Force and Vice

[Bill Cook]

It's my understanding that the use of Force is dysfunctional by definition.  I wanted to get some feedback as to the dividing line between proper GM play and the use of Force.  There are two functions typically assigned to this role that concern me: rendering the game world and pacing.

By the former, I mean things like setting difficulty levels, describing what the characters see when they enter the room and metering chaos.  e.g.  "The city panics as invaders pour in under cover of night."  The GM has an opportunity to show his taste and further the desired style of play by giving emphasis to any number of details.  (e.g.  "A bullet whizzes over your shoulder and blows out a car windshield," "a cacophony of clicking boots and blurring uniforms stream by the end of the alley," "bursts of gunfire spark in the darkness as the city power grid fails," "urgent voices shout orders outside the door before it explodes in a shower of splinters," etc.)  And also things like (1) do the bad guys set up an ambush or (2) will the nameless, faceless mayor yield to political pressure (which is not a character anyone had any plans for, which we're only dealing with because it's relevant to some development in play).  They make the world "go."

The latter is exercised as abstracting the experience of play.  i.e. Framing scenes to cut out the bloody, boring details.

Here's the rub: what is the dividing line between the province of the player and that of the GM?  I recognize that this is a parameter of the Social Contract.  I'm asking how you guys do it.

My first thought: the person and inner state of the player's character is inviolate.  However, as much as vice is an aspect of chaos, may its incarnation escape this restriction?  Is it ever not Force-ful to predicate a scene on theft by a player's character to finance a drug habit, for example?  (Again, my interest is to poll the practice of our membership.)

A Sim-minded counter argument to the above perspective is: how else can a GM ensure that vice shows its head in play?  This point is what makes it an issue, for me.

And the way I see scene framing causing trouble goes like this:

GM: Cut to tomorrow night.  You're in the cemetery standing over a freshly dug grave.  You hear a rustling at the tree-line of the adjacent field.  A horror of fiendish ghouls hop from the trees and between the tombstones, coming towards you.
Player: Wait, I don't want to go there.
GM: Well, where do you want to go?
Player: I don't know.  But I should get to say where my guy goes.
GM: That's a good impersonation of a vagina.

Edited for layout, grammar and clarification.

[clehrich]

I may be misunderstanding your question, but I would make a sharp distinction between Force and Railroading.

You bring up a nice example: supposing the Premise is about drugs and vice, about addiction and whatnot.  How do we ensure that this gets addressed?

First of all, the game needs to reward addressing this Premise.

Second, you could certainly Railroad: you can structure events such that the question keeps arising.

If you do the first very effectively, you probably don't need to do the second very much; in any case it's not inherently Force.

Now suppose the characters are in such a position that they cannot help dealing with the question of vice.  They have a range of choices, from "Just say no" to "I'm going to become a dealer."

Force is when you predetermine which choice they must make.

So let's suppose the characters are undercover cops working the Vice squad.  You're of course supposed to be busting the dealers -- that's your job.  But in order to get in with the serious bad guys, you may well have to prove that you're users, i.e. you're going to have to "smoke, drop, shoot, snort, rub [it] into your belly, or whatever," to quote George Carlin.  And the stuff is addictive, so it's going to be hard to keep clear what side you're on.*  

So long as these are open choices, that's not Force.  But if the game is so structured, by whatever means, that the PC's cannot help but be on the side of the law, absolutely, then they must not only address Premise but come up with a fixed answer.  This is Force.

Does that help?

*See the 1991 film Rush, with Jason Patric.  Not a great film, but the whole thing is about addressing this Premise, and Patric acts extremely well.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

There are a couple of topics to cover here.

ONE: FORCE
I'll be as blunt as I can: Force is not, by definition, dysfunctional.

a) It is incompatible with Narrativist play when we're talking about Premise-addressing decisions.

b) It is essential to focused story-creation during Simulationist play.

c) Force is not the same thing as "GM input." One of the things that's very hard to get across is how much input a GM can have - and it can be huge! - without exerting Force. I think so many people have become accustomed to Force that they think, without it, that a GM is practically stricken dumb and cannot contribute at all.

TWO: INPUT-NEGOTIATION
The key to reaching an accord about this during play, among the participants, is to distinguish between "decree" and "approve."

Let's take some Narrativist play. In your graveyard example, I typically say something like, "You're at the graveyard - is that OK?" And the player can tell me then whether we ought to do something else first. Note that I have not said, at all, what is about to happen to him at the graveyard. I need his complicity in being there first, before he knows the consequences of agreeing. The whole point is that I, as GM, have an idea for the crisis the character will face, but I cannot actually play his character to get him there - but we can, together, cut to this scene as long as we're both in on the cut.

[Side issue: if the player consistently uses this opportunity to dodge out of play, as in, "No! I'm not at the graveyard. I'm, uh, driving around." So I cut back to him later and say, "What now?" and he says, "Um, I dunno." I say, Come on, and he says, "Oh, I guess I'll stop for a hamburger." This guy is dodging out of play. At that point, I'll probably say, "Dude, you're wasting our time," and move to the next guy, or carry out some other social techniques that I described in a recent thread.]

By contrast, I might also use some Force and simply take unto myself the privilege of total authority over all such scene-cuts. I play more this way when we're going pretty Simulationist, and the participants (me included) are not as committed to addressing Premise - just to "playing out a story" in a kind of "story is set or at least in the improvisational hands of one person, hence out of our hair." The GM uses Force, the players say "Frame me, baby."

Does that help at all? In each case, the relationship between suggest and approve is the same. It's just that in the second, blanket approval for the GM's "suggestions" is granted at the outset. It so happens that in doing so, a certain Creative Agenda is hamstrung, but that might be perfectly OK.

THREE: RAILROADING
Railroading literally means the use of Force such that the suggest/approve process, whatever its acceptable form has taken for a particular group, is abused. I think that is about as clearly as I can put it. Does that help to distinguish why Force is not, in and of itself, a dsyfunctional phenomenon?

Best,
Ron

[Bill Cook]

Boy, you two really see things differently.

Chris:

I wasn't necessarily focused on Nar play, but I think you're right to sense its relevance to this issue.

You answer within the context of addressing Premise.  I read the following procedure: Reward; if that doesn't work, Railroad (i.e. Frame the scenes so as to restrict choices to those that address the Premise).  So far, no foul.  Force is not only setting the scene but also making character decisions.  And that's bad.

Ron:

Well, you're so succinct, I can't reduce it.  This adds great clarity to my thoughts.  I observe that Force is a high-level concept.  By your understanding, it is Railroading (i.e. a sub-type of Force that connotes abuse) that I name as the villian.

I will probably get the gains I seek by reaching an explicit agreement on the mode of input negotiation.  This reminds me so much of Fast Effects and phases of a turn in M:TG that I must share an anecdote.

The group I used to play with got in a quandry about how not to play effects by an auctioneer model (i.e. Racing to respond before your opponent makes another declaration.)  What liberated me was the idea that for every action, you must allow your opponent the opportunity to respond.  But no one wants to constantly repeat: "Would you care to respond to my declared action with any fast effects?"  So in practice, we'd blaze ahead, and if someone wanted to counter an effect three issues down the stack, we'd back up.  It was their right, went the thinking.  (Another proviso worth mentioning: once they made some response, they lost all time holds up to that point.)

Assuming there's no side issue play avoidance, I could see myself adopting this practice to role-playing.

So, for you, playing vice is just another suggestion for approval. Assuming a Nar agenda, you might say, "Last week, you stole money from a lady's purse on the subway.  Is that okay?  Cool.  You look up and realize that she's your waitress," whereas I might do the same without asking, having established the requirement of player consent on a per scene basis, where lack of dissent indicates approval.  (I recognize this efficiency may risk Sim Drift, but again, I'm banking on clarity in the Social Contract.)

And if they play avoid, they're just a wet noodle, and you move on.

[clehrich]

Boy, you two really see things differently.

I'm not sure that's the case, although my use of the world "railroading" was a little dubious.

I wasn't necessarily focused on Nar play, but I think you're right to sense its relevance to this issue.

It seems to me that Force is difficult to see clearly without Premise being at stake, because Force is shorthand for Forcing An Answer To The Premise.  If the characters are vice cops who are pre-designed such that they never, ever consider being on the bad side, then the fact that this is Force is not dysfunctional if the players are happy making choices about something else, as Ron says.  By the same token, it's very difficult to spot, because it's not an issue at all.

Railroad (i.e. Frame the scenes so as to restrict choices to those that address the Premise).  So far, no foul.  Force is not only setting the scene but also making character decisions.  And that's bad.

You've reframed the word "Railroad" more effectively -- this is exactly what I meant, simply strong framing of some sort to ensure that everyone is on the same page.  But Force isn't bad unless addressing Premise is the point.

The thing is, if you strongly Frame to ensure that the Premise is at stake, and then you use Force to ensure that there's only one answer to the Premise, then you really do have the players in a situation where they can't do anything.

In fact, I see Force as a specific type of player control.  It's fine, as is any other kind of control, except when it so dominates things that players end up without any control of their own, or when it in some other way violates the social contract.  

Force is a way of dominating Premise.  There are other ways of dominating other factors.  If you combine them sufficiently that the players cannot do anything but follow a pre-determined path, then you don't have a functional game.  So long as you leave them choices somewhere, and those are the kinds of choices the players want to see, then you have functional gaming, with or without Force.

[Bill Cook]

I'm glad you're airing your take on this issue.  It's interesting to see how people see things differently.  I think we all have a gut-level understanding of an SC violation through restriction of choices.

Reading your post, Chris, has brought to mind a separate issue that I would describe as fumbling the lead.  It relates to dysfunctional Force -- Railroading, if you will -- in that players end up frustrated in their pursuit of agenda.

In a scene from a campaign I ran, the party was milling about in a town, trying to get insight into the nature of a cult that was sweeping the kingdom.  One player asked a guard where the cult compound was.  I made a Persuasion check and he failed.  The player explained how his request was reasonable and that the guard should give him the information.  And I said, the dice have spoken.  The player continued to dissent.  I consoled him, but didn't budge on the result.  I terminated the spiral by cross-cutting to some other players who were tailing some of the cult members.

Looking back, I didn't handle it so badly.  But if I'd wanted to stay with that character, then either he or I would have had to suggest another approach.  And when neither role steps up, the lead just dries out on the table.  There ought to be a term for that!  If people only knew the suffering this causes.  

And just imagine if the session became a paperclip chain of these instances, punctuated by downtime scenes of Sim maintenance functions.  (Shudder.)  People that have the fortune of invested players who do this should be branded on their ass.

It's striking to me how similiar these types of dysfunction are.