The Lumpley Principle Goes Wading

[Valamir]

That's the claim, but that is directly contradicted by my experience of gaming.  It's quite possible for a player to disagree with a GM's rules call and sulk for a while, trying to deny that it happened (this is uncommon, because you agreed to abide by the GM's decision when you sit down and join that social contract, and most adults are capable of living by their agreements; I don't play with oathbreakers).  When a player says "I do X", the GM is the only one whose yea or nay is relevant.  The other players may point out facts which would change the situation, or react, but don't get a veto.

So what?  This is 100% Lumpley in action.  The game rules apportion credibility.  Here you've given 100% credibility to the GM.  Great fine.  Again so what.  

You do realize that everything you wrote above is 100% in concordance with the Lumpley Principle right...cuz if you don't...then you really don't get it...at all.

A "follow the rules" social contract is a dictatorship, not a democracy.  Hopefully a benevolent and enlightened dictatorship, and people are free to leave the group if they find it oppressive, but still the rule of one.

Have you actually read any of the threads where this has been hashed out before?  Threads that have been linked to multiple times now?  I'm not seeing any evidence that you have.  In fact, I even quoted pertinent parts of that thread in this one...and I still see no evidence that you've actually read them.

Rather I see you setting up straw men arguements where you say "The Lumpley Principle says X...I can disprove X...therefor Lumpley is wrong".

Thing is the Lumpley Principle never said X.  It never said half of the stuff you are trying to ascribe to it.  Maybe you should go back and try actually reading the thread; then start a new one to question the points you are having trouble with

I think you're going to have to accept that your universal principle *IS NOT UNIVERSAL*.  Sorry, no Grand Unified Theory of roleplaying for you.  It applies only to a specific freeform style of gaming.

Well, I hate to break it to you Kam.  But you're wrong not once but twice here.

First...there is no attempt for a grand unified theory of roleplaying here.  In fact this is explicitly stated in point #2 of the original thread and quoted above for reference...yet more evidence that you haven't actually read the material you're attempting to comment on.

And two...yes it is very much universal.  Give me any example of roleplaying you want and it is child's play to demonstrate the Lumpley principle in action.  I refer you to the parenthetical in item #2.

It is not productive conversation to insist that everyone is exactly like you, and must therefore play the same way you do.  You need to learn to phrase your comments in a civil manner, with propositions leading to conclusions, rather than merely asserting your conclusions.

Yet more evidence that you don't grasp the principle.  This has nothing to do with play style.  Where you got the idea that this is how "freeformers play" and that its different from how "rules players play" and therefor it doesn't apply to you...is frankly beyond me.

This is fundamental human rules of discourse.

1) do you have human beings at your table?
2) are all of them free from telepathic mind control influence?
3) is someone speaking, gesticulating, writing, miming, or otherwise communicating in some fashion with the other players about the game?

If the answer to all of these questions is Yes, than you are operating under the Lumpley Principle.

There are only 3 possible avenues at this point.

a) Whatever it was the person who was speaking described has just been accepted as happening in the game world.
b) Whatever it was the person who was speaking described has just been denied as happening in the game world.
c) Whatever it was the person who was speaking described has been altered or modified before being accepted as happening in the game world.

The Lumpley Principle simply states that the function of game rules is to determine which of these three avenues occurs and how it gets there.  Thats it.  That's all game rules do.  They take statements made by players and outline the process by which those statements become or don't become part of the game:  whether that involves defering to the GMs judgement, or taking a vote, or spending a hero point, or whether it involves rolling dice and consulting charts...what is actually happening is that credibility is being granted or denied to the player who just made a statement in the game.

Even the setting information is conveyed this way.  A player says "I draw my gun as I walk up the marble steps of the temple..."  Are there guns, are there temples, are there marble steps in this world?  The rules in the form of setting information are simply there to give credibility to the players statement...or to give credibility to some other player (such as the GM) who say "no there is no temple near by".

Carefully read the Kamikaze Principle (slightly amended, now that I've slept on it): "In a follow-the-rules gaming social contract, the players agree to play a specific game by the rules, with one player chosen as the judge of the rules, game world, and characters."

Do you realize that all you have done here is taken a universal principle of credibility apportionment and zeroed in on one of many possibilities fully supported by the Lumpley Principle...

In other words...you are not refuting the Lumpley Principle at all...you are merely defining a specific case.

Note the verbs, because I chose those words carefully.  The players agree, and choose.  The one player judges.  At no point are the rules said to do anything.  The law does nothing without someone to apply it, but that does not mean that there are no laws.

Which is exactly what the Lumpley Principle says, and has said from the beginning.  Which is why I stated above that I don't see evidence that you've actually read the threads in question...

You are argueing vehemently against something which you are agreeing with.

The Lumpley Principle claims that the players must agree with every action.  Once play starts in a "follow the rules" social contract, that is just plain wrong; it's up to the Judge.

Survey says....buzzz.

No it doesn't.  Never has.  

Until this thread, I too would have thought this was so basic that it didn't even need expression, that it was beyond dispute, but apparently not.  Now I've accepted that freeform social contracts behave in a different manner; I've done it myself when playing freeform, and the Lumpley Principle is right *for that context*.  It is just not correct *for this context

*.

All contexts.  Every game.  Including yours.

Again, it is not a productive conversational strategy to insist that everyone is exactly like you, and has no room to argue with you.  Don't do that again, okay?

This has nothing to do with individual preference.  It is universal and irrefutable.  None of this is "in my opinion" it simply is the way things work.  Sorry if you don't see it that way...but if you don't...simply put you're wrong.  

There is no experience you've ever had in roleplaying (relative to actual in game play events) that is not described by the Lumpley Principle.  

This is not because its some revolutionary thing...but because its so basic that to deny it is to deny human communication.
Th

[Marco]

Actually, there might be another case that's maybe interesting: A rule call is made last session. Something fairly catestrophic happens as a result (the Sid the barbarian is killed).

Next session, the call is shown to be in griveous error--already a lot of play has been predicated on that event (the players contineue *without* the barbarian).

The GM, when shown the rule, punts: "Okay. Sid is back. I don't know what happened--but he's back. You pick him up at the next tavern."

At that point play is continuing with a gray space where the rules have prevented 'X' or 'Y' from happening but there is no 'Z.'

Even if Sid's player makes up a story, the rules have not granted him the credibility to do so--all they've done is take it from the GM (who declared him dead).

Not that I think this is *especially* relevant to anything--but when Mike noted that different people might imagine things in different ways I thought "I bet that happens all the time!" (ask what color the evil necromancer's eyes were next time after a big battle and you didn't specify it--but that wasn't really about the rules or credibility, per se).

-Marco

[Valamir]

Even if Sid's player makes up a story, the rules have not granted him the credibility to do so--all they've done is take it from the GM (who declared him dead).

That's an excellent example.

The root of all credibility in a game is the players themselves.  They sit down and agree to be governed by the rules of the game.  The rules of the game then apportion this credibility back out amongst the players in some organized fashion, generally reserving the bulk of that credibility for the player known as the GM.

Now I've never seen a set of RPG game rules that explicitly outlines what to do if a mistake is made (interestingly I've seen several board game and war game and minis games that often have pages addressing this issue).  

Typically the closest we'll get is some blanket rule about GM being the final authority.  

So what do we have in the game then.  We have Sid's player perhaps saying "hey we did that rule wrong...Sid shouldn't have died".  Does Sid's player, by this statement alone have the credibility to simply declare Sid back to life.  Probably not.  

Most likely what will happen is the GM will utilize some of the undefined "GM is God" powers apportioned to him (by the other players through the vehicle of the rules) to declare a solution to the problem.  

How rocky this solution is will be a direct result of 1) how clear the rules are at apportioning credibility, 2) how willing players are to abide by that appotionment, and 3) how strong the social contract is among the group at dealing with issues that are not explicitly outlined.


*side note to Marco.  This is very much the same sort of Credibility Apportioning issues that we've discussed before in relation to the Impossible Thing.

[Marco]

Agreed--in the scenario I'm envisioning there's a functional gray-space in the narrative:

Sid descibes falling for hours, battling with a fire demon. Underwater, high mountain tops. You get the drift.

The other players (and maybe even Sid's player) don't buy that scenario ("You fell down a well when you totally blew you dancing roll, dude. It was like penalty for excessive celebration in the in-zone from hell")

The GM has said he doesn't know how to resolve it (rules say he shouldn't have fallen. The play following the event established clearly that he had, the well was established as fatal ... etc.)

But play continues. So each player might imagine it differently--or at very least it's a functional example of a self contradictory situation. Now Mike says Lumpley is an *attempt* to aportion credibility--so here no one has any credibility for what happened in the shared imagining ... so it's just a failure (and indeed, it's a rules failure that starts the ball rolling).

So that's a good way to look at it: the rules grant no credibility so there is none.

But on the other hand, it was the rules themselves that *create* the gray space (without the re-examination and ex-post-factor application of a solid rule Sid remains sadly dead).

So it's an extreme case. A paradox.

Hey ... next time travel game I run, that's how I'm gonna to do it. A real-world in play paradox.

-Marco

[Lxndr]

That's what my point was about LARPs and MUDs.  In both of these, a non-consenting player does not stop play or even necessarily greatly disrupt it.  There may be some local disruption, but play continues in other areas without noticing.

In MUDs, a non-consenting player has no real voice - he can log off, and that's it.  The rules are in the code itself.  Not the best example.  That's like talking about a non-consenting player of Super Mario Brothers.

On the other hand, in a LARP, a non-consenting player can indeed stop or disrupt that instance of play.  In a LARP setting, ostensibly one game, there are many different things happening at once, and oftimes many different "GMs" who have to share credibility between themselves (when players aren't just doing things by themselves).  So you have to stop looking at the macro level, and you have to look at the level where things are actually happening - the application of the rules within a LARP.  

Rarely, if ever, does a rules situation come up that affects the whole LARP as a single entity.  Instead, individuals and groups get together and go, "Hey, we're going to try this.  Oh, that's bogus/rockin/whatever."  That's where the Lumpley principle comes into play, if I read it right.

[John Kim]

I suppose that, occasionally, when it doesn't matter to anyone, people do obtain their own idea of what happened in a game, even when they know that others have a different idea. Still, this doesn't speak to what system is designed to do. Just that all systems are imperfect.

The Principle doesn't speak to success, just what system is intended to do.

Ooh, ooh!!!  OK now, just because you said this, now I want to go and design a system which is intended to encourage multiple game views.  I think someone described this as a "Post-Modern" RPG before, and now that I think about it, it sounds neat.

This sort of plays at something I was pondering about Mage: The Ascension.  In that game, the PCs are people who can change the nature of reality by manipulating belief.  I pondered deconstructing this, and saying that the people who think of themselves as mages are actually delusional and simply manipulate their own reality.  

An extension of this would be a game where each player has her own vision of reality.  There should probably be a GM to coordinate.  The GM at times will pass notes out to different players, but he will also make statements.  The thing is, based on the differing information they have -- the players interpret the statements differently.  

To some degree, this is always true, I think.  Players will interpret statements differently, and they don't always identify and correct differences.  What I would be trying for would be to actually exploit this for effect -- to actually try to keep up differences among player views.  

There are only 3 possible avenues at this point.

a) Whatever it was the person who was speaking described has just been accepted as happening in the game world.
b) Whatever it was the person who was speaking described has just been denied as happening in the game world.
c) Whatever it was the person who was speaking described has been altered or modified before being accepted as happening in the game world.

I believe that Vincent actually contradicted this.  He said that the Lumpley Principle didn't say a thing about the game-world.  In any case, here you assume a single group viewpoint: i.e. either a statement is accepted or not by everyone.  However, if you have multiple people, then this can be ambiguous.  One person can accept it as happening, while another person could deny it, and a third could accept a modified version.

[Valamir]

[quote="John Kim]I believe that Vincent actually contradicted this.  He said that the Lumpley Principle didn't say a thing about the game-world.  [/quote]

Actually, the comment of Vincent's you're referring to was made specifically to address an issue brought up by EJH referring to setting books and how the principle applies to reading books about setting.  It doesn't apply to what I'm saying above, which I believe is entirely consistant with the principle as outlined in the original thread.

In any case, here you assume a single group viewpoint: i.e. either a statement is accepted or not by everyone. However, if you have multiple people, then this can be ambiguous. One person can accept it as happening, while another person could deny it, and a third could accept a modified version.

Sure.  In general this would be considered a "bad thing" and a source of frustration for the players...but if you approached this as a specific design goal, could be interesting.  The explicit withholding or obfuscating of credibility as a game mechanic.  Of not being sure whether what one says is or isn't accepted as part of the game world.

Quite an interesting application of the Lumpley Principle to experiment with.

[lumpley]

I for one would be happy to end this thread.  Seems like pretty much everybody agrees, or is gonna have to keep thinking about it.

John, Marco, in the initial thread, I set up an example of some PC picking up a can of peaches.  Between me and Mike we imagined a situation where the fate of the peaches was never satisfactorily resolved, but play continued, dodging the issue, and over time it became not a big deal.  Forever after, some of the players held conviction that the peaches had been picked up, and some held conviction that they hadn't, and the group talked about it with ribbing, joking, and friendly controversy.

There, the consensus wouldn't be "yes, X happened," it'd be "whatever, let's move on."

Exactly your gray area, Marco, and a lot like your post modern game, John.  Cool, very interesting stuff.  

I believe that Vincent actually contradicted this. He said that the Lumpley Principle didn't say a thing about the game-world.

No.  I agree with Ralph.  You might be reading me out of context.  I said things like that to Ed, but he was using "game world" in a very different sense than Ralph was.

Also I've said explicitly that larps and other kinds of rpgs - muds clearly qualify - might operate on different principles than "consensus rules."

-Vincent

Crossposted with Ralph, and he said it so well I mightn't have bothered.

[Mike Holmes]

Ooh, ooh!!!  OK now, just because you said this, now I want to go and design a system which is intended to encourage multiple game views.  I think someone described this as a "Post-Modern" RPG before, and now that I think about it, it sounds neat.

Actually, that was me, heh.

To some degree, this is always true, I think.  Players will interpret statements differently, and they don't always identify and correct differences.  What I would be trying for would be to actually exploit this for effect -- to actually try to keep up differences among player views.

Quite true. I was surprised that it didn't come out before, but this seems to happen in games I'm in all the time. Someone will think that they're in a room with another character, and start a conversation when someone will note that the characters are in two totally different rooms.

Doesn't that happen to everyone quite a bit? Failure to create consensus is going to always exist as a phenomenon due to the imperfect nature of human communication.

But, I too, am somewhat intrigued by this idea. Jonathan Walton's StoryPunk (or whatever it's called this week: Ever-After, I think. jk) I thought was going to be this way, but I'm not seeing it anymore. Another mode would be like a really competitive Universalis, where you'd be doing "story combat" trying to hack a story of your devising away from what the other players want. Lot's of potential room here for very weird stuff.

I even have this one game where the players are totally decieved by the GM as to how credibility is being distributed....

Tweet gets credit first for his OTE metaplot in which the characters discover the players. Which leads to all sorts of philosophical problems in terms of credibility.

Mike

[kamikaze]

When a player says "I do X", the GM is the only one whose yea or nay is relevant.

Not true in all cases. Are you refering to a specific game, or maybe just using this as one possible answer? Or, do you view this process as applicable to all games? I don't think this happens as you describe in Dust Devils, as an example.

As I've taken pains to point out throughout, that only applies to "follow the rules" social contracts, *NOT* to "freeform" social contracts, and it has zero, zilch, nada to do with the weight of the system.  Dust Devils is a very freeform game (actually, I'm not sure I'd call it an RPG, it's really a STG like Universalis), and purely coincidentally, it's also generally used in a freeform social contract.

I just played Dust Devils tonight, BTW.  I've played Ronin before.  So I'm not saying "freeform = bad", by any means, if that's what's bothering you.

Further, even if this applies in 99% of how gaming operates, it is still operating under the Lumpley principal. It is indeed universal.

Please don't make assertions without some kind of argument to back them up.  How is it universal?  It does not describe what happens with a "follow the rules" social contract.  Unless you can show where those negotiation points are, and suddenly reveal that we've been doing it without knowing it, you're going to have to accept that this is not the case.

The kamikaze principal presumes a lot about how RPGs operate, by the way. We could, for example, have a bidding system in which players "vote" with resources to say how "X" happens. Such a system could be robust, and it could also be played strictly by the book.

There's three things wrong there: first, that may very well not be an RPG--it sounds like Universalis, which isn't.  Second, systems are not the same as social contracts.  And third, you can choose to use the rules in a freeform social contract.

And no, the Kamikaze Principle assumes nothing about how RPGs operate, because *IT IS NOT ABOUT SYSTEMS*.  It's about a social contract.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Mark, man. You need to chill out. Seriously.

That said, your follow-the-rules social contract fits perfectly within the lumpley principle, which I've always heard described as: the system is the means by which group concensus is reached as-to what is in/occurs in the shared imaginative space. Following the rules is a means by to reach this concensus.

I don't see any confusion.

[kamikaze]

I for one would be happy to end this thread.  Seems like pretty much everybody agrees, or is gonna have to keep thinking about it.

This, I agree with.

A couple people in this thread are becoming excessively dogmatic, and are never going to agree that the principle with your name on it only describes certain social contracts; I'm not sure if you recognize that or not, but at least you haven't been dogmatic about it, and have tried to make useful clarifications.

If no reasonable argument in favor of universalizing it has appeared so far, it's not going to.

Also I've said explicitly that larps and other kinds of rpgs - muds clearly qualify - might operate on different principles than "consensus rules."

Keep thinking about that case.  There are tabletop RPGs that operate on different principles, as well.

So, good night to all, and will the last person to leave the thread please lock up?

[contracycle]

A couple people in this thread are becoming excessively dogmatic, and are never going to agree that the principle with your name on it only describes certain social contracts; I'm not sure if you recognize that or not, but at least you haven't been dogmatic about it, and have tried to make useful clarifications.

Sure, certain social contracts.  The ones that are games.

Why do political organs have manifestoes, planks, and policy documents?  Becuase every individual has a slightly different take and experience and if the group is to achieve anything at all it must ACT with consensus.  Not everyone agrees with every article - but they accede as the lesser evil.

The lumpley principle is only a specific implementation of this idea in regards games.  I consider it to be fundamental to all games; in non-system games, credibility to impose change on the SHARED space is mediated by some other method, but in systematic games that is thr raison d'etre  of the system.

[Paganini]

Geez, guys.  A page and half since I called it. Did you just not notice, or what? The thread is OVER. The original topic has been covered. Ed's question has been aswered. If you want to continue discussing other aspects of the Lumpley Principle, start new threads; please don't post to this one.