Leadership addition

[Bret Gillan]

The Leadership page currently doesn't tell us a lot about Leadership, and I think there is a lot of content that could be mined from this post by Ron. As someone who's rolling up their sleeves and using all of this as an opportunity to really dig into the Big Model, the key points for me that are lacking in the current Leadership article that helped me to understand it are how Leadership is determined by the group and Authority is determined mechanically/procedurally, and that there is no formal determination of Leadership. It's something collectively but mostly not consciously decided. I might be GM, but everyone at the table knows and respects Carly's rules expertise so in matters of rules disputes we all might defer to her even though I have the Authority by the book. There was never a vote, it's just the dynamic.

Is that correct? And is it more helpful if I write up drafts of suggested revisions?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Bret,

Right! In fact, it might even be helpful to get personal and describe some features of your game group in action. These variables are typically not as concrete as those in Techniques, and unfortunately are most apparent in the breach, which makes discussing them hard. But I do think we can develop the right language and lenses. You've probably seen me interrogate people back at the Forge about who's playing, who travels to get there, who's related to one another, who's romantically involved, when they thought they were asking a simple question about whether they were Simulationists because they played Werewolf.

Here are at least some of the concepts I have in mind when looking at a group socially.

Let's play this game
I keep using the phrase "Let's play this game" as if it were special, and I think it is. It means these people, this game, together, now, all of which are distinct decisions rejecting a host of alternate options. It also includes the commitment to have fun together, which effectively means discovering/producing a Creative Agenda ... or else. I think this kind of commitment includes as well the willingness to learn when trying to play a new game, as opposed to rejecting it when it works differently from familiar ones.

One variable we ought to consider is how fragile this is, or isn't. At first glance a group's stability is a feature of the existing social bonds among the people, but counter-examples exist. I have sometimes been surprised at how fragile a long-standing group of friends can be, whereas sometimes a thrown-together con game can be remarkably close and successful. A group becomes unstable (relative to the role-playing) when other social dynamics intrude, obviously. In a long-standing group of people who know one another well, profound tensions of status and sex can build. Whereas in a just-met, play-once group, priorities favoring instant social credit ("Who's the GM," "who's the best gamer," et cetera) can be brought in immediately, and if they aren't there, the group is surprisingly well set to work well, in part because it's temporary.

Of course, there are also the Five Geek Social Fallacies and the Geek Hierarchy to take into account, both of which pour oil on the fire.

Leadership
Leadership is a major issue for sure. I talked about five kinds, which as units may be as centralized or decentralized as a given group prefers:

Social organizer: basically people-wrangling - getting them all to the location at the time of play, with as much or as little effort as this requires.

Host: the one who sets up and maintains the space and conveniences for play; includes all sorts of things, but is always present, even at sign-up con games (where it's combined with social organizing).

Rules-owner and introducer: the one who owns the book and lets its contents be known to everyone else; should be way more de-centralized than it typically is.

Creative leader: the one whose enjoyment of the SIS and contributions to it set a certain standard for everyone else; this is not always the person who puts the most talking time into it, as that person may well be tone-deaf to the leadership instead of holding it.

Social/procedural leader: the one who is consulted and treated at least as consensus-partner if not outright boss when it comes to how the group will apply the known procedures of play.

Again, just because I keep wanting to this nail hard with the hammer, none of the above has anything to do with the Authority techniques. Thinking they do is a fallacy, and even worse, thinking that a given centralized Authority holder necessarily becomes one or more of the above is a second-order and very toxic fallacy.

I will not abandon you / No one gets hurt
Meg's constructions of "I will not abandon you" and "Nobody gets hurt" are also important. They may not apply to all instances of play, but when the content is genuinely emotionally important, then one or the other has to apply or all manner of badness happens. Moreno has already brought up the issue of how Lines and Veils would be related to these; the more I think about it, the more these seem like Techniques which are used relative to the Social Contract issues Meg has articulated.

Social context
Another variable - a big one - was one of topics I introduced for the Infamous Five discussions in 2004: Social Context. Its daughter threads (less important but good to include anyway) were Gay culture / Gamer culture, Self-image, Christian gamers and self-esteem, What does role-playing gaming accomplish?, and Sexism and gaming. The point here is that the Social Contract in a given group is deeply affected by how its members construct their activity as role-players relative to everything else they do in society, which brings in all sorts of issues about friendship, identity politics, and even secrecy.

That's a lot after all! Would you mind disclosing some stuff about your group and how it functions at this level, with some of these variables in mind?

Best, Ron
edited to include geek links - RE

[Moreno R.]

Rules-owner and introducer: the one who owns the book and lets its contents be known to everyone else; should be way more de-centralized than it typically is.

Maybe this should be changed. One possible way is separating the two parts, but then "introduces" seems too similar to "procedural leader"

Another is limiting the "introducer" part to "propose to play it", without the "lets its content be know to everyone else"

I am saying this because in the group I usually play there is a peculiar separation between the owner of the rules and who read and explain them: seeing that the publishers of Narrattiva are part of the group, a lot of games we try are possible candidates for publication. Often they are brought by Claudia and Michele after hearing good things about them or just because the premise interest them, and then I read them and explain to the others the rules.  Sometimes I say "no, I don't think it's a good game", or "no, probably it's good game, but I am not going to run it" (this usually with prep-intensive games). Sometimes I am the one who make a list of possible games to try, and Narrattiva buy them upon my suggestion.

It's a rather peculiar way of splitting the cost and the reading of the rules in a gaming group, born from the mixing of a publisher's interest in the testing of possible products with the playing of a game in a group of people, but it shows that the ownership of a book or a box, the initial interest ("let's check/buy this"), the proposal to the group ("let's play this") are different things, tied together only by habit and convenience.

Creative leader: the one whose enjoyment of the SIS and contributions to it set a certain standard for everyone else; this is not always the person who puts the most talking time into it, as that person may well be tone-deaf to the leadership instead of holding it.

Often there is a "technical expert", too: the one consulted by the others in his camp of expertise. It's interesting case because it's a boon for a group that readily accept his competence and use it to enrich the game, but it's depicted usually as an "asshole who always argue with the GM" in groups tied to the idea of the "all-powerful GM" as the one who should have all the authorities and leaderships.

[Ron Edwards]

Good points, Moreno.

Two threads I forgot to link: Motocaust: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, which should show you that Jake was reasonably motivated to stop playing the game as written; and More alphabet soup, Meg's original presentation for NGH and IWNAY.

Best, Ron

[ndpaoletta]

In my long-running group in Boston, we definitely had a "technical expert" who we depended on for rules calls and clarifications. It was usually C, but sometimes it was a different guy depending on the game and how much expertise they had in it (P was our White Wolf system expert, f'rex). It was only ALSO the person GMing/facilitating the game when we were playtesting one of my games.

On a purely technical level, it made running a high-point-of-contact game a lot easier for the GM to have someone else to ask/expect to know about rules interactions and fiddly bits.

[Ron Edwards]

In the 1980s, in the various groups I played in, the GM (in procedure terms, held most of the Authorities) was generally held to be the rules leader as well - no ifs ands or buts. Since a number of us were playing in one another's games, it was considered extremely poor form to act "like the GM" in someone else's games. Most, although not all, of these games were versions of Champions (which around 1987 was quite a mash of available editions and texts), and so there was some logic to linking the interpretation of rules and text-choices to the same person who would be using them creatively and also as imposed constraints in terms of point-spending. Whining or lecturing about a given rule was usually treated as violating the standards of someone else's turf.

In the 1990s, I was playing in a couple of groups who - well, at least some of the members - were more oriented toward understanding why we were using rules, so we often tried new texts or old ones we'd always wanted to use. To give you an idea of where my head was at, I was astounded to discover that the game we Champions-heads had always written off as silly, Marvel Super Heroes, was remarkably strong. In these groups, we found that we did well to be committees of equals regarding the rules, as we understood that we were all learning through use and play.

Not that long ago, I played a favorite game of mine, Zero, with two people who didn't know it at all. But Peter is one of those gamers who can absorb texts apparently by holding them, and since it had been a long time since I'd played, it was really fun to have full GMing creative responsibilities (as pertains to that game, which is very important regarding the setting) while Peter basically played umpire regarding the more involved system-moments. I at least was surprised at how painless it was.

It definitely put me more in the mood to play GM-centrically again, with someone else at the table carrying the heavier end of rules-application as I dealt with situational content.

Best, Ron

[Paul Czege]

Ron,

Someone should formalize that particular style of play in a game. We did that exact same thing at the Embassy Suites a few years ago, with you GMing With Great Power and Michael coaching all the rules.

Paul

[Bret Gillan]

I've been trying to think of some good examples because my gaming groups have been rather fluid lately. I'll go by one the last multi-session gaming group I had, which initially started as an attempt to play Stars Without Number and then morphed into Apocalypse World. Initially the GM was my friend Matt, with myself, my girlfriend Carly, and my friend and roommate Mike playing.

There wasn't really a firm social organizer, which has caused us some problems. The assumption, I think, was that since Matt was the GM he would be the social organizer while he may have been thinking that I would be the social organizer since I'm in more direct contact with Mike and Carly. This led to one problematic cancellation where there was some miscommunication and frustration.

The host was me, I think. We're playing at me and Mike's apartment, but the room we have set up for gaming is more familiar to me, I know where the papers are kept and the dice stored, etc.

Matt was the rules owner and introducer, but he and I both became interested in Stars Without Number at the same time and I regularly GM so sometimes there would be breaks to discuss uncertainties or confusion about the rules and I might offer input. The buck stopped with Matt, though, as he introduced some house rules so I couldn't speak with certainty to the rules based on my reading of the text. Which makes Matt the social procedural leader as well, I think.

Let me know if more examples are needed or if I left some gaps.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi!

Bret, I thought I'd quote you for the topic at hand:

... the key points for me that are lacking in the current Leadership article that helped me to understand it are how Leadership is determined by the group and Authority is determined mechanically/procedurally, and that there is no formal determination of Leadership. It's something collectively but mostly not consciously decided. I might be GM, but everyone at the table knows and respects Carly's rules expertise so in matters of rules disputes we all might defer to her even though I have the Authority by the book. There was never a vote, it's just the dynamic.

That is indeed exactly what I'm talking about. I also want to point out that "Authority by the book" is quite an artifact, and absurd on its very face - a book can never tell a person what to do, after all. Sometimes what the book says is itself evidence of odd dysfunctions, as with the spate of "The GM is always right" assertions that I saw during the 1990s. I remember text to this effect ("The Seneschal is always right") in the first printing of The Riddle of Steel, and I asked Jake, did he really mean it? As it seemed counter to the whole proposition of play that even to play this game at all, you had to work with intertwining subsets of rules, and the way they worked together was so fun that it seemed odd that anyone would question the application of any single rule. Or to put it more simply, if someone didn't want to use these rules, fuck'em, play with people who do. Jake told me he "had" to put that text in there because his co-author insisted, as I understood, quite emotionally. It was gone in the revised next printing.

Anyway, there are really two subtopics for Leadership, then: (i) the types themselves and (ii) the way these types are parsed for a given group with a given game to play.

The types themselves are in pretty good shape, I think, subject to the tweaks Paul and Moreno provided. The way they get distributed for a given group ... well, I'm not sure there's any way to describe the ways systematically, because effectively, that's a sub-function of ordinary human social dynamics with their myriad priorities and very local outcomes.

You offered to provide some text ideas for the wiki about that, and I'd love to see them here.

What you said about social leadership being uncertain is a big deal for me, and I wish I'd handled it better over the years. I am, to say the least, bipolar in social organizing - sometimes I am your classic wolfpack dominant with strong nurturing and protector components, slicing through the bullshit and laying down how it's done, delegating tasks all 'round ... and other times I'm a hopeless idiot unable to get three people into one spot across twelve months of ordinary life. I really think I'd have done well over the past few years simply to have someone else take the whole load of getting us together to play. I know as well that part of the trouble with that issue is confounding it with the host role, and since "where we play" has been pretty variable in my life over the past six years or so, it's muddled up the habits and expectations regarding how and when we're going to get there.

Best, Ron

P.S. Paul, I certainly am tempted to include instructions in the next game I write, specifically to place rules-umpire tasks with someone who is not conducting the GM-tasks techniques. Hey, you ought to do it for The Clay that Woke!

[Bret Gillan]

It may be that I understand it less than I thought. I kind of thought the big distinction of authority vs. leadership is that one is by the book and the other is decided by the group, typically unconsciously. Is the distinction really that authority is discussed/determined consciously and leadership is not?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Bret,

No ... we have to back up a bit, I think. As usual with the developing jargon, any gaming-based associations or previous notions regarding a term - especially if it's an ordinary word - should be junked. In this case, that "authority" has anything to do with "rules," in the textual sense of latter word.

Authority only concerns how we get information of any kind into the fiction. "You're all at the inn." "You wake up." "He strikes at you! Roll defense!" "Right then, that's when I show up." "My character has blonde hair." "Shit! My arm's crippled!" How these are spoken, who says them, what mechanics constrain or inspire them ... that's all about organizing Authority. These are strictly Techniques and specifically and only concern the fiction itself, i.e., what it is and how it changes.

Leadership is huge, much bigger than that. It's among the real people and concerns those issues I listed above. Don't mix up the "rules guy" Leadership for anyone who's using an Authority at any given time. That's the key dysfunctional convention from role-playing traditions - to think that the guy who carries that Leadership must also be the guy who wields or holds final judgment over all the Authorities. Among other dysfunctions, legion in fact.

Does that help at all? I could do a pretty good job with a detailed enough understanding of a given real-world play group, if you want to do that.

Best, Ron