Giving them what they want

Roleplaying games have a unique property that no other media shares- it can become the game that you want, as you’re playing it. This unique factor actually has been a Big Fucking Deal for rpgs, though few folks have really sat down and thought about how it gets handled in play.

Traditional games have left this task solely in the hands of the GM, usually without explicit guidelines or rules to help them figure this out. The GM usually has to try to guess or elicit or read the players’ desires, utilize the power of setting up scenes, controlling the spotlight, and creating interactions with characters and challenges to meet the players’ and adapt to their desires. In recent years, this has become easier (though, really, still not easy) through things like Flag mechanics or explicit understanding of Scene Framing and other techniques.

More innovative games have played around with stuff like giving camera control or narration rights to the players. I had been thinking about this for over a year unable to articulate exactly what it was about narration trading I found so fascinating, and it’s this: it’s a simple and efficient way for the players to directly input into the game and change the game into what they want. Though it’s somewhat of a clubbing tool for this, it’s important because it’s far more effective than what we’ve BEEN doing for the last 30 years in the traditional realm. More subtle games play with the ability to change elements or load the odds or other things that aren’t as hamfisted to adapting play to meet the players.

This self-guiding/correcting element is often what makes some games resilient in their fun factor: like I’m surprised EVERY time I play Inspectres how much fun I have with it. And that’s because it adapts to meet the players quickly and easily.

Comics Culture, Games Culture

So I finally picked up Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. It’s a good read, though it didn’t strike me as deeply as Understanding Comics, though whether that’s because of the writing itself, the fact that it’s more techinical and dry, or the fact that I’ve internalized a lot of it’s concepts already, it’s hard to say.

Nonetheless, it has a couple of good parts that do make crossover to rpgs.

The section on character design covers motivation, building characters as part of a cast, contrasting them to one another, looking at character motivation without overbuilding the character before the story begins, a lot of good stuff.

The chapter on Comics Culture was the most interesting with rpg crossover to me. He talks about folks using comics as art for art’s sake, art for technical expertise/experimentation, art for expressing life and art for speaking to larger truths.

Yeah, tell me that doesn’t happen in rpgs, both from the design side and the people playing side.

It didn’t just lay out for me the issues of people talking past each other, but also the passionate commitment to the hobby people have. Unlike comics, it doesn’t leave this long lasting artifact we can interact with and call art, but roleplaying does have a value as a performance entertainment- it’s a participatory entertainment.

With other things, you have something left behind that can be judged by someone outside of the experience- and eventually you form a body of critics who spend a lot of time thinking, comparing and talking, and with that dialogue, those of us who are less informed can get the analysis after the fact. We don’t have to do all the hard thinking about it. (This applies to anything from sports commentators to Lit Majors, so…)

For roleplaying, only the people present can fully analyze the experience, so unless someone who thinks along those lines is there, basically our critical culture is limited to the people with both the inclination to think about games that hard and their game experiences. Imagine if music criticism was limited to only the times you’ve played music, as part of a band or larger group, and that only very few people took the time and effort to develop their own music theory from the ground up.

Anyway, Making Comics is a good book on it’s own. I wouldn’t recommend buying it for rpg stuff, but if you can borrow it, or time to spare at a chain bookstore, read those sections. I’d love to see rpgs get their own book that has such clear and down to earth analysis of our hobby, but I think we’ve got probably about 20 years more stuff to work through first.

Choices: Emergent vs. Preloaded

This excellent post on Enworld explains the difference between 3E & 4E D&D.

It also highlights a massive difference in design philosophy from what has been most of mainstream gaming vs. indie games in regards to loading choices in play.

Most mainstream rpgs usually added more and more layers of complexity onto character building, powers to choose from, and mostly more to resolution without actually adding choices IN play. You have to have mastery at character creation, and naturally new folks will lack this.

A fundamental design focus for the Forge influenced indie designs has been on the experience -in- play, so rules tend to shift away from spending a lot of time on pre-play building and more on constraining play to aim the experience towards making certain choices -within- play.

Some of these are brutally clear- like in Falling Leaves “Will you do your duty or disobey (and risk death)?” or Humanity checks in Sorcerer. Some are subtle, and come out only after playing awhile- Inspectres or Lacuna for example.

It’s funny, because I see this not just as a divide in design, but also a divide in the kinds of players it produces. I’ve seen a lot of traditional gamers freeze up in indie games when the choice time comes out in play. It’s like too muich pressure to make a choice in play, rather than have preloaded all your choices before play. (this includes fictional positioning, and character as well).

The Concept Hurdle

Flipside to wargame logic being applied senselessly to roleplaying games, there’s also what I’m calling the concept hurdle- how much does a player have to dig into the fictional setting and concepts in order to be able to engage the game?

That is, do I have to read 200 pages about 20,000 years of fictional history, made up arcane concepts, and fiction bits to really “get” the game? Do I need to read 200 pages of real world history? Either way, it’s a lot of investment.

The way I see it, rpgs basically fall into 4 categories with regard to baseline concept- the High Concept game (which you have to know X things to “get” the game), the Genre game (you must be familiar with the genre), the Genreless game (As a group, you need to set up what everyone needs to know to help produce the necessary concepts and keep them in play), and the Situation game (”This is a game about this specific place and time and this situation”).

So far, in my experience the Genre game and the Situation game tend to work best for introducing new folks- it doesn’t require either learning about a fictional world to play with it, or having to negotiate it amongst the group.

Geek-wise, I get why High Concept is the most common. It’s fun to write setting stuff, it’s fun to make a world and have other people play in it. It’s fun to pour your weird sci-fi/fantasy/horror ideas into something other folks can appreciate without having to either write a story, draw a comic, or make a movie around it. It’s also fun to lose yourself in a setting and make your own stories within it. At the same time, this is a pretty high investment request to ask of people.

It’s also interesting because this highlights an important part of roleplaying- everyone playing is involved in the process of creating the fiction- the more value you put on adhering to the fictional vision, the more the players will have to put in to get on the same page. If you’re playing a videogame, all you really need to do is fight things, solve puzzles and do fetchquests- no videogame is built for you to break it’s conventions, they’re automatically enforced- you just play and the concepts are delivered to you.

Fictional Positioning 101

The last few months, a lot of folks have been talking about Fictional Positioning. It’s not really a new idea, though, it’s probably one a lot of folks take for granted. It’s also something which has been misunderstood pretty terribly by a lot of people.

What it be

Let’s say my character wants to cut a monster with a sword, right? There’s a lot of things we have to consider for that to happen. Most games have a set of mechanical procedures you go through- roll the dice, pull some cards, move a mini, etc.

But aside from the rules, there’s important stuff that has to work in the imaginary stuff- the fiction, for it to even be an option- my character has to have a sword, the arms and hands to wield it, the monster has to be within arm’s reach, etc.

These are common sense things- but it’s crucial to play. For something to happen, it has to be both mechanically possible and make sense within the fiction for the group.

Fictional Positioning as a verb, is considering the fiction, and looking at ways to shape it to fit what you want out of play- this can be from a tactical and/or creative standpoint. Fictional Positioning as a concept, is where everything stands in relation to each other in the fiction- the things the group has agreed to have happened/exist ala Baker-Care principle, the feel for the characters, the situation, the gameworld, etc.

Misunderstandings

So if you keep in mind that in play, for things to happen, they engage both the fiction and mechanics, what do you have left if you take away the mechanical part? Historically, in games where there either were no mechanics or the group does not want to engage mechanics, all you have left is the fiction, and Fictional Positioning to work with.

So you see Fictional Positioning working as the sole pillar:

- When a set of rules is so punishing that the players seek to avoid taking the risk (avoiding combat in older D&D)

- When the rules do not match what the group wants, so they discard them for freeform or GM Fiat

- Classic GM railroading (”And the pass is blocked by a landslide, I guess you’ll have to go another way”)

So, historically it only stands out, alone, when we’re talking about really bad or broken play, though it is used for good play as well.

So you often find people who, for instance, maybe never found working rules or rules that have done what they wanted, and Fictional Positioning is king and dice are the devil. You see these folks beam with joy when they say, “And we only rolled the dice once that night!”.

The flip side, you’ll find folks who have had bad play with folks who have abused Fictional Positioning (mostly through railroading and GM Fiat) and for them, it’s the devil and mechanics are king. (Though, they’re actually using it all the time with mechanics, even though they’re not aware of it).

It is both incorrect to either think of it as everything that matters in the game, or nothing that matters in the game. It’s simply one important factor in how we, as a group playing the game, figure out what happens.

Examples

In gamist play, Fictional Positioning is stuff like, dropping a barrel of tar on a beholder, to blind it’s eyes (well, all but one, but that’s the one you need to deal with right away). Ben Lehman has been talking about this for awhile, especially in terms of using it in older D&D play.

In narrativist play, FP is stuff like, in Dogs in the Vineyard, though the mechanics say you and I can pull guns on each other to get our way, we’ve built up this deep friendship and so, we’re not going to do that, because it would violate our sense of character- the fiction we’ve built around them. This is what Emily Care Boss means when she’s talking about Story Capital.

In simulationist play, it’s stuff like, “My knight refuses to kill his foe, instead capturing him and treating him with hospitality!”, “Don’t bother rolling the dice, he was caught in a small area with a grenade- no chance to survive.”

For Sim, FP is core to the play itself! Sim play is highly focused on the fiction (though it can use buckets of mechanics to get there), and the outcome of having fiction that fits within the idea of the game, that it makes sense given the fictional world. The most important thing is that the fiction is true to whatever sim ideal is being aimed for. So, if it’s realism, the fiction must fit with the group’s ideas of reality, if it’s western movie genre, then it has to fit with what the group expects from westerns, etc.*

(*Usual caveat- do not assume that Nar or Gam play doesn’t value being true to it’s fiction or plausible, just that Sim play it’s the focus, whereas the other two styles are looser or more willing to widge on it to fulfill what they’re doing. Ok? Ok.)