Why Jargon is Bad, and Some Modern Resources for RPG Theory

[AbdulAlhazred]

It appears very difficult to find a copy of Different Worlds issue 1, where this mini-RPG came from. I did find issue 2 of Different Worlds, though, where Lortz discussion what he means by dramatic focus in RPGs. I was hopeful there was something I was unaware of, because he was using language in a way that the Forge used it much later, but that article makes it very clear that he's talking to a pretty traditional RPG structure, just using "dramatic structure" and "dramatic action" to refer to things like rolled random encounters while a part is resting. I'd still like to review the original text of Cannibals and Castaways, but given the follow-up discussion the next issue, it doesn't look at all like he was talking to the same things as what Apocalypse World is doing (or any other strong narrativist supporting RPG).

You can read that article in issue 2 of Different Worlds by Lortz here.

Interesting. I don't see anything there which would indicate Steve was thinking in any way beyond stock classic D&D. His definitions are based entirely on a very stock D&D dungeon crawl example, and there's no mention of anything like the possibility of building scenes to address character concerns, or in terms of the kind of snowballing and playing to find out what happens that characterize a more modern notion of Narrativist play. His mental model assumes a group of plunderers who's concerns are political power, riches, and survival. While it certainly doesn't preclude the existence of motives and needs beyond what he defines, I can't say that he's got a notion that this could be a part of, or actual focus of, the RPG. Likewise the nature of the fiction and its relation to the different participants is extremely classic Gygaxian D&D based, with no hint that other arrangements might be possible.

I don't know how this discussion relates to the Cannibals & Castaways example mini-RPG presented in issue #1, but given that he calls this out as a follow up discussion to the issues raised in that previous article it is hard to understand why he would revert to such a classic structure as an example if he'd just invented Narrativist play! I mean, nothing in the issue #2 article is ANTITHETICAL to potential Narrativist play, it just doesn't hint at any awareness of the possibility at all, beyond the simple observation that the character's dramatic needs can be viewed as motive and a driver of play. Had he just considered the possibility of individualistic needs and the rise of resulting conflicts as a potential focus of play he'd have taken a BIG step, but it seems from just this text that he didn't make that leap.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Didn't you get the memo? @AbdulAlhazred is only anecdote until an interview with him is published by an academic press, at which point he becomes a data-point!

(To be clear: there are methodological techniques in the social sciences that can handle the criticism implicit in my remark; and the relationship between the knowledge of the research subject, and the knowledge created by the researcher, is something that has been much explored from a variety of methodological and political angles. I don't think the dismissal of AbdulAlhazred in this thread is consistent with those approaches, though.)

Right, I am not really trying to assert an authority that is beyond what is reasonable. In fact, not much at all. I'm simply observing that I, and thus by extension MANY other people who post here, probably possess quite extensive real-world experience with RPGs, including their design, aspects of RPG culture and related culture, etc. My guess is that if the cited experts the OP references were here, we could give them a pretty thorough examination in our own terms. I think they are probably going to prove to be quite knowledgeable, but not unassailable, and probably not even particularly insightful on some points.

There's a sense, particularly, in which I think that discussions of the analysis of RPGs in terms of their fine structure and how they actually work in specific instances of play, how the processes, system, participants, etc. interact in that detailed act of playing out the game, is only really addressed by a very few. I don't think this is really the thrust of, for instance, Peterson, at all, nor of Torner. I don't even think it is the primary thrust of some attempts at analysis like GDS. But when I read Baker talking about clouds and arrows and the actual unvarnished going down to brass tacks of "what is happening here" I see a level where none of these others I mentioned here have gone. There's a fundamentally different character to it, and only a limited number of other people seem to have thoroughly thought things out at that level, in which list I include Edwards. I take MY experience through the lens of what these people are saying, and I see that detailed level of what is happening and how and why laid bare.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

(Emphasis added.) To clarify, by demphasizing the importance of producing a satisfying narrative, are you saying that you're ok if the outcome of play is an unsatisfying narrative? Or are you saying that you're ok if the outcome of play isn't a narrative at all?

In either case, how do you see the label "narratativism" as applying to your style of play?

Hmmmm, personally I think the agenda is mostly concerned with something close to 'play to find out what happens'. The results may well not be a very satisfying narrative. They may have some dramatic character but if written as a story would represent horrible pacing, presentation, and quite possibly fairly inconsistent characterization, amongst other possible flaws (it might also come across as completely illogical and break suspension of disbelief for example). None of these things is necessarily a deal breaker in RPG terms though. As for '[not] a narrative at all', I don't think that is generally possible, though I guess you could probably invent an RPG that could produce something completely incoherent. I am not sure how you would play it...

As for how 'narrativism' fits as a label? I'm not entirely sure it does. I think the focus is generally on Character. Really it might be more useful to use labels that are derived from what the focus is, like Character Focused, Plot Focused, Environment Focused, etc. but honestly I am probably not the one to try to parse all that out. The existing labels at least have the virtue of already being established... lol.

 

[soviet]

I have a vague sense that this is why some TV shows fail. I like it when I am surprised, when the rules or my expectations are subverted (including unexpected character deaths). But once you get to the final season or so, Dramatic Expectations take over, and suddenly the surviving main characters are now invulnerable and wild coincidences happen to put them in the 'right place' so that the 'poetic thing' happens. Good narr play for me is about not doing that, instead it's about loading up the stakes so that every outcome is exciting and just letting the chips fall where they may (even at a risk that some threads don't quite fire, or end in damp squibs, etc).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Right, and I think this is strongly related to my observation that one of the early themes in thinking about RPGs was that if you could just make your game a perfectly immersive simulation, such that the rules literally produced, sheerly by appeal to internal logic, the milieu appropriate outcomes, then magically this would be a sort of perfect RPG where everyone would be perfectly in character and all the action would 'make sense' and produce entirely genre-appropriate outcomes. It was, obviously, a pipedream, but a whole generation of RPG designers chased their tails for years on that quest. Obviously nobody thought they would actually reach 'RPG Nirvana', but much of the early tweaking on D&D, for instance, had this general character (IE if we can only make combat realistic, then other things will follow, so we have to 'fix hit points'). My guess is this was the early genesis of all the ICE 'Law' books which, around the end of this period, were grouped together as Rolemaster.

Well, like I said, GDS was kind of a conversation between people who might have viewed it that way and people who very much wouldn't (among other things, the latter recognized that the sort of stylization I talk about with superhero games was a thing, and that you couldn't approach it just from in-setting logic and have it work properly, because parts of it didn't run on in-setting logic). If nothing else, the GDS managed to convey across that divide that it was a divide, and acting like it wasn't was doing no one any favors.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Mmmm, well, in some respects Champions can be moderately crunchy, though IIRC things like combat have a somewhat abstract aspect.

To a degree, but it still makes a pretty strong effort to have a heavy game engagement in parts of the game, especially combat; you don't see games that don't care about the game aspect doing things like the "Move By", the Hero System Block, and other related mechanics; these are not just the gestures toward being significant for game play some similar ones are in other games; they have some actual teeth.

(Noteably, I have never found another game system that felt so satisfactory to play a martial artist in, because you have such a degree of engagement and decision making).

I think it is one of those games which took GAME seriously enough to try to achieve a decent level of playability (unlike a lot of early '80s/late '70s RPGs). Still, it seems mostly focused on what I would label 'HCS concerns'.

I'll give you an example of something that tips the system's hand in how much it cares about game. Hero System movement is very much set up to largely force staying on a battleboard. Even supers with very high strategic speeds have acquired them with methods that don't mean those speeds matter (at least to anywhere near the degree) tactically. If you look at other popular superhero RPGs, its almost unique in that (though at one time M&M had it, that disappeared by 2e, and the only other one I know that does something like it is BASH UE). Its very much in many ways counter-genre (though it does serve to prevent certain degenerate counter-genre results too, but on the whole it stands out how much unlike the genre it looks in this area).

There are other examples; its notably visible how hard it was until the current edition to be really immune to handgun fire.

V:tM... Hmmmm, if it had any pretentions to be gamist in any sense, the sheer lack of quality of its rules (which the author claims is deliberate!) would seem to remove it from real consideration. Certainly any 'gamism' in that game is purely accidental! Those are my opinions on it. I think we just don't operate from generally similar definitions. 'Gamism' to me has to really be trying to create challenge and generally some reward/score kind of construct (though it may not be explicit in a lot of games).

I think, again, it was very gamist in some areas of focus, but largely out of habitualization. It was just incompetent about it. Again, there's too many things in, say, the combat system that want you to engage with it on a very detailed and specific level to be otherwise. This was the game system that was adapted for the Street Fighter game at one point after all.

 

[Xetheral]

There's a sense, particularly, in which I think that discussions of the analysis of RPGs in terms of their fine structure and how they actually work in specific instances of play, how the processes, system, participants, etc. interact in that detailed act of playing out the game, is only really addressed by a very few.

I suspect you may be right that few have gone into the "fine structure", but I think that's mostly because different types of analysis (and different styles of play!) hinge on differing levels of generality.

The fine structure analysis by Edwards, et al., definitely led to novel structures of play, and that fine structure analysis is crucial to explaining how those novel structures differ from previous structures. So it makes sense that those whose gaming preferences include those novel structures are heavily focused on the fine structure analysis that defines them.

But for those whose gaming preferences do not include those novel structures, it makes sense to me that they would focus their analysis at a higher level of generality. After all, if the games they're interested in all have similar fine structure, fine structure analysis isn't going to have anything meaningful to say about the differences between them (or the differences in preferences of the people who play them). I think that's why fans of what GNS labels as simulationism (SIM) tend to perceive the GNS view of SIM as overly reductionist: by working at GNS' low level of generality, the fine structure analysis elides the diversity found within SIM at higher levels of generality. Conversely, I think that's why fans of what GNS labels as narrativism (NAR) perceive analytical frameworks that don't take into account the fine structure differences between NAR and SIM as necessarily incomplete.

And of course, when it comes to conceptual structures, no level of generality is privileged over any other. (As a trivial example we could go to an even lower level of generality than GNS which would elide all of the diversity in RPGs found at higher levels, which I think everyone would agree would be unhelpfully reductionist.) Both those whose gaming preferences are most usefully unpacked at a lower level of generality and those who preferences are most usefully unpacked at a higher level of generality have perfectly good reasons for focusing on the level of analysis that is most useful to them personally. (But thanks to some of the less flattering aspects of human nature, it's not surprising that people vociferously defend the utility of the level of analysis that is most useful for them personally. At this point I think it's fair to say that both camps feel attacked by the other.)

Returning to the original point, if I'm right that GNS as an analytical approach is most useful specifically to those whose gaming preferences include the types of games that GNS enabled, then I think it makes sense that academic treatments of the hobby as a whole tend to focus their analysis at a higher level of generality than GNS. Preference among types of games aren't evenly distributed, after all. That could mean that the academics in question aren't as familiar with the fine structure analysis of GNS as its proponents are, or it could mean that they frame their analysis to appeal to the largest possible audience. Either way, I think the comparative absence of academic treatment of GNS's fine structure analysis is understandable (regardless of whether or not it is justifiable) as a reflection of the distribution of interests of the RPG player base at large.

 

[Campbell]

Thanks for explaining! In the various discussions of PbtA and BW, I've noticed the emphasis posters have placed on raw, visceral experience. (That wasn't part of my PbtA play, but I suspect my MC wasn't using the system fully in line with the design intent.) However, I'd previously understood that desire as interest in creating a narrative that was raw and visceral, and that a system that produces narratives of that sort was the design goal. Indeed, that emphasis on creating that particular type of narrative was where I understood the term "narrativism" to came from.

So I appreciate you explaining that in your experience the desire for raw, visceral experience is divorced from any desire for a satisfying narrative. That helps me learn more of the nuance! In your experience does the demphasis on satisfying narratives mean the term "narrativism" itself is misleading, or is there another way that you see the label "narrativism" as applying to PbtA and BW (and/or to the the goals of players of those systems)?

I'm not particularly wedded to the exact terminology. I tend to prefer the epitaphs (Step On Up, Right To Dream, Story Now) to the isms because with the isms people often try to assign whatever meaning feels right to them whereas the epitaphs are clearly terms of art. I also would change out Story Now for Visceral Protagonism if I could. With that change I feel those phrases are pretty descriptive.

 

[pemerton]

I did find issue 2 of Different Worlds, though, where Lortz discussion what he means by dramatic focus in RPGs. I was hopeful there was something I was unaware of, because he was using language in a way that the Forge used it much later, but that article makes it very clear that he's talking to a pretty traditional RPG structure, just using "dramatic structure" and "dramatic action" to refer to things like rolled random encounters while a part is resting.

I think this is a bit of an underselling of what Lortz says in the article.

His discussion of RPGs-as-cinema has resonance with Robin Laws' articulation of similar ideas. (I would assume that Laws had encountered Lortz's work, but don't know that.) You're correct that the discussion of how questions are posed and sequences resolved rests on a pretty traditional structure, including about the authority of the GM over scene-framing, stakes and content ("the art of
running an RPG lies in the game-master’s ability to order moves and sequences into a dramatically satisfying whole").

But this is interesting:

Every sequence of moves is motivated by some dramatic question. From the demonstration, we see that a game-master can determine if a sequence has ended by asking whether or not its motivating question has been answered. When a sequence has ended, the play seems to have come to a dead end, the game-master and players can determine the most appropriate course to pursue by asking if there are any dramatic questions left unanswered. If there are, the game-master can determine the best scale for the next sequence by examining the nature of its motivating question. If there are no questions left unanswered, the game-master and the players know it’s time to set new goals for the characters, and start a new adventure.​

I've had RPG experiences that would have benefitted from this advice!

I don't see anything there which would indicate Steve was thinking in any way beyond stock classic D&D. His definitions are based entirely on a very stock D&D dungeon crawl example, and there's no mention of anything like the possibility of building scenes to address character concerns, or in terms of the kind of snowballing and playing to find out what happens that characterize a more modern notion of Narrativist play. His mental model assumes a group of plunderers who's concerns are political power, riches, and survival. While it certainly doesn't preclude the existence of motives and needs beyond what he defines, I can't say that he's got a notion that this could be a part of, or actual focus of, the RPG. Likewise the nature of the fiction and its relation to the different participants is extremely classic Gygaxian D&D based, with no hint that other arrangements might be possible.

Agreed - this was how it seemed to me.

 

[niklinna]

But this is interesting:

Every sequence of moves is motivated by some dramatic question. From the demonstration, we see that a game-master can determine if a sequence has ended by asking whether or not its motivating question has been answered. When a sequence has ended, the play seems to have come to a dead end, the game-master and players can determine the most appropriate course to pursue by asking if there are any dramatic questions left unanswered. If there are, the game-master can determine the best scale for the next sequence by examining the nature of its motivating question. If there are no questions left unanswered, the game-master and the players know it’s time to set new goals for the characters, and start a new adventure.

Is this what is meant by "dramatic logic"? That bit of jargon never did get defined.