proposition: background and foreground

[Valamir]

You'll have to provide some examples of where they get vague Gareth, because I'm not seeing any vagueness of a sort that could possibly matter.

[John Kim]

You'll have to provide some examples of where they get vague Gareth, because I'm not seeing any vagueness of a sort that could possibly matter.

Er, can you provide an example of something that is definitely color?  I'm hard-pressed to think of anything.  It seems to me that something is only "color" in retrospect because it isn't important to resolution.  To take a particular example: "The King of Tarakush is dying."  If the game has nothing to do with politics or is not even set in Tarakush, this might be a bit of color.  On the other hand, it might be setting.  Conversely, if the game is set in the royal court of Tarakush, it might be situation.  Lastly, it might be character if the King is a PC.  

I think examples are extremely helpful.  For example, let's take the case of punching through a wall.  Let's imagine a Champions game...

Player A (as PC Stellar): "Dark Horse, do you think you can punch through that wall?"
Player B: (to GM) "What's the wall like?"
GM: "It's a brick wall maybe a foot thick."
Player B: (consults rulebook) "So around DEF 5, BODY 8?"
GM: "Yeah"
Player B: (as PC Dark Horse) "Of course I can punch through that wall."  

Now, note that the wall hasn't actually been punched through.  So there has been no resolution per se of the punch.  Instead the rules mechanics have been invoked to determine dialogue.  

These rules mechanics are representational -- i.e. they convey information about the SIS, just as flavor text, a background chapter, a character sheet, or spoken words of the players do.  They are also, however, invoked to determine what happens when the PC actually does try to punch through the wall.  

It's this potentially representational aspect which seems to be ignored here -- which maybe comes from designing non-representational games with mainly narration-based mechanics.  i.e. Here the Champions damage mechanics don't just determine how the players resolve a punch, they represent what the punch is within the world.  Thus the players can  talk in-character to each other about what the punch would do, referring to the mechanics for information.

[Marco]

Actually, after thinking about it over night, I'm pretty sure there's a way that situation is like system.

John Kim argued (convincingly) that an AD&D game that was all politicking would be, in essence, drifted--even if all the rules were scrupulously followed. For that to be the case I think one of two things has to be true:

1. Situation is essentially just like mechanics and therefore System.
2. Games where the GM arranges situation so that certain rules that aren't wanted are excluded from play are not drifting the game.

Collary: I think contra is saying that foreground setting/situation is like System and background isn't. I could deal with that but with the caveat that one can never be sure which is which until after the game is over and we know setting element X never became important).

I'm cool either way--but if we decide that setting isn't  system then I can run my all-politics-no-level-advancement-AD&D game and, hey, you can't say it's drifted.

That seems a bit odd to me.

-Marco

[contracycle]

Well  I had kinda hoped that this might serve as a way of resolving not so much some top-level identity of a given game element, so much as thinking about facilitating these transitions.  So in the previous discussion where we were discussing the introduction of a little town, I was hoping to be able to draw a distinction between creating a town for colour purposes, and creating a town for setting/situaiton purposes.

I was also hoping it might be deployed in the specific local game context.  As I see it, if you have a grup that is perhaps a ranger with a favoured enemy and a thief with a guild membership and a fighter with membership of a military order, then in this game those entities will be actually played, quite separately from the published setting material.  Even though in that material some particular named city say was the intended default foreground location for the action, in this local game that city might be rendered Colour becuase the action is not set there.

But all that said it was only a proposition.  I seem to see a distinction here but if others don't, fair enough.

But I do think that the general and specific cases become confused when we talk of setting as an undifferentiated whole.  Usually, the setting for Hamlet or similar might be said to be the castle, or Denmark or something, rather than Earth, if you see what I mean.  So I think that when you make a local game out of some setting material, you are selecting which elements are going to be real and present influences on the course of the action,a nd which are going to be used in that game as colour.  you might in another, subsequent, local game select to emphasis diffreent elements; and even more usefully, explicit mechanisms might be built to allow characters to interact with and or own some of these elements.