Yudhishthira’s Dice

Re-posted by request from Story Games.

I’ve been tangling with this for about a week, but I haven’t gotten anywhere. Up until Brand posted his moments of crisis clarification of push and pull, I thought I was following the whole discussion fairly well. And as I try to reinterpret what I’ve seen about push and pull in light of moments of crisis, I seem to be hitting a wall. It seems that push and pull are observable, while moments of crisis are not. But then how can the observable push and pull depend on the moment of crisis to be observed?

Now, likely I’ve got one of these two things wrong. Are push and pull things that can’t be observed, so you don’t know which you are using, if either? And if moments of crisis are meant to be observables then how do you observe them? How can you know when one happens, especially if their existence is subject to subsequent reinterpretation?

It’s possible that my difficulties here are due to a deficiency in my cognitive technology. But its becoming clear to me that if I am going to build a moments of crisis detector I need more guidance on they ways they can be detected. As far as I can see, the alternative is to accept that push and pull is simply something I can’t use.

A moment of crisis is super easy to observe. You observe them already, Mendel, you just haven’t been calling them that.

I could show you in a five minute demo, if we were face to face.

Instead, next time you play, notice when someone says something and a) whether it comes true isn’t foregone and b) if it comes true, things go forward a different way than if it doesn’t come true. Then notice the moment at which you find out / determine that it DOES come true, or that it DOESN’T after all.

“I throw you off the building!” “Do you? I want to know! Let’s find out!” …

“You do! OH CRAP!”

That’s the moment of crisis.

Keep noticing the really obvious, overt ones - the ones where there’s a space between when someone introduces the idea and when it comes true-or-false - and pretty soon you’ll be able to spot the more subtle ones too.

Vincent,

I think you’re saying that the moment of crisis is the process of synchronization associated with a contribution, rather than a particular point within that synchronization. Is that accurate?

Also, what about the importance component of a moment of crisis?

Synchronization? I don’t know what that means.

I’m talking about the moment where, as a group, you decide that it’s true or that it’s false, for good and all.

The importance component equals “if it comes true, things go forward a different way than if it doesn’t come true.”

Vincent,

By synchronization, I mean the process where the players refine and merge their personal perspectives of the events in play.

I figure these moment must occur at some points during this proces. I just don’t see how all the players can reliably know when.

As far as importance, I’m concerned because both you and Brand seemed to indicate some minumum level of importance. ‘things go forward a different way’ doesn’t seem to capture that sense of scale.

It might help to tell me how to categorically identify resolution or changes to the fiction which are definitely not moments of crisis.

Nah. We could make words about it forever but they won’t mean anything until you connect them to your actual play. Better to start now.

Notice the really, really obvious ones first - “wow, if your guy throws my guy off the building that’ll change the whole future of the game” - and work on the subtler ones from there.

And where do you stop?

Because if there isn’t a stopping point then everything in play is a moment of crisis. Which I’m pretty sure you don’t mean.

On another note, I was talking with Joao last night about this, and I came up with the following:

The importance is a minimum authority to affect that portion of the game. Which means that pulls will always be beneath that level, and so won’t unintentionally occur without other players’ involvement. Likewise, push will always require engagement on the part of the other players, because some authority must be exercised in response.

Now I have no expectation that this is correct, but it may help in unpacking moments of crisis.

You stop when they don’t matter.

If you tell me that you can’t tell the difference between what matters and what doesn’t matter, I’ll just tell you again to practice, starting with what obviously matters and refining your judgement from there.

“What matters” vs. “what doesn’t matter” is the bottom line, atomic.

Mendel, for my part I think that it is (as Vincent said) very easy for me to observe what matters to me. It is slightly harder for me to observe what matters to my group as a whole and harder still for me to observe what matters to my friends as individuals.

But learning to observe those things is a skill that I can, indeed, master. As Vincent says, pick the things that obviously matter, and refine from there.

There is a separate question, which is “What matters, to everyone, always, everywhere?” which I don’t think there is any one answer to. Indeed, the skill of learning what matters to me involves (among other things) recognizing the things that matter to other people (like having a character thrown off a building) that really don’t matter to me at all.

So if you’re asking “How can I observe moments of crisis subjectively?” then my answer is “Nobody can tell you but yourself … but you can learn to do that, so get to it.” If you’re asking “How can I observe moments of crisis objectively?” then my answer is “You can’t. They aren’t objective phenomena.”

Standard Disclaimer: Vincent and/or Brand may well disagree vehemently with anything or everything I just said. Or they might agree completely. I do not claim to represent anyone’s opinions but my own, and I accept full responsibility if my statements muddy the waters more than they clear them.

For my part, I find myself agreeing with Tony and Vincent.

“The moment of crisis” is pretty much just “a moment when something that matters to someone in a real way is about to happen.”

The only skill involved is in figuring out what actually matters to you (believe it or don’t, a lot of people don’t really know) and what matters to others you game with and WHY.

This is why I’ve said over and over again that figuring out where P/P and moments of crisis are in AP posts is often impossible without a lot of information about the game, the players, and their CA. Something that may be a big deal in many games may not be an issue at all in others, and so the only “objective” standard is the one I gave above — what matters at that moment to those people playing.

If you saying “I leave my ring ungaurded” and the theif’s play says, “So?” and you shrug and the game goes on, it wasn’t a moment of crisis. It didn’t matter. If you say it and the theif’s player trips his wig and refuses to ever play with you again, it obviously was.

Very well. If the moment of crisis skill is something that is both difficult and highly sensitive to the current situation and the players present, then it must accept some risk of failure at any given time.

Let’s say you’re playing in a group you know pretty well, and that allows you to predict moments of crisis very accurately. But you still have a rate of false positives (things you thought would moments of crisis, but didn’t turn out that way) of 20%, and a rate of false negatives (moments of crisis that you missed) of 5%. You do some pushes and some pulls, but what happens in the 20% of your pushes that didn’t turn out to have a moment of crisis, or the 5% of pulls that inadvertently did?

The reason this question is very important to me is that I do have the skill of estimating player responses in terms of rough probability. This is antithetical to a perfect skill of detecting moments of crisis (since I cannot estimate out the error). But if error can be tolerated in attempts to push and pull, then I can do so, even if it is only an 80% likely push.

The major issue I have with the DatE vs DitM alignment with push and pull is that it leaves me feeling that the form of pull in which you basically surrender narration rights to another player doesn’t fit very well into this structure (even though it does specifically feel like a form of resolution). I know that I have harped about this on Vincent’s blog, and I know that hI have backed off from trying to treat it as DatB or some such, but I am still uncomfortable with anywhere that I have found to fit it into this structure.

I shouldn’t care, as I consider the structure only as useful as its ability to describe the observed structures of play (as, I assume, does everyone - the map isn’t the territory, etc), but I am interested in what is needed to improve the map. Maybe it is something small, maybe it is something large, maybe it is merely a matter of effective layering of types of resolution system (I suspect the last of htose three).

Anyway, I’m interest to hear if anyone else form whom this formulation makes more sense has a good feel for how (for example) Moyra having her character leave herself entirely defenseless before her enemy, and leaving Brand with full narration rights about what happened next, fits into DatE or DitM.

Ick.

Forgive, please, the typos!

Charles,

You said: it leaves me feeling that the form of pull in which you basically surrender narration rights to another player doesn’t fit very well into this structure

Two things. First, that form of pull, to really be pull in my view (Mo may disagree), needs you to have guided the person’s narration. Just to be clear on that point. So if you just say “you do it” you haven’t so much pulled as just passed your turn. If you have set up some groundwork or limitations, however, then it gets on to being a better pull. I don’t think you’re saying differently than that, but I want to be sure we’re on the same page.

Second, that may be one of the areas in which P/P are bigger than DitM/DatE. It’s sort of like the difference between a square and a rectangle. All squares are rectangles, not all rectangles are squares. So it may be that the part of P/P that is most interesting to you doesn’t fit cleanly into the DitM/DatE category. Especially if you’re interested in the social and rhetorical aspects, rather than the resolution aspects.

Also, if you want to talk about the Kika example in detail, email me at the brand at gmail dot com (no spaces or nothing) and we’ll go over it.

First, that form of pull, to really be pull in my view (Mo may disagree), needs you to have guided the person’s narration. Just to be clear on that point.

I agree. That’s the “directed” part.

I totally agree that simply surrendering narration rights to someone else is not inherently pull, that it needs appropriate and effective framing of the surrender of narration rights to be pull. I referenced the Kika example mostly to ensure that the proper context was included in the example (as providing an imaginary example almost always fails to provide adequate context, and providing my own real example would take far too long), and also because it seems to me like a very interesting example specifically in relation to the DitM/DatE resolution question.

It seems to me that that was a pull that was also a form of resolution, or that determined the form of resolution, and that I have had a hard time framing it as DitM.

Actually, looking again I can see it. That style of resolution is very much DitM, in the sense that itM refers to the fact that the basic resolution (yes or no) is decided before the details of the resolution. A fate based system in which we frame the conflict and then roll for narration rights would be about as FitM as we could have (if I understand itM and atE), and this form of pull is simply the equivalent in dramatic resolution.

Instead of rolling for who controls the resolution (FitM), or doing a back and forth of descriptive mini-resolutions (DitM or DatE mediated through DatE), one player simply chooses to cede control of the resolution to another player (pure DitM), before the resolution is even determined (but after the conflict is framed). The player to whom narration power is handed has the choice of backing out of the conflict (so the conflict reaches the point of crisis with full buy in), or of choosing which character wins, or whatever they want, but the resolution (who narrates) is determined before the exact outcome.

I think that makes sense.

I’m not sure how much it matters that that sort of pull can be fit under DitM, but it felt like a serious lacuna in the idea of pull at the resolution level to not be able to describe that kind of pull.