Early roleplaying and the interpretation of scripture

[contracycle]

I like the term "rhetoric of promise" and have a proposition for how it comes about from the requirements of the text.

In early RPG design, the idea was self-consciously new, and had to be explained to the reader.  So the author must necessarily adopt the stance of an expert explaining to a novice, and this places demands on the phraseology employed.  In most cases of RPG rules the language is didactic, and often structured to go from simple concepts to complex ones.

IMO this remains a feature of most modern text, in large part becuase of the subtle nature of RPG.  It's hard to read the rules until you "get" the form of play, a fact echoed by the dictum to conceptualising the mode of actual play before setting out on mechanical design.  Board games by contrast are able to assume that the mode of play is largely known, and often assume you already have the components out in front of you or have inspected them already.  By contrast RPG tends to need to explain the Why of every strructure.  And so modern texts still often begin with a "what is RPG" section because it is necessary to be sure that the reader understands enough to comprehend the remainder of the text.

Combine that with the cargo cult, and the prestige of the published author, and I think its easy to see that in the absence of God, Gygax had to do.

[Callan S.]

On a side note about board games: I recently played a game called cranium. The guy who ran it (decided to run it, rather than players possing questions to each other as per the rules), had us roll the dice before our turn and if we got the question right we rolled again, and kept doing so till we got it wrong.

On reading the rules I tried to note to him 'I don't think you keep getting turns', to which I got a quick 'Well, whats the point of correctly answering then?' without any pause for further negotation.

I'd decided to play because I wanted some more board game experience to broaden myself. I was not dissapointed...the social structure and rules interpretation was highly reminicent of early roleplaying sessions. (on a side note, your supposed to roll after your turn in that game and you do so when you get a question right...ie, that's your reward).

So in regards to contra's board game note...actually, I think some people just like to make it up. It's perhaps not all that hard to 'get' the form of play the book suggests...instead it's easier for people who like doing this to just do their own thing with it. To bend it their way. They'll do it with a board game and hell, RPG's are far more ripe for this sort of thing.

[Alan McVey]

This is just a short update to let people who are interested know that I'm still dealing with the issues raised in this thread.  I've been browsing through older gaming material and, in order to narrow down the topic, focusing on what Gygax has had to say in the past about rules and their interpretation.

My, he has a lot to say.  There's next to nothing in the original D&D books themselves, so I'm working my way through his columns in old Dragon magazines, as well as looking at his advice on rules from later works -- Dangerous Journeys, his two books of advice on roleplaying (Role-playing Mastery and Master of the Game), Lejendary Adventure, and a few articles from Lejends magazine.  While it's clear that his attitudes change over time, there does seem to be a certain consistency to them.

This passage from Role-playing Mastery seems to sum up his views on how to approach rules quite well, and is also, I believe, appropriate for a conversation about rules as scripture:

If the reader is forced to begin with inadequate material, he must spend time and effort understanding the bases for the structure and devising logical corollaries.  Where voluminous rules exist, then the reader must absorb them. Both cases require patience and understanding, and the understanding extends not only to the written rules but to what lies between the lines as well. This is the spirit of the game. Spirit is evident in every RPG. To identify the spirit of the game, you must know what the game rules say, be able to absorb this information, and then interpret what the rules imply or state about the spirit that underlies them....  The spirit of an RPG pervades all the statistics, mechanics, and descriptions that make up the actual rules; it is everywhere and nowhere in particular at the same time. (p. 26)

Now, this comes from 1987, so it's likely already the product of some years of reflection, but it's a good example of the idea of the in/completeness of rules: he's essentially saying that no games can ever be complete, but that there is a spirit to them that unifies them, and that the understanding of that spirit is part of what separates "master" players and GMs from one who "may be able to achieve expertise in the play of the game, but ... is doing no more than going through the motions -- unless he also perceives, understands, and appreciates the spirit that underlies all those rules."

St. Paul would be proud.

[T'oma]

I find this thread both highly satisfying and personally amusing, in that it was Gaming that led me to study Rabbinical Hermeneutics (by providing conceptual metaphors that allowed me to by-pass the highly intellectual Marxian agnosticism I was raised with), and Rabbinical Hermeneutics and comparative religion that led me to back Game Design (by developing mental habituation to the practice of analytic rational, non-rational and trans-rational approaches related to comparing, deconstructing, and synthesising superficially contradictory zeitgeist and weltanshaung reductio et coaguli).

phew.  lemme take a breath after that stream of BS.

OK, let me pile it a bit deeper:  (wade through it, it gets good fast)

Briefly and much over-simplified : Rabbinical Hermeneutics is broadly divided into four streams of textual analytic strategy summarized in the mnemonic acronym 'PaRDeS'.  This stands for "P'shat" , "Remez", "Drosh", and "S'od".  

"P'SHaT" refers to the plain & simple, straight-forward and unexpansive interpretation of  a given text (what an uneducated person would be assumed to understand at a preliminary reading/recitation).  Thus: _It is roughly equivalent to Gamism in the GNS model_. "What Must We Do?"  

'ReMeZ'  is related to intertextual cross analysis, or "rules lawyering" (in a non-perjorative sense of course). "Why Must We Do It?"

"DRoSH" refers to an expansive cross-correlation of a text with a _real-world_ example, usually in homiletic form "How Should We Do It?"

(The collected P'ShaT and ReMez interpretations make up the Mishnah, and the collected DRoSH interpretations make up the Midrash.  Mishnah + Midrash= the Talmud.)


and "S'oD"...ah, yes.   S'od.

S'od is the Way of Understanding: " ...but...WHY?"

Thus: PaRDeS is the equivalent of Practical MetaGame Design, Analysis and Ecstatic Play.

I should also mention all four of these methodologies have systematic sub-methodologies, and that _none_ of them are given pre-eminence (...except perhaps S'oD... among the ChaSiDiM  ;P)
but rather are viewed as simultaneously valid _even if they appear to be contradictory_

I am urging some caution here. The stakes for religion are most of the time existential, while the stakes in gaming are at best economical (if you want to continue to sell books).

I totally disagree:  Gaming can be (and in my mind -should- be) viewed as a secular post-modern 'religion' (the Hero's Journey and all that) or at least do-it-yourself philosophy (anyone who has used an alignment as a real-world descriptor proves my point)  Thus:  for at least one full generation, Gaming -> has <- had high 'existential stakes'

(...well...ok...maybe only in my opinion...;P) .

I should make my own biases clear here: I'm an academic, and my field is religious studies.  That means that I tend, like Chris, to look at texts through a particular set of lenses, and to use comparisons from the material and methods with which I am most familiar.

Dude, we have _got_ to talk!  :p

(T)oday, there is no such thing as trying to construct the perfect system. Thus, todays designers are not deceiving themselves as to whether something is an addition/supplement or not.

I've been trying to construct "the perfect system" for 20 years.  All that has changed is my definition of "perfect", from anal retentive border-line Messianic aspirations to 'Good Enough to Satisfy Myself and my group'

Once the text is out there, it's up to the readers to decide how they're going to interpret it; there may be an implied reader discernable from the text, but there will also be readers who resist the imposition of certain interpretations.

which is why the competing RP theory models are so amusing to me:  taken in toto they are nearly identical to the PaRDeS methodology-

what I'm interested in is why and how certain strategies of reading rules developed, and what effect they might have had on the ways of playing games and of creating them between the mid-'70s and now.

My gut reaction 'ocham's razor' me to think the strategies are directly related to the people playing the games.  Pull out a Kiersey temperament sorter and you'll have a meta-guide to the various strategies.
<shrug>
of course, I may have misunderstood what you were saying here..

I tend to agree with you that game-designers today tend not to present their work as complete (or even absolutely authoritative), but I wonder if that itself isn't a reaction against an earlier tendency to present games in just that way..

That feels like a brilliant piece of inductive reasoning to me-

Lev -- I've been wondering about whether you could make divisions in a way similar to what you've done with respect to other responses to gaps in the rules.  "It's realistic," "it's part of the genre," and "it's for game balance" seem to match up fairly well with your priests, wizards, and mystics.

I feel compelled to mention that the S'od methodology of Q'BoLaH has developed a "four worlds" poetic view that can be over-simplified and semi-correctly personalized to "Body, Emotions, Intellect, and Spirit" which, through the oft mis-understood and mis-used mnemonic flash card system of Tarot and its development into modern playing cards are  conceptialized as Earth (pentagles/diamonds), Water(cups/hearts), Fire (swords/spades) and Air (wands/clubs) {IIRC ..Golden Dawn type memorization is not my long suit [pun intended!]}

->which is _exactly the literary origin of the Classic D&D character classes of Fighter, Rogue(thief), Wizard and Cleric_!!!!

T'oma , Memetic Engineer

YuMe MiRu MoNo TaCHi MiNa SuKuWaReRu

[T'oma]

... focusing on what Gygax has had to say in the past about rules and their interpretation.  My, he has a lot to say.... While it's clear that his attitudes change over time, there does seem to be a certain consistency to them...This passage from Role-playing Mastery seems to sum up his views...

Might I suggest that if Gycax was Moses (and thus Arneson was Aaron) that would make Steve Jackson a candidate for Jeremiah.  I have been reviewing his articles in the 'Space Gamer' after the release of 'The Fantasy Trip' ,  and his accounts of the dialogue of cross-pollinizating Idea exchange with other 2nd gen designers such as Paul Chadwick & Greg Stafford led to a foment of ferment of RPG exegesis.  The reason SJ gets the nod is that he _wrote it all down_.

If the reader is forced to begin with inadequate material, he must spend time and effort understanding the bases for the structure and devising logical corollaries.  Where voluminous rules exist, then the reader must absorb them. Both cases require patience and understanding, and the understanding extends not only to the written rules but to what lies between the lines as well. This is the spirit of the game. Spirit is evident in every RPG. To identify the spirit of the game, you must know what the game rules say, be able to absorb this information, and then interpret what the rules imply or state about the spirit that underlies them....  The spirit of an RPG pervades all the statistics, mechanics, and descriptions that make up the actual rules; it is everywhere and nowhere in particular at the same time. (p. 26)

[quote="Alan McVey"St. Paul would be proud.

Not to mention the Maimonides, Machmonides, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe!!

In fact: if you substitute [ religious text {X} ] in the statement for the term [ RPG ] you have as good an explanation as has ever been promulgated by Any Romantic Organicist or Mystic from Lao Tzu to Ram Das!!

We're having too much fun with this :P