Establishing a Social Contract

[hix]

A couple of recent threads here and in the Heroquest forum have started me thinking about the preparation phase for a game.

Assuming that everyone in a hypothetical group was open to the idea of discussing changes to play style and techniques, what sort of questions and topics would you discuss to set up a rock solid * social contract?

If this has been discussed before, I'd appreciate it if someone could point me towards some relevant threads - when I tried to search on 'establishing social contract' I got 81 pages of results.

My RL application for this is that we're about to start prepping for a game of Nobilis (the first time with the system for quite a few of us).

Cheers,
Steve.

* Or 'crystal clear' if you'd prefer another cliche.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Steve,

I've been engaged in this issue for a very, very long time, and I hope my experiences will be helpful for you.

Issue #1 is the non-gaming aspects of the interactions. They involve where and when we play, and most especially how to deal with schedule conflicts.

For instance, back in the 1980s, I negotiated that Champions night was Wednesday, that if one person couldn't make it then no one played, and that if you were that person, it was your job to do the phone-tag to inform everyone and if possible, to set up an alternative time. Weekends were allowed for alternatives, but generally were considered non-gaming time, and most especially, it was OK just to miss a week if an easy alternative wasn't available. We ended up playing maybe four weeks out of every six, and the game was sustained, well, pretty much indefinitely.

(If the word "negotiate" seems too harsh or cold to you, as it seems to for some folks, substitute "talk about" or "arrive at" or "reach consensus on.")

That was just one aspect of the non-gaming-specific social contract for that group. It had tons of implications, all of which enabled us to keep role-playing from being a threat to any other aspects of our lives (e.g. weekend parties, romantic stuff, etc), as well as to give it some weight and value relative to those aspects.

Nor is that the only way to handle such things. It's just the way we handled it back then, in college. Now, the groups I play with have slightly different "rules" from the above, but the point is that the same issues are understood by all of us.

Issue #2 is the tricky relationship between Exploration and Creative Agenda. It's tricky because, in the human mind, very little distinction is made between the two. If you say "like Cowboy Bebop!" to me, and I go, "Yeah!", there is really no reason to think we've communicated at all. When the rubber hits the road in actual play, we may discover that we are taking extremely different approaches, which may even be incompatible. But it's so, so tempting to think that we have communicated, and even upsetting to consider otherwise, sometimes.

The best solution I've found for that, at least for groups that haven't arrived at a comfortable set of Creative Agendas for themselves, is to use lots and lots and lots of examples in discussing "what we're going to play." The examples should concern two things:

a) Actual instances of play from the past which were especially enjoyable, no matter what setting/etc (Exploration) they concerned.

b) Elements of the proposed Exploration material that floats your personal Creative Agenda at this particular time. For me, tending toward Narrativist play unless a particular sort of Gamism is in the offing, I usually point out thematic issues, and how characters' decisions lead to thematically-intense outcomes in the source material. But someone else might focus on some other features that indicate emphasizing a completely different Creative Agenda.

I think that neither (a) nor (b) require using any particular GNS jargon in the discussion itself, but benefit greatly from understanding it.

Best,
Ron

[Valamir]

a) Actual instances of play from the past which were especially enjoyable, no matter what setting/etc (Exploration) they concerned.

b) Elements of the proposed Exploration material that floats your personal Creative Agenda at this particular time. For me, tending toward Narrativist play unless a particular sort of Gamism is in the offing, I usually point out thematic issues, and how characters' decisions lead to thematically-intense outcomes in the source material. But someone else might focus on some other features that indicate emphasizing a completely different Creative Agenda.

I think that neither (a) nor (b) require using any particular GNS jargon in the discussion itself, but benefit greatly from understanding it.

Good advice.  

Continuing with your Cowboy Bebop example, could you provide some examples of what you'd specifically say with regards to exploration elements if you were sending out an email to players about a proposed "like Cowboy Bebop" game?

[hix]

Further searching has revealed these threads

"Communicating the Social Contract" was the most on-topic discussion I could find. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=5937

Then of course, there's "The Whole Model - This is it", which I can't believe I didn't think of. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8655&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc

The implications of developing a premise are addressed in the first post of this thread: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=5250

And a one-message thread of actual play musings is the sort of thing I was thinking of posting. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9226

Steve

[Mike Holmes]

Another thing to do is to use a coherent game itself as the guideline. That is, say before hand that you want to play X game, and to stick to the modes that it promotes. If players go in with an open mind, the game rules then become a roadmap to how to play in terms of CA.

This does require open-mindedness from the players.

What often happens is that people do the part that Ron talks about, and discuss examples, and then discussion often turns to what games support that sort of play well. Between the examples, and the mechanics referred to, you can usually get a clear picture fairly quickly.

Not to mention you may already be halfway home on what to play, specifically.

Mike