[Through the Ansible] Play-by-post the ecumen.

[Simon C]

So I was thinking about the concept that rules in roleplaying games exist to determine who is allowed "authority" over the truth of a narrative.  The "Lumpley principle"? I think?

Anyhow, I was ALSO thinking about how awesome Ursula le Guin's "Ecumen" stories are.  For those who don't know, they're basically about space-anthropologists, which is as cool as it gets for post-grad antho student/rpg geeks like me.  The ecumen types go to other planets, where there's intelligent life, and try to share information with them, if they want to.  Space travel takes centuries, but information can ravel instantly through the "Ansible".  A lot of them are kind of about how our perceptions of other cultures are created from our own fantasies, and also about how "truth" is arrived at by consensus.

THEN I was thinking about how all my role-playing friends don't live in Japan like I do, and how I've never been into online play, but wouldn't it be cool if there was a game that made play-by-post not only ok, but the preferred method of play.

And then it all came together! My concept of the game is that the player are members of the ecumen, sent to explore and study a new planet.  First they make characters, and describe them to each other.  Then, they post their character's experiences on the new planet they are studying, with the new cultures.  The players entirely make this up, out of their own heads, referring to the other players previous posts.  Their posts represent their reports sent back through the ansible.  They send their reports to the GM, who represents the rest of the ecumen.  The players can say anything they like in their reports.  They don't have to respect the "truth" of what previous reports have said.  They can offer alternative explanations, they can condemn the others' reports as lies, they can tell what happened next, or what happened before, or they can be completely unrelated to the other peoples' reports.  The GM doesn't really have to do much, except provide some structure.  Maybe the ecumen could send instructions sometimes, and maybe the GM can say "Ten years later" and stuff.

So, in short, the players create their own realities out of their reports, which intersect, contradict, support and inform the others'.  The GM provides some narrative structure, and is the "ear" for the reports.  Crucially, the GM never accepts one account as "true" over any other.

What this needs now is a few more formal structures, and thins is where I'm stuck.  How does the game end? How often, and in what order do people post?  I'm really excited about this idea, and I look forward to your ideas.

[Qi Chin]

Hi there.
Let me see if I get this straight. The setting of the game is quite clear (ecumen exploring the civilization of an alien planet), but you need some structure to how this game should be played. As it stands right now, I think it needs a bit more than that. Right now it looks like storytelling/debating on a forum, with a fixed setting, and the GM as a listener. If you are creating this game just for you and your friends, and you all love this kind of stuff, then there's not much of a problem. Otherwise there's a lack of motivation and structure.
What does this game accomplish? Why would someone want to play a character in your game?
It's sounds like a novel idea, but you could add some sort of turn-order to it. Maybe think of it as a board game with the forum as the board. The GM can then hand out rewards to the players if the characters accomplish certain goals (perhaps set by the GM, as per an 'adventure' with 'challenges'), and the player can then use these rewards to gain some advantage in certain situations, such as finding out more info or gaining an extra turn.

Other than that, any more thoughts you have, put them in here.

Hope that helps.

Qi

[Simon C]

Thanks for your response, Qi, but that's really not the direction I want to take this. 

I guess it is "just" storytelling on a forum, but I still see it as very much a game as well.  The game already has a "reward" structure, it's just not a mechanical one.  Reports which fit with the other players' ideas about the planet are considered more "true" by those players, and they interact with them more.  The player who goes of on a tangent, not referencing what the others have written, will lose the only resource that really matters in an RPG, the right to influence what is "true" in the setting.  They still contribute just as much, but if their reports are ignored by the other players, they're not influencing what is "true" in the game.  Of course, that player could feel like their account is the only "true" one, and the othersare wrong.  No one is judging.

So you could view the game as a kind of competion to see how much of your own vision you can get into the story, and still have your interpretation "accepted" by the rest of the players.  That's a really unsubtle way to look at it though, becasue reports which vary from what is accepted as mainstream truth can be really powerful statements about your character, and how they're percieving the world.

Maybe I'm not explaining this very well?

[Qi Chin]

I think you are explaining it well enough to understand what you would like to accomplish, but, at least for me, at this stage, it's a bit difficult to really imagine what this kind of play would look like. Is it something like every player trying to influence the basis of this new world, and trying to persuade other players to take in their accounts as true? And the best way to do this would be by basing your own account on those of other players? Sort of like a competition where everyone tries to set what the world is like?

Qi

[Simon C]

Ok, so, imagine a conflict like what you'd encounter in almost any roleplaying game.  Something like, there are two people, player one and player two, trying to beat each other up.  Player one says "I beat him up", and player two says "I beat him up right back".  The rules in most (all?) roleplaying games exist to determine who's version of events gets turned into "reality".  So you roll some dice maybe, or consult some numerical values, and one of them gets to say "damn right I beat you up!" and this becomes true in the setting.

In my game, this isn't the case.  Player one says "I beat you up", player two says "no, I beat you up".  Rather than rolling any dice, both accounts are considered equally valid.  The only way to have your account have more influcence over the game is to make it more interesting, or more useful than the other accounts.  Critically, however, there is never any "official" adjudication of what is more useful, and one account never "wins", it just might become more useful to the story.

So, in the game, there is no "true" account of the setting, just multiple versions, some of which are more compelling or useful than others. There are a number of stories by le Guin which pretty much exactly reflect what I'm trying to do here.  There's one I don't remember the name of, where this one guy's account is all about how he's accepted into the tribe as a leader, and how he marries the princess, and becomes their god-chief.  Meanwhile, one of the other characters is talking about all the different political factions in the tribe, and how this new "chief" is being used by one faction to gain power, and how it's throwing out of balance their whole belief system.  There's this subcurrent of mystery, becasue there's an electrical power grid on an otherwise primitive planet.  And then there's a report from someone ages later, who talks about how this "god-chief" was sacrificed to the god of the waterfall, which was actually this giant electrical power station, left over from ancient times.

The story highlights the discrepancy between the macho fantasy of planetary exploration, with sorts of cliches about noble savages and stuff, and this really pragmatic, real-politick account, and also the sort of mythic interpretation given to it by another observer.

So the game isn't neccessarily about accounts competing for reality, it's more that they are all true, but the way you write your report can throw a different light on the other reports.  Do you get what I mean?

My feeling is that this is a functional mechanic, as long as it's supported by the players.  What the game needs to make it more playable is a more formal structure of who can post and when, and it needs a structure which can move the game from beginning to end.  Perhaps a good way to do this is for the GM to introduce a few mandatory elements.  So, for example, the GM can say, "at the end of the game, the natives reject the ecumen" or "Doctor Ravel will be murdered", and play moves toward that statement being accepted.  It's kind of like the opposite of a Kicker.  It's something that will happen at the end of play, that draws the characters forward.  I'm imagining GMing this game would be a bit like piloting a bobsled - a few nudges now and then, which can produce dramatic results down the line.

[Trevis Martin]

Hey Simon,

You might get something out of a little game I wrote called Revisionist History.  It has some similar ideas.  I think, crucially, my game lacks a true endgame which I think it needs but maybe there are other things which might give you ideas there.

best

Trevis

[Simon C]

Hey Trevis,

I really like your game design, and it was certainly interesting to me to see another game designed to be played by post.  I thought it was really cool how your rules were really explicity exploring the "lumpley principle" that rules exist to determine who has the right to say what is "true" in the game.  I think that's the key difference between our games.  Ideally, I want that determination to occurr in a "fruitful void" (to use a buzzword I just learnt) outside of any written rules.  I want my game to explore what methods we use, in the absence of rules, to determine truth, and how multiple truths can inform and influence each other.

That said, I'm glad I read your game, and I'd like to know more about how it panned out in actual play.  Did it cause trouble that players could post as much as they wanted? If you could design an endgame now, how would you do it?

[johnwedd]

i think the structure of the game doesn't really require endgame, unless a general storiline is inserted by the gm. that is plausible.

[Eero Tuovinen]

The definitive game in this genre is called De Profundis (English version in 2002), so you might want to check that out if you haven't already.

[Trevis Martin]

That said, I'm glad I read your game, and I'd like to know more about how it panned out in actual play.  Did it cause trouble that players could post as much as they wanted? If you could design an endgame now, how would you do it?

The playtest that ran was done by Jeremiah Genest and his online group.  You can find it here.  I actually didn't see anyone making more than the number of posts it takes to earn coins per turn.  I really liked the way the game was organized into Journals with one article for each Researcher per journal.

However it dried up pretty fast and I never really got any comment on why.  The energy seeped out of it  and I think one reason is because the game is set up as "play till you say you're done."  Which is, in my experience, death to internet games unless you have some people who are very dedicated (or very isolated or something.)  It's one of the reasons why Universalis tends to sputter out online.

As for endgame, I've been giving it some thought.  I had wanted to ask people here what they thought would be a good endgame.  I was thinking simply a number of total turns based on the number of subjects or relationships in the game but the more I think of it the more I like the idea of something like Mechaton's doomsday clock. (I don't know exactly how that mechanic works as I am still patiently waiting for my hard copy of Mechaton.)  That is, the players can pay coins for the privilege of ticking down the clock, or maybe can tick down the clock instead of taking a token in the payout phase.

When the clock ticks down to Zero, game is over.

What do you think, is there another good way to do it?

[Simon C]

Hey, thanks everyone for your useful replies.

John, I think that, while it's not strictly essential for the game to have an end, it would dramatically improve it.  Not only for the reason that Trevis pointed out - that a clear end in sight helps people maintain enthusiasm, but also becasue I think that endings are a powerful way to convey meaning.  "Dust Devils" is a game that really clearly emphasises this, becasue the entirety of play is about how you get to the end.  I think I want a similar focus in my game.

I checked out "De Profundis", and it is, as claimed, the definitive game in the genre.  It goes even further than I was planning with this game, by making the issue of truth and reality pretty much irrelevant.  It also has effectively no rules, and not much in the way of shared imagined space.  Thanks for the reccomendation.  It's certainly interesting to see how far the concept can be taken.  I think that I'd like to make some framework for the game that supports a shared imagined space to a greater extent, and I have a few ideas about how to do that.

Trevis, I think your ideas about how to create an endgame would work well for your own game, but my own idea doesn't include any kind of mechanical resource, which would make that kind of rule difficult to impliement for me.  Here's what I've been thinking would work both as a way to focus play into a more shared imagined space, and also promote an endgame.

I was thinking that the GM could provide a single event which will feature in all the players' narratives. This should be a significant or emotionally charged event, such as a death, a wedding, the acceptance or rejection of the ekumen, and so on.  The GM could also provide a list of words.  Once all the words have been used by a player, the game is over for that player.  So, I guess the words are a kind of token, which they can spend to move the game towards a conclusion.  Their use of the word before anyone else uses it means they might get to define how that word affects the SIS to some extent.  If the word is "Genderless" a person could radically effect the world by saying "The people here are genderless" before someone else says "The people here have no concept of something being genderless - everything is imbued with gender". 

So players pretty much choose when they end the game.  A player could keep on playing indefinitely if they wanted to, at the expense of never mentioning the things that were important to the other players. 

Would that achieve what I want it to?