A New Spin on the Old Magic/Religion Question

[Jack Spencer Jr]

The way Jack talks about it, you'd think that the only solution is they can't talk to Apollo or Ra. Sure, there are ways to prevent them from getting to the sun, if there's reason for them not to know. But this starts to seem a bit high-handed, if they can get everywhere in any universe except the sun.

Actually, I've kind of changed gears on this in the Unified/Religion thread somewhere where I state that I find this sort of thing is not especially helpful to the discussion. See my post above involving hypethetical situations, but my main point is that you have a game world where you have to conflicting religions in them. The obvious solution is to not have that, of course. Get rid of the Egyptian myths and the priest of osiris and you're golden, right? But you have both so it is therefore your problem to figure out how to resolve the conflicting religions (I offer two possibilities in the other thread). Or it's the problem of the game designer who's game you are playing, which I think is your main point, but it is ultimately still you're problem if the design did not as in AD&D 1st ed. Your choice then is to either work out a solution or to play something else. It would depend on your personal preference which you select.

there must be an objective and universal truth in any game for the purposes of resolution (of all sorts of things)

We're talking about consistency, right? You mean keeping the things in your game world etched in stone, right? I can point of items of inconsistency in several places.

A narrative flub in Robinson Crusoe has Crusoe stripping naked to swim out to his shipwreck and once there he filled his pockets with provisions. He was naked. What did he use as pockets?

A better example is probaly in Magnum P.I. in the character of Robin Masters, Thomas Magnum's mysterious millionaire benefactor. In the first season or so, Masters was a near-invisble character. All we got was shots of his hands or from behind and his distinctive voice, a lot like Charlie from Charlie's Angels. According to a website his voice was none other than Orson Wells. This is, Wells died at some point so what the show's producers did was simply not talk about Masters for a while, like a season or two and then brought him back in a sense with Thomas Magnum suspecting Higgins was in fact Masters. This completely ignore that Magnum had shared scenes with Masters in earlier episodes and, to my knowledge, they never addressed this with anything like "Oh, he was a look-alike" or any other explanation. They simply took the nature of Robin Masters, the mysterious millionaire, and re-applied it after a period of time where everyone had safely "forgotten" about the particulars of Master, namely the guy with the hands.

If you look hard enough, you could probably find similar inconsistencies in other tv shows or novel series and the like. These media have the benefeit of a second draft, a rewrite, and in many cases a continuity editor who is supposed to be watching for stuff like this. How much moreso is this to be expected in RPG play were the story is bult as it happens with no possibilty for a rewrite?

I suppose it boils down to personal taste, really. Some people are going to want bullet-proof consistency no matter how much I say "just let go, man." And I really shouldn't judge, either, another's preferences.

I am just saying...well it's like this.

Feedback used to be something the recording industry tried to minimize and remove. Jimi Hendrix came along and he made feedback a part of his sound. He tried to mold it, to make it do things to make groovy sounds. People from the old school would heard his stuff and said "Man, listen to all of that horrible feedback." But other people listened to it and said "Man, what a groovy sound."

I put forth that inconsistency is very much like feedback in this example. It is traditionally believed to be something to minimize if not completely remove from one's game. I say it is yet another tool at the roleplayer's disposal when playing and for their own enjoyment.

[M. J. Young]

So that brings me back to the question I've had from the beginning. What you seem to be saying, M. J., is that an incomplete game hasn't enough presented to be complete. All tautologies are true. So?

There's a part of me that wants to say that Fang has nailed the problem quite effectively, and a part of me that draws back from the notion that all I've done is state a tautology. I hope I can show that there's more than just "incomplete games are incomplete" in what I've said--but let me touch a few other things on the way.

1. Clearly game worlds do require some internal consistency, so of course there are some  principles at work. But I don't think M.J. means every kind of fixed principle, no matter how vague or abstract. I think he has something pretty specific in mind, having to do with certain kinds of empirical questions. But I would ask for clarification here.

In Monopoly, if someone lands on one of your properties, you get to collect rent from him. But what happens if you don't happen to notice he's on your property, or if you forget that this is something you own? Can you come back at any time later and say, wait a minute, you were on Marvin Gardens a couple of turns back, and didn't pay me my rent, so you owe me? This is a question that seems likely to come up during play, maybe not every time you play but at least once in a while. The rules answer it: they say that once the next player rolls the dice, you can't collect the rent.

I think that just about any game and any game world raises obvious questions; and that they have to attempt to provide a way to answer those obvious questions. Don't get me wrong; you can do a lot with player assumptions to fill in gaps. I have no problem with saying, "this is just like a modern world except" or "this is just like a fantasy medieval kingdom except", because it puts people on the same page. That in itself can be the basis for making those decisions. For example, I don't off the top of my head recall what detail I gave to the defenses of the castle when I wrote The Dancing Princess; but I gave enough information that anyone with some familiarity with medieval materials can fill in the gaps. They will certainly have crossbows (those are, I believe, detailed with standard soldier equipment in the materials). We can suppose certain reasonable medieval seige engines, such as catapult, ballista, ram catcher. Those aren't detailed because the world isn't supposed to involve such a war; but there's enough information that the referee should be able to extrapolate to if there is a war, these are the kinds of weapons that will be used, and so fill in the gaps. There's also enough information that the referee should see that there aren't wizards fighting in these battles; the magic in this world is much more limited in terms of who has it, and people don't, in general, have it.

I could be quite happy with a game that said that actually the sun is a ball of fire blazing millions of miles away and the earth turns on its axis so that it appears to move across the sky; but the spiritual realities are that these gods are involved in the process, so that it is spiritually true that Apollo moves it in a chariot and also spiritually true that a dung beetle rolls it across the sky, and which you find depends on how you get there. What I want is for the game to explain that to me, and not try to tell me that all of these beliefs are literally true despite their contradictions, and leave me to figure out how that can be without any help.

The principle could be as simple as roll the dice, and if it's a low number, the players find what they expect, and if it's a high number they find the opposite of what they expect, with a middle number being something different, between the two sort of, then record it as it has now been determined. In fact, Multiverser uses that system as one of the ways of filling in gaps in a scenario.

This sort of brings us to the other point.

2. Suppose we are playing a game in which there is a lot of directorial control handed to players, or in which there is no GM per se. The way this argument has run, it sounds as though M.J. would think such a game unplayable, because there is no GM to decide things. I don't think that's what he means, though. I would ask for clarification here, too.

The clarification here is actually this is a good example of exactly what we need. Such a game will only work if there are rules for determining what is true in the world. Those rules may include such things as no violating genre conventions, such that our medieval knight can't suddenly find a laser blaster under the bed, or whenever two players agree on a fact about reality, it becomes true, so the agreement of two players fixes a point beyond argument, or the dice determine whether a player statement establishes reality, so we have a random factor as a limiter.

It sometimes happens in board game play that someone will ask, "what happens if," and you'll read the rules over again, and you can only say, "it doesn't say". The question at that moment comes down to, do we understand how this game works well enough that we can answer the question consistently with the game, or not? If we don't, there's a flaw in the game. If it's a situation that's likely to come up as frequently as every few times you play, that's a major flaw.
I have the impression that some RPG creators think it's all right to have such a major flaw in a role playing game. I say it's not all right to have such a flaw.

I put forth that inconsistency is very much like feedback in this example. It is traditionally believed to be something to minimize if not completely remove from one's game. I say it is yet another tool at the roleplayer's disposal when playing and for their own enjoyment.

I find that intriguing and challenging, and will have to consider it.

Yet even if you allow for the game world to be inconsistent, I think you still need to establish enough about the world that the players can extrapolate the answers to the questions they don't have.

In the Robinson Crusoe example, the core principle could be that Crusoe can find a way to get or make the things he needs; therefore, there is some way to carry stuff back from the ship. The reality might shift, but there's a rule governing it.

In the Magnum example, the rule is that Magnum will never actually know the identity of Robin Masters. (As to those earlier scenes, Magnum accused Higgins of having hired an actor to appear as Masters so he wouldn't have to deal with the fame himself.) We think that he could rush the chair and so find out. Apart from the fact that he would certainly be fired for such an action, he might at that point discover that the guy in the chair is not Masters but someone hired, or that he just had a nose job and his face is entirely bandaged, or that there's a mannequin in the chair with a speaker system so that Masters can seem to be talking to him here while actually on his plane to his next location--because the rule is he can't find out. But note that this is different from the question of how the sun is moving across the sky. In that case, we can postulate both reasons to want to know and means to determine the answer, and we don't know how to handle them. If the answer is that nothing the characters will do will ever reveal the physical truth of the matter, that is a valid answer, but it has to be stated as such.

What is unacceptable is for a game to create something that is clearly a significant aspect of what the game is about, and then fail to provide some guidance for answering questions that clearly and obviously will arise during play. I've had people in my games attempt to use ultraviolet lights to destroy vampires; I had to know whether that was a correct understanding of the reason sunlight killed them or not.

Have I clarified things?

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

There's a part of me that wants to say that Fang has nailed the problem quite effectively, and a part of me that draws back from the notion that all I've done is state a tautology. I hope I can show that there's more than just "incomplete games are incomplete" in what I've said--but let me touch a few other things on the way.

Fang has not nailed the problem IMO.

The proposal that MJ and I are challenging is this "I as the game designer can design a mythic world, assert that its mythology is all true, and then elect not to discuss either specific implementations or general principles governing this mythology.  Furthermore, I do not need to explicitly discuss this issue with the purchasers of my product."

Thus, the claim is being advanced that what Fang describes as incomplete games are NOT incomplete, and that the perception that they are incomplete is itself false, resting as it does on the assumptions of the "sophisticated mindset".

The issue is not whether incomplete games are incomplete; the issue is whether or not ommission of the fundamental principles governing a clear and explicit in-game function makes a game incomplete.

[RHJunior]

Greetings M J,

<snip>


What's KFC's secret recipe?

What is in that can of WD40?

<snip>
Kind Regards,

Kester Pelagius

Heh. Couldn't pass that up.... in actuality, you can dig up that "secret recipe" if you know where to look. I'ts *advertised* as secret, yet by law it's on the books as public access-- KFC is just careful not to tell anyone where to look. (You can even get a book with that recipe--- and dozens of other things "noone is supposed to know.")

And in truth, they found out that those "secret herbs and spices" are bunk. Chemically analyzed, it's just salt, pepper, and MSG. If they still add those herbs and spices, it's maybe a pinch to every few hundred pounds of the stuff.


ANYWAY, back to the subject at hand....

I think what everyone's driving at is this: how much detail do you need in your Game universe to keep the detail-hungry gamers satisfied-- and how do you keep it internally consistent so that suspension of disbelief doesn't blow a tire?

Dicey, to say the least. Screw it up and they'll catch you out in self-contradictions, or even worse, in a "Murphy's Rules" mistake (like the classic Star Trek RPG-- where a bow and arrow had better range than a phaser.  Or the Superhero game where your hero's base speed was 2.5 miles per hour.... when a normal human can easily run 15 mph or faster.)

One of the things that got me about the old explanation for D+D spellcasting systems--- you forgot a spell after you cast it, so you had to relearn it. First off,  who wrote it down in the first place?? Second off, what's the explanation? Do the gods come down and manually erase your brain after you cast a spell?
Sort of damages your suspension of disbelief, don't it.


As to "why magic lights aren't everywhere"--- there are basic reasons why IRL certain things aren't more common: Harmful side effects, Cost, Social Prohibition, lack of support.....


Consider these scenario options.
One: extensive use/concentration of magic in one area can conceivably cause detrimental side effects-- aka magical "pollution." too many active magic spells in one place, mingling with one another... let your imagination run amok. Or consider the results of potion runoff from an apocathery on the local wildlife.....

Two:religious/political prohibition. There would be plenty of people with a bug up their tuchus about hocus-pocus for various reasons. Or maybe too much magic in one place opens portals to the Dungeon Dimensions (Terry Pratchett's Discworld), or honks off the gods so they come down and stomp everything...

Three: Expensive, hard to obtain ingredients. Though as demand increases, improvements in supply follow.... Still, that "Half an ounce of powdered scale from a Red Dragon with PMS" is gonna slow up mass production a bit.

Four: "mana drain." The equivalent in magical terms of having too many appliances plugged in at the same time--- where the raw supply of magical energy can't keep up with the demand. Various means of storing up, conserving, or producing more mana for ready use would have to be devised. A push for more "fuel efficient" magical spells and items would result.... but there would always be an upper limit on how many magic geegaws you could have running in one location before the lights started dimming. (this sort of thing is the reason I wish most fantasy RPGs and novel writers would at least give a *passing* nod to the law of conservation of matter and energy.)

Five: Human limits. If a wizard has to enchant an artifact, and there's no way to automate the process, then there's going to be a limit on how many undimming magic lamps he can create.... especially if the process is personally taxing. Which do you want, lots of lit streets and an exhausted Royal Wizard, or a fully powered mage ready to deal with that marauding dragon? Add to that the consequences if the Wizard's spells and enchantments dissipate after his death, or if they need renewing after a time, and perhaps ordinary oil lamps are a touch more feasible. Especially if the wizard charges by the hour.

[simon_hibbs]

I could be quite happy with a game that said that actually the sun is a ball of fire blazing millions of miles away and the earth turns on its axis so that it appears to move across the sky; but the spiritual realities are that these gods are involved in the process, so that it is spiritually true that Apollo moves it in a chariot and also spiritually true that a dung beetle rolls it across the sky, and which you find depends on how you get there. What I want is for the game to explain that to me, and not try to tell me that all of these beliefs are literally true despite their contradictions, and leave me to figure out how that can be without any help.

While 'me too' posts are genraly bad form, I have to say this is very well put. I think it's a very rasonable expectation to have of games that purport to represent mythic themes in game play. It's also proved quite tricky to get right, but there are a number of games our there now that are getting pretty close to this ideal target.


Simon Hibbs

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Yet even if you allow for the game world to be inconsistent, I think you still need to establish enough about the world that the players can extrapolate the answers to the questions they don't have.

"We demand clearly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty."

God bless Douglas Adams.

What is unacceptable is for a game to create something that is clearly a significant aspect of what the game is about, and then fail to provide some guidance for answering questions that clearly and obviously will arise during play. I've had people in my games attempt to use ultraviolet lights to destroy vampires; I had to know whether that was a correct understanding of the reason sunlight killed them or not.

OK, minor anecdote time.

We were play D&D, my group and I, we had acquire an artifact that needed to be soaked in dragon blood to work. Fortunately, we had also recently killed a dragon so we had some dragon's blood. We were about to face down an army and I suggested that we use an atomizer to spritz the blood onto the artifact so it would last longer, demonstrating this Sophisticated mindset, I now realise. The GM and at least one player started shaking their heads "No, no. Magic doesn't work that way." I was rather taken aback by this because the group is usually more Sophisticated than that. This caught me off guard. However, I recovered quickly and said "Well, tell the Catholics that." The GM didn't seem to find it humorous given his Catholic upbringing, but his girlfriend did. So there we go.

What we seem to be dealing with here is the difference in the Sophisticated and Naive mindsets here. The Sophisticate will think of things like can we use a spray bottle to mist the blood onto the artifact or want to know if the vampire-killing component in sunlight is UV rays so they could use UV lights to kill some vampires. The Naive mindset simply doesn't do that. "The magic just doesn't work that way," it says.

And not to nitpick on the RObin Masters example, MJ, but Masters was only mysterious to the Audience in the early episodes. I remember at least one episode where Magnum look right at Masters and it wasn't like "So that's what you look like." He knew Masters, the Audience didn't (it has been a while since I've seen Magnum PI but I'm sure seasons will pop-up on DVD any day now) The constant about Masters is that he was mysterious. He started out being mysterious to the audience only, for the most part since the audience could not see his face, but in later episodes they had changed how he was mysterious by having him be mysterious to Magnum. Now they could have rationalized the Masters from the earlier shows with the hired actor explanation you give, but my point is I don't think they ever did.

Anyway, back to the real topic here. Gareth & I had been talking about this in PM a little and I'll post some of what I told him. Some cut & pasting here:

You are talking about an RPG with various conflicting myths and that these myths are reflected in the game's mechanics. What to do when a character of one faith witnesses definitive proof involving a conflicting faith. This is the question, right?

Actually, no it's not. The statement is that an RPG with various conflicting myths and that these myths are reflected in the game's mechanics, there should be an explicit explanation or guidence of what to do when a character of one faith witnesses definitive proof involving a conflicting faith. This may include making this defined by the players the way demons are to be defined in Sorcerer.

I personally can argee with this. If that's it then I can say "yes" and we can all go home. I mean, the game designer could simply ignore the conflicting myths but I think it is better if he addresses it in some way:

Player: "So you have a world with conflicting myths?"
Designer: "Yes."
Player: "But they are all true?"
Designer: "Yes."
Player: "Literally true?"
Designer: "Yes."
Player: "What do I do when the myths in question are brought into conflict?"
Designer: "That is up to you."

This is good enough for me, so long as he says at some point that it's up to you.

More c&p:

Now way I see it, there can be a couple possible solutions here.

First is experiencing such a thing immediately shatters the faith of the individual. This is not a very good solution IMO and it really doesn't work very well with the mythic style.

Second is to ignore the problem entirely. I believe some people don't think this is a very viable solution, but it is. See my Robin Masters post. You see, in this case the contridictions in the myths is happenstance. The myths are supported via mechanics but only to power certain thing, cleric for example. But the game is not necessarily about these myths clashing. In this case, the priest of Osiris would argee to go with the group to the sun and see Apollo and now worry about dung beetles at all. What actually happens could vary. Maybe the priest does see a beetle. Maybe the reality of the world is many parallel worlds overlapped and the priest sees the beetle and the others see Apollo. Maybe he does see Apollo and this has nil impact on his faith just as how visiting Anubus last week had no impact on the other's faith.. There are too many possible ways to rationalize what is essentially the problem being ignored.

The third possibility it to have some form of mechanics to reflect this effect, making it less hash as the first option while not simply dodging the problem like the second option. Like the second option, this could have several possibilities. A couple that come to mind are the AD&D one cited where certain gods have more power in different areas. Another is to have a Faith score for the character and to have the player make a saving roll to retain their faith when confronted with contrary information. Failing this roll means a lowed Faith score and Faith is the main score for any cleric abilities.

I hope I was helpful with this. My main point seems to be that both the second and third options are viable, although I get the feeling some would not enjoy playing in a second option game very much.

[Le Joueur]

Thank you for your detailed response M. J.

So that brings me back to the question I've had from the beginning. What you seem to be saying, M. J., is that an incomplete game hasn't enough presented to be complete. All tautologies are true. So?

There's a part of me that wants to say that Fang has nailed the problem quite effectively, and a part of me that draws back from the notion that all I've done is state a tautology.

Well, so far you've only stated a tautology.  In this post you take it a step farther, thank you for that too.  (Let me see if I can trim it down to make the extension obvious.)

What I want is for the game to explain that to me, and not...leave me to figure out how...without any help.

...The question at that moment comes down to, do we understand how this game works well enough that we can answer the question consistently with the game, or not? If we don't, there's a flaw in the game. If it's a situation that's likely to come up as frequently as every few times you play, that's a major flaw.

I have the impression that some RPG creators think it's all right to have such a major flaw in a role playing game. I say it's not all right to have such a flaw.

... I think you still need to establish enough about the world that the players can extrapolate the answers to the questions they don't have.

What is unacceptable is for a game to create something that is clearly a significant aspect of what the game is about, and then fail to provide some guidance for answering questions that clearly and obviously will arise during play.

Have I clarified things?

Very much so, despite how others still try to bring their own baggage and chips on their shoulders, you have made things very clear...I think.  Let me run it past you:

"An incomplete game hasn't enough presented to be complete."  And

you think that's not right.[/list:u]Thanks very much, I think that about does it¹.  By the way, at this level, I completely agree.  I actually spend a lot of time trying to determine exactly what components can go into a game, so that I can also figure out how many is enough.

As for 'baggage:'

The proposal that MJ and I are challenging is this "I as the game designer can design a mythic world, assert that its mythology is all true, and then elect not to discuss either specific implementations or general principles governing this mythology.  Furthermore, I do not need to explicitly discuss this issue with the purchasers of my product."

And that challenge fails.  Oh, you can challenge it all you want, but ultimately adequate "specific implementations or general principles" remains completely a matter of personal, subjective interpretation.  It is just an opinion.  As Jack illustrates, different designers will have different opinions about 'what is enough.'  And there's nothing you can do about that but whine¹.

Thus, the claim is being advanced that what Fang describes as incomplete games are NOT incomplete, and that the perception that they are incomplete is itself false, resting as it does on the assumptions of the "sophisticated mindset".

That is not at all what I said.  I never set out any criteria about what makes a game incomplete, anywhere, I speak only of the concept of incompleteness.  It should be clear what I have been driving at is 'an incomplete game is incomplete to you.'  What you define as incomplete is different from what Jack defines it as is different than what E. Gary Gygax defines it as is different (I'm pretty sure) from what M. J. defines it as.

"Complete" cannot be anything other than a subjective estimate, nothing more than a matter of opinion.  Certainly we can all agree on the extremes, but nearer to 'the middle' we will find we have different thresholds of 'completeness.'  An obvious example is the difference between people who like "sophisticated mindset" requirements in a game and those who prefer "naïve mindset" games.

I'm sorry Gareth, there simply isn't anything you can prove here, but feel free to rabidly vent about what you think should the absolute and perfect definition of "complete."  I can guarantee I will disagree with the definition, but I defend your right to your opinion.  However, don't think that it belongs to me.

The issue is not whether incomplete games are incomplete; the issue is whether or not omission of the fundamental principles governing a clear and explicit in-game function makes a game incomplete.

Some omissions will, some won't, as defined by your opinion.  If I say that in my game all mythological religions are literally true and further say that it works simply because no contradictions can be found in the same physical locations (for example, Apollo's chariot leaves Olympus to cross the celestial firmament - that you can climb to - while the Egyptian dung beetle rolls the sun across Nuit's body - that you can only boat to) and that modern physics and astronomy don't apply, to me, that is enough.  All that matters is it is my opinion; it's my game.  There is no reason you must agree, nor to play my game; furthermore there is nothing that can prove my game is "complete enough" or not.

So it is a matter of incomplete games being incomplete to you, and absolutely nothing more.

Fang Langford

¹ Now we can begin to discuss specific criteria to measure venues of 'completeness' by, regardless of what threshold personal opinion applies to them.  I would invite that kind of discussion as opposed to people setting up vague examples and shooting off their mouths back and forth.  The only substantive move in this direction so far, is the fledgling 'naïve' versus 'sophisticated' criteria.  I really hope we can get past this absolutist ideal of there being a universal defining 'point of incompleteness.'

[simon_hibbs]

What we seem to be dealing with here is the difference in the Sophisticated and Naive mindsets here. The Sophisticate will think of things like can we use a spray bottle to mist the blood onto the artifact or want to know if the vampire-killing component in sunlight is UV rays so they could use UV lights to kill some vampires. The Naive mindset simply doesn't do that. "The magic just doesn't work that way," it says.

I think these are completely different situations. I agree that if we know that dragon's blood has a certain effect, then surely sprayed dragon's blood should also have the same effect unless there's an actual reason why not.

The vampire/sunlight situation is different for several reasons. Firstly, why Ultraviolet light? While the UK TV seriesof the same name was excelent, I don't realy understand why UV specificaly (as against any other frequency) was chose. Secondly, vampire mythology has accumulated a lot of mythological connotations from various sources through history. Vampires are damned, and sunlight is associated in christian mythology with presence before the sight of god. Vampires are also associated with Cain, the first murderer, who was banished to 'the dark places of the world' and consorted with demons. None of this has anything to do with spectral analysis, or skin allergies. In this case the 'sophisticated mindset' is displaying a very naive understanding of myth.


Simon Hibbs