Is Inconsistency Playable?

[Shreyas Sampat]

This is closely related to my game The Calligrapher's Sword, but independent of it, so I thought to start a Theory thread.

I was thinking about games set in realms that are explicitly inconsistent, or have the potential to be, like Storypunk, Kathanaksaya, or my own.  These games all have the characteristic that their worlds are defined to be changeable, and can change through play; in TCS, even history is not a constant.

Does it even make sense to play a game like this?  If you can declare in-game, "Hey, I'm just dreaming; this world is a product of my imagination, and I can change it as I see fit", then why are you playing at all?  What makes conflict in the floating world meaningful?

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Your post had two relavant questions IMO and I shall answer them in turn:

Does it even make sense to play a game like this?

I am going to say yes in the sense that I believe that any concept for a game is playable or worthwhile if it is designed properly.

What makes conflict in the floating world meaningful?

This is, of course, the designer's problem. It's very easy at the idea stage to cook up an idea for a RPG about anything. It's when you sit down and start writing that you find out how practical the idea is or not.

I still side with the optimistic any idea can be made into a viable RPG, it's just a matter of figuring out an angle for it.

[bluegargantua]

Does it even make sense to play a game like this?  If you can declare in-game, "Hey, I'm just dreaming; this world is a product of my imagination, and I can change it as I see fit", then why are you playing at all?  What makes conflict in the floating world meaningful?

Because other people have imaginations too.

Feng Shui and Amber both have worlds which are pretty malleable to the whims of the movers and shakers who inhabit it and yet there's plenty of challenge.  Mostly because there's some "core component" of Reality which is finite and can be controlled by someone.  So there's a lot of action trying to gain control of those components.  Even if the universe is so completely open-ended that everyone could have their own infinate slice of it, someone would be power-hungry enough to want to enslave other parts of it.  After all, in your private universe, there's no one who is a genuine challenge to your authority.  Only in competition with others can you find challenge and display your superiority.

later
Tom

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Shreyas,

To address your question properly, I have to distinguish among:

1) Consistency of conflict - what's wrong or otherwise posing an undeniable hassle for the characters; this is what I call Situation in my essay.

2) Consistency of "worldly" operations like physics, time, the mind, and so forth from the point of view of the characters (and thus what they have to "work with" for their decisions).

3) Consistency of attention - what's just plain interesting to the people playing the game.

These aren't the same things at all. A setting's features may change radically, as in books like Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, but the story may maintain the conflict and the interest we have in the whole thing. Or similarly, a conflict may change (e.g. when a character realizes that the big villain is his father), but nothing else.

Relationships among #1-3 are crucial, but none of the many possible relationships among them requires that they all be stable throughout the story.

I'd like a better idea of just what is changing and what is stable before I can understand how to discuss your questions further.

Best,
Ron

[Shreyas Sampat]

Hello, Ron.

I think that in all of these games, there is a formal way of dealing with 1, but the other two elements are uncontrolled.  Unfortunately, this flies up against the facts of the setting:
What I'm wondering about is the interaction of 2 and 1 - in a world that is little more than a figment of a character's imagination, how does consistency of conflict make sense?  It's implicit in the properties of the imagined world that the character always has the power to imagine his conflicts away.  This makes the formalism of 1 seem artificial and forced, or meaningless.

Edit: Edited for structure and error.

[Jonathan Walton]

Hey Shreyas,

Y'know, I'm reminded of the way Morpheus acts at the end of Gaiman's "The Kindly Ones."  Repeatedly, people point out that he's one of the Endless, he has near God-like power and would be completely capable of wiping the floor with the Furies.  He's Dream; they're just second-rate godlings that nobody really takes seriously anymore.  However, in the end, Dream allows them to best him, because "there are rules" concerning how these things work.  In effect, he's in a kind of social contract, even though he's one of the Endless, and has to act according to the established guidelines.  So there's one possible answer.

Additionally, in a game where the "setting" is fluid and changable, it stops becoming the setting of the conflict and becomes a medium for conflict.  The setting might as well be a group of all-powerful beings floating in empty space.  If the matter, ideas, and characters present can all be freely manipulated by the PCs, it's not really setting, anymore than a fireball spell is setting.  The fact that fireball spells exist can be part of the setting, just like the existence of all this reality-manipulation is part of the setting of Storypunk/Calligraphers/Etc.  However, setting requires a certain degree of consistancy that these games lack.  It might be helpful to try to wrap your mind around a new concept of setting for games where the cosmology keeps shifting.  It's certainly helped me.

[clehrich]

Hi.

I've read through this thread a bit, and I have a few questions to ask of you all.  If this seems like too much of a hard shift to one side, somebody please split it off --- but I think it's on-topic.

I apologize for this post being somewhat long.

1. Background

I have tried, twice, to run an occult game.  I set it in 1888 London (Jack the Ripper was a central concern), but I don't think these issues are limited to this period.

The basic conceit, from the GM's perspective, was that the universe was extremely malleable.  The ability to alter the universe to a degree or in a manner inconsistent with what would in-character be considered "normal" was generally called "magic," although there were no absolute rules about what magic was or how it worked.

The game was played both with and without dice, depending, and using Tarot cards as a magical mechanic.  The idea was that a player would play a card from a hand, interpret the card (according to a pretty stock Tarot reading), and thus influence the universe in ways not entirely consistent with "normality."

The idea was that the characters perceived the universe as having very rigid norms, which I think fits pretty well with the Victorian era, where not only physical but also social norms and constraints were taken as pretty much normative, even "natural."  They increasingly learned that these laws were not at all fixed, and could be bent through "magic," which was thus almost by definition perceived as "unnatural," hence ethically problematic.

From a meta-game perspective, the idea was that as the players gained familiarity with both the "normal" and the "unnatural" universes, they would learn to bend the campaign to their own wills, through character action and magic, which would in turn force them towards what you might call the "dark side."

2. My Questions (at last!)

A. My experience was that a lot of players do not like standing on shifting sand; they want to know that certain facts and rules are absolute.  Admittedly these rules are indeed absolute so long as nobody challenges them, but I would of course have magically-oriented bad guys shift such rules.  Has anyone got any suggestions for getting players to be a bit more comfortable with a limited "write-your-own" universe?

B. I also found that many players respond to this sort of thing by shifting into a passive, "you lay out the railroad tracks for us to roll on" mode.  It was as though they felt that, being empowered to do potentially anything, they felt unable to do anything.  That may seem contradictory, but it happened consistently.  I think the players could not really believe that I had made the universe as open-ended as I claimed, and so when they didn't see a clear set of options they would just throw up their hands and say, "Well, I don't get it."  Has anyone else had this experience?  Does anyone have suggestions?

C. One comment made by several players was that they didn't feel comfortable enough in terms of knowledge to act.  That is, they felt that a real Victorian person would have a whole range of known options to deploy, but as players they didn't know these.  I would translate this into meta-terms by suggesting that they didn't know enough about "normality" to be able to improvise ways to break it.  Without forcing my players to read stacks of Victorian history, has anyone got suggestions for giving them this comfort level?

D. An essential point here, perhaps, is that I did my Ph.D. work in the history of magic and the occult, and thus there was naturally a certain sense that I "knew the answers" and would disallow or ignore actions which didn't fit with "real historical magic."  This wasn't my intent, certainly, but I do think that this dynamic was almost necessarily present.  It was probably exacerbated by my typically academic approach of doing a hell of a lot of research about the period.  Now some of you must have run historical-type games, and done a lot of research, or alternatively designed fantastically complex universes about which the players knew relatively little (i.e. they didn't read the 800-page handout).  Does anyone have suggestions for getting around this problem, specifically in a universe where player and/or character "rewriting" is essential?

I think that's enough to be getting on with.  Thanks.

[Shreyas Sampat]

In response to the questions you ask:

A: I think that setting the lines that the players can colour inside (to shamelessly metaphor) is essential here.  There is a sense in which even WW's Mage is a universe where the players can set the rules, but the way that they go about it has two effects: they don't know they're doing it, and they're restricted mechanically in very specific(ish) ways.

To take (my reading of) your game as an example, it seems that there was a set of conditions N that was considered "normal".  If you tried to do something outside N, you'd have to resort to magic.  That's pretty dizzying; a negative condition like "not part of N" contains a whole lot.  Supposing that magic was more difficult as you got farther and farther from N, you'd have something more approachable (from a player's standpoint).

B: I don't really know what you're asking here.  Could you elaborate?

C: I think that the best way to get players to recognize their options is to tell them their options.  I know that's incredibly unhelpful-looking.  Maybe it's be better if I explain some more and you look again.  I had an issue like this with Torchbearer - I didn't want to write hundreds of pages of a totally useless "setting atlas".  No one cares about those, really.  But how to set the setting, without all that tiresome exposition?  Examples.  Show the players what they can do.  Sure, they won't get any pure knowledge from that, they'lll have to think and infer, but it'll get them thinking in the right directions (if the theory works right).

D: I think this might have had something to do with goal conflict.  If the universe is really as open-ended as you said, then what does "real history" have to do with it?  The attempt to empower the players crashes up against your attempt to create historical verisimilitude.

A note: It seems I mistitled this thread, as all this discussion "feels" on-topic for me, but it doesn't have much to do with the title of my initial post.  Maybe a better thread title would have been "Empowering Players to Control Setting" or something.

[clehrich]

Okay, let me see if I understand you.  If I get you totally wrong, please don't interpret it as a flame --- I'm genuinely trying.  Just stupid.  :)

The idea behind historical verisimilitude, in terms of the research and whatnot, was that "normality" would have an historical basis.  So a character in a Victorian world would, for example, try to get in contact with someone by mail or by telegram (assuming relatively high class status and money), and be relatively confident of a result.  More simply, a Victorian would figure that to get from point A to point B within London, you walk (if it's close and the weather isn't too horrible) or catch a cab.  The idea is that the sorts of day-to-day methods you use to accomplish goals are the sorts of things you can imagine Sherlock Holmes doing, setting aside some of his quirkier behaviors.  To give an additional example, a Victorian would not check a murder site for fingerprints, since these were not known (much), although an expert might start checking for information to fit into a Bertillon database.

But now suppose you want to get in touch with someone in Tibet.  And you want to talk to him NOW.  You're going to have to use magic, right?  Because there aren't any phones, after all, or email, or faxes.

Now that's a pretty limited set of examples, but I think you get the idea.

Okay, so what you're saying (I think) is that the players were not clear on (a) the lines between what's "normal" and what's not, and (b) given what's normal, just how abnormal a given magical behavior or effect would be.  So if the character just wanted to dowse over a map to figure out where someone else was, I would figure that was pretty close to normal, but they would have no way of judging normalcy, and thus might well not even think of dowsing as a possibility.

I think the problem here is that since the players didn't have much sense of normalcy, and the magic in question was so open-ended, they couldn't think of ways to bridge the gap.

Now you mention the possibility of giving lots of examples, so that the players will infer what's possible.  How do you mean this?  I tried having NPCs demonstrate powers and whatnot, but the problem was always that if the PCs refused to ask questions, or make immediate inferences, they tended to treat NPC magic as super-tech.  To put it differently, it always seemed to the players that all the NPCs were infinitely powerful and knowledgeable, when in fact a lot of them were idiots with maybe one mediocre gimmick.

I think the problem (one of them) is that I had a lot of trouble giving examples.  Can you, er, give examples?  :-p

Thanks a lot, btw.  I think I have some useful ideas for this thread on inconsistency (and I think I know what you mean by that, incidentally), but I want to be sure I have some basis for discussion.  My sense is that the world I was trying to create was deliberately inconsistent, in that the universe-rules (physics, etc.) were simply not fixed, and that when things worked well (and they did sometimes, actually) the PCs grappled with disjunctures in the world they lived in.

One nifty example, while I'm writing, was when a PC received a letter from Jack the Ripper, along the lines of, "Dear Boss, I read that leter about Leathr Aprin it was very funy dint you think.  Im so glad now you ar on the cais the police had no clevir in them.  I wil eat the hart of your girl but wil sav a bit of kidne for you lik tother I ate.  Yours truly, Jack the Ripper."  When they eventually caught up, they were forced to watch through an iron grate as saucy Jack ripped a friend of theirs.  This despite the fact that there was no physical way he could be there --- he wasn't really human, actually.  Then the PCs wandered away and agonized for a while, and tried to rationalize why they'd failed, and mostly ignored the wackier couple of PCs who kept saying that maybe Jack was some sort of inhuman monster to whom physics didn't apply.  Of course, the players knew perfectly well by this point, but they had great fun with their PCs flatly denying the possibility.

Anyway....

[Michael S. Miller]

I'd like to get back to Shreyas' initial question.

What I'm wondering about is the interaction of 2 and 1 - in a world that is little more than a figment of a character's imagination, how does consistency of conflict make sense?  It's implicit in the properties of the imagined world that the character always has the power to imagine his conflicts away.  This makes the formalism of 1 seem artificial and forced, or meaningless.

It seems to me that you're assuming an absolute, unfettered Willpower on the part of the character (haven't looked at Calligrapher's Sword, so forgive me if I trample on anything there). Most people I know, and most characters I care about in fiction, don't have that. They bring their baggage, their most pressing, unresolved issues, their pain with them everywhere they go. And, in the dreamworld you seem to be postulating, the setting is infinitely malleable, leaving the only isle of consistency being ... the character who's doing the perceiving and imagining.

So, consistency of conflict (Ron's #1) can come from the fact that the character continually re-creates his own conflicts within whatever reality he dreams up. It may have different clothes, it may now be a clown with a chainsaw rather than a demonic shark or a silent grey alien, but it's still there. Because the character put it there.

I know there are references for this kind of story, but the only one I can think of at the moment is obscure and none-too-well-done. An old Spiderman graphic novel called "Hooky" has a character who is hunted by a creature that is destined to destroy her. Spidey continually defeats the thing, but it keeps getting bigger and badder until the girl believes that she can face it. Then it loses all its oomph.

I think if your have players author their characters' psychological hobgoblins, then this kind of thing should certainly maintain continuity of interest (Ron's #3) of the flesh & blood players.

Wow. Come to think of it, this is a kinda cool idea. Please let me know if it helps. Or, as always, if I've overlooked something.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Michael,

I think that in this discussion I have been making that assumption.  It made my point less difficult, I guess.  It's the case in Calligrapher's Sword that the ability to make conflicts that the game has identified meaningless is a finite resource, but it doesn't deal with the reason this is true.  I sort of designed the mechanic out of weird inspiration; I don't really know what drove me to do it, but it seems to model what you're suggesting.

What I get from your statements is that all these conflicts are consistent because they are internalized, and the malleable world is just a canvas to paint them on, which is what Jonathan was saying.  On that, the setting of the plastic world isn't the world itself, but the rules that govern the world.

Back to your comments, sorry for the digression.  I think that I'm getting what's going on here: the only consistency in a game of malleable world is character, so to make things meaningful, they have to be tied to character.  Since players tend to be interested in their characters, this will also maintain consistency of interest.