Question on play style and characterization

[Callan S.]

*snip*
Callan, I think you're misunderstanding a fundamental aspect of gamism.  The character is not (necessarily) competing - the player is.  I have never played gamist with a character who was 'out to win', excepting in the service of some other goal.  Even in the standard example of the dungeon crawl, which most folks around here agree is pretty straight up gamism, the characters aren't going "I want to see if I can beat this", they are motivated by some in-game reason - money, or "save the town" or something like it.  It's the player who wants to beat the dungeon.

Even, as in my politcal example, when the characters are competing, they aren't doing so "as a grand game" as you suggest.  They are doing so for fairly complex reasons.  Again, it's the player who is treating it as a game.

Character motivation is not what determines CA.  Player motivation is.  Or I'm completely out to lunch, and don't understand GNS at all.

James

Heya,

Indeed, what I need to add is that I don't believe in this 'I act/behave this way, but my character acts/behaves this way with zero influence from how I behave'.

The idea is that although you might want to play a hero who fights to save everyone, but as a player you want to win game goals, the two will influence each other.

Choices display character. Gamist play involves...making choices to win a game goal. The way you as a player make choices then determines the character that your hero PC shows, you can't get away from it.

The nail in the coffin is that your humanised NPC wouldn't see a hero who saves everyone, he'll see someone who's goal is to win (particular goals). The page and a half of backstory the player wrote might be full of heroic goodness, but now he's come out and made these choices, which tell us what he really is more than any amount of background does. It's pretty obvious after even one or two choices, just what any particular PC cares about the most.

The only way around it is if the gamist player makes making choices like the character would his primary gamist goal (so he doesn't loose his heroic image), to smoke screen what his real goal is. He does this as much as possible while trying to maintain other gamist goals (friction). And this smoke screen means he ends up exploring character as a primary goal. Narrativist mode.

Another option is that the GM then goes and flattens the humanised NPC's responce, breaking the tool and loosing credibility for all other tools of a similar nature (Once Mary Jane becomes a 2D token, meeting the president is just meeting another token. Because of their similar human background, they all begin to share the same flatness).

Or the humanised NPC can be played human, and directly conflict with the PC's win state. The PC wins, but then MJ just says hes a bastard for how he acted like its all a game. The humanised NPC sours and creates friction for the gamist mode.

If you only want to look at from a perspective of only players and GM's being in modes, then its basically a 'players playing gamist and GM playing narrativist' dysfunction. The GM has done this by deploying humanised NPC's into the SIS. Either he then uses them against type to facilitate play, breaking them and thus parts of the game world, or he plays them to mode, clashing modes together.

[Blankshield]

*snip*
Callan, I think you're misunderstanding a fundamental aspect of gamism.  The character is not (necessarily) competing - the player is.  I have never played gamist with a character who was 'out to win', excepting in the service of some other goal.  Even in the standard example of the dungeon crawl, which most folks around here agree is pretty straight up gamism, the characters aren't going "I want to see if I can beat this", they are motivated by some in-game reason - money, or "save the town" or something like it.  It's the player who wants to beat the dungeon.

Even, as in my politcal example, when the characters are competing, they aren't doing so "as a grand game" as you suggest.  They are doing so for fairly complex reasons.  Again, it's the player who is treating it as a game.

Character motivation is not what determines CA.  Player motivation is.  Or I'm completely out to lunch, and don't understand GNS at all.

James

Heya,

Indeed, what I need to add is that I don't believe in this 'I act/behave this way, but my character acts/behaves this way with zero influence from how I behave'.

The idea is that although you might want to play a hero who fights to save everyone, but as a player you want to win game goals, the two will influence each other.

Choices display character. Gamist play involves...making choices to win a game goal. The way you as a player make choices then determines the character that your hero PC shows, you can't get away from it.

The nail in the coffin is that your humanised NPC wouldn't see a hero who saves everyone, he'll see someone who's goal is to win (particular goals).

Wow, I just cannot see this at all.  The townfolk come to my noble and righteous paladin and say "Please sir, save our town from the evil wizard with a dungeon full of marauding goblins."  Paladin goes off and does so.  The townsfolk will not say "You jerk.  You didn't kill the evil wizard and stop the goblins because you cared, you did it because it was fun!"

I guess I just can't wrap my head around what you're suggesting.  I see zero inherent conflict between a player (or group of players) with a gamist agenda and characters with depth.  Sorry.

Bluntly, I have seen coherent gamist play that involved humanized characters.

James

[M. J. Young]

And this smoke screen means he ends up exploring character as a primary goal. Narrativist mode.

I am so with James on this.

Why do you think exploration of character is necessarily narrativist mode?

Have you never seen a gamist player strategize in such a way that he says, "Although this would be a more effective strategy, that character wouldn't do that?" In D&D, a cavalier will never sneak up and stab someone in the back, even if that's the best strategy; it is contrary to his honor. The game attempts to codify that as a limit on the cavalier--but there are other limits on characters that are not so codified. The question in such gamist play becomes can I win this within the constraints of this character?

There's some video game in which the soldiers are in this house full of zombies, and trying to get out alive. (That's the gist; I haven't played it.) There are two characters you can play, a guy and a girl, and they have different abilities. Which one you choose impacts the strategies you can use, because of those abilities.

In the same way, who a character is in a gamist role playing game is a limitation on what he can do, no matter who he is. If he's a stupid barbarian who will rip anything apart that gets in his way, that impacts his relationships with local villagers. If he's a noble paladin to whom the villagers look for protection, that connects to what actions are within what he can choose. Exploring the character is not inherently narrativist. It is just as common to explore character in sim and gamist play--it's just done in the context of different goals. One could argue that narrativists don't explore character because they can only do so in relation to premise, while simulationists can explore character entirely for the sake of discovering the nature of that character, without reference to some premise being addressed. Yet clearly you can explore character as part of addressing premise. You can also explore character as part of meeting challenge, and character depth is not inimical to this--just as character depth impacts the degree to which character matters to premise, so too character depth impacts the degree to which character matters to challenge.

Is that any clearer?

--M. J. Young

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

James (Blankenshield) and M.J., you're making sense to me, certainly. Callan, do you think you might have some synecdoche going on?

Best,
Ron

[Callan S.]

In terms of synecdoche as part of something being used to describe the whole, that could be it. Suppose out of three things you want to do, one is called horse riding, one piloting and one driving.

Now, you have 5 hours and you want to go horse riding. You spend 90% of that time in a car, so you can spend 10% of that time riding a horse. Further, you could have ridden a horse at the start of the five hours, but since cars were made available, not horses, you need to use one of those to get to where the horses are available.

Horse riding is what you want, horse riding is indeed what you did. And its clear you didn't go do the activity of 'driving', the use of the car was for reaching the goal of horse riding. When someone talks to you about what you did for five hours, they are going to talk with you about your goal, they are not going to ask how you enjoyed driving, because you've told them that isn't what you went out to do. They'll talk about the horse riding with you.

So, there is a lot of evidence there that what you did was horse riding. However, if horses were supplied at the start, you could have spent a lot more time on an actual horse. Indeed, if your desires lay with riding a horse, and for examples sake we say your skill is there also, for that reason, your probably not very good at driving a car. That poor car may get its gears ground, its bumper dinted and otherwise damaged/perhaps crashed, because your heart wasn't in driving it, obviously.

You can also scale the percentage the other way, so you spent 90% of the time riding a horse. It's hard to avoid thinking all you did was horse riding. But if horses had been provided from the beginning, it would still be higher.

Now, if NPC's are designed as 'vehicles' for a certain goal, then you want them all to be designed as the right vehicle to support your goal. It may be just a personal biassed opinion of mine that if someone spends a high percentage of there time in a car, even though they want to ride horses, the actual thing they were doing was driving, IMO. But certainly I can see that being in a car all that time didn't change their goal for them.

Anyway, its clear I'm either way off course here or too inarticulate to get anything across, so I'll read all replies to this and absorb them. But unless I definately think I can add anything more than I have already attempted, I wont reply as I think I've started to just repeat myself and drag out this post. I'd rather give up the last word than do that. Plus I think I've become more annoying than engaging.

[Gordon C. Landis]

Hi Callan,

Let me run with your car-driving/horse-riding analogy here - I'll assume a group of pepole drive together to the ranch, take a horseback ride, and drive back.  GNS is not going to look at what percentage of time you spent doing what.  It's not going to look at which activity you have more or less skill in.  It's not even going to look at what your "intended goal" for the activity was.  In talking with people about the experience (keeping this RPG/GNS specific, it's the group on the car trip talking to each other), it's not that you talk about the "goal" that matters - what matters is what you actually end up demonstrating is the priority during that time you spend.  It would certainly be *possible* to be more excited about the driving than the riding, groovin' on how many MPG you got on the trip or how you did 90 past that speed trap and wasn't it lucky the cop already had someone pulled over.  Just like it would be possible to be all about how cool it was to be out in the wilderness on horseback and what a great horse you got to ride, even if you spent most of your time crammed into the back seat of a car.

Merging this back into Gamism and humanized PCs, the question is: do the participants demonstrate that having humanized PCs (taking the car ride) is something they do (possibly even enjoy, to some degree) as part of an overall activity that prioritizies the Gamism (stuff about horseback riding), or does some Premise associated with the humanized characteristics of the NPCs (stuff about driving) grab them instead?  If that DOES happen, than we have Nar rather than Gamism (even though they do end up riding horses during the process).

If you are saying that having human NPCs creates a possible Premise-grab situation that 2D NPCs don't have - sure, that sounds true.  But possible Premise-grabs (and Challenge-grabs, and Dream-grabs) are found throughout play.  Group-shared mode preference can generally can overcome that kind of grab - and just because a group prioritizes a particular mode doesn't mean they don't have other preferences.  They may like humanized NPCs - it's just not allowed to be the whole point of play, because there's something else (Step on Up) filling that niche.

You can appreciate driving to your horse ride in a limo rather than driving there in a Yugo without changing the fact that the point was to go horse-riding, not to go limo-cruising.  Or maybe you DO appreciate the limo more than the horse ride - which means the priority was there.  It's only a problem if some people are trying to optimize the car trip while others are trying to optimize the horse ride.

Hope that makes sense,

Gordon

EDIT in a PS:  I suppose in a situation where you have some folks who are pulled to (e.g.) Nar, but who have agreed to do Gamist in this particular game, keeping "temptation" away by not humanizing NPCs would be a fine strategy.  I think I've seen an extreme version of this, where a Nar or Sim-focused roleplaying group that sometimes likes to Step on Up will do so only when they play a multiplayer board/card game - cutting out the usual RPG cues makes it OK to do something that normally ain't allowed to be a priority.  So . . . synechdoceseems likely.  Yes, it CAN be good to keep humanized NPCs out of Gamist play, for some groups and/or situations.  No, that does NOT mean that ALL Gamist play has to keep humanized NPCs away or risk not staying Gamist.

[clehrich]

Callan,

If you're saying that NPC design and manipulation can facilitate CA goals, i.e. that this constitutes part of the Technique toolbox, then I'll buy that.  You can certainly design and use NPC's to help support Story Now, or Step On Up, or Dreaming.

I don't think, however, that it's a question of humanizing vs. dehumanizing.  I think deeply real, human NPC's can be part of any game, regardless of CA.  I also think that you can make them ciphers and still support any CA.  It's just a question of what the purpose and structure of your game is.

In Sorcerer, for example, it's perfectly possible to make the NPCs' realness a part of the horror of your PCs' arrogance and ruthlessness.  I think it could also be structured such that the NPCs' mechanical nature makes the PCs' focus on other areas of their own Humanity than their use and abuse of others.

In AD&D played as straight Gamist dungeon-crawling, it certainly makes sense to have the NPC's be blanks, mere allocations of statistics.  But you could also structure a dungeon-crawl such that dealing with NPCs' complexities and foibles was part of the challenge of beating the dungeon.

Chris Lehrich

[contracycle]

Seems to me, if you drove for 4 hours and rode for 1 becuase that was the necessary prerequisite for riding, then GNS could still say that riding was your favoured mode - because, when given the opportunity to make a decision, the riding was prioritised over the driving.  Similarly, even if you had to get through many hours of Simmy slog for 10 mins of Narratavism, if thats when you perk up and look attentive, we can still identified your preferred mode.  Whether or not you get much opportunity to indulge in your preferred mode is another question, one to do with what the group believes it is there to do.

[Valamir]

It would certainly be *possible* to be more excited about the driving than the riding, groovin' on how many MPG you got on the trip or how you did 90 past that speed trap and wasn't it lucky the cop already had someone pulled over. Just like it would be possible to be all about how cool it was to be out in the wilderness on horseback and what a great horse you got to ride, even if you spent most of your time crammed into the back seat of a car.

Yup, that's exactly right.

If 5 years from now when you're hanging out with your buds reminiscing are you going to say:

"remember that time we went horseback riding and Joe fell into the creek"

or

"remember that time we drove out to the horse ranch and totally left that cop in the dust"