Intentional Vagueness (split)

[Brendan]

Split from Early role-playing.

Virtually all games have moved away from this model. Even Fantasy Heartbreakers tend to have 'more unified' mechanics. It's certainly more manageable for designers to create a closed-ended rules-set, and it helps to moderate some kinds of argument at the table. But there's a certain mad element of whimsy that the lacunae and endless baroque modifications of early D&D created that I think is pretty cool. I'd like to see that element somehow taken up by more current designers, actually - a functional System which incorporated an open-ended/polymorphous/heavily home-table-adaptable Rules set.

Early, early DnD had only two effective stats: character level and player creativity in the use of resources (everything from 10' poles and furniture fragments found in rooms to potions of gaseous form); these, as you and others point out in that thread, were applied in astoundingly creative combinations in order to survive the lethal conflict resolution systems (combat matrix and arbitrary saving throw values).  Now, I imagine this is the reason for much immediate rules-drifting as well; certainly it's why we started using stats as defacto task resolution target numbers!


However, it'd be interesting to see how you could capture some of this in a "modern" game; after all, we're looking back on all this stuff, and much of the misunderstanding stemmed from youthful naivete.  Would you do it with, say, multiple inexpensive related products?  With a magazine whose sole purpose was to provide variations?  Could intentional vagueness be usefully incorporated?

These quotes are related to an idea I've been playing with for months in my head, stemming from two things:

[*]D&D, specifically AD&D2 (with which I have the most experience), is effectively a known-bad system.  Yet I played it and loved it; in fact, much of the my affection for it seemed to arise in part from wrestling with the bad rules.

[*]Single-unified-method systems should be more fluid, intuitive and sensible--and yet I find them boring.
[/list:u]
These facts led me to conclude that what I wanted from an RPG was not a unified, well-designed system, but a detailed and contradictory one, including both overlap and vagueness.  Why?  I'm not entirely sure, but part of must be the metagame such systems induce:  the writing and rewriting of rules between and during play sessions.  The unintended consequence of the bad rules was--as "Early role-playing" attests--to draw the players into authorship of the game.

How can such authorship be deliberately induced?  Kesher suggested a loose affiliation of cheap products, or regular updates by magazine; my own approach, whenever I finally get the software working, will be a wiki that allows for multiple alternative rule-chunks (actually, in an odd coincidence with Sean's wording, I'd planned on calling it Baroque RPG).

There is a downside to intentional vagueness, of course.  The thing I want to avoid is the kind of hand-waving "now you try it" ethic I saw in books like the Creative Campaigning DM supplement.  I purchased it as a teenager with high hopes of using it to come up with new and exciting campaign ideas, and found it almost entirely useless.  It consisted mostly of an "evil circus" module, a couple boring variant races and lots of ways to limit my already underpowered PCs (shrink them!  Give the orcs guns!).  Whenever a section ended, the book would have a question like "what else can you come up with," which--as anyone who remembers creative writing in grade school knows--is the least helpful question on earth.

So here are my questions:  why does accidental vagueness lead to intriguing homebrew patches, when deliberate vagueness doesn't?  Can the authorship effect be deliberately reproduced?

[Brendan]

I hope this is in the right forum, by the way--I didn't think it would fit in Indie Design.

As a side note, I think this outs me as a Gamist (something I didn't want to admit for a long time).  That in turn makes me wonder:  do broken systems appeal to Gamists because they allow for exploits, or because their breaks help create a Gamist metagame?

[TonyLB]

Perhaps intentional vagueness undermines the conviction (as conveyed by the text) that there should be a right way to run the system.  That conviction, coupled with the obvious fact of the system being broken, can convince people that they are trying to "perfect" a system that actually exists (on some Platonic level of abstraction) but has not yet been expressed.  In that mindset, the players have a positive duty to the rules, to free them of the imperfections that were introduced in their descent from the realm of perfect ideas into the messy realm of real game-design.

Or... y'know... not.  As I read that over I'm thinking that most folks aren't doing any game-drift due to worries about platonic ideals.

[timfire]

May I make a request for this thread? Rather than speak about this issue abstractly, could you discuss actual games. I mean, when you say that you don't like unified "methods", what games are you specifically talking about? What 'vague' games do you find 'fun'? What is it about the text that makes the game 'vague', specifically?

[ffilz]

I think I'm in this boat also of disliking overly unified systems. So for some concrete examples:

One thing that really sticks in my mind was the early reactions to RuneQuest. The RQ weapon table was quite a jumble of things that didn't all work the same. John T (Tables) Sapienza came up with a unified self-consistent weapons table. I initially used it, but eventually dropped it. Why? Because it removed individuality from the weapons. I also never went for the RQ II rules which introduced different types of weapon specials. In RQ I, all weapons crit 5% of the time, but spears and arrows impaled 20% of the time. RQ II added slashing and crushing special damage 20% of the time also. Suddenly spears lost their reason why you would use a spear instead of a sword.

A lot of the attraction of D&D's spells is that they are so unique. Now Cold Iron does use a more unified spell system, which I do like, but I also acknowledge that it reduces some of the fun of the system. But it's also important that the magic system is very different than the combat system.

I haven't tried Hero Quest yet, and I do wonder, how much will I like the fact that it doesn't matter if you resolve a conflict with negotiation, combat, or magic, all that matters is what your best numbers are?

Frank

[ffilz]

Oh, another example. I think part of why I like character class systems is that they keep everything from being so unified. Classless systems try and treat all character types the same. So why do I like Rune Quest which is classless? Because it isn't. Each cult is very different, and your cult stands in for character class.

Hmm, Cold Iron unifies things in some ways by declaring that everyone has a fighter level that determines their combat ability. I resented how this made spell casters fight just as good as pure fighters, so I modified the system so that wasn't so true.

Hmm, I thought about another intentional vagueness issue with Cold Iron that may have led to it's being interesting to me. Cold Iron has never been published in toto, in fact, when I first started running Cold Iron, what was available as printed material was stuff developed by players who had collected as much as they could from the designers game (though I think he may have shared more with one other guy who was GMing the system). There was a complete spellbook printed out on fanfold paper, but out of respect of the designer, it was not copied. When I wanted to start GMing Cold Iron, I was told I could not photocopy the spell book, but hey, if I happened to hand copy some stuff, well, what could they say. To this day, I still have a hardbound notebook with the spells copied from that spell list. The designer didn't allow people to have that spell list on the table during his games (since it presumably had errors) and really preferred it not to be copied (where people could think that it was "official" since it was printed). These days, he has finally accepted a later edition of that spell book, and even distributes an edited now (he sent me a copy and I found plenty of cases where he had very clearly started with the "blackmarket" text).

Interestingly all of this added a certain mystique to the game. And there is probably another reason we all liked the early D&D. There was a great amount of mystique to actually understanding (or pretending to understand) the rules well enough to actually run a game.

Frank

[komradebob]

Brendan:
Could it be that the vagueness of early D&D lead to success by leaving open the way for other interpreters to leave their own mark on the game?

Another thread in this forum is discussing Toy Quality, the abilty of subsystems to engage players in and of themselves. Could vagueness in some way be related to that concept? Basically, I'm suggesting that incompleteness encouraged players ( both character players and dms) to tinker with the system. This then became a hobby in and of itself, and also lead to a vast variety of other rpgs, as tinkerers created so many variants that effectively they learned to create their own systems.

On a related note, how does one consider the creation of D&D in this regard? D&D is generally considered to be the work of a few key individuals, as noted in the authorship of vbarious editions and permutations of the game. Is this really correct however? Doesn't the body of work represented by the module makers and Dragon Magazine contributors also count as part of D&D's design?

How can such authorship be deliberately induced? Kesher suggested a loose affiliation of cheap products, or regular updates by magazine;

That seems to be consistent with the Dragon Magazine approach. It also seems to match up with the concept of rpgs as a hobby, as opposed to , um I don't know what word I'm looking for to mean "not-hobby". I'm not familiar with Wiki, so I can't really approach your comments that follow the above quote. As a general philosophy, I suppose you could simply agree to let contributors to your game to submit material, with very minimal editorial control ( spelling checks, perhaps some warning labels for material you deem, er Adult, if that's appropriate...) rather than take a heavy handed " It's my game!" approach.

One thought presents itself to me, and that is the idea of a game that starts off with a setting, as opposed to system. Think of it as the rpgame equivalent of the Thieves World or Wild Cards anthology series.
I don't know that this would be the perfect answer to your question, but it might be a starting point...

Robert

[Callan S.]

I was going to start a thread on what that other thread brought up, myself.

What I was thinking was simulating the bombardment of strange rules you would have gotten as a young player, and how you were forced to figure it out.

What I was thinking was to have a table of rule fragments, something like this but longer:
1. Find the characters correct attribute and roll under it on the attribute test die.
2. Apply damage to the both armour and target struck, the armour deflecting it's usual ammount.
3. Etc, etc.


You'd have perhaps three charts...one for the first part of a rule, one for the middle and one for the end. You just roll on each to generate a completely arbitrary, yet intriguing sounding rule!

Then you roll to see who is the 'buck stopper' in the group. This isn't the person who decides exactly what the generated rule means, but who collates all the arguements and declares how it 'really' works. This random system would be designed so everyone get's an even number of turns at 'buck stopping'.

As to when this happens? You just freeform along until someone (anyone!) challenges something you do with 'Nah, there's a rule for that!".

Sort of the mad brother of Universalis!

[komradebob]

Callan:
You are a sick, sick, man!

Having said that, I would recommend that idea as a card game rather than a chart based game. Perhaps we should contact daMoose-neo(Nate Peterson)?

Robert

[Kesher]

Perhaps intentional vagueness undermines the conviction (as conveyed by the text) that there should be a right way to run the system. That conviction, coupled with the obvious fact of the system being broken, can convince people that they are trying to "perfect" a system that actually exists (on some Platonic level of abstraction) but has not yet been expressed. In that mindset, the players have a positive duty to the rules, to free them of the imperfections that were introduced in their descent from the realm of perfect ideas into the messy realm of real game-design.

Now you're cooking on a great potential name for something: Shadows in the Cave :)

Actually, you make an excellent point, which is, I think, just the other side of the coin from the idea Ron raised in his "Hard Look at DnD" essay:
(equally as platonic...)

Everyone had to shape, socially and procedurally, just what the hell you did such that "role-playing" happened. How did you know it worked? What did you do it for? All of it, from Social Contract right down to Stance, had to be created in the faith that it worked "out there" somewhere, and somehow, some way, it was supposed to work here.

So, in his view, people thought it simply must work; others were playing it, right?  Maybe just a tweak of this rule, and then we'll just make this one a bit clearer, etc.  I think this also ties into the weird guilt factor that I and others brought up in the other post; you didn't really want to create a new game (at least at first); you just wanted to be able to adequately play this one!

Another thread in this forum is discussing Toy Quality, the abilty of subsystems to engage players in and of themselves. Could vagueness in some way be related to that concept? Basically, I'm suggesting that incompleteness encouraged players ( both character players and dms) to tinker with the system. This then became a hobby in and of itself, and also lead to a vast variety of other rpgs, as tinkerers created so many variants that effectively they learned to create their own systems.

I think you're spot on, and that this is the logical outgrowth.  I mean, really, this seems, from everything I've read about the origins of DnD, exactly how the whole thing happened in the first place; Gygax and Arneson just started tinkering with a fantasy element introduced into a wargame, which became a hobby for them and, voila!  Plus, in terms of DnD itself, the early texts very clearly told you to go forth and tinker; it was about the only thing in the rules that WASN'T vague.  It wasn't until the DMs Guide was published that the idea of a "core" set of unalterable rules began to be shaped with (again) vague propaganda about "game balance" and "tournament standards".

What I was thinking was to have a table of rule fragments, something like this but longer:
1. Find the characters correct attribute and roll under it on the attribute test die.
2. Apply damage to the both armour and target struck, the armour deflecting it's usual ammount.
3. Etc, etc.


You'd have perhaps three charts...one for the first part of a rule, one for the middle and one for the end. You just roll on each to generate a completely arbitrary, yet intriguing sounding rule!

I guess I'm just gonna be a Positive Pete all the way 'round, here.  This is a strong first step, I think, towards what Sean was talking about in the quote at the top of this tread.

I think the idea he mentioned of "lacunae" might be key; blank spots.  I was thinking about this last night and realized that it wasn't the rules themselves that were so evocative, it was what they suggested was possible through actual blank spots in the rules themselves.  E.g., the only mention of spell books in "Men and Magic: Vol. I":  "Characters who employ spells are assumed to acquire books containging the spells they can use, one book for each level."  That's it.  Your mind starts turning, where do these books come from?  What are they made of?  How big are they?  Can you buy them?  If so, from whom?  

I dunno.  I re-read that, and it starts to sound like questionable lit crit.  I suppose nowadays we'd probably just call rules like that "bad writing"...

However, I do think some sort of "intentional vagueness" (i.e., lacunae, baroque phrasings) mixed with actual randomness might achieve something interesting.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Kesher, you nailed it 'far as I'm concerned. Great post.

Best,
Ron

[Callan S.]

Callan:
You are a sick, sick, man!

Having said that, I would recommend that idea as a card game rather than a chart based game. Perhaps we should contact daMoose-neo(Nate Peterson)?

Robert

Thank you!

I agree that cards would be better during the discussion. But what other reasons did you have? I find it hard to put away the idea of not just having charts, but charts that create wonky rules! I'll need to more reason to ditch this sort of kinkyness. :)

I think the idea he mentioned of "lacunae" might be key; blank spots. I was thinking about this last night and realized that it wasn't the rules themselves that were so evocative, it was what they suggested was possible through actual blank spots in the rules themselves. E.g., the only mention of spell books in "Men and Magic: Vol. I": "Characters who employ spells are assumed to acquire books containging the spells they can use, one book for each level." That's it. Your mind starts turning, where do these books come from? What are they made of? How big are they? Can you buy them? If so, from whom?

I'm reminded of the article here by Erick Wujcik. The one where he goes into elaborate detail about the traps mechanics, because his HP suck.

I wonder that if you have some basic mechanics surrounding an activity, enough to support a game, but then put in stuff like traps and make them deadly, or spell books and make them compelling rewards, but niether are detailed at all well, then it provokes invention. Your compelled to invent something, to avoid a penalty or obtain a reward. Those basic mechanics ensure that mechanically something WILL happen...you wont just be inventing the effect (ie, the trap has to go off to hurt your HP. Your not just wishing the trap away, your describing how it wont go off). But that's the thing you have to invent, but with the creative focus that if you go too wacko, what you will invent wont be for the game you sat down to play.

I think this also ties into the weird guilt factor that I and others brought up in the other post; you didn't really want to create a new game (at least at first); you just wanted to be able to adequately play this one!

YES!

Rifts! (oops, did I say that outloud?)

YES! It'd be really good to take this guilt and turn it around, doing the same thing and feeling good about it.

[Brendan]

I actually meant to let this thread drift off the front page, because I've been too busy for the past couple of days to adequately read and respond to it, and it was aging.  Then something occurred to me that made me want to bump it, which is this:

I think the idea he mentioned of "lacunae" might be key; blank spots.  I was thinking about this last night and realized that it wasn't the rules themselves that were so evocative, it was what they suggested was possible through actual blank spots in the rules themselves.

Basically, I'm suggesting that incompleteness encouraged players ( both character players and dms) to tinker with the system. This then became a hobby in and of itself, and also lead to a vast variety of other rpgs, as tinkerers created so many variants that effectively they learned to create their own systems.

YES! It'd be really good to take this guilt and turn it around, doing the same thing and feeling good about it.

All excellent points, and what I was trying to get at in my initial post.  And all things that could be almost directly applied to the Provisional Glossary.

Think about it:  we have here a work of prototypical theory, recommendations and highly specialized terms that work in a shared imagination-space between a relatively small group of interested hobbyists.  It has one author and a great many contributors.  It is certainly (as several threads will attest) subject to vocabulary drift.  It's admittedly incomplete.    It produces a model of a world with huge possibilities, and the things it doesn't cover have resulted in a great many new and powerful game systems.

Only in this case, the Forge has done exactly what Callan suggested.

(More responses to the other cool ideas here later.)

[Sean]

Hi all -

It seems like it might be worth mentioning Jared Sorensen's game Lacuna... in this thread - it was one of the things I had in mind when I wrote the post that inspired Brendan. It's an intentionally incomplete game that even misleads you to some degree about what it is. It's really the only example I can think of offhand of a designer deliberately using a less-is-more design principle that takes advantage of the phenomenon I was pointing to in the other thread. I'd love to hear about others though.

Carry on with the great discussion!

Best,

Sean

[Brendan]

I'm not familiar with Wiki, so I can't really approach your comments that follow the above quote. As a general philosophy, I suppose you could simply agree to let contributors to your game to submit material, with very minimal editorial control ( spelling checks, perhaps some warning labels for material you deem, er Adult, if that's appropriate...) rather than take a heavy handed " It's my game!" approach.

This is exactly what I'm planning--in fact, you pretty much nailed the nature of wiki there, for somebody who claims not to understand it.  I just want to throw open the doors to competing systems and foci ("It's a game about combat!"  "But if you use this chunk instead, it's a game about photography!").

I had another big thing here, but I think it needs its own thread too.