DERPG and GNS

[Calithena]

I'm jumping ahead to the next step here, but I want to pose a basic question and see how people answer it.

I think that the Dying Earth RPG is Narrativist. The fact that it's a game that simulates the Dying Earth and Vance's stories thereon might indicate Sim, but I think that's wrong, since the goal of the game is not to 'be a character on the Dying Earth' or to be true to the setting, but to generate stories of a certain kind. A player's identification in DERPG is with their character's story first and foremost, and the system is designed to support that. (There is an 'actual play' thread for Dying Earth on rpg.net which makes this point very well if you read it carefully.) The stories one produces are stories of a certain type, the type of Vance's own Dying Earth stories, but the story's the thing, not the simulation.

(An interesting analogy I'm still mulling over: if you write a computer program designed to write music in the style of Bach, i.e. within the mathematical framework in which all of Bach's music perhaps falls, the program is not simulating Bach, but creating music in his style. I think.)

I don't believe, however, that DERPG stories have a Premise in the sense that I've seen it sketched out so far. Extravagant debauchery, mincing murder as the sun goes out. Get what you can until you get Walloped, then pick up and try again. But do it stylishly!

I won't return to this thread until I respond to Ron in the other one. But I wanted to raise the question: if it's right that DERPG is Narrativist, as I think it is, then what's the Premise?

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I agree with you that the game facilitates Narrativist play better than any other mode.

Based on my presentation in the other thread, the moral/etc conflict at hand arises out of Situation, which in this game, follows very strict rules based on the Cugel stories: venal self-serving little scut encounters grossly hypocritical society.

(For the higher-power game, based on the Rhialto stories, it's a little more complex and the game provides little help. I'll restrict myself to the Cugel level of play, which is where my play-experience lies.)

In such a Situation, the question is whether any "Good" can emerge from anything in play. Make no mistake: the villagers are almost always bastards, or being exploited by a bastard, who's more than a match in wits for the player-characters. There's also almost always one or two innocents involved, such as the little blue guy who emerges from a characer's intestines in the example scenario.

1. Do you get a big mess due to everyone, so to speak, running around Vulcan nerve-pinching one another? Often - practically guaranteed, in fact.

2. Is a condition or situation that no one really understood revealed that upsets the chances for anyone profiting? Often.

3. Do you get a "top bastard beats other bastards" ending? Maybe, barely maybe.

4. Do the innocents and/or good guys actually get a little justice? Maybe, and even likely (often through inadvertent actions on the characters' parts which are more than a little engineered by the players).

It all goes back to my comments in the other thread: the conflict is not felt by the main characters. But as it's inherent to the situation (bastards coming a'cropper), it's embraced by the players. Quite often, the game system facilitates players hosing their own characters terribly (via the characters' own bad choices) in the interest of generating #1 and #4 above.

That sounds like Premise and Theme in action to me.

Best,
Ron

[gentrification]

If anyone's interested, the RPG.net thread is here. It's my game, as a matter of fact.

Fair warning: I wasn't trying to be particularly reflective or analytical in this write-up, so it's mostly just a very detailed chronicle of events. Written in a somewhat Vancian tone. To varying degrees of success. The thread is interspersed with some discussion of the rules, though, and near the end a guy from my gaming group pontificates on how to best approach the game as a player.

In any case, my experience with the game has matched up pretty closely to Ron's analysis of it.

[Calithena]

Ron: In light of my updated comments in the other threads I'd say the following. We agree that DERPG facilitates Narrativist play, and I think we agree that part of the Creative Agenda of the game involves an interest in acting out stories of a certain kind. So the only remaining question is 'what kind of stories are those'?; and the answer to this question involves on the one hand tales of actual play (such as those recounted in the wonderful thread linked above), and on the other hand Vance's tales themselves.

I'm sure that you and I could have a wonderful argument on the moral messages of Vance's fiction, but if that's what's at stake here, we can just agree on gaming theory and leave open the ways in which Theme is essential to Dying Earth stories, at the levels of production and analysis of finished product both. Actualizing the Creative Agenda of a Dying Earth story just is figuring about how to create certain kinds of situations and stories, using your character as your token; and an interest in that is obviously far different than an interest in cracking the top level of the Howling Tower and beating that frog-demon once and for all. The moral status of either interest, in the story, in the game-world, or in the real world, are separate questions, which don't need to be addressed to get at the structural essentials here.

Recantation: my original question in this thread is a bad one. Never mind.

This leads me to a query though: Ron, you obviously think there's something funny in the DERPG design, an 'edge effect' that makes it an odd example of Narrativist design in at least one way. Since my question is bad, it can't be getting at your issue - but I'd like to understand what you're thinking here. If there's aught else to be accomplished in this thread (take a loop of magical metal...you're well upon your march!), I suppose I'd ask you to follow up on that in more detail.