Ongoing failure to understand

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Craziness! Let's see how many people I manage to ignore accidentally. Please let me know if you're one of them.

Seth - we're on the same page all the way.

Gareth - I'm using addressing Premise as an example because it's relevant to the game we're talking about at the moment. I could make exactly the same points about the murk regarding any other CA application. I am not saying that "clearing the murk makes addressing Premise appear!!" as a general concept, only as a specific application in this case for this game.

Also, as you can see, there are a couple steps I've skipped ... clearing the murk only reveals how we play (in this group, at this time, with these people), and the business of establishing or having a CA is only one thing to do with how we play. Conversely, I also want to say that a very murky group can indeed have a strong and coherent CA, they just have no idea how or why, and conceivably, may not want to know.

Callan - Giving is a highly specific rule in Dogs in the Vineyard; I'm referencing that rule, not inventing a term for a concept. Its specific relationship to Gamerdom Assembled isn't anything worth speculating about; it is historically rare in role-playing rules, although I can think of a few sideways or informal ways it gets done. The ability to turn and flee in D&D 3.0/3.5 combat without inviting an Attack of Opportunity makes no sense to me at all except in the context of such an option.

Museleading - I think I'll do best to work from one of your sentences, re-phrasing it in my way.

You wrote,

So, a failure to understand giving is a failure to realise there is a mechanic within the Dog's system to ignore the system?

My re-phrase: a failure to understand Giving is a failure to realize there is a mechanic within the Dog's system to exit a conflict by conceding failure. It's all still "system," there isn't any ignoring-system going on. In Forge jargon, "system" is far more than dice mechanics.

The reason I'm emphasizing this point is that I think your last few paragraphs aren't on the mark at all except for a very specific situation. I suppose that if a group is using a given rules-set that they do not actually want to use (it doesn't work for how they play), then the murk can allow them to conceal how frequently they ignore it. And then later, if they say, "ah screw it, what's the point of pretending, I always fudge perception checks anyway," and stop making perception checks, then that's less murky.

But again, that's a highly specific situation, of using a game whose rules aren't suited to us. We could, for instance, be playing a game I'm prepping with one of my groups right now, called Apocrypha. It has a lot of great rules which I have no intention of ignoring during play. But like most RPG texts, the written rules leave much of play up in the air, totally unconstructed. I can tell you how Apocrypha characters can hit one another with psionic swords, or how they can have visions of the future. I can't tell you anything, based on the book, about how we would ever bring those rules into play.

In order to play at all, unless I and the rest of the group take a moment to reflect, we'd have to descend into the murk now. We'd have to say, "Gee, my guy does this," and someone else says, "My guy does that," and I as GM have to say, "And the new day dawns," or "The Mole had been working hard all morning," and so on. We won't have any idea of how to establish scenes or how to put characters into the same or different scenes except for our experience with other role-playing instances ... and for all we know, our collective experience will suck hard for purposes of really enjoying the unique aspects of Apocrypha.

So we'll do some reflection and thought about stuff like this, and in fact we did so last Saturday, in order to play in a less murky fashion. I bring up this example because it shows that we are not talking about ignoring any rules. We'll be using the rules in Apocrypha without ignoring the dice or anything of that sort. The question (the murky part) is how do we play such that we get to the situations covered by those rules.

Best, Ron

[Callan S.]

Callan - Giving is a highly specific rule in Dogs in the Vineyard; I'm referencing that rule, not inventing a term for a concept. Its specific relationship to Gamerdom Assembled isn't anything worth speculating about; it is historically rare in role-playing rules, although I can think of a few sideways or informal ways it gets done. The ability to turn and flee in D&D 3.0/3.5 combat without inviting an Attack of Opportunity makes no sense to me at all except in the context of such an option.

Cool, I think I get you pretty well.

Just PM'ing as I'm not sure it'd add anything to the thread to post it there, but wanted to show some agreement.

[Callan S.]

That clearly wasn't a PM. Crap.