Yudhishthira’s Dice

There has recently been a lot of chat in the blog and forum-o-sphere about the ways that stories get made in RPGs, and who is responsible for what and how player and character decisions influence the development of the story. Some of the posts that were the most influential for me in this area are: Jesse’s thread about Players and Character Failure and John’s comments therein, specifically “Even if all the conflict resolutions are decided rather than randomized, you can still have emergent story from the complex interaction of different players’ inputs.”, and Robin’s article about Linearity in RPG Plots*. The mother of it all was Vincent’s post in which he discuses Not knowing what the story means or what genre it is until after you’re done.

At this point I’m starting to see the development of three different models or genres for story development through game play. They are the linear, the gestalt, and the emergent. These three things are not fully separate from each other, but rather form a continuum that individual games infinitely shade back and forth between. I’m introducing the terms not to box things, but to allow people to talk about what they are and are not looking for in game.

Linear play is that in which the GM or other central figure has the primary control of the plot and its development, from background information to the direction and evolution during play. Extreme linear play is the all known and all feared railroading, in which the PCs are able to interact with the color of the game, but are fundamentally unable to alter the plot or its development in any structurally significant way.

Gestalt play is that in which the players (including GM) have enough joint authority over important choices to change the game into something none of them would have created alone. This is where I see John Kim’s ideas about the complex interactions of all the player choices creating a story that is radically different than any player would have made alone. Because all the players have some say, and because the possible number of those interactions and decisions grows exponentially throughout the game, the result of having players who can make real choices will create something that is greater and different than the sum of its parts. The result of gestalt play will be a story that none of the players could/would have told alone, but that was still guided directly by the decisions the group made and the story they wanted to tell.

Emergent play, otoh, is play that comes when the players all have the ability to make choices, as with Gestalt play, but when those choices, either alone nor as an aggregate, do not have the ability to solely determine the story. This is the kind of play that Vincent was talking about when he talked about not even knowing what story you were telling until after you had told it. In the farther out cases of Emergent play you could have situations in which everyone OOCly agrees that the story really should go one way, that it would be the best thing, but because of some IC conflict of interests (for example, other things could cause it) a contest is called that results in a radically different outcome than that which everyone thought should happen. The guy that obviously was the hero of the story turns out to be a bastard and then gets killed, or the couple that was really in really real love ends up broken up and not speaking to each other, or any other of a multitude of outcomes that weren’t foreseen.

Obviously all of these things will move in and out of each other, depending on the style of play you’re pursuing. For example, Robin is arguing that a linear clue line can still lead to gestalt story, because the decisions and actions, rather than the solving of the mystery in point form, are where the story comes from. This is where the line between “linear” and “gestalt” starts to blurr — even in the most linear GM driven stories the PCs usually get to influence color. At what point does that color influence become actual gestalt play? For me it seems that it only happens when the actual play and story are changed — so in Robin’s case it could be, but in the cast of the GM who says, “Well you got to decide she was a red-head” it probably isn’t.

There are some clear places where gestalt and emergent play differ. Many freeform games with no GM roll and no randomization offer clear gestalt play, as everyone has joint authority but the complexity of the game comes from the combination of choices, not from surprises to everyone. OTOH, there are some games in which you do not even know who the protagonists are until play is well underway — the players don’t know that just because they are playing a character (if they are playing a single character, which isn’t always the case in this type of game) that it will turn out their character is important to to the story. It may end up being that their character will only be supporting cast — even if they’re playing lots of characters all of them may end up being only support, no matter how much they wanted to be the hero.

Obviously, however, most cases fall somewhere between these extremes. When you all are making strong gestalt type choices, but still have random task resolution, where does the line get drawn between what you’re all choosing and what randomly comes out of the game due to surprises from the dice? And how different are the choices that come from pre-meditation and the choices that come from reaction in actually determining the story?

I think it is worth noting, though it should be unnecessary, that none of these modes are inherently superior to the others. Not even the linear mode is a bad thing, as Robin argues in his article. They do, however, give radically different benefits and styles of play and that should probably be kept in mind when playing (or designing, I suppose). If you want a game where the characters go from point to point chewing scenery and mocking genre tropes, emergent play is probably not your best choice. If, otoh, you want a story that surprises everyone and sparks off revelations and decisions that would never spark without the sudden changes and unexpected developments then a linear style isn’t your best tool.

P.S. Because Fang brought this up: let me say the above only really applies to games in which most of the players are trying to tell a story. Those that are just trying to play a game, or even just play characters without concern if what they do creates story in any way, will probably not find these terms useful. Nor do I think they should be applied to such play unless those playing find it useful to do so. In short, if you aren’t telling a story, don’t worry about how you’re telling a story.

-

*I did a post not to long ago in which I argued a position similar to Robin’s, but with the twist that in a typical mystery the story is about the crime and its solving, and not about the characters as much. If anyone knows where I made that post, I’d appreciate a pointer to it because I can’t find it now to save my life.

I see some folks talking about reward system getting it confused with simple feedback. This is a mistake because while feedback can be part of a good reward system, it alone does not a reward system make.

So, what the hell did I just say? Like, not in crazy moon language?

Okay, a reward cycle in a game is what you get out of playing that game. Now all games, hopefully, give you “fun” — but a reward cycle for a specific game is the specific things that make up fun for a specific game, turned into a (hopefully) positive cycle that encourages more of that type of fun to come out. This, in many RPGs, has to do with how the character, world, or mechanics change in order to let you do more of the things that are causing you fun. In general a reward system operates at a fairly large level, and though it can be seen in the moment to moment of game, its best seen for many games when you look at the game or campaign as a whole. In Dogs, for example, the reward cycle is the ability to make moral judgments: not just about NPCs, but about your own character.

Feedback, otoh, is a systemic feature of the game and the social group you’re playing with, that gives you a cookie for being good right now. It’s the system and the other players saying “that was cool, have a sweet.” Feedback usually happens, or at least happens best, when its immediate and directly tied to an action just taken or currently being taken. In Dogs, fallout is feedback. (Other forms of feedback would be Stunts in Exalted, Fan Mail in PTA, and so on.)

Now I’ve seen a lot of folks talking about feedback as though it was the sum total of the reward system of a lot of games. In some games it may even be so, though I generally find that to be sloppy design. I’ve seen some talk recently about how if your game is supposed to be about falling in love and your reward system is nothing more than “you did a love action, get a bonus dice” you’re missing the point, and I tend to agree. Feedback is good, but alone it does not a reward system make.

There are also games that I find problematic because they separate feedback and reward system almost completely. Exalted comes to mind here, as stunts give you pretty clear feedback in the moment, and may give you a very minor tactical edge, but in general have nothing to do with the long term changes, heroic growth, or development of either the character or the world. The best they do is give you more essence, so you can use more charms, so you can fight more, so you can do more stunts… it becomes a treadmill pretty quickly unless the players find something of value that the system doesn’t easily supply. There is feedback, but it doesn’t go into the reward system at a higher level.

Now, for an example of a game in which both work together, with feedback giving immediate access to the reward system without being the total of it, I’m going to point (yet again) at Dogs. In Dogs you get feedback when you take fallout, the system is designed to encourage you to take some hits when you’re in conflicts. But more importantly, that feedback allows you to then put judgments about your character onto your character’s sheet in mechanically supported ways. Think about it, your traits are judgments about your character, and the most interesting traits are always those which say something important about what just happened and what the character learned from it and what you think about that learning. The fact that you chose your own fallout traits turns it from simple feedback (”I got experience!”) and into the first chance to judge your own character (”my character is a dick!”). The reward system as a whole then kicks in when across multiple towns your character sheet becomes a record of all the judgments on and of your character that leads you to end the characters story: either with the character as a human or a monster. Every step of the way the feedback turns over to reward, and the reward builds cumulatively to the final point.

So, just because your game has a feedback mechanism doesn’t mean you’re done with reward systems. In fact, it usually means you’re just getting started.

We all know that its a bad thing to say what is and what is not an RPG. It limits creativity on expanding the range of what the games in our hobby can do, it keeps us from experimenting and pushing our personal boundaries, and it means we can’t all be unique snowflakes while still being part of the snowstorm. The truth, however, is that among the many reasons why people do it there are a few that have valid purposes, even if they don’t find a well expressed or logical voice.

How many of us have gone on some RPG forum in the wilds of the internet and asked for game recommendations, advice, or brainstorming assistance only to have people come back with stuff that makes you blink at them like they were speaking Urdu? How many dirty game hippies go onto RPG.net to talk about Exalted and blink when someone suggests their game can be fixed by them tricking the players into following their preconceived plot? Or how many traddy borg-clones have come onto Storygames and asked for advice only to be left walking away shaking their heads when they were given advice about “protagonists making story altering choices” in a game that’s about guys with medieval weapons killing shit and taking its money?

Calling all RPGs “RPGs” and nothing else is good in as much as it reminds us all that we’re all playing games, that we’re not doing things that are so different from each other, and gets us to try things that work differently than other games we’ve played. But it can become an absolute disaster when we don’t have terminology to describe the kinds of games that we are currently playing, looking for advice on, or trying to set up and we walk into a room together and try to talk about all our games as though they were the same basic activity.

Awhile back I talked about GNS as genres. I also said that I thought they were only the start of genres in RPGs, and John Kim quickly came in and kicked in other things — the dungeon crawl (possibly a sub genre of gamism, but certainly not all gamist games are dungeon crawls), and fast cinematic action or diceless fantasy as other genres developed outside the Forge. I think those are all valid genres too, though they operate at a slightly different level than GNS do. But what all of these genres have in common is that they give a defined style of play while not insisting that other styles of play are “not RPGs” they are just “not the RPG I’m playing right now.”

In our community I think we need more ability to signal and flag for that latter thing. GNS does it a little, dungeon crawl vs cinematic action does it a little too. But other genres such as “GM centric” or “Player plot controlled” can help as well. (And most of these things are terms people already use, but only randomly and semi-sloppily.) The fact that we often can’t say to people, “Oh, you’re doing that in your current game…” and instead act as though what we’re suggesting is universal to all RPing (”you don’t have a GM?!”) is what sends a lot of people down the “that’s now an RPG” tunnel. Because they know that what we’re talking about and what they’re talking about are not the same things, and in absence of proper language to discuss the differences the easiest way out is to deny that we’re doing the same thing at all.*

There has been lots of good work done in this field already. Aside from GNS, Ron has done lots of talk about the various genres of GM-full to GM-less games, and games with different leadership models. Others have given us long standing definitions of things like hack and slash and All Roads Lead to Rome games. I think we need to extend and further develop these genre types, not as boxes to put our games into, but as tools to let us communicate better. Being able to say, “I’m playing a GMless game with lots of focus on cinematic action and no predetermined plot and I need a cool looking villain” may sound a little awkward, but it has to be better at getting specific, focused, and helpful responses than saying, “I’m playing an RPG and don’t know what to do next week” will.

The short of it is, we may all be playing RPGs, but we aren’t all playing all games the same ways. At this point we have a lot of different communities of practice, and the interactions between them are constantly frustrating because of the lack of common language and standard acceptance that others have genres of play that are different than ours while still being fun and functional. I think we need to start moving past that if we want to get any kind of “cross disciplinary study” action going in our hobby.

Else wise we’re going to continue camping out around the tower of Babel.

In that vein its probably worth checking out:

John Kim’s History of RPG Design Fashion

and

Fang’s talk about what genres of RP there is that may or may not be RPGs and Fang plays the Name Game
-

*This is the best case scenario. There are also lots of people who are doing these things as rhetorical power plays of various types. I’m less concerned with them right now, as you can’t communicate with people not interested in communication where you can help bridge a gap for those who really want to talk but don’t know how.

In the Swine-Nation Blogosphere there is often talk about “dangerous play” or “edge play” and how to do those, or use those, or whatever. Its a term that on the surface seems pretty self-explanatory, certainly not jargony at all. It is also, I think, a term that causes some confounding of understanding when we all start using it together, assuming we all are speaking of the same thing.

Let me give you some example of things that I’ve heard people talk about when they say “danger” in an RPG:

I had a friend, years ago, who was a hard core D&D player. One day he got playing an Exalted game with Mo and I. In part of the game Mo cried, out of character, because of the way her character (who wasn’t crying in character) felt about the horrible situation his character was in. So ICly there was this scene with stone-faced stoics facing horror without flinching, while at the table Mo is in tears. The player, after the game, said that he’d never even really considered that you could have that level of an emotional reaction to a game or to a character. He thought that it was cool, but that he couldn’t do it himself because it would be too dangerous. To him having any real emotional reaction to game was a dangerous thing.

I’ve known a lot of people who find Dogs in the Vineyard dangerous on first blush. The game has a religion that looks like a real life religion, deeply embedded into the game. Even when they find out the game wasn’t written by someone pushing a religious agenda it seems to them to be a dangerous thing because it could either a) still force engagement with religious ideas which is against their personal morals in various ways and/or b) start real fights between the people at their table who come from different religious backgrounds. So to them, bringing in ideals and dealing with them at the table in a mixed social situation is a dangerous thing.

I’ve recently talked to other players who do what they call “mask play” or “possession play” in their games where they use theatrical mask techniques in order to subsume themselves into their characters to the point at which they hit a trance state and lose some part of their conscious personality for the duration of the mask play. They don’t see what they do as being dangerous, but other people told about their games often recoil as though a red-hot poker was being waved at them with a variation of “that sounds too dangerous!” coming from their lips.

In a recent game that I ran was packed full of clashing religions and characters who lost all faith and belief, characters who had all been sexually abused and controlled by their mentors in one way or another, rape, PC’s children being murdered, lies and betrayal between PCs, more than half the players at the table breaking down into tears or being so afraid to speak that they couldn’t get their voice out at more than a whisper, and other things besides. Even more important to the “danger” was the fact that in the circle of players around the table we’d had people who had IRL, faced sexual trauma, questioned their sexual identity, were in the process of becoming parents, losing their religion, or recovering from abusive relationships. All of those issue found direct mirrors in the trauma of the PCs at the table, and more than one person I’ve talked to about the game has told me how dangerous it sounded to cross that line. And yet, when playing the game ir was rare for any of us to consider it dangerous. There was a point at which one of the players felt she had no right to introduce something particularly traumatic without group permission, but once given permission we didn’t consider it that dangerous anymore. We had more danger in disagreements about who got spotlight time.

For my last example, there is this game “Zero at the Bone” in which while making characters you have to select a “wrongdoing” from a hat for your character. The game text describes ths process like this: “Now for the wicked part, which one reviewer described as “dangerous and wrong.” Every player writes down the worst thing someone whom he or she knows has really done on a slip of paper, and all the slips go into a hat. The GM reads them all. Now, every player picks a paper from the hat, and his or her character is now conceived as having done that thing, which is called the Wrongdoing. The rest of playing the game may be seen, perhaps, as Karma (the philosophical concept, not the game-mechanics term) in action.”

When I’ve told some people about that bit of danger their response is “I could never do that.” Others respond with “Cool, but it would be even better if it was your own worst thing ever — that might actually make it actually dangerous!” Hard core Truth and Dare players may not even find that all too out of bounds, but I know it makes my skin crawl a little.

I am not saying who is wrong and who is right about danger at their table. I am, however, encouraging folks to figure out the thing(s) that they think of when they say “danger” in regards to an RPG, and how they may or may not be the same thing as what others are speaking about when they use the word.

Introduction to Genre Theory

Everyone knows what a genre is, right? It’s a way of dividing up literature, putting it into categories like western if it has cowboys and SF if it takes place in the future, right?

Well… from the standpoint of Genre Theory that’s only part of the story, and one that is often inaccurate to boot. So, before I go further into the RP theory part of this article I’m going to have to take a few moments to explain what I mean when I use the word “genre” and why it can be a useful word to use, especially when analyzing GNS and playstyles. Also, note that I’m going to be talking about things in terms of rhetorical Genre Theory, and so other schools of thought may say other things about the issues I’m addressing. Many people, for example, put a big emphasis between “genre” and “media” — whereas I’m going to talk about media as just another division of genre. This isn’t to be absolutist, its simply to be coherent.

In terms of Genre Theory genre is a classification of material (”texts” in rhetorical academic circles) that is socially constructed as part of people’s attempt to frame, interpret, and understand the material. It is, in essence, a conceptual framework that helps enable people to use intertextual comparisons in order to understand the current text both internally and in terms of how it relates to the world around it. Genres are defined both in terms of the similarities between texts within the grouping and in terms of the differences of the texts within the grouping, because the series of repetitions and differences is one of the primary ways that people build classifications and use them to cement understanding.

Okay, that was brutal to anyone who hasn’t had Barthes and O’Sullivan shoved in their left ear by sadistic rhetoric and semiotics professors. So let me try to break it down into some easier to follow ways.

First off, it means that a genre is not an absolute. They are based on factors of social understanding and not scientific classifications like those used in biology. As Steve Neale says, “genres are not systems: they are processes of systematization.” What this means is that some people may call Little House on the Prairie a Western and others may say it isn’t. Neither is objectively correct, both are simply using the genre terms to explain how they view and understand the material. In addition a genre work that plays against genre expectations can still be seen as being in the genre, because it is specifically using the tropes of the genre as a way to construct and communicate its meaning.

This is because the people that define genre are “all of us.” Now, who that “us” is and how democratically that definition is split up among “us” can vary a lot between situations. In movies, for example, movie critics opinions of what genre a movie falls into are probably going to have a lot more to do with its public classification than Joe Bob of Brooksbirdge Alabama’s will. However, two hundred years after a work has been written and entered the public consciousness the weight of public opinion on a work may change the genre it is seen as being a part of. (This happened with Shakespeare.)

The key to it is, as Robert Hodge said, “genres only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them.” So as to if LHotP is a western or not is going to depend on who has the social weight to make decisions about that at the given moment that you’re trying to understand what LHotP is, means, and where it fits in your view of the world. Which yes, also means that part of genre classification is personal – as the construction of meaning is always split between the world and the group and the self.

Second, it means that genre cannot be determined by a simple listing of surface factors that populate works in the genre. So just because someone is wearing Stetson, riding a horse, and shooting a gun does not inherently make the work a Western. It takes more than that to really situate a work as a Western. However, at the same time many genres are heavily signaled by their surface factors — so the moment you see a six shooter and a cowboy hat your brain will probably, at some level, start trying to figure out if you’re dealing with a western. How important this is depends on the surface symbol and how central it is to a genre. A cowboy hat and six shooter have a lot more value to one genre than, say, lipstick has to another. So while you can’t fully separate the surface symbols of a genre from a genre, you can’t fully rely upon them to situate it either. After all a Garth Brook’s video is, in most people’s mind, not a Western, even if it is country western.

Third, in Genre Theory the “genres” we’re talking about aren’t only the standard literary and cinematic ones you’re probably used to thinking about. Western is a genre, certainly, as is Science Fiction. But movie is a genre as well, as is novel. This is because the medium of a work has a vast effect on the way the work is classified, understood, and systematized in our world. Just as you can go into a bookstore and look up “western” vs. “horror” you can go into a WalMart and look up “DVD” vs. “Book.” And if that breaks your brain, some rhetoricians extend the meaning of genre even further to include nearly all types of communication that are systematized (which, arguably, is all of them).

To give an example of this, I’d heard it argued in the past that a prescription is a genre. Yea, sounded funny to me at first too. Then I went to India and got a prescription from a doctor there while I was having allergic reactions to stuff in the air. When I went to look for the prescription the next day I had trouble finding it, my eyes passed over it three times before I realized it was right in front of me. The reason for this is I was looking for a prescription – you know, something written on a doctors pad with (usually) letterhead, official stamps and times, and the doctors signature, probably on a piece of paper of a size between a postcard and a half sheet of paper. All my life that’s what a prescription looked like. This, however, was a scrawl of the names of some medicine on a blank sheet of A4 paper. No signature, no specific numbers of pills, no letterhead or date or anything. So even though everything that mattered was there (it was a note from a doctor that would get me medicine from a pharmacist) because it had so many differences from my idea of the “genre” of a prescription I couldn’t recognize it when I wasn’t consciously thinking about it.

Now the thing that ties all of this together in Genre Theory, and the reason anyone thinks this crazy crap is important, is that under this model looking at how and why people construct genres tells you a lot about what they value, how they construct meaning, and the ways in which they communicate. At the less ethereal edge of such studies people have spent a lot of time learning how genres help us communicate, share information, and work together to build meaning and collaborate on communication and creative endeavors.

Which brings us at long, long last to….

GNS and Genre Theory

If you’ve stuck around this long it should come as no surprise to you that I’m about to suggest that GNS are, in fact, genres. Specifically, they are genres of play direction. Surprise! Now what does that actually mean and why am I wasting your time in saying it at such length?

First, I am specifically calling them genres of play direction because they are genres about how we structure and understand the play of the game at the creative and social level, rather than the content genre of the game or the genre of creativity we’re using. Our genre of creativity, we mostly agree, is “Roleplaying Game.*” Our genres of content are things with the more familiar genre labels: Western, Horror, Sci-Fi, etc. GNS aren’t about those.

Also, GNS aren’t (directly) linked to specific techniques that are used in play, in much the same way that literary genres aren’t directly linked to surface content. Shared narration, for example, does not make a game Narrativist – it might be a clue pointing towards it, but in and of itself is not a defining feature or even particularly good clue as to Nar play. Ron Edwards recently put it this way:

We are talking about whatever goal/priority/agenda is shared among all of you at the table, and mutually reinforced throughout the rises and falls of play… My take is that, in discussion of our own actual play, we always tend to focus on the distinctions and differences among us, which is why people are always asking me if Bob scratches his ass during play and Jane doesn’t, isn’t that some kind of CA clash? The answers you get to direct questioning about goals will vary, because people are always focusing on style and technique, not on expressed/active goals and shared priorities.

I recommend looking over my discussion with Levi and the bicycle racing analogy that seemed to work so well for him. If you ask bicycle racers why they do it or what they want, they can potentially go on about all manner of wild extrapolations or focusing on some technical or organizational detail - completely missing the fact that they are all, actually, engaged in racing against one another. It’s so obvious to them that it presents no target for reflection…

You will find that a CA, if present, operates more like a “value system,” or a context for standards that apply in some way to all parts of the Big Model in action. Another way to look at this is to say, “What is so functional (consistently fun) about this activity that this group continues to play this game together?”

So what we’re looking at isn’t ways to all have cowboy guns together, or even to all play immersive together. What we are looking at is a way to build a shared understanding of the goals and boundaries of play and communication in play that results in a game that we are all playing together, working at one and the same time towards the same goal. They become genres because they give a set of forms, tropes, and materials the systematization of which gives guidance and understanding to how we structure play.

In that mode I have to argue that GNS have been very successful for a lot of people. GNS genres give valid, functional ways to play. They build shared understand and so give a thing to play with or off of that gives coherence. They give us, in short, a way to systematize our understanding of play in a way that lets un know how to use it to accomplish specific goals and actions as well as the limitations of what we can and cannot do as part of the game.

Want to know why it is so important that we have these genres, why, in my opinion, it has been worth the sound and fury around their discussions to get to the definitions we’re now developing? Well let me refer to an article by Thomas Erickson about people collaboratively writing limericks on the internet, and why it was possible for strangers to get on and quickly start writing poetry together. He says:

Limericks are a genre. As a consequence, they have a regular form with well understood patterns of rhymes and meter; their content is less well-defined, although they are often about people and they are often funny, or at least absurd; and while perhaps classified as poetry or verse, their purpose is primarily entertainment… Because limericks are a genre, most people understand these things. All that they really need, in addition, is to understand the turn-taking protocol, and once that is grasped, everyone knows what can be done. At almost any point in the conversation, it is possible to say where the conversation is with respect to its goal, and to understand what must be done next to move it in that direction (or to disrupt it!).

Genre is useful because it shifts the focus from issues such as the nature and degree of relationship among “community members”, to the purpose of the communication and its regularities of form and substance. To the extent that people understand a genre - what it’s for, how it can be used to accomplish particular actions, and what allowable moves are - they are able to participate in coordinated, coherent interaction within it.

That sounds pretty much like what Ron has said about GNS. They move the game from being about what each person does to “what we are doing together” and they give regularities and understanding that allow the people at the table to do it all together. They form a genre of play expectations and goals that allow us to work together to build coorditnated, coherent interaction.

Now, an RPG is obviously more complicated than writing a limerick. However, that only increases the need for people to have a goal, structure, and social focus that allows them to move forward together rather than pulling against each other in different directions. G, N, and S all allow for such a goal, give that structure of play that allows us to know where the “conversation” of the game is and to understand what must be done in order to move it in a given direction.

The thing about it is that, in my view, GNS are not three exclusive ways of doing this. They are simply the three most publically developed ways of doing this. I see them as modes of play that have been communicated, codified, and given coherence and explination — but I also don’t see them as being essential nodes of contact that are the only way to play. Just as you can find a lot of genres between a poem and a novel, and off to either side, I think there is the potential to find other genres around GNS.

For example, there is the possibility that individual groups of people working together for a long time (Communities of Practice) need such over-riding genres less. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, they know each other and so may be able to build coherent play based on mutual understanding. If the members of the group are either willing to share time or have a strong sense of negative capability they may never develop a genre of play direction, but still have functional play. Sure, it’s “genre incoherent” but if the result is fun for everyone, then its their choice to go with it. There may be “wasted energy” as they move in different directions, lacking that coordinated, coherent interaction - but not everyone seems to need that. These groups could be seen, according to Erickson’s definition above, to be playing genre-less, or at least genre-light, and so they don’t have the same structure to guide the coordinated effort towards a common goal.

However, and more importantly in my eyes, building a joint language based around common group practices with shared goals over any length of time will, I argue, lead to the development of a new genre of play specific to that group. I know that, for example, my Exalted play with Mo, Nicole, and Gary was a thing very specific to us and not always recognizable as the same game that other Exalted players were experiencing around their tables. And yet if we were to sit down and play another such game we’d be able to do it quickly and easily, because we developed a genre of play direction. At the same time, however, I have never been able to comfortably fit what we did in that game into a GNS slot. It was a “hybrid” game as far as I can tell. However, when a hybrid game becomes a way to play in and of itself, hasn’t it actually become its own genre? Its own way of systematizing and understanding the forms that we work with and use while we play?

Given that I think we should look at the fact that limericks worked better than elegies in the online poetry example above. The more tightly a genre is focused the easier it is for people to work together to complete a good example of the genre — or for that matter to play against the genre and succesfully make something that isn’t genre normal but is still coherent and meaningful. To this date GNS, because they have been the only three, have all had to be wider and less specific than they perhaps could have been if there were more directed genres to fill the space. Sim play is particularly damaged in this regard, as even among longterm Forgeites there is a lot of honest confusion and disgagreement as to what makes the genre we know as Sim. It has so many things, so little systemitization, that it becomes almost useless except to use to look back on a game after the fact and say, “Oh, maybe that was sim.”

I have to wonder if this lack of specificity is one of the reasons we’re seeing more call towards games that blurr the lines between boardgames and RPGs. Because in a very specific heavily designed game the game itself has more of an ability to specify and control the genre of play. That such specific control is needed may, in part, be due to the fact that there isn’t enough structure found elsewhere in the discourse of the community and so it has to be implemented at the level of the individual game. The current level seems rather unhappy, with Nar’s “address premise” being both too narrow and too vauge in some ways and Sim being a floundering mess in most discussions. (Ironically most people seem to grock Gamism no problem — possibly because its the genre that shares the most definition with the “comman man” definition of game.)

So why, to this point, have we been so concentrated on these three genres if there are more possible genres out there to develop? And especially if we aren’t getting the most milage out of the potential by having only three? Well, there are three reasons, and how good or bad they are I’ll leave up to your judgment.

The first is that people have been willing to work both very hard and publicly to develop these three genres into coherent, functional sets of tropes that build functional games when used in a more or less straight-forward way. Ron, for example, has busted his ass over and over in order to help other people learn this new genre of play in which they have protagonists who address premise, and he and guys like Vincent have put a lot of work into explaining how and why and wherefore this group of tropes and ideas builds functional play. At this point G, N, and S are all (with S being slightly less so) developed genres that have strong structuring principles that can be used with comparative ease and confidence. (Comparative, mind you.)

The second is that these three genres fall into three general areas where people have been historically playing, trying to play, or wanting to play. They sort of were formed up in the center of a big stew of ideas, each taking a point in the vast sea of it and shoring up their slopes until they were built into castles. So, this history of RPGs and RPGers interests has also had a helping hand in defining where people put their energy and focus. Really, it isn’t like the Forge or RGRPGA invented these out of nowhere. They saw things people were doing and wanting to do and developed systems for classifying, systemetizing, and understanding them. That they then got the line between “things we’ve seen” “thing that work” and “things that are essential to the division of meaning” a little blurred is not only natural, but pretty much the default for emerging schools of thought.

Finally, let us remember that “genres only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them.” There have been organized communities of practice and design that have put a lot of their time and effort into defining and enforcing the definition of these genres. This has had effects both good and bad, and how it will play out in the end is very much still in question. However, I think it worth noting before some of our anarchist tendencies get to up in arms about the idea that “those guys” evilly “enforced their rules on us” that in genre theory we’re all enforcing rules on each other all the time. There isn’t any malice in it, its just the way social communication and the development of ideas happens. In fact, like it or lump it, I still feel we owe a debt of gratitude to the people who did such hard work over so many years.

So, at the end of this long, long clump of ramblings, these are the ideas I want you to take away:

GNS are genres. They are systematizing modes of forming RPGs into regular methods of joint communication and creative building that have been regulated and pioneered by groups of people working to understand and systematize the vast morass of RPG play. They have given us powerful and important tools to use, play off of, and learn from about the ways that we can us genre to form coherent ways of playing game. And most amazingly of all, they can do that even if we reject the current models. I personally see them as being very valuable and as useful tools to getting a group into a place where they can communicate together rather than working apart. However, I also believe they are only three of a multitude of possible genres and that we need to be open to the idea of other modes of play becoming full genres in and of themselves.

Okay, now if you’re still awake, go ahead and ask the questions.

.
.
*Although it makes for an interesting study to see the shift in terms to “Storytelling Game” and how that relates to the rule that “genres only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them” and the idea that genres help us order and understand the world. Think there may be an agenda there? It’s also worth noting the constant debate that goes on around how we are to understand RPG in the context of other creative genres like film or literature – and the struggle over how much theory we should import from other genres to define and structure our own. We always are getting power by defining our world the way we want to rather than the way others want to, its just inherent to the way human monkeys work.

So Mo’s long anticipated series of posts about immersion will not be happening because she’s giving up on the term immersion.

She will, however, be talking about getting really into your character socket with a cathartic goal for an emotionally based payoff. Its already started, and you should check it out if you were interested in the artist formerly known as immersion.

Push Volume 1 is now on sale.

For those of you living under a rock, Push is the new journal of RPG esoterica, design, and theory that was put together by Jonathan Walton. The first volume has essays by the inimitable Emily Care Boss, Eero Tuovinen, and the badass John Kim, as well as games by Jonathan and Shreyas Sampat. It also has guest commentary by the cool kids: Moyra Turkington, Jessica Hammer, Annie Rush, Paul Tevis, and Victor “I’ll kill your gazebo” Gijsbers.

Oh, and me. But don’t let that stop you from checking it out.

(And you have no idea when writing “RPG esoterica” how badly I wanted to write “RPG erotica.”)

Right now Thomas is interviewing Mo over on his blog, Musings and Mental Meanderings. It’s quite an interesting read for those of you who may not have heard Mo’s gaming history.

I’d like to call special attention to her second reply where she talks about her experience with “soap” play live on stage — and the way that their blocked scenes resemble and do not resemble scene framing, scene targets, and that odd and illusive form of authorship in which people still create both character and story despite not being in directory control nor having final say over the shape of the story. It seems, to me, to point to a divide between authoring your character and authoring the story that has been under explored to this point. I know that it would explain a lot of why I can’t be comfortable playing in trad games while I can GM them with no problem — I am not a good author of character, only a good author of story. So when I can’t author the story in a moderately direct way, I choke. Mo, otoh, has a perfect background for authorship of character as primary and is used to indirectly pulling the story through character focus — which may be why she has a harder time GMing.

Anyway, my blathering speculations aside, it’s interesting stuff. Check it.

I love history. Been learning it all my life, since 6 month old me was read “A Study of History” by my graduate-school attending father. You should ask Mo about our trips together, and how I have to stop and read every historical plaque and see every historical landmark and go to every historical recreation and read every book on the history of wherever we’re visiting. She puts up with it well, but even she gets short on patience sometimes because my love of history is consuming.

It’ll be no shock, considering the context, that I also love RPGs. So you’d think it would be chocolate and peanut butter when the two go together, right? That I’d be constantly up to my eyeballs in historical RPG play and all of it would rock and all of it would roll. And yet I’d say less than 20% of my RPGing history has been playing historical games, and of that very little of it stands among my best moments in gaming. Don’t get me wrong, many of them were fun — but when asked about my top five game experiences I find myself thinking of things like Exalted and Dogs and Changeling, and not my Dark Ages or Persian Empire games. (Only my last full campaign of Pendragon, which was as much Romance as History, meets the high water mark.)

Despite this I still have a deep and abiding love for historical gaming, or at least the idea of historical gaming. I’ve also worked on a few quasi-historical games. Suryamaya, which should be out this year, is not a historical game – but is very much based on Indian history and mythology. I’m also currently being asked to look at doing a Sassanid Persian Empire game using RuneQuest OGL. Furthermore, whenever I think about my game The Wounded Lion I always think of it in terms of historical settings. Because of that, and my mixed history with it, I wanted to take a look at some of the agendas, goals, and ideas that go into playing various types of historical games and why we would, or would not, want to play them.

Reasons Why We Like (or Dislike) Historical Games

• In order to feel like you are there, as part of the history
• Playing the “what if” game. As in “what if the Romans had gunpowder” or “what if Ceasar had invaded Persia”
• Having a reason to do research, especially a reason to do joint research with friends
• Because history can give a game a “realistic” grounding that helps in the suspension of disbelief and acts as a catalyst to creativity and imagination.
• Fetishization of history, the more scholarly form of using, say, Superhero RPGs as a reason to argue about if Spiderman could whup the Flash.
• History makes a powerful tool to comment about the present through allegory or metaphor, even if you aren’t really talking about the history as fact (see any movie about Rome made in America)
• History taken factually and faced on its own makes a powerful tool for confronting, supporting, and generally playing with our notions of ourselves, our past, and our place in the world
• The massive research and books form pretty tourist books to deep scholarly works gives a deep, rich, and easily accessed wealth of material for setting. It’s also a setting that your players may already know something about and have emotional investment in. (Alternately, it could be one that they have even less interest in than something featuring elven-vulcan halfbreeds, depending on their relationship to history.)

It’s also worth noting that almost all of the above can be taken in different modes: form the intellectual strategy of the war-game “what if” to the emotional escapism of immersing in Victorian melodrama – or the reverse cognitive appreciation for the forms of French Romanticism to the deep emotional resonance of Roman what ifs.

This list is hardly definitive, its just what I came up with in reflecting on my own history and after reading essays and posts on the subjects by such field luminaries as Paul Elliott, Mark Galeotti, and John Carnahan. If you’ve items to add, or disputes with the listed items, then by all means post them to the comments!

So I’m going to stop there for now, because I want feedback on what I’ve said – especially on anything I’ve missed – before I continue on with my theorizing.

Brand is back, tell a friend.

Ottawa was lovely. Now I’m back, and this is the post in which I’m going to be dealing with a lot of the issues that you noisy monkeys have brought up in the 4 days that I was out of town. You’d think I’d been gone a month, not a piddly little half-week, with the volume of discourse you’ve all been generating. Oy.

So here are my thoughts and responses. It’s long and long, but please actually read the whole damn thing before you start to respond, or else I’m going to get cranky really fast.

Also note that I’m going to be moding conversation on this thread for at least a few days, and limiting comments to specific folks. I don’t want to talk about this as fast as fast can be, I want everyone to actually take some time to think and formulate and feel confident and safe about what they’re saying. The break-neck speed that we use in our discourse on the net is a lovely thing for getting energy up and building networks, but it is lousy, lousy, lousy, for people actually getting to understand what others are saying.

So, here we go:

Push and Pull vs. DitM and DatE

My current thoughts on this one are that Vincent’s takes on DitM and DatE are all good ones, and do relate directly to push and pull and the moment of crisis in a very real way. They are also, for the moment, the parts of push and pull that I want to look at.

However, I don’t think that DitM/DatE is all of push and pull. If you look at the history of the discussion of P/P you’ll see that there are a lot of different levels being looked at. Jess Pease in here 20×20 Room article was looking at them as two possible modes of interaction (out of possibly many) in the greater social sphere. Mo and Chris in their Deep in the Game discussion looked at them as techniques to be used in game in order to move the game in a direction. This is a much narrower definition than Jess’s – but it doesn’t negate Jess’s, it just focuses it down another level. Similarly my moment of crisis was another step down from Mo’s definitions from the Deep in the Game thread. Now Vincent’s ideas about DitM/DatE are the newest narrowing and tightening of scope.

To be specific, at this moment with DitM/DatE we seem to be mostly concerned with technical issues and how those effect game play. P/P did this too, though probably less directly stated, but P/P was also concerned with emotional and social issues and how those effect game play. DitM/DatE hasn’t gotten to talking about that yet. Not that it won’t, in time, but it isn’t yet because we’re just getting started and are looking at the process of how things work. In time we may get to talking about how those processes contribute to the social and emotional resonance of game, but we’re not there yet.

So if you’re looking at DitM/DatE and P/P and saying, “I can see how they’re related but they don’t feel the same” there is a good reason for that – DitM/DatE is just starting to explore on area and figure out how to use it mechanically and technically. That gives talk about it a very different tenor than talk about the whole of P/P and the emotional investment/social construction angle. So if your intuitive objections come down to “well, maybe, but I don’t think it feels the same” then you could well be right. It doesn’t feel the same because it isn’t 100% the same discussion, its an exploration of a new direction that came out of the old discussion.

So it is very likely that there will be much more to talk about with regards to P/P than the DitM/DatE discussion. However, for now I want to table that so that we can focus on the DitM/DatE line of enquiry and work it out and figure out how to use it in play and design to maximum potential. Once we’ve gotten somewhere with that, then we can come back and look at other issues under the bigger umbrella as seems useful or fun. I will talk about why this is causing some disconnect later in this essay, but I don’t want that to be the point – I’m just going to offer it up in way of explanation under the Digression header below. That’s just to see if I can’t help people get on the same page, and not because I want to get back into the whole issue of what P/P are and every nuance of their being.

Seriously, I mean it. Especially because a lot of people seem to get it intuitively, and just have trouble talking about it. I’m really hoping that when they start seeing some technical system issues that gradually build into social and emotional agenda issues they’ll be able to start putting names to their intuition. (Though even if they can’t, I’m not too worried. I’ve talked with several people already who, though they have a hard time isolating if “this specific little nit here” is push or pull or ItM/AtE already know the basic ways of using it in game, and that’s fully cool. It’s only really the hard-core designers who need to know huge amounts more than that.)

Also, I’d like to note that I’ve been talking about what Push and Pull are for six months now, and like Mo I’m healthily tired of the endless talk about “if this particular close to the line example is push or if it’s pull and what are push and pull anyway.” I want to move on now and start looking at things they do in game and how to use them, and DitM/DatE is something that does just that. Maybe as this develops the new angles we figure out and the new games that come out of it will help people twig to the rest in time. (Like how I didn’t really get Nar until I played Dust Devils and went “OMG!”) Maybe it will lead to something completely new. Either way its something cool that came out of the conversation, and I’d like to be able to talk about it rather than the same things for another 6 months.

So, on with DitM/DatE and the issue of resolution.

Resolution, you tricky bastard

We all know what resolution means, right? Well good, because I don’t. Or that is, I thought I did until Vincent and Ben exploded my head. Now, in terms of this whole issue and things Ben and Vincent have been talking about, I’ve been forced to reconsider some things.

To explain why, lets look at some issues, shall we? Won’t that be fun?

The Stakes Example

In stakes resolution you resolve a conflict by setting up stakes and then using a method of resolution (usually framed as fortune – the dice) to decide what happens from those stakes. So you make stakes about an issue, you consult the oracle, and you get a resolution.

Example: If Jon makes this roll then Mo will write commentary for his new magazine. If Jon fails the roll then Mo will never speak to him again.

Seems simple enough, right? We’ve got stakes, and now we’re heading towards resolution.

But, um, from where did we get those stakes? Did they magically appear out of the air? Did Jon say them, in exactly that manner? Did Mo? Did Jon say what he gets if he wins and Mo say what she gets if Jon loses? Did I, the GM in this little drama, get to modify either or both of their statements? Did the other people in the group? Did Jon start off by saying, “If I win you’ll co-write When the Forms Exhaust the Variety with me” and then get negotiated down to the commentary angle? Did Mo start off by saying “If I win, I’ll kill you, you bastard” and then get negotiated down to just not speaking to him again if she wins?

Here’s the thing: by the time we get to resolving the stakes, we’ve already had to resolve something – the stakes themselves. We’ve had to, as a group, come up with what we want the stakes we’re going to resolve to be. Some games may give one person the authority to just say the stakes and have them stick. In some games the whole group may have to agree that the stakes are good, and even non-participating parties can mess with them. The way we, as a group, get down to actually making the final stakes for the stakes resolution is, in itself, a resolution.

Judd has often come onto stakes and conflict resolution threads and given good advice. One of the best pieces is to make stakes that lead to goodness if they are won or if they are lost. In this view the group should set it up so that if Mo comments or if Mo never speaks to Jon again it will drive the story forward. Is it just me, or does it sounds like using group Drama resolution at the social level to set the stakes? If that’s true, by the time we’re whipping out the fortune to say if Mo is going to speak to Jonathan again or not, we’ve already used Drama resolution to set up stakes that we find interesting.

If I, as GM, had the ability to set those stakes myself and no one else could say anything once they were set, is that DatE of the issue of setting stakes? If I could suggest stakes (or others could) but the final stakes didn’t get set until we all agreed what was most dramatic and fitting, is that DitM of setting stakes? By the time we get to resolving what’s going on in the fiction, haven’t we already had to have some resolution at a meta-level?

The IIEE Example

Okay, the thing is not all games use stakes resolution, especially not in the way I was talking about above. (Polaris doesn’t even come close, for an easy example.) But what about IIEE? Oh that lovely IIEE. It will make our lives in this discussion even more fun and interesting.

Vincent recently talked about IIEE and how it relates to ItM/AtE, and said, “IIEE is about what happens in the fiction, ItM/AtE is what the players actually do at the table.” That is true, and I do not dispute that. What I will say is that the matrix of how they work together can be a lot more complicated than one ItM/AtE exchange determining the whole IIEE.

We all know that a game can have separate steps for resolving different parts of IIEE. The classic example is rolling to hit and rolling to damage in D&D. You roll to hit to see if you can execute the “I hit him” action, and roll to damage to see how much effect it has. You can succeed or fail at either step along the way. That’s a nice easy example.

The thing is, once you get into it, the examples don’t stay easy for long. That’s because at each stage of IIEE you can have a different resolution for that stage, depending on the system of your game. So, you could do something like this (using one, multiple, or all of these for check points for blocking/rollback/authority):

Intent: You get to say what your intent is, once you’ve said it no one else has anything to say. That’s Push/At the End.

Initiation: You have to negotiate with someone else to actually start the action, even when you’ve said you’re starting, other people can still modify it or cancel it by choosing not to buy-in. That’s Pull/In the Middle.

Execution: Once you’ve started it, you may then have the ability to say how it goes until it hits the moment of effect. Your narration is thus Push/At the End.

Effect: You could then have to stop and negotiate with others to see, now that the action is done, what the effects of its completion are. That’s back to Pull/In the Middle.

To make it worse, you may be able to use different types of resolution as well. You could use (probably normally do, in fact) Drama to determine the intent, karma to determine the initiation, fortune to determine the execution, and drama again to determine the effect. Like this:

Intent: You roll against a chart to see what the NPC’s intent is (fortune)

Initiation: You have them go about that intent in a way that seems the most likely to cause conflict (drama)

Execution: You play cards against the PCs to see if the NPC can do what they want (fortune)

Effect: Having succeeded or failed at your execution, you now narrate what happens based on how well you think the others responded to your challenge (karma)

At this point we’re starting to make a matrix, a big list of choices for things that can be combined and recombined to make that process of working through IIEE work very differently in different systems. Who has authority at which level of IIEE to say what? Is their say the end of it, or only the start of the negotiation? When do they use dice? When do they use drama? At what point is it even an issue? You can make a game, I’m sure, that always goes right to effect. (I don’t know if it would be a fun game, but I didn’t claim that either.) At that point things get simpler, but not necessarily for the best.

In Nine Worlds, for example, you use drama to set up your stakes and intents and then (depending on how you have framed it) use fortune to determine who has narration rights, and then that person gets to use DatE to determine initiation, execution, and effect. (Though I’ve noticed that most NW’s APs I’ve seen never have the narrator stop the initiation of the other person’s effort – they just stop them before they get their desired effect. It’s an interesting social gambit, don’t you think?)

OTOH, in Sorcerer you frame up your intent dramatically, roll the dice and start playing to see if you ever get to execute (Ron’s talk about how in Sorcerer you may not get to have an action every round goes here – we assume that we should get an attempt to execute every pass, but that isn’t how all games work), and after the dice are done use part mechanics (damage, currency, etc) and part narration to decide what the dice actually mean in terms of effect.

Then, combine that with the stakes issue from up above, and you start getting a “resolution tree” rather than a simple resolution. Every time we go about resolving something in game, we’re really resolving a whole host of tightly interconnected issues.

(Also, it’s probably worth noting the ways in which Intent and Stakes framing work together, but that’s a different issue.)

So, um, when are things actually resolved?

So, if you have a resolution for stakes, or a resolution for II that then leads into another resolution for E and then another for the E after it, and one of them is something in the middle and two of them are something at the end, when the hell does something actually happen?

Well, lets look at Polaris. With Polaris you can get into a scene without specific preset stakes (in fact, you usually will), have people go back and forth in multiple turns of adding, modifying, negating, and doing things in the middle. Some things will get resolved as you go – a big stack of “but only ifs” for example, may all come to pass in the fiction when someone else pulls an “and furthermore.” But even then the resolution of the whole conflict isn’t over until you hit an end phrase. When that end phrase comes up, you get your final resolution. Be this fortune at the end (”It Shall Not Come To Pass”) or Drama at the end (”And that Was How It Happened’) you know you’ve hit the end and the whole unit of conflict is resolved because you’ve gotten your end phrase.

I think there are probably invisible end phrases at the end of a lot of resolution trees. Much as it can be confusing to think about the multiple levels of resolution that may go into deciding a conflict, we all know when we get to the end – it’s when the thing at hand is finally decided. Once the conflict has been staged, with all the resolutions needed to stage it, and then acted out, with all those resolutions, and then finalized, with all those resolutions – you’re done. Now lather, rinse, repeat.

Okay, so how can pushing me off a roof be pull?

One of the issues I’ve seen brought up over and over is how can something like “I push you off the roof” be pull? Isn’t it something that demands a response?

The answer is, and I want you all to say this out loud, IT DEPENDS ON THE SOCIAL SITUATION AT THE TABLE WHEN THE STATEMENT IS MADE.

Okay, maybe I need to calm down and stop shouting. Let me back up here and address something that a lot of people have been having issues with, and see if I can clarify it in a very brief way. In communication theory one of the very basic models of how communication works is that you say something, the other person hears something, and the aggregate of those things is the communication. So if you say something meaning “Come to dinner on Friday” and I hear “come to dinner on Friday” then the communication was “come to dinner on Friday.” But if you say something meaning “Come to dinner on Friday” and I hear “Come to lunch tomorrow” then the communication is a mess of signals that involves you and me having an indeterminate meal at an indeterminate time. It’s the thing in between the intent of the speaker and the perception of the listener that is where communication happens (or doesn’t happen).

Push and pull work much the same way, they take up the middle space between what you intend to do and what the other person thinks you are doing. You can intend to push, and if I know that you’re pushing then the push can go through. You can intend to pull, and if I know you’re pulling, then the pull can go through. But if you go to push, I think it’s a pull, and start treating it like something to be negotiated over, we’ve gone into muddle land. Most of the time this probably gets resolved by whoever has the better ability to argue/coerce/convince/plead coercing the interaction into the type they wanted it to be. So you could intend to push, I could intend to pull, and we could end up pulling or pushing depending on who gets their way in the end. (We’ll also probably both be unhappy.) Thus if you’re my GM and say “It’s raining” and mean “I am saying it is raining, that is said and done don’t argue” and I say, “It would be better if it is clear and sunny” and mean “I want to modify what you said because I think you want my input now” then we get into issues. If you force it over me anyway, then it stays pull. If I get you to mod it, then your push got subverted. As with communication it’s the thing in the middle, the thing we end up communicating, that is where push and pull sit.

Luckily for us this does hook up with the resolution theory pretty well. If you think that you’re getting to do DatE and say something, and I think that you’re going to DitM and try to mod what you’ve just said… we end up with issues. If we have a good social contract and/or explicit system to fall back on then we can use that system to figure out what we are doing and why. If we don’t, we’ll end up in the same muddle as above – with the one of us that can finagle the best getting it out over the other guy. Knowing what you are doing, what the other person is doing, and who has rights to do which is thus key to keeping things flowing smoothly. So at that level being able to have system/social contract that says “we can push/DatE in situations t, u, and v; but must pull/DitM at situations w, x, and y” is just making sure we’re on the same page and doing the same thing so we have fewer miscommunications and abuses of those miscommunications.

Thus all the confusion over “is it push or pull because I say it or because the other person perceives it” is missing the point. It is both, and neither. What you intend matters, what they perceive matters, but what the social dynamic/resolution method of the game ends up actually being because of the fusion of intent/reception/and social force is what determines if it was a push or a pull.

So, given everything I’ve said above, lets consider a game where you cannot even finalize your character’s intent (first I in IIEE) until you have the approval of other players AND everyone at the table knows that explicitly. At that point we’ve got an In the Middle for resolving Intent. You say, “I push you off the roof.” But, every single one of us at the table knows that you aren’t doing any such thing. In fact, what you’re really saying is, “Can my character want to push yours off the roof?” Because until you’re done with the system for resolving intent, you haven’t even gotten the authority to want to do anything ICly yet. You don’t have authority to push me off the roof, or even have you character want to push me off the roof, until I’ve bought into it or had a say about it. Because you have to get my buy in before it happens, then it must be….

I chose this example on purpose, because most of us are used to games in which our intents, and the intents of our characters, are fully under our authority. Much as someone may be able to stop us from executing the push over the roof, they can’t stop us from saying that our character wants to. But, if even intent is something that must be done ITM, then you can’t even form an intent as a final action until after others have had a shot at it.

OTOH, if you have the authority to say “My character wants to push your character off the roof” then you’ve made a push/ATE at the intent level. Once you’ve said that is what your character wants, there ain’t nothing I can do about it. However, even then we now know that is only one part, and that it can still get turned into a pull/ITM at the Initiation level with any number of responses.

Tell me about the division ▼

Right, so back to discussing the structure of resolution, where we’ll stay until we get to the point were we’re solid enough with mechanics and systems and how they’re actually working to get back to the discussion on how they effect social and emotional agendas.

So The Thing Is

I think some of us have gotten used to thinking of resolution in terms of “conflict resolution” – which is a good thing in some ways. We should be able to resolve conflicts, and have coherent systems for so doing. But, we can’t overlook the fact that resolving a conflict is made up of a series of smaller resolutions. Many times we overlook those because they are assumed, or because someone has the authority to just make them happen. Things like framing intent, for example, aren’t often thought of in terms of resolution because in most trad games you have the authority to frame your character’s intent however you want. But if you acknowledge that in some game somewhere you could have to negotiate with others to even frame your intent, you realize that there is, in fact a choice there, and that choice is actually resolving something.

From that point, you have to play and design to make a resolution that gives you what you want out of the game. If you don’t want people to be endlessly figuring out what their intent is, make it so they have authority over it. If you want people to have to work together from the first moment, however, make that intent framing something that happens in the middle.

Now I’m sure you all have many questions. Good. For now, however, I only want comments from Vincent, and Mo so that they can tell me all the errors I’ve made, and we can work this out. From there I’ll open up a thread where others can comment. I may do this in waves, adding a few new people to comment each time, so that the thread can get multiple input without getting drowned in the competing (and not really listening) voices that tend to crush so many threads in the cold, nasty world of the net.

You’re also free to email me at the usual places if you want to talk or ask questions privately.