Charmed and Harry-Potter online free-form roleplayers

[Librisia]

The people running the game get to play all the interesting characters who get all the play time and plot attention, while folks who haven't proven themselves get to sit around and watch them play.

You've just described everything I hated about the Vampire LARPs I tried.

*LOL*

[Vaxalon]

Is TTRPG unique, in that a rank beginner can jump in and expect to attract as much "screen time" as someone who has been doing it for years?

Are there any other hobbies ANYWHERE that have that characteristic?

[Selene Tan]

Most board games, and especially party games, fit that category. Most party games are designed to have lots of wild swings as to who's in the lead so that everybody gets some "spotlight time", although the most skilled person/team will win in the end. Spotlight time is desirable because it helps foster the social interaction.

[James Holloway]

Is TTRPG unique, in that a rank beginner can jump in and expect to attract as much "screen time" as someone who has been doing it for years?

Miniatures wargaming, or any kind of wargaming, really. There the build-up is before play, in amassing an army. But I played actively in the Durham Wargames Group for a while without an army to my name, because experienced historical gamers tend to own their armies in matched pairs. But the game is usually structured in such a way that it's not really possible to reduce the amount of attention one player gets.

Equally, many TTRPG (how I hate that term) groups do put new members through a certain amount of iniatory pummelling.

[contracycle]

I'm not sure it is the game, so much as the social context, that drives this phenomenon.  The new kids getr hazed in a lot of contexts in which membership and the identification of membership is important to the group.  This can apply to table-top RPG if the group has that sort of mindset, especially where they have been bonded in the fires of adversity, as it were.

But the parlour games that give everyone spotlight time straight away without any dues-paying are dealing with a social context which is entirely ad hoc, and composed of people for whom the game-activity is essentially trivial, rather than anything seriously purposeful.  Its just a bit of fun.

[James Holloway]

But the parlour games that give everyone spotlight time straight away without any dues-paying are dealing with a social context which is entirely ad hoc, and composed of people for whom the game-activity is essentially trivial, rather than anything seriously purposeful.  Its just a bit of fun.

Indeed, part of the point of parlor games is, by imposing a structure of "rules," to force social participation out of people who would otherwise be shy and reticent.

[Mike Holmes]

The FFRPGers call their games RPGs, but they are really interactive fiction communities.  

Well, if you start staking claims like this, the problem is that somebody always comes along with a better claim. Next thing you know, the Psychologists will be telling us not to call what we do RPGs because they're really Shared Imagined Space Games. Given that RPGs "properly" are what psychologists use in their offices to help patients and have been using since... well way before Gygax.

In fact, this is why we use "Table Top" RPGs to describe what we do. Because the CRPG and LARP pepople aren't going to give up the monicker RPG just because we think it belongs to what we do. Much easier to simply say it's all RPGs and that what we do is specifically TTRPGs. Then we can use FFRPG for what they do and everyone is happy. (Note that this is all only neccessary in the context where it might be confusing not to simply say RPG - I'm not suggesting that everyone at the Forge use TTRPG all the time).

It's all just ways to have fun. Nobody has an a priori superiority in this which makes one or the other deserve the title that people apply to all of it.

Some people are willing to go through the initiatory process to "prove" that they aren't Mary Sues.  I'm not willing to do that (see my "Monopoly" scenario above), because for me, an RPG is a GAME, and I don't feel that I should have to go to great lengths to prove that I can play a game.  I'm a grownup, and I don't want to spend my time reading along for months and not get play time.

I think this is reasonable, but I do not think it's reasonable to leave the FFRPGers with no social controls at all. That is, they should have some valve by which they filter people.

Mike, I agree that much of the screening process is done beforehand in TTRPGs.  But only most of it.  Ron's whole GNS conflict paradigm occurs quite often when someone invites a gaming friend who is primarily gamist into a group where the focus of the games is simulationist (or any combination thereof).  People feel like they can't ask the new friend to leave because he's a friend of a player they don't want to piss off ... we all know the story.

That's the Agenda level, however. You don't play with people who, for example, offend you with their body odor, do you? You filter those people out of your selection process by not inviting them. Which doesn't make it perfect - your buddy might invite Mr. Smelly over. But you handle the result socially. Yes, it might take more than one session to filter. But that's part of the social nature of FTF contact. It's simply rude to not allow someone to participate after they've been invited to play FTF.

But you might not ask them back.

It's the anonymity of the internet that allows for the anti-social behavior to newbs, and sorta requires it. That is, there are no "sessions" or invites online (or, if there are, then these problems do not occur, right?). As such, the only way to filter is to either have the hazing period, or to play with a person and then kick them out if you don't like them. The problem with the latter is that nobody likes confrontation, and often the social contract of the group is that anyone is supposed to be allowed to play in theory. That the membership is not arbitrarily controlled by somebody.

So if you take away hazing, I think you need to replace it with something else.

As Andrew and Brendan point out, the online ffrpg communities unfamiliar with tabletop games are paranoid about characteristics they think are "Mary Sue" characteristics.  What I created was a good character for a tabletop game that uses canon characters as NPCs.  What ffrpg players see is someone who is self-aggrandizing and not able to play well with others.

Well, like I say, I can see them as feeling that the player in question is not contributing to a community level aesthetic. The player is playing for themselves at the cost of the overall aesthetic. IOW, the creative agenda is not agreed upon, or at least not being followed by the player in question.

The problem is that the "systems" used in FFRPGs are poor for delivering CA. As Ron points out about them, they have the highest level of "Points of Contact." Basically every single time you make something up you have to decide whether or not it's appropriate from just examples. That's not easy. So it doesn't suprise me that CA isn't transmitted always to new players.

And given the lack of social context other than hazing filtering, why should somebody care? Do these people spend a lot of time trying to get to know each other outside of the game context? That's not been my (admittedly limited) experience.

What I'd suggest for FFRPGs is that they make the initiation very explicit and helpful intent on getting people up to speed instead of simply being a filter for people who don't want to put in the effort. I'd require the person to do a short bio on themselves, including what other experience they have. Then I'd give them a sponsor who would show them around and introduce them to everyone. While doing this they should be given docs on the group expectations regarding CA, and should be required to recapitualte what they've learned. Only once they've done this, and thus become a social member of the group, should they be allowed to participate.

Many groups just make this simpler by making play invite only.

The problem with my model is that it voids the "FFRPG" is simple principle. That is, it's seen as something with a very low barrier to entry. But that ignores the fact that they do have a system supporting a certain CA, and that if it's not transmitted, that you will get lots of players who won't fit in. And then you're back to either hazing or allowing "bad" play again.

Which may be simply what evolution has produced. It may simply be that this is the least effort/ greatest return formula that they've found. How would I know, I only play TT most days.

Also, a point I have yet to discuss is that in the ffrpgs that base themselves in a fandom, what happens is that the mods and their friends all play the canon characters.  I hate to break it to them, but canon characters ARE MARY SUES.  Which is a blind spot that most people who play ffrpgs in a fandom setting seem to have.  The people running the game get to play all the interesting characters who get all the play time and plot attention, while folks who haven't proven themselves get to sit around and watch them play.

To put it in our parlance, again, basically it's a particular CA for the "in" group, and the other players have no CA. CA means allowing protagonism in some form, and the non-central characters, due to canon restrictions, are prevented from having any protagonism.

The Mary Sue term is a bad one, because it's used to mean any CA difference from what I can tell, or, in this case, disallowing other players from engaging in the CA. They're different phenomena being tagged with the only name that they have for it. Which is why it becomes so easy to apply to anyone. Yes, it means, basically, "our play is incoherent with regards to agenda, and (typical of incoherence) that bugs me!"

Mike

[James Holloway]

Well, like I say, I can see them as feeling that the player in question is not contributing to a community level aesthetic. The player is playing for themselves at the cost of the overall aesthetic. IOW, the creative agenda is not agreed upon, or at least not being followed by the player in question.

Right. I don't think that this -- disallowing the character -- is specifically a difference between the types of game. That sounds very much like the kind of character I might have disallowed in a tabletop game, although for very different reasons. The two types of game tend to express these negotiations differently, but one can equally imaging a TT game in which that character would be inappropriate and an FF one in which it would be A-OK.

[SK]

Gosh, Librisia, I'm really sorry for the delay.  I honestly didn't mean to do a "post and run" on you; I just got a little bit distracted there for a while. (And now you know why I'm not currently in any games - of late, I'm unreliable, and I know it.)

I think it's a misnomer to say that gaming and fandom are separate. Gaming is a subculture of fandom in general. I disagree that fandom is overwhelmingly female.

Quite true. I was using "fandom" in the sense of "the subculture of people whose fan participation primarily takes the form of writing fanfic and playing on-line RPGs"--probably mainly because that's the sense in which the people who belong to that group usually use the term "fandom."  In my experience, that is a predominantly female subculture, but I also agree with you that it's only a subset of fandom as a wider phenomenon, and that within that wider phenomenon, there are more men than women.  (And agreed also, btw, on the misogyny.)

I'm willing to wager that most people playing successful, enjoyable online rpgs - whether they be SIMs or PBEMS - are having the enjoyable success because someone involved in the creation of the game has experience with tabletop games.

You may be right. I really don't know.  My own experience with on-line gaming has mainly been as a lurker/reader (and as a confidante to stressed-out mods), rather than as an active participant.  I do know that the games I've followed have been both run and played by people who don't seem to know squat about other types of gaming. Some of their games look pretty good to me, others...oh, well, you know. Notsomuch. But I don't have an equal sample size of on-line games run by experienced table-toppers, so my ability to make useful comparisons here is pretty much nil.

Would you be willing to elaborate more of the idea? For instance, what parts of GM authority are given over to the player in online sims?

I was primarily thinking of plotting there.  Although I know that a lot of the Indie folks around here have started to question this idea, it seems to me that it's still pretty standard traditional table-top practice to consider the related questions of "which scenes are going to be played out in detail and which glossed over?" and "what should happen in the overall plot in the future?" as falling under the GM aegis.  In a number of on-line games, on the other hand, that authority is considerably more diffuse. The entire group is jointly responsible for pushing the plot forward--and in fact, a player who refuses to take on a GM-like "authorial" role by helping to initiate and construct plot is often viewed as an obstructive, selfish, or just plain piss-poor player.  In some LJ-based games, for example, you can get into some trouble with the rest of the group if you only write in your PC journal, without ever contributing to the out-of-character plotting journal: it's considered really poor form, and in some groups, might even cause someone to ask you if you really want to be playing.

This strikes me as very different from the traditional table-top model, in which players are not really expected to create the overall plot --and certainly not to create story-lines that don't even involve their PCs!  The entire notion of what the player is actually "playing" is somewhat shifted: your primary responsibility is not just to play a character; it's to play the game, which is understood to encompass the plot-lines.

Like I said, though, the expectation in TTRPG is beginning to change now, in some places.  But I still think there are some strikingly different expectations which serve as the norm in the two types of play.

Even more striking, though, I think, are the differences in how authority over the PC is perceived.  Individual player control over his or her PC is significantly reduced in fictive on-line RPGs.  I mean, players are writing each others' characters' dialogue! It's really hard for me to imagine that flying too well with your average table-top gamer.

One of the the things that has arisen as a result of the reduced player control over the PC in these games is the whole question of "God-Modding" -- inappropriate control of another player's character. Precisely what constitudes Godmodding varies greatly between these games, and establishing just what the rules are regarding it seems to be a vital part of the individual game contract.  In some games you're allowed to write entire scenes featuring another PC even without player permission; in others, player permission must be granted first, but once it is given, you're free to do whatever you want; in yet others, you not only need the other player's permission to write their character, but the final scene must be given a stamp of approval before it goes live on-line (and therefore "really happens" in the game world).  And then there are some other types of games -- forum-based RPG, for example -- where you get distinctions over what sorts of things you can write for another PC (dialogue may be okay, for example, but combat not okay; distinctions are sometimes drawn between trivial dialogue and character-vital conversations; some games I've seen actually have line limits -- you can write X lines of another PC's dialogue, but any more than that and it's ::gasp:: God-Modding; and so forth.)

As someone who came to gaming through traditional table-top, I find this diffusion of control over the PC completely fascinating -- and the nuances of game contract necessary to keep everyone on the same page with how much of that power is supposed to be shared even more so.  

(Was this the sort of game contract issue you meant, Mike, when you referred to methodologies for "transmitting CA?" Sorry if it's a nuisance question - I'm still getting used to some of the terminology you folks use around here.  If so, then I agree that the FFRPGers could probably learn something from TTRPG here: they don't seem to me to have yet developed very good methodologies for conveying to new players what is expected in regard to a number of issues of great importance to their game contracts.)

I don't really know if table-top gamers could learn something from trying out similar approaches to PC authority in their face-to-face games, but I think it might be interesting to find out!

RE: Librisia's FFRPG experience:

No one was actually that rude.

No. I should have read more carefully. ::rueful smile::  Post in haste, repent at leisure...  

After I'd already posted, I went back and followed your links and realized that I'd somewhat misinterpreted--or perhaps merely overreacted to--the situation.  Sorry.

I think the literary rpgs are also more interested in writing interactive fiction than they are in the experience being a game, per se.

Welllll, there's a continuum, to be sure, between Game and Interactive Fiction, even in table-top RPG, and the literary on-line RPGs do tend to fall pretty far to the IF side of things.  Then again, back when I used to hang out on rgfa in the mid-90s, my favored approach to table-top gaming was constantly accused of being "not really RPG" but instead being "really" interactive fiction -- and I assure you, it was a hell of a lot less so than some of the stuff people here on the Forge are into!  So perhaps I've grown more than a little bit leery of that particular accusation.  The on-line stuff still looks far more like RPG to me than...oh, say, a round-robin serial does.  It's certainly more game-like than a collaborative fiction project.  But I agree with you that it's closer to that end of the spectrum that your usual trad TTRPG.

(No angst, though?  Whoah! What's up with that?  It seems to me that the written medium is well-suited to it -- you get all that focus on the internal, after all, yeah?  It would seem rather a pity to let it all go to waste by choosing a character who isn't very self-reflective.  I mean, sheesh!  Like you said, where's the fun in that?)

Brendan:

Thank you for that link! It was a very interesting article, yet also made me feel...oh, a tad uncomfortable? Even when one can see that there are strong sociological reasons for it emerging as a practice, it's hard to feel too good about hazing.

Is TTRPG unique, in that a rank beginner can jump in and expect to attract as much "screen time" as someone who has been doing it for years?

Well, now, that all depends on the TTRPG, doesn't it?

My first TTRPG were D&D games in which the DM and his two buddies played the k00l powerful protagonists, who had interesting things happen to them, and knew important NPCs, and were central to Big Important Plot Stuff Happening In The World.

In FFRPG terms, in other words, they were the only ones who got to play canon characters. :-D

The rest of us?  Oh, we played the cannon fodder.  We got no screen time, the DM would steamroll right over us whenever we tried even to converse in-character among ourselves, and we spent most of the combat sequences unconscious. No, let me correct that: if we were lucky we'd spend them unconscious.  All too often, instead we'd spend them dead.  Then we'd make new cannon fodder characters.  Eventually, I stopped even bothering to give them names.  Then I stopped showing up at all.

The amazing thing is, I suspect that I would have been perfectly content playing dropping-like-flies cannon fodder if only I'd been permitted to have in-character conversations with all the other grunts. Really, I'm appallingly easy to please that way.  But they wouldn't even allow us newbies to do that!  I mean, sheesh, at least in a crappy LJ game, you can' be utterly denied play time (unless they refuse to let you join at all, of course), because you can always write in your PC journal.  

Nah, James is right. TTRPG groups are hardly immune from the hazing instinct.  Still, I do think it's less of a problem in TT, for all the reasons that others have already mentioned: the built-in screening of meeting people face-to-face, the relative difficulty of being a gate-crasher in real life as opposed to on the internet, and so forth.  

I also think that, for the very same reasons, it's usually less of a problem for grown-up TT gamers than it is for younger ones.  The hazing I encountered in high school was probably partially due to the games taking place in the context of a school club.  I suspect that if I had been invited to play with the same group at a private game at one of their houses, the social dynamic would have been a bit different.

But then, I wouldn't have been invited, would I?  Because I didn't know any gamers.  Which is why I was attending a meeting of a high school D&D club in the first place.

So.  

It's sort of irresolvable, that, isn't it?  On the one hand, groups that are open to all and sundry have to do something to protect themselves.  On the other hand, I don't suppose we'd want them not to exist at all; it would make it much harder for interested would-be gamers to find others of their kind.

[Mike Holmes]

Was this the sort of game contract issue you meant, Mike, when you referred to methodologies for "transmitting CA?"

Yes, quite.

And we're really only just learning how to do it well in TT, IMO. I mean, take D&D with several hundred pages of text that you can read to try to get the hang of how to play - and the CA is still not transmitted well. You still get D&D players trying to make great thematic stories. Yikes.

I don't really know if table-top gamers could learn something from trying out similar approaches to PC authority in their face-to-face games, but I think it might be interesting to find out!

Well, we've already gone off in that direction quite a bit. I'm actuall co-author of a game called Universalis, for instance. No GM, no PCs. It's really not a TTRPG in the traditional sense at all except for the presumptive tabletop part of it (in practice it's used a lot online). But it comes from the TT tradition. In that game, all characters are held completely communally all the time by default. And it has control mechanisms to make this work.

So, on the contrary, while I don't want to tout the superiority of TTRPGs, I'd say that The Forge has been instrumental in looking at these things closely. And that the FFRPGers could learn something from us in this way.

It's a circlular problem, however. They don't want "rules" yet they have to have rules in order to make these things work. What they really don't want are "resolution mechanics." But that's not easy to see. Basically I think that they could benefit a lot from formalization of their control mechanisms.

Mike

[SK]

They don't want "rules" yet they have to have rules in order to make these things work.

They already do have rules to make those things work.  I itemized some of them in my previous post.

What they don't yet have much of is a shared vocabulary for the theoretical constructs on which their games depend, which renders them less effective than they should be at conveying expectations cross-game.  That's where I think that they could learn the most from TTRPG, which has been around a lot longer, and which has therefore accrued quite a bit of shared vocabulary and theoretical construct which makes it easier for TTRPGers to establish contractual detail.  (Of course, they do have written record, which can serve to fill in some, if by no means all, of the gap there: you wanna see what the game's about? Read it!)

What TTRPGers could really learn from FFRPGers, I think, is what RPG looks like when viewed through the prism of a fictive paradigm, rather than from that of a game or cinematic paradigm.  Universalis (as I read it) is an attempt to lead people accustomed to the more traditional TT paradigms away from those modes of thinking and towards a more fictive approach --which is a very cool thing.  FFRPG is where you can go if you want to see how the gaming of people who were never exposed to any of those TT paradigms and tropes in the first place developed.

Of course, it's possible that there's not too much of pragmatic use to be gleaned from the games of people who didn't start out from the same place that you did, and who therefore don't have quite the same problems and issues when it comes to their gaming practice --and who instead may have different "problems" that you find a bit baffling.  But it's always instructive, IMO, to see what makes sense to people who are viewing things from a different angle, and what doesn't make sense; or what is viewed as "problematic" and what is not.