Hit Points and "Threat Zones" in Step On Up Play

[James_Nostack]

(I've been trying to make this post for several days, and keep running into technical problems.  So I'm splitting it into a couple posts and hope that fixes things.)

I did not want to de-rail Joshua and Eero's productive discussion over in [proto dnd] An Endeavor Inspired by Eero's OSR Sandbox, but Ron raised an interesting point that I thought deserved a smidge more discussion.

Ron wrote [snipped in places]:

here's a perspective on hit points before 1982 or so, from someone who was there. . . [snip]

Clinical death at 0 off one bank of resource points is terrible design for role-playing, but given that Chainmail wasn't about role-playing, I think it's one of the early TSR textual artifacts that got embedded in the assumptions of play and design which has required workarounds ever since. . . .

[snip . . . discussing several historical approaches, including a "seat-of-the-pants" method of deciding whether a character lives or dies]

The thing is, no one wanted to admit that seat-of-pants rules for death - or even anything mechanical that simply happened not to be a resource pool for countdown - existed and were functional. The countdown-pool was "set," subculturally, despite its dubious functionality (at least in general; it's perfectly fine in T&T and Paranoia). So people kept using those rules and kluging the shit out of them at the table, introducing add-on patch rules so "the" rules would at least sort of work.

These klugey rules like the -3, -5, et cetera mortality that I first encountered in the AD&D Player's Handbook, frankly stank - they just put off the inevitable a little . . . . [snip]

The options are truly wide open; "playing by the book" is historically ridiculous, because the rules were not written from thoughtful play and no one fucking had to follow them anyway. In that context, your current solution is a good one, and your disinclination to use the negatives-method is a sign of good judgment.

In my earlier drafts of this post, I wanted to point out some aspects of D&D, specifically, that look naive and stupid, but are actually kind of clever, making me wonder if that's a happy accident, the result of playtesting, intuitive genius, or what.  But ultimately that's beside the point: I just wanna talk Hit Points for a minute.

At the outset, it's important to distinguish short-term play versus long-term play.  If you're playing a game for, say, a convention game or anything under 12 hours (3-4 sessions) the hit points thing is bearable, even fun: it's an extremely hard constraint.  But by textual implication D&D is one of those games that's supposed to be played forever--some of the guys in our local New York Red Box group have a game that's been played for 180 weekly sessions--and past a certain point of fictional investment, getting lights-out skragged on a bad roll is just hugely un-fun.

Fundamentally the problem is that D&D doesn't have an established way to imperil characters other than (a) bludgeoning them into bloody goo through lost hit points, (b) zapping them into stone or what-have-you via a failed save, (c) taking away someone's beloved magic items, (d) taxing the character via level drain.

For many, many hours of play, these things verge on game-ending catastrophes.  We lost so many dudes to poisonous spiders that it became a running joke.  Yet by the time you're hitting 6th or 7th level, i.e., mid-game, these problems have become merely serious annoyances instead of the verge of a TPK.  Which means the GM is going to have to step up his own game to threaten you.  (I've heard some of the Red Boxers in that long-running game say that they've started literally running into incorporeal, invisible, level-draining undead.  Which I personally think is a failure of the imagination, but whatever.)

All the other stuff that matters to a well-established character--social status, relationships, reputation, personality quirks--comes down to GM hand-waving.  Which is fine when the GM is up for it, but you've got to house-rule such things out of nothingness.

This is one of the things I really like about Pendragon.  In some ways, it's much more ruthless than D&D: if your knight takes one pretty serious hit, you're pretty much out of the session if not killed outright.  But usually survival isn't what's at stake, and there's a whole lot of other stuff for the GM to mess with.  What is the chivalrous thing to do in this situation?  Is this woman a good marriage prospect?  Damn it, I just built a ditch for my peasant villagers, and the dice say the ditch burned down--how is that even possible?--but screw it, let's dig a deeper, fire-proof ditch!  Above all: I want more glory than that slimy bastard Sir Agravaine.

Obviously, a ton of Forge games take a similar approach to finding things to imperil, albeit with far less bookkeeping than Pendragon.  I love early D&D for many reasons, but that huge blind spot (or arguably "fruitful void," I suppose) is nearly always a drag.

OMFG Where Is The Actual Play In This Boring Post?
When I play D&D, I usually play Arnold "Zolobachai" Little-Worth.  Arnold's deal is
* Every problem can be solved obliquely
* "Useless" spells are a lot more useful than you'd expect
* A frying pan to the head solves the occasional exception to those principles

Basically because, when I sat down with the other guys at the gaming table, I said, "I have more balls than any of you and I'm going to out-perform all of your characters by playing a guy who is useless."  I felt I needed a handicap to play on the level of these so-called D&D "veterans."  And God damn it if Arnold didn't pull his weight as an equal, if not superior, member of the party without ever memorizing sleep or charm or fireball.  (Alas, when we were worried about being swallowed whole by Purple Worms, no one would fund his research into Zolobachai's Omnipotent Laxative.)

As a result, the big events in Arnold's adventuring career were:

* Losing his beloved frying pan, when a minotaur smashed it through with one of his horns

* Being forced to become the party's "primary magician" for several sessions, which led to an extremely strong temptation to pack "useful" spells in order to insure his friends' survival until he could bring the "primary magician" back to life

* Losing the magnificently random wand of wonder, which sure, was just a magic item, but perfectly suited Arnold's philosophy of turning everything to his advantage with enough legwork

* Engineering the team's triumph over a pair of randomly encountered Balrogs (demons far more powerful than we were) through the creative use of magic items, calling in some favors, and letting everybody do their schtick.

These were, for me, hugely important challenges/defeats/victories, and were super-fun even when I lost.  (I still miss that frying pan.  They said they would go to the Far Orient to get me a two-handed wok to replace it, but they never did.)

In comparison, Arnold has died once (bad save versus poison gas because I didn't think to say I was holding my breath before dispelling a magical lock), and been level-drained twice.  (The first time was because the rest of the party members assumed I was up to something sneaky, and thus it didn't occur to them to warn me.)  Arnold also nearly was reduced to -5 HP (i.e., death in one of the campaigns) but just barely survived.

These death- or near-death experiences, and level-drains, have generally been completely uninteresting.  There wasn't really any crucial lesson to be learned, other than, "Next time, stand out of range of fire-breathing doorknobs." 

What was really going on here is that I was pushing Step On Up play as to particular parts of my character - particularly, his role as a devious semi-pacifist.  These aspects of the character did come under stress from time to time, but almost accidentally.  The GM wasn't aiming for them; they were constraints I'd imposed on myself.  What the GM was aiming for was HP, hard saving throws, level-drains, and magic stuff.  But honestly, in a long game, that's not very interesting.  In fact, when thinking about Arnold's history, I totally forgot about the time he died until typing out this summary of his career.

Death, where is thy sting?  And why the hell are there Hit Points outside of con games?

I'd add a little bit more, but this post is long enough as it is.

[Tom]

Death is generally overrated in most games, and too much focus put on the point of death.

I ran a very long campaign of a self-made fantasy system many years ago. I still have the character sheet of the one(!) character who died during that campaign. And he really didn't give me much of a choice (he jumped down the ladder into a room they knew was covered with pressure plates triggering crossbow traps).

In general, I always said that there are things much worse and much more interesting than death that I can do to characters. I think the  game I'm currently writing reflects a lot of that and the official rule there is that death is a fluid concept, subject to drama and story requirements, and the worst status a character can reach game-mechanically is "dying", never "dead".

Death is a dual threat. To the character, it exists independent of game mechanics. To the player, if he is not ready to let the character go, death is a threat of taking away something. That's a negative play experience, whine about it being part of the game as much as you want.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Tom,

Here's a useful Forge reference regarding character death: Interview with Vincent and me, the subset of the thread begun by Marshall Burns. (This thread is incomplete; the first two pages were cut off by a server crisis and are available at the Forge Archives, but some of my posts in that location are damaged. But the link I provided does include the dialogue I want to cover here.) You can get my full perspective on the role of character death in RPG history and role-playing as a creative experience.

It also cross-references nicely to the current thread about The Final Girl, which has expanded to cover a number of games in which character ownership is flexible and character mortality is common.

So, to get back to hit points as such, here's a bit that I emailed to James when he was having trouble posting to the forum:

I think that histories of role-playing tend to overlook the tournament scene of the day, most of which used pregenerated characters. Teeny-tiny experience points summarizing both kills and acquisitions, low-if-any buy-in to your character, competition across dozens of groups all running the same characters in the same dungeon with the same descriptive narrations, and a very limited (in fact delimited) play-time - the hit-points and easy-death make a lot of sense in this context.

What they don't make sense in is the Blackmoor tradition of play, with its emphasis on grand spectacles and character arcs, especially when filtered through Gygax's fascination with social classes and traversing geography with strict attention to in-game time.

Put all this into a driving commercial need finally to produce something, anything, as long as it was perceived as *the* thing, called "D&D," and you have nothing but a mess, no better and possibly much worse than what tons of other people were doing as house-rules (and certainly worse than well-conceived alternatives like T&T). No wonder so many role-players idealize house-rules - the tradition they're drawing on doesn't even have genuine rules-as-written - just words on paper.

Best, Ron

[Callan S.]

Hullo,

It's worth remembering in AD&D that you lost a point of CON upon each ressurection. Thus your con was your final HP score (ie, there are two resource points in play in regards to perma death, not just one). It's also one of the rare sections of the book where Gary actually shows some passion AND speaks to the reader directly (as a person) about the importance of this and that without it, in his words, play is meaningless. Of course the interesting question right after noting that is, who plays with that CON loss? There's a AD&D game at a local store and as far as I'm aware, there is no CON loss instituted by the DM in that game.

In regards to actual play, there's the question of stepping on up to what? Particularly with retroactive 'failure', in that a fictional event is described, then after that the player decides whether they count this as a failure. It's kind of risk adverse - as in only that which the person (without any pressure) wants to call a failure, is a failure.

The other part is where success has no alternative failure condition. I mean, if you treat the balrogs as smashing you as an uninteresting, then it's not part of the process of outmanouvering them, since outmanouvering them is considered interesting (overall it can't be both unintererting and interesting at the same time). So the outmanouvering of the balrogs has no failure condition. If you didn't out manouver the balrogs and they smash you --- that's 'uninteresting'. Rather than a failure. That's really not admitting one has lost. The step on up lacks a fail condition - thus it's a question of stepping on up to what?

As usual, that thing we call D&D provides an interesting mindfield. Minefield...I meant minefield...

[Marshall Burns]

For a certain kind of D&D and D&D-alike play, the players make their own goals. When you accomplish one of your goals, you win. When you suffer setbacks, it's like getting pushed back to your own goalline. Full-on loss doesn't actually happen until the goal becomes impossible to obtain, *which is rare* -- usually it can only become more difficult. Death isn't a full-on loss, because it isn't going to make your goals impossible (the loss of resources it entails will make them harder, though). Even if there aren't reliable means of resurrection, there's nothing to stop you hastily rolling up a new character and pursuing the exact same agenda; this ain't Shakespeare (actually, an argument could be made for Hamlet being Hamlet's father's player's hastily rolled new character). Death is a slap on the wrist because characters are cheap. The worst that death can do to a player is stick him in the penalty box for a while, unable to play until his dude can get rezzed or his replacement character can get inserted into the Situation. And, since most goals are never entirely lost, you find that people Step on Up about how *cleanly* they can accomplish them rather than whether or not they can accomplish them. And since your Stepping is judged by your peers, such cleanness is relative; if you get squished by a balrog along the way, the attitude at the table may be, "whatever, man, it was a BALROG; what else could you have done?" If no one can hold it against you, it renders the squishing a non-issue, score-wise.

In this kind of play, players also tend to change and reprioritize their goals frequently! And any given goal isn't really a goal unless the player cares about it. The GM throws stuff out there, and the players ultimately decide whether they care to set goals relative to it. Like, there's all this stuff going on in the city, with factions and stuff, that you can leverage to your advantage maybe; but maybe the player just says, "screw this, where's the nearest dungeon?" If a player isn't interested in the balrogs, they become a distraction, annoyance, or minor digression (depending) rather than being something to Step on Up about.

And (the most interesting thing) it doesn't matter to the play process whether the goals are easy or hard. Harder goals will be more satisfying and garner more recognition when accomplished, so the "scoring" (qualitative as it is) balances out even if one player is like, "I want to be king!" and another is just, "I just wanna survive this dungeon, man." The latter is more likely to win and win cleanly, but it counts for less *because* it's more likely. As with gambling, your winnings are limited by your wagers.

So this is why losing a skillet can be so much more important than getting stomped by a balrog, if "being the guy who kills monsters with a skillet" (or, even harsher, "with THIS skillet") is one your goals.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Callan!

I agree completely. That's why a particular aggrieved intensity shows up in conversations about gaming when someone uses the phrase "playing D&D" as a reference point, and therefore the conversation (whatever it may have been about) instantly shifts to a cat-fight over that single phrase. Each person desperately seeks to validate his or her use of that phrase not for personally-specific reasons, but because they want their use of it to represent the universal, widespread-in-practice, and above all obvious meaning.

I'm thinking about a companion concept to your point, concerning representation in the SIS, or in plain language, how rules in action affect what we say is fictionally happening.

All the way back around 1980, I remember a comedic magazine article in cartoon form (don't remember which mag), mocking all the little rules-fuckups of this very kind in various games. One panel depicted two RuneQuest characters who shared the same native language failing their language rolls and being unable to communicate (characters in the game began with 40% in their native language, hence 16% for mutual communication). Another mocked the album game Swashbuckler because a sword and a kick did the same damage in combat; the image showed a guy decapitated with a clean slice by a kick.

I could be mistaken about the details, but I think the first panel in that article showed a D&D  character receiving a back massage with about ten weapons embedded in him, "Ah, that feels good!" Obviously the point was to mock the 131-hit-point character who ignored a dozen successful hits upon him, any one of which would have killed him when he was at 2nd level.

The thing is, the article was witty but ultimately stupid. It completely missed the Lumpley Principle: that things become established in the fiction because we talk and listen, not because a specific mechanic comes up a certain way. Therefore the operation of a specific mechanic is always contextual to the fiction.*

I want to talk about missing the principle entirely, in thinking that the mechanics of the game are a simulative engine which account for anything and everything in the fiction, even what isn't in the fiction but somehow purportedly in the same world. Basically, the idea that the mechanics of play are in-fiction physics.

If that were the case, then yes, getting hit by the orc's sword for 7 hit points damage should be the same fictional event no matter who the target character is (and in the Swashbuckler cartoon, 7 points is 7 points no matter how you get it). However, hit points in AD&D were explicitly not saying this. Here I'm speaking of the Monster Manual + Player's Handbook + DM Guide of the very late 1970s. Gygax's prose is dstinctive on this point too, in this case his borderline-snotty funny mode (disclosure: which I enjoy), when he writes about "our lordly fighter." He is incredibly clear: a hit delivering X hit points to a 1st level fighter which exceeds his hit points is  a mortal blow, fictionally speaking. It punctures a vital organ, it desanguinates him, it kills him. But that very same hit upon a 10th-level fighter is at most a scratch; it could even have been (wait for it ...) a near miss.

Shit! Did I see that? Did the AD&D rules just say that not only the magnitude of rolled damage, but even the validity of a successful hit, depend for their fictional identity on the identity of the target? Yes, I did. It's still there in that book.

And just as you described for the CON cost of resurrection, Callan, everyone I ever knew who played the game or criticized the game skated right past and over that text. Somehow, historically, the Lumpley Principle was taboo from the start -  instead, the mechanics were supposed to impact the fiction on an atomic level, with each atom having its own perfect and circumscribed specific effect.

A group engaged in long-term D&D play (of whatever edition) typically found itself house-ruling another kind of damage system - usually importing BRP in my experience - or eliding the whole thing through uncritical purism and therefore actually conforming to what the cartoon was criticizing.

Looking over the thread, the whole thing becomes a methodological catastrophe: what are hit points? It's a perfect example of how a Technique mekes sense only in a specific context of Creative Agenda + System - specifically the how in the Lumpley Principle I'm always boldfacing.

Best, Ron

* Subpoint 1: Although true, this principle can be exploited for evil, most obviously the parpuzio as Moreno calls it, in which talk-talk-GM says -talk-roll-GM says-talk-talk is all a confused cloud in which nothing happens except what the GM says. But we've spilled enough bandwidth on that and it's not my topic here.

Subpoint 2: One way to honor the Lumpley Principle is to nest mechanics, so that any particular ephemeral bit of a Technique must be interpreted in terms of all the other relevant Techniques of the moment, i.e., other larger-scale and larger-larger-scale Ephemera. This can quickly reach impractical levels as well as get out of control in terms of plausibility (hence Rolemaster), but the idea is sound.

Subpoint 3: Given #2 above, one might want to let all the mechanics take on all the task of "honoring the fiction" via mutually-reinforcing constraints, hence Purist for System design. As I've written before, I think that mechanics = in-fiction physics is impossible, and that its only functional role in RPG design and play is found in what we best called Constructive Denial, the heart of The Right to Dream play. And therefore antithetical to Step On Up.

A final point about this thread: we're free-associating just a little bit here, which seems appropriate when considering a fundamental but functionally vague rules feature of a loaded topic. More of it is OK, in fact the more participants in that the better, but sooner or later it'd be good to bring the posts around toward conclusions.

[Moreno R.]

Hi!

Callan, I  am that one GM!

It's worth remembering in AD&D that you lost a point of CON upon each ressurection. Thus your con was your final HP score (ie, there are two resource points in play in regards to perma death, not just one). It's also one of the rare sections of the book where Gary actually shows some passion AND speaks to the reader directly (as a person) about the importance of this and that without it, in his words, play is meaningless. Of course the interesting question right after noting that is, who plays with that CON loss? There's a AD&D game at a local store and as far as I'm aware, there is no CON loss instituted by the DM in that game.

Yes, I did enforce the -1 CON after resurrection, and the one-year-age penalty to the Cleric that cast it, and the necessity of having a "complete" corpse to be able to use a "raise Dead" instead of the more costly "resurrect", etc.
We even used material spell components and weapon modifiers against different armours: we were really hardcore.

Reading about other people's experiences with OD&D or AD&D I realize that out table was exceptional, in the sense that the way we played EVERYTHING "by the book" was exceptional. But there was a cause for this: our gaming group was a splinter group from a older table (with people who started playing in the '70) where the mass of house rules was so big to dwarf the D&D rules, and almost every one of these house rules was dysfunctional, unbalancing and grossly un-fun (their function, I realized afterwards, was to "keep the newbies in place". Well, we newbies realized what was our place: another table with another GM). After all these bad experiences with house rules, everybody wanted to avoid using them as much as possible.

This obstinacy in playing "by the book" didn't pay well in game terms (we realized after a while that the written rules were not much better) but it paid very well in years of internet flames afterwards, when I could cite every single rule by chapter, page and verse against people who defended D&D and I could tell them that they didn't even know the rules they were defending...  ;-)

Anyway, this post is not so much about that bit from Callan's post but about this:

All the way back around 1980, I remember a comedic magazine article in cartoon form (don't remember which mag), mocking all the little rules-fuckups of this very kind in various games.

Murphy's Rules http://www.sjgames.com/murphys/

I could be mistaken about the details, but I think the first panel in that article showed a D&D  character receiving a back massage with about ten weapons embedded in him, "Ah, that feels good!" Obviously the point was to mock the 131-hit-point character who ignored a dozen successful hits upon him, any one of which would have killed him when he was at 2nd level.

The thing is, the article was witty but ultimately stupid. It completely missed the Lumpley Principle: that things become established in the fiction because we talk and listen, not because a specific mechanic comes up a certain way. Therefore the operation of a specific mechanic is always contextual to the fiction.*

I want to talk about missing the principle entirely, in thinking that the mechanics of the game are a simulative engine which account for anything and everything in the fiction, even what isn't in the fiction but somehow purportedly in the same world. Basically, the idea that the mechanics of play are in-fiction physics.

If that were the case, then yes, getting hit by the orc's sword for 7 hit points damage should be the same fictional event no matter who the target character is (and in the Swashbuckler cartoon, 7 points is 7 points no matter how you get it). However, hit points in AD&D were explicitly not saying this. Here I'm speaking of the Monster Manual + Player's Handbook + DM Guide of the very late 1970s. Gygax's prose is dstinctive on this point too, in this case his borderline-snotty funny mode (disclosure: which I enjoy), when he writes about "our lordly fighter." He is incredibly clear: a hit delivering X hit points to a 1st level fighter which exceeds his hit points is  a mortal blow, fictionally speaking. It punctures a vital organ, it desanguinates him, it kills him. But that very same hit upon a 10th-level fighter is at most a scratch; it could even have been (wait for it ...) a near miss.

Shit! Did I see that? Did the AD&D rules just say that not only the magnitude of rolled damage, but even the validity of a successful hit, depend for their fictional identity on the identity of the target? Yes, I did. It's still there in that book.

Yes, it's in the book.

And, seeing that I did read that book dozens of times and I tried to do everything by the book, I tried to use that rule.

But it doesn't work.

It's theoric in the worst sense of the word: "this is made-up theory that explain why this clusterfuck of a rule is really not so bad". But as many of these "theories", it doesn't stand to actual play.

We used even the material spell components. We used the different frequency in encounter rolls in different terrain. We used the modifications to the roll based on weapon and armour. We used everything. But that "explanation"? No. It was impossible. (and trust me, I TRIED)

I have encountered really a lot of people who played AD&D, I have played tournaments (well. one tournament. But I won it as "best player", so it counts more), I have played regularly with other three GMs, and I have talked about this with a lot of other people, by forum or in real life. It's still not even the 0.00001% of the players in the world, but it's a significant number. And none of them described a "hit" as something other that "you are hit", and a hit from a sword with maximum damage was a bad hit, no matter if the target still had as lot of HP, so yes, fighters were able to laugh off a lot of very bad swords hits, being bitten by dragons, etc.

Why accept something so absurd in the SIS? Because the alternative was worse. The alternative was boring, useless, repetitive and tiring "waste narration".

The alternative was, following that rule, to describe, every single hit, something like "the sword miss you by a inch: if you were not so fast and experienced in combat, you would have been hit" (but even "the sword miss you by an inch" was really too much). Making people at the table wait until the end of a false narration that everybody did know had no sense whatsoever, "yeah, right, I know, I got hit by 8 points, but it's a miss because I have still 70 HP, now please can we go on with the game?"

There is a big difference in role-playing in a rpg, even D&D, and roleplaying in Risk or Monopoli: in these other games, role-playing has no effect on the game. You can role-play all you want, you don't get to reroll even a single die, you don't get to change even a single results, so nobody bother to roleplay them.

For the same exact reason, nobody bother to narrate a hit as a miss in AD&D just to "maintain credibility". It's much, much easier to simply "close your eyes" and ignore the fact that the fighter that was just bitten by a dragon, burned by a fireball and hit by 6 arrows just said "don't worry, I don't need healing, I have still 46 HP" and is not bothered in any way from the arrows. It's easier to simply making "history" disappear: no arrows, no bite, nobody ever talks about that, let's continue the game.

And this is good: D&D combat is already way too long as it is (it was usual to pass an entire evening in a single fight, with all these rolls), so the narration was really reduced to the minimum, if you had to narrate what happened every roll you would have needed THREE sessions for a single fight, and after having narrated the 245th to-hit roll of the evening...  I don't think that anyone could go on without screaming...

(245th roll? Easy. Eight players, eight monsters, 16 to-hit rolls every round, with good armor let's say that only one roll every three hit something, so every player hit the monster every three rounds, and then make a damage roll. Four rolls to inflict around 5-6 points of damage. Let's say you need four of these hits to kill the monster, you need 16 rolls. Multiplied for 8 players are 128 rolls. Add the monster's roll and you easily get to around 200-250 rolls for a single fight)

So, at the end: that in the book is a "nice explanation for the rule" but I doubt very much that even Gary Gygax even played like that. The only way to survive playing AD&D (and not be killed by your own players bored out of their minds by your useless descriptions) was to play the Murphy's Rules Way.

[Callan S.]

Hi Ron,

The thing is you have a self concious knowledge of the Lumpley principle in play. What if we just subtract the self concious part? Well for that person, the fiction just appears to move by itself and be as self animating as the real world is! It self animates - it's as alive as we take things to be alive when we dream (though upon  waking (becoming self concious) we realise differently).

This, definitionally, becomes roleplay for many. It's rather like if grandma was definitionally grandma, but actually 'grandma' is a puppet someone else is animating (ideally that they are both animating!). The person even gets 'grandma' to say 'I'm just a puppet', but the person says 'Oh, don't say silly things, grandma! You're just encouraging him!' - or even unconciously uses their power to manipulate the puppet to block 'grandma' from saying that (or just kicks the trouble makers from the group/flees from them)

So we get gamers who think they could handle the premise of the matrix and find that the world was a lie - but will adamantly resist having this notion of the self animating fiction disenchanted.

Never mind that real life doesn't like to come in convenient binaries but instead spectrums - some people have some grasp the Lumpley effect, but at a certain point on the spectrum they slip back into the self animated world. I would even propose that if you look at Vincent's blog on 'height advantage' in an older post, even the person the principle is named after slips back into the self animated world at that point, as he would say 'but it's obvious the other person is just higher!", ie an appeal to the atomic level of determination. So lets get a real world ruler out and measure that if its so obvious - no, we can't? And this is the difficult terrain of the matter - with spectrums where suddenly someone will snap over to a self determining world. Without much any distinction involved in that change over. Makes for difficult conversation.

And the fact is, I wonder at what point I might very well dip into the self animated world, seamlessly, without realising it of course. I don't propose that any particular immunity to it is obtainable.

But having said all that, I'm not sure it is a companion concept - step on up is borderline scientific. And pretty much emperic - atleast if you look at physical sports. The running must cross the finish line, not just say 'oh, good enough!' at some point. The ball must cross the line, not just 'yeah, sure, we'll let that one in'. Umpires in such sports aren't trying to 'support the fun', they are genuinely trying to determine whether a ball crossed a line or such.

In regards to Moreno's apt reporting, apart from the above I'm thinking the text themselves cause a splintering effect - no one can say something that even falls remotely close to what someone else would say (hey, it's kind of like that cartoon where the two guys who know the same language can't communicate! But for real!). I mean, were rolling to hit, but were not hitting? How can even conciously Lumpley principle embracing conversation get around that, let alone dreamers? It's practically 2+2=5 territory! The splintering means we all start in one spot, but our imaginations race off in one of 360 different directions (splinters) - thus we don't say anything that paralels what others might say - and as Moreno notes, we give up on saying anything at all. The communicative spectrum, ironically, isn't narrow enough for us to speak and for it to fall atleast near what others might expect to hear. Yes, granted, with dreamers it's not 'that's not what I expected to hear' and instead it's 'that doesn't make any sense!!1!!', but the idea is the same. Though one might say that such disruption is perhaps beneficial - since it disrupts dreaming and potentially forces some amount of self conciousness. But it's a rough red pill to swollow.

Anyway, I can't resist talking (and then listening) on the fiction - I would pretty much always imagine a hit, even if it's nicks, shallow slices (or cool scar making shallow slices) or even a slap from the flat of a blade/bruise makers. I imagine that in a magic rich world the fighter simply absorbs magic and becomes kinda stone skinned or fast enough to dodge. Some might just say they are just that skilled. Others might talk about destiny embeded into their very frame. I feel there's alot of ground for some mutual idea to be worked out. But I feel the spectrum of options was left too wide on something that isn't all that exciting (atleast to me) to talk about.

In the end though, does this sort of 'clearing up the SIS issues' talk get anywhere with the step on up talk, or is it why the hobby became (atleast in my estimate) so simulationist focused - because everyone spent so much time and ink trying to clear up SIS matters instead of getting onto the real agenda (ie, the primary agenda, if your primary agenda is gamism or nar)? Hey, I wrote alot above (could have deleted it - didn't) - I aint no saint on this matter!

[Ron Edwards]

That last paragraph nails it to the wall, Callan. And the whole post - and Moreno's too - is better food for thought than anything I provided.

This is really, really what the hit points issue is about.

Best, Ron

[Callan S.]

Hi Marshall,

Like, there's all this stuff going on in the city, with factions and stuff, that you can leverage to your advantage maybe; but maybe the player just says, "screw this, where's the nearest dungeon?"

To me, well that'd be rather like playing the riddle of steel, but the players both keep their spritual attributes secret AND they use the rules to change them every so often, so even if the GM was starting to guess what they were, he's left behind. The GM thinks he's figured your onto this political stuff and starts working up material on it and...wang! Your off to a dungeon!

As much as the explicit description of character goals is part of the riddle of steel, I think gamist goals would do well to be explicitly writen and that writing even be part of the system. Perhaps rather than spiritual attributes, mettle attributes? Player invented goals, written down. And before play begins, open to challenge by others as to how it is determined whether such tests of mettle have been met or not, written down as to how it is determined to the satisfaction of all present. They wouldn't work the same as spiritual attributes - you don't get anything for trying and not suceeding or failing (whereas that was sort of the pivotal thing about spiritual attributes - you got more dice even if your PC failed! Completely different ball game!)

If no one can hold it against you, it renders the squishing a non-issue, score-wise.

I'm guessing the background of this notion essentially comes from a gamble based game system.

And people forgiving others for losing at a roll they honestly can't control (and would even be cheating if they could control the die roll!)

This forgiving really needs to stop!

Well to be specific, I'm not sure why one would come with a step on up attitude to a gamble based game unless you adopt the idea that people who failed rolls FAILED! Or atleast some attribution of losing, as much as passing a roll (that they can't control) attributes them as winning.

Really, if we ignore the failed rolls as nothing to do with the person, but we treat the passed rolls as some sort of success on that persons part (ie, we do attribute wins to the player, but don't attribute losing to the player) - it's cognitive dissonance, surely?

Even if there aren't reliable means of resurrection, there's nothing to stop you hastily rolling up a new character and pursuing the exact same agenda; this ain't Shakespeare (actually, an argument could be made for Hamlet being Hamlet's father's player's hastily rolled new character). Death is a slap on the wrist because characters are cheap.

Reminds me of the way our genes treat us, their mortal incarnation. Cheap. Disposable. Ephemeral. Perhaps a gamist challenge one could take up is to play as a human, instead of as a gene? It'd be interesting to actually play the one game in both these ways.

And now I may post this, having mastered the confirmation hint system now. I didn't really fail at answering the confirmation question before - not really! - no one can hold that against me... >:)

[Marshall Burns]

Callan,

Well, look at it this way: as the challenge level approaches impossibility, the negative appreciation for failure falls, and the positive appreciation for success increases. If a high school baseball team were to play against a Major League team, no one would hold it against the high schoolers if they lost -- frankly we'd be stunned if they didn't. On top of that, every hit, out, and run that the high school team scored would be held as more valuable than it would against a more reasonable opponent.

The opposite is also true: as the chance of success approaches certainty, the positive appreciation for success dwindles, while the negative appreciation for failure increases. If you screw up and fail at something easy, teasing and ribbing are likely in order. (If the MLB team lost to high schoolers, they'd be a laughing stock; if they won, nobody would be high-fiving about it.)

This resembles gambling so much because that's pretty much what Step on Up is: wagering esteem. No matter what the procedures and scoring methods are by the game rules, the real-world Reward comes down to the esteem of your fellow players. But I'm thinking we've battled over this point enough times in the past, so I'm not going to belabor it.

Your other points are interesting, but are more in the territory of game design than discussion of what goes down in D&D play as it is. I'm personally exploring the idea of explicitly acknowledged goals in a manner similar to SAs in Riddle of Steel or Beliefs in the Burning Wheel, in my own game Madlands (formerly MADcorp) -- and the jury's still out on whether it benefits the game! As far as D&D's situation on this issue goes, it works fine as-is, much like Trollbabe works just fine without any kind of explicit acknowledgment about what the Trollbabe wants out of or believes about the situation she finds herself in.

[Callan S.]

If the highschool baseball team had a choice about taking on the major league team, yes, I would hold it against them if they lost. Not to such a ferocious degree than if they were major league as well. And there's still affirmation of position for the major league (who knows - major leaguers might run off of hot air and nobody figured that out - so this is a test of whether they really are any better or just advertised as better). But to me there is no taking on something so big that you are safe from losing esteem if you fail and applauded if you win. Ironically to me that seems like gaming the system of esteem itself, to ensure zero esteem risk and only potential esteem gain.

[Marshall Burns]

...or to sit around trying to win the lottery, while everyone else is getting jobs and thus earning more than you ;)

[Marshall Burns]

I'm sorry, this is getting very far away from the original topic. If anyone's interested in taking this line of discussion further, I think I could frame it very well in the context of playtesting my failed alpha game, Badass City (it was this playtesting that brought these issues to my attention).

[Ron Edwards]

Right - in this thread, everyone needs to focus more on the personal brainstorming and less or none on the debate. As usual, much lava is close to the surface with this topic.

Marshall, the playtesting post would be greatly appreciated.