of it. I see that as a fundamentally limited conversation because it will never teach us how to do this thing or even acknowledge that how we actually do this thing matters a great deal.

But if that is the case, we have talked about that. I've posted plenty of examples of what I do, how characters are run, etc. I broke down what it involves. Maybe the tools we talk about, the open methods for handling the exchanges at the table, don't work for you: that is totally fine. But I have pointed to how the GM in a living sandbox needs to see things in the setting as pieces that can move and can even have a volition (imaginary volition but volition you can give clear parameters to: i.e. "Jake wants to become an immortal at all costs but also wants to protect his mother in her old age: he believes the Stray Arrow Society is thwarting his efforts to achieve immortality"). What we are saying is when you lay out the pieces right, when you honor their volition, when you honor the setting parameters you have established, when you honor the things players do and try to do, and don't view yourself as 'the author', it makes play very different. The living part of living sandbox is stuff like the volition of NPCs. It is that this is a world with responsive and active things in it, and the GM is largely expected to act through those things (not act through wanting a particular encounter or scene)