Ordering of play elements

[Stuart DJ Purdie]

Of course Setting matters. Without characters, setting, situation, a system, and color, role-playing isn't happening.

Read this over in the setting matter thread, and it crystalised something that I've been kicking around.  Those 5 elements are important.  However, they are not as important as each other, in any one particular game.

I would propose that it is therefore feasable to define an order on these five elements, giving a well-ordered set.  The ordering relation should be read as "is prioritised over".

Secondly, there are three disctinct arenas where these elements might have an order applied to them.  These are:  The RPG text, the Gamesmaster, and the players.  Strictly, the last is a set of ordered sets, with each player potentially imposing a different order on the elements.

So far, so what?

If the GM and the players hold different orders, can the game be functional?

If the GM/Players hold a consistant and different order than the text, is that Drift?

And, as a discussion point, does the ordering of elements a) exist and b) is important outside of simulationist play?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Stuart,

Actually, I just started to address this in the Setting thread, so make sure and check that out too ...

What shocks me about your post is that I can't understand, or failed to understand, that my existing discussion of the five elements seems to have lain so fallow in people's minds.

To lay it out as clearly as I can.

1. These five elements are present at all times during the act of role-playing.

2. They have a causal relationship which I present on the other thread but will repeat here.

a) Characters in a Setting give rise to Situation. [Situation proceeds from both]

b) Events proceeding from a Situation are resolved via a System. [any agreed-upon method of doing this is a System; see The Lumpley Principle]

c) Color reinforces and anchors all of the above into the shared, imaginative Explorative experience.

3. (This is a new point) The entry point and emphasis of the five elements differs greatly from game to game.

a) In Narrativist play, either Character or Setting is usually favored in terms of its contribution to Situation (note "favor" does not mean "replace"). Some Narrativist play, however, starts right in with Situation. Note that Narrativist play often "feeds back" into Character or Setting to set up new Situations.

b) In Simulationist play, the five elements' relative emphases are highly variable; see my Simulationism essay, which I thought was very explicit about the existing range of possible emphases.

c) In Gamist play, Situation is almost always the Queen Bee element, with the others in fairly subordinate, Situation-facilitating roles (which still do vary, in a pattern much like Narrativist play). Play tends to proceed into new Situations without much need to feed-back into Character or Setting to do so.

Again, I was under the impression that this was all old news. Is any of it unclear, or unreasonable, or incomplete in any way?

Best,
Ron

[Stuart DJ Purdie]

If the GM and the players hold different orders, can the game be functional?

That was the core of my thesis - namely I'm not convinced that play where one player is bent keen on expolation of System, and the other are exploring character is functional.

Again, I was under the impression that this was all old news

Thus far, particularly with the simulationism eassy, there is implicitly one single order on the elements.  It is not clear with whom that order lies - The designer (and thus the text), or which of the players / GM.

If everyone has (more or less) the same idea about the relative importance, then great - that's practically a definition of functional play, everyone expecting the same sort of thing.

With Gamist and Narativist priorities, the metagame influence is sufficent to ensure that all the participents are playng in sync.  With Sim play, there is nothing to replace that.  Thus I think that breaking it down further is useful.

Your points about Gamist and Nar play are pretty clear.  So, I'll drop that, and focus on the sim issue a little more.

There's been some discussion of this sort of thing, but I've not found anything about dysfunctional play resulting from different emphsis, whilst all the players are within the bounds of Sim play.  

So, has anyone observed this sort of problem, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Postscript: That's a really neat lay out.  Grab that for a glossory or some such.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey there,

I recently completed a very intensive email discussion about this with a fellow who'd raised almost exactly the same questions. I just emailed him for permission to lift those mailings into this thread for general reading, so we'll see what he says. If he doesn't want to, then I'll have to take some time to rewrite the points in a more essay-style format.

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Landon was kind enough to give his permission for me to post this exchange. It concerns a Lord of the Rings game that, at the time of the conversation, was just about to begin.

****************
LANDON
... what I'm thinking might lead to the ultimate failure of the game in favor of something else has directly to do with Simulation-based concerns.

If you look at LOTR as a High Concept Simulationist game (well, what it is is an incoherent game, but it's closer to this than anything), then the obvious emphasis is on "getting it right" in terms of Setting (the rest of the formula would work as Coloring, then Situation and Character, then System). Approaching it as a gamemaster, I've found that my biggest concern was "translating" Tolkien correctly into an RPG format, etc etc.

Oddly enough, though, the majority of the players are mostly unfamiliar with the vagaries of the setting and the dramatic peculiarities of Tolkien's books: of them, only one person has read all the books recently, one of them hasn't even read them at all, and even yet another read them a long time ago but... much preferred the films. (It's extremely hard, by the way, to avoid making a value judgment on that last notion. <grin>)

So, what I've begun to realize is that I have a case of differing Premise from the start: I'm most interested in Simulation emphazising Setting here, regardless of whether or not the plot arcs I have planned turn into a "story" or not. If I have no story, but I get 4th Age Middle-Earth right, I've done my job with this game, IMO. The players aren't really conscious of their goals in terms of GNS distinction, but I'd ID it most strongly as Character Simulationism, in that most of them seem most interested on developing their character toward an end (in-game, non-competition based) result regardless of what actually happens in the campaign.

Because they don't have quite the reverence for Tolkien's work that I
do, I get the feeling that my efforts to do "right" with Middle-Earth
will largely go unnoticed, because few of them have even a basic grasp
of what "should" and "should not" be in a Tolkien-style work. I could
push it into high fantasy and it's likely that as long as they were able
to develop their characters, no one would notice how grieviously wrong
it was. :)

Here are my questions: Is the game screwed? And if not, how is it that these differing Premise goals can meet in the middle? And if there's no way, would it be smart, do you think, for me to gear things more towards the players' Premise, considering that they seem to share with each other than they do with me?

*********
RON
> ... I have a case of differing
> Premise from the start: I'm most interested in Simulation emphazising
> Setting here, regardless of whether or not the plot arcs I have planned
> turn into a "story" or not. If I have no story, but I get 4th Age
> Middle-Earth right, I've done my job with this game, IMO. The players
> aren't really conscious of their goals in terms of GNS distinction, but
> I'd ID it most strongly as Character Simulationism, in that most of them
> seem most interested on developing their character toward an end
> (in-game, non-competition based) result regardless of what actually
> happens in the campaign.

Right - the classic: GM has "my beautiful world" and player has "my-guy."

> Here are my questions: Is the game screwed? And if not, how is it that
> these differing Premise goals can meet in the middle?

I think it's pretty easy, if the following is possible: (1) you must be "audience" to their play of their characters and demonstrate, regularly, that their characters are interesting to you; (2) they must be "audience to your presentation of the world and demonstrate, regularly, that its details are interesting to them. If you can get your presentation of the world and their portrayal/enjoyment of their characters into a mutually-supportive relationship, then all is well. The key, of course, is Situation - their characters have to deal with X, in which the "X part" comes from Nifty Stuff in the setting, and in which their characters' unique features or details are what factor into the "deal with" part. You will have to become the Scenario-Maker Master.

> And if there's no
> way, would it be smart, do you think, for me to gear things more towards
> the players' Premise, considering that they seem to share with each
> other than they do with me?

OK, if the two goals become incompatible - and remember, I'm not saying it will - then it'll depend on the social dynamic involved. Some groups look to the GM as the aesthetic leader and are willing to try or do whatever he heads toward. Others are more into the "your job is to entertain us" mode and get fractious. As you might expect, I prefer a more group-based shared aesthetic (which at its root is all GNS/etc ever said), but in practice, I've found that the artistic-leader role is often thrust upon Me.

*********
LANDON

> Right - the classic: GM has "my beautiful world" and player has "my-guy."

Or, in this case, "Tolkien's Beautiful World" (tm). :)

> The key, of course, is Situation - their
> characters have to deal with X, in which the "X part" comes from Nifty Stuff
> in the setting, and in which their characters' unique features or details
> are what factor into the "deal with" part. You will have to become the
> Scenario-Maker Master.

Yeah. That's about what I figured. This brings up an interesting question, however: if the foci are different, even if it's still
Simulation play, does that constitute the same kind of Premise issues that, say, two differing GNS styles do? In other words, could you still call the overall goal of a game Simulationist even if the players and GM were emphasizing different aspects of the dream, so to speak, or would you just say that there was no unified Premise? If it's true that my game can be kept on an even keel by using Situation to bridge my emphasis on Setting and their emphasis on Character, isn't that similar to pulling an El Dorado or a gradual transition from disparity into a unified GNS emphasis?

If anything, that's my one point of "iffy"-ness with Simulationism as a GNS mode. I'm up in the air about whether or not the aspects of Simulation with emphasis on each of the Exploration elements are different enough from each other to warrant the same kind of separation as G from N, or N from S, and so on. If they are that different from each other, the actual matrix should be GN(SC, SSy, SSe, SSit, SCol). :)

I'm not sure that the fact that they share a lack of infringing out-of-game motivation makes them similar enough in execution to be categorized together. But that would make the matrix damn unwieldy, wouldn't it? :) Or maybe I'm just thinking about it too hard. :)

> As you might expect, I prefer a more group-based shared
> aesthetic (which at its root is all GNS/etc ever said), but in practice,
> I've found that the artistic-leader role is often thrust upon me.

Yeah. I'm not sure I've ever had a group of players be into the game for the exact same reason. Usually, all my games come down to the solution you presented, Sim/Situation being the sort of catch-all focus where all other player and GM goals meet. :) Before reading about GNS theory, I used to call it the Grand Unification Theory of Shit Happening.

*********
RON
> if the foci are different, even if it's still
> Simulation play, does that constitute the same kind of Premise issues
> that, say, two differing GNS styles do?

No. Not at all. What a lot of people fail to understand is that Situation is a function of Character + Setting. You can therefore mix & match these all kinds of ways which are often compatible:

- players are heavy into Character, GM is heavy into Setting, and the intersections create Situation which interests everybody. This is the riskiest approach, but it does seem like your best bet at the moment.
- players and GM are all heavily invested in Situation, players reinforce it through Character, GM reinforces it through Setting. With any luck, this is what the above approach evolves into.

- players and GM are mostly heavily invested in Characters, which GM reinforces through Situation, and Setting is referred to only in order to get the primary elements into place. This is what I used to do in running Champions.

- players and GM are mostly heavily invested in Setting, which the GM reinforces through Situation and tweaking Character Hooks; Characters are mainly there to get their arms and legs moved by the players in order to see some part of the Setting. This is what a lot of White Wolf play becomes, or rather, what a lot of the text assumes that it is.

> If it's true that my
> game can be kept on an even keel by using Situation to bridge my
> emphasis on Setting and their emphasis on Character, isn't that similar
> to pulling an El Dorado or a gradual transition from disparity into a
> unified GNS emphasis?

It's not either of these, because it's not dis-united. Of course, it *can* be dis-united if you get a Purist for System type GM with players who expect (say) Character-heavy open-outcome "story" to be guaranteed by the GM, or a GM who *is* doing that with players who expect (say) Setting-heavy closed-outcome "story" to be prepared for them to experience. Or stuff like that. But don't get all worried about within-Sim disparity at the stage you're at now. Situation is your friend.

> If anything, that's my one point of "iffy"-ness with Simulationism as a
> GNS mode. I'm up in the air about whether or not the aspects of
> Simulation with emphasis on each of the Exploration elements are
> different enough from each other to warrant the same kind of separation
> as G from N, or N from S, and so on. If they are that different from
> each other, the actual matrix should be GN(SC, SSy, SSe, SSit, SCol). :)

I think you making this way harder than it is. I've tried to say over and over that the listed five elements are *always present,* but people seem to keep talking about Sim play as a "hydra." Yes, there's diversity there. Yes, failing to recognize that diversity can be a problem, especially for certain combinations. No, it's not the same as the fundamental aesthetic divides among GNS categories.

It's getting aggravating (not you, but in general) - people seem capable only of seeing (a) a swamp in which all categories are gooey, "just my opinion" whatever-things; and (b) a set of highly delineated little environments with mines and barbed-wire separating them.

**********
LANDON
> No. Not at all. What a lot of people fail to understand is that Situation is
> a function of Character + Setting. You can therefore mix & match these all
> kinds of ways which are often compatible:

Ah, noted. So once you're certain of a Sim preference for play, the different elements are more like tools.

> I think you making this way harder than it is. I've tried to say over and
> over that the listed five elements are *always present,* but people seem to
> keep talking about Sim play as a "hydra."

I'll have to go back and read your essays yet again, to figure out how that latter perception started creeping into my head. As more of a newbie to the theory, it might just be the initial tendency to want to overthink all the definitions and categories. So, to clarify: all the elements of Exploration are present in Sim play, it's just that some are emphasized and some aren't, and the emphasis can be mixed and matched for different kinds of effect or dynamic within the group. So the key is mostly just to be aware.

> It's getting aggravating (not you, but in general) - people seem capable
> only of seeing (a) a swamp in which all categories are gooey, "just my
> opinion" whatever-things; and (b) a set of highly delineated little
> environments with mines and barbed-wire separating them.

I've noticed that on the forums. Honestly, that is most of the reason why when I have things to ask about GNS, I usually just e-mail you rather than post there. It's only been a few months since I read the essays, and I haven't done as much gaming as I've wanted to do since then. So, to a great degree, I can only see how GNS looks on paper and do some theorizing of my own. I see the categories as definitive but flexible, for the most part. No one gamer is always one or the other, they just lean toward preferences. The best analogy I can use is that the barriers between GNS modes are like plant cell walls. Definitely seperate, but semi-permeable.

An analysis of my own usual play style seems to split me about 50/50 between Narrativism and Simulationism, depending on what I'm playing and who I'm playing with. Gamism I've never really instinctively liked, unless the primary mode of competition is players vs. GM's obstacle, with the players being more like a sports team. I'm hoping that the latter is something that might get addressed in the Gamism essay, because I have the perception that a lot of gamers think Gamist motives are bad. Is that accurate, do you think? It might be a good idea to mention in the essay that players can cooperate as a team and still be
collectively playing in a Gamist mode, and so on. In other words, Gamism doesn't automatically mean a lack of party cohesion, etc.

Anyway, thanks for the clarification about Sim. It might be an interesting pursuit to write some kind of a "user's guide" for the
practical application of GNS into game, sort of a "GNS for Dummies". There's a stark contrast between your conversational writing style (including forum posts) and the original GNS essay style. I get the feeling that the original essay's academic leanings might unconsciously be steering some folks to overthink what's presented. Something to ponder, anyway. The reverse problem being that if 'GNS for Dummies' is too casual, it might steer folks to underthink what's presented. :)

*************
RON
> to clarify: all the
> elements of Exploration are present in Sim play, it's just that some are
> emphasized and some aren't, and the emphasis can be mixed and matched
> for different kinds of effect or dynamic within the group. So the key is
> mostly just to be aware.

Actually, it's a bigger picture than that! The elements of Exploration are present in ALL of role-playing, regardless of GNS focus, and the emphasis can be mixed and matched for effects/dynamic. This isn't a Sim issue at all, although the relationships of mixing & matching follow a certain profile in Sim play that's not the same for G or N play.

> ... Gamism I've never really instinctively liked,
> unless the primary mode of competition is players vs. GM's obstacle,
> with the players being more like a sports team. I'm hoping that the
> latter is something that might get addressed in the Gamism essay,
> because I have the perception that a lot of gamers think Gamist motives
> are bad. Is that accurate, do you think?

I think it's very accurate. I also think that even a lot of Forge-ish folk classify Gamism in order to dismiss it, to get it out of the picture so we can talk about "real" role-playing. I also think that Gamist play and Narrativist play are tremendously, tremendously similar, and that people often mistake incoherent G/S hybrids for Gamist design.

> It might be a good idea to
> mention in the essay that players can cooperate as a team and still be
> collectively playing in a Gamist mode, and so on. In other words, Gamism
> doesn't automatically mean a lack of party cohesion, etc.

Waaaay ahead of you, actually. You'll find that to be a necessary outcome of my major points about Gamism.

> ... It might be an
> interesting pursuit to write some kind of a "user's guide" for the
> practical application of GNS into game, sort of a "GNS for Dummies".

Please do! I welcome such essays; there are a couple kicking around already.

> There's a stark contrast between your conversational writing style
> (including forum posts) and the original GNS essay style. I get the
> feeling that the original essay's academic leanings might unconsciously
> be steering some folks to overthink what's presented. Something to
> ponder, anyway.

I don't recall if we've discussed this, but the context of the current essay included some very hostile, very angry people who were literally frothing regarding my "Narrativist biases." The legalistic (not academic) tone of the essay is intentional in order to lay out the issues without any kind of friendliness or antipathy anywhere. It really wasn't written to be an entry, plain old happened-upon-the-Forge person sort of text.

*******
I hope all this was interesting and helpful.
Best,
Ron

[Emily Care]

Thanks for posting that, Ron.  I'm glad this discussion is happening, the topic of group dynamic intra-Sim incoherence has been brewing in the back of my head for a while but it was hard to put my finger on it.  

The point that all five elements are always present is well taken. That may help discussions about solely-Color focused games.  We never can explore just a single element.  But at the same time, every player has a unique set of preferences about which elements they want to focus on, and how they want to do that.  (This is similar to what I was getting at in my thread a ways back about Immersion.) Perhaps, as Stuart says, looking at the order of priority each element is held is a good way to identify these conflicts.

Regards,
Emily Care

[Stuart DJ Purdie]

Hm, sorry for delay, had to let that one bake a while.

My initial motiviation was that I'd observed another player in one of the games I'm in to be focusing a lot on System and Situation, to the point that whenever that player was not around, the other players were commenting on it.  This set me thinking, trying to understand the other players POV, as a prelude to engaging in discussion [0].  I'd pegged the playstyle as Sim, and was looking to peg why the play style wasn't meshing.  

Ron reckons (if I read it correctly) that differning emphasis of elements needs to be pretty extreme to cause a problem - in general any Sim players aught to find common ground without difficulty, unlike, say, a Narrativist and a Sim player.  I'd agree with that. In fact, the sources of dysfunctional play ariseing from different priority on the elements would require such an extreme situation that they would be both fairly obvious and dysfunctional in most cases.

For example:  Char over setting:  The players character has no connection to the setting, except in a very generic manner, and may not be consistance with the setting.

Char and Setting over system:  The characters background has description of the character accomplishing things that they can't actually do.  

And so on.

And, at this point, bringing theory in is quite redundant - the problems are clear, as are good solutions.

So, ordering the elements, whilst it may be interesting academically, fails the test of usefulness in application.  Well, at least as far as identifying, and helping to prevent, dysfunctional play.

[0] I feel that is multiple players are gumbling about some element of anothere play style, it's an indication of (slightly) dysfunctional play, and thus worht devoting effort to.  From past experience, if I don't have some handle on the other persons play style, then al that happens is people get confused and annoyed whenever the problem is addressed.

Postscript: I did identify an apporach to the other player - his character is highly secrative, meaning that outside of the game, all the player feels he can do is talk about the characters powers (supers game), both current and potential.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Stuart,

You might be over-reading the positive tone of my responses to Landon. He'd described his situation in such a way as to lead me to think he and his group were not in a danger zone.

However, there are danger zones in Simulationist play. I alluded to a couple of them in this paragraph:

it *can* be dis-united if you get a Purist for System type GM with players who expect (say) Character-heavy open-outcome "story" to be guaranteed by the GM, or a GM who *is* doing that with players who expect (say) Setting-heavy closed-outcome "story" to be prepared for them to experience. Or stuff like that.

And I'd also like to call attention to issues of System itself, which are of course going to be playing a role too. If one fellow is adamantly opposed to the idea of rolling dice when "persona" role-playing, and if another fellow is strongly committed to the skill-system being used (which includes personality and influence skills), then you'll have trouble. These are Exploration/GNS issues, for sure - and they exist very firmly deep within the Simulationist zone.

Landon's situation, it seems to me, is a happy one - the slight disparity he's seeing with himself and the players is not procedural at all. That's why I think careful scenario design (Situation) will bring everyone together without trouble. But I think extrapolating my comments to "any Sim players aught to find common ground without difficulty" is going way, way too far.

Best,
Ron