Useless Detail?

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Andrew,

Yes.  I even almost came back and edited my post to comment on this.

But I find I'm boggling boggling myself these days.  This is a whole 'nother thread, but I'm getting really confused about this.

Back in the day, in High School using the three AD&D hardbacks and nothing else, we played a campaign that, apparently wasn't anything like most group's straightfoward style: I did think about why the monster were in the dungeon, the campaign was about a small village being threatened by the resurgance of an evil cult, as much time was spent in romance and intrigue in forest and towns as was spent crawling in dungeons, the story arc was these farm kids growining into heroes, the alignments (mostly good) encouraged tension in "what is the right thing to do?", PC dreams were interwoven with character bits created by the PC's players so they all felt the PCs were part of the fabric of a fantasy world -- in short, what I liked best, and what my players liked best, had almost nothing to do with what was in the rules, and certainly, apparently, not the way most people were playing the game.

Now, the rules were there, and we certainly weren't "rewarded" by the rules for this behavior.

Why did we play this way?

It seems to me I keep depending on some sort of aesthetic sensibility to carry the day (which, we all know doesn't make any sense, since System Does Matter).  On the other hand, building the rules set that would Encourage GMs to Respond to Players Bits and all other items I think make a great session ad nauseum would be as clunky and patched at AD&D -- except with a Narrativist slant.

At some point isn't it on the heads of the players to have -- christ, I don't know what to call it -- Good Taste?  Generosity?  Creative Spirit?

I suppose this is where my concern about building a "game" slips away and I just want to hang out with fellow storytellers and go to town.

But I still think the question needs to be asked: Style and Technique counts for something, right?  Do we need gerible feed as a reward for every choice.  Or can we use words and action as players at the table to create more fun, more aesthetic pleasure, more generosity simply -- because we can?

Your in confusion,
Christopher

[greyorm]

Do we need gerible feed as a reward for every choice[?]

I know your post was directed towards Andrew, but I feel I've got the answer right here among the forums. Check out my latest thread in Actual Play: More Player-driven 3E and the links to the other threads in the series before that.

The simple answer to your question is: obviously not!
The more complex answer is to ask what you mean by gerbil feed?

If you are talking solely about the mechanical reward-aspects of a system, then my answer stands; if, however, you consider your own on-going, fully-engaged enjoyment to be gerbil feed, then the answer changes.

Functional play relies on gerbil feed...you've got to be getting something out of it regularly or continuously, you need to be recieving some sort of (non-mechanical) reward, or it becomes dysfunctional play.

In the campaign I reference above, we're playing that way because it's fun, and it's probably the most fun we've had as a gaming group in years. So that's our reward, and yes, that's important.

We're using the existing system as our base for adventures and scenarios, the system is integral to it: I'm focusing on the character aspects presented as obviously the important things to focus on.

So, since the characters have Skill X at Y, I'll use that information to run appropriate scenarios for them. Frex, a number of characters have ranks in Intimidation and/or Diplomacy...that gets used. If they didn't have such skills, I would avoid situations calling for those skills (since it isn't my job to point out what they should have taken or done, but work with what they did take or do instead).

Now here's my question to you: is that use of the system to facillitate better play gerbil feed?

[Walt Freitag]

Damn, Christopher, that's a monumental post.

Should we take the question to another thread?

- Walt

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Reverand and Walt,

I'll need to get to the 3E thread and read it through before I can answer.  But thanks for providing the prep work on this discussion.  (As it stands, I've got to get some writing done and errands now.  I'll check in later tonight.)

What's spinning around my head right now is this idea of fun -- and even pleasure.

Chleric has split the thread already.  (He seems to have knack for doing this.)  There he chose to follow up on the term "good taste" -- which often suggests a kind of intellectualized knowledge of what is good and bad.

But we might consider it in a blunt, reversed understanding: responding postively to that which tastes good.  So, yes, greyorm, that which gives us pleasure is our own reward.  But where do we go from here?

Apparently to the new thread on Good Taste.

Back later,
Christopher

[Shreyas Sampat]

Ok, I'll have to jump in on Good Taste in a bit, but on Currency costs:

This is part of my issue, certainly an important part, but I don't believe that Currency is the only thing that creates deprotagonized detail.

There is a cost in energy and attention associated with creating any detail.  This is monumentally more important than Currency; Currency should be a representation of the flow of attention anyway.  So the question is about focus of energy and attention: Who has to write around whom, and do they do so in a rewarding way?  How can we help them do so?

I see now that the two options are mutually exclusive, but this thread has helped me see the problem more clearly, and cleared the path for a solution.  Thanks, guys.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Greyorm,

First, congrats on getting your mojo back in your gaming.

And second: well, there it is.  Your games are not more fun beause of specific reward mechanics in the game that are rewarding certain behavior.  As Ron correctly, I think, pointed out on your threads, you've dumped certain rules that move things out of certain Gamist and Simulationist agendas.  

But certainly no Narrativist bennies are on the table in terms of concrete mechanics.  Not that they're needed for it to be Narrativist play.  As Ron pointed out on your Actual Play thread, protaganized, Story Now play is a big chunk of Narrativism, and that's what you're doing.  None the less, something "good" is happening, everyone playing is responding to it.  What is it?

I think it's this:

The rules of improvisation.

From everything you're doing you are using (whether you know it or not), several primary "rules" form improv.

* You are saying "Yes, and..." or "Yes, but..." to suggestions from your scene partners.

* You are not contradicting, denying or ignoring scene or character "truths" introduced during "play"

* You are not presuming to know what the scene/(story) is going to be about, be willing to discover as details are added on the fly.

These are rules.  By applying them, you get gerbile bennies.  What are the gerible bennies?  Good scene work and story.  

There's no metagame score keeping or whatnot.  But there is an aesthetic reward.  It is the pleasure of watching coherent patterns grow on the fly.

So, I'd offer:

1) there is a kind of system/game being played

2) this system/game you've added to your AD&D game is time tested and provides rewards

3) the rewards transcend metagame concerns and are aesthetic

4) these rules are very soft and the reward (aesthetic pleasure) nearly impossible to quantify, and so often dismissed/ignored/denegrated by those who want things quantified

5) you've stumbled into them by accident (ie: hanging around at the Forge and hearing a lot of Narrativist talk)

6) the rules for this system/game have absolutely nothing to do with what most people think of as system or game when they talk about RPGs -- but nonetheless folks often grasp after these aesthetic pleasures after encountering them by accident -- but almost always by reworking mechanical rules and quantifiable details (character personality trait lists with dependents and allergies that might never get into play) that they think will bring them back to what they got by accident, but, in fact, have nothing at all to do with the pleasure they seek -- for it, in fact, cannot be measured

That's what I've got so far.

Christopher

[Christopher Kubasik]

Oh, one more thing.

Ron's work on Sorcerer turns a lot of the Imrovisation rules into game rules.  Kickers for example, start the story off and make everyone aware: "This is what the story is about; every scene builds off of this scene."

Compare this to other styles of play (whether to gain competative advantage or experience the world), where there's no need to stay focused on *adding* to what has come before.  With a Kicker, you start with a situation, add to that situation scene by scene, and finally resolve it.

That's good improv.  But, again, the reward mechanic is simply "pleasure"; a pleasure created by that weird human desire for good storytelling, which is a matter of taste.

Christopher

[M. J. Young]

I don't know how much help this will be; but I think it's related to the question.

When we were developing Multiverser, we became more and more focused on getting characters as detailed as possible. After all, we were talking about a player representing himself, the person he had become, as a character, and real people are extremely complex with many and varied talents and abilities. We recognized that as they entered the worlds they would rely on things they knew, and couldn't really predict which things they knew would be relevant, even given knowledge of the worlds they entered.

As an example, we dropped three players into The Postman (the Costner film story). One of them, an engineer, couldn't avoid the draft, but once inside began using his skills to create an underground newspaper to undermine the authority of the command structure, until groundswell of opinion within the ranks tore the army apart. The second fell back on his skills as a hunter to stalk General Bethlehem and ultimately kill him, taking over the army from outside. The third used his diplomatic skills to organize townspeople in an effort to build a society strong enough to oppose the armed brigands who pretended to be government. Part of creating a world is presenting problems. Part of playing a character is figuring out how to use the abilities you do have to solve those problems.

However, character creation got rather complex and involving. Eventually we realized that we were overdoing it. We were working with conflicting objectives: streamline character creation and create detailed characters. Ultimately we went back to our roots, and devised an on-the-fly character creation system. In this, we ignored most of the spaces on the character sheet. That is, you've got so many attributes and any number of skills, but I really don't need to know that your character is of average strength and average agility and average intelligence when we start. Even if you're a bit above or below average, I don't have to worry about that. I don't need to know that you learned to ride a horse in summer camp, not right now. What I need to know is whether any aspect of your character is outstanding or extraordinary. Are you a genius? Are you a star athlete? Do you have professional level abilities in something? Did you study computer design, or genetic engineering, or astrophysics? Are you a blackbelt in some martial arts style, or a sharpshooter for the police force? Give me a list of the things that make you remarkable.

If during play you decide you have to swim across the river, and you didn't mention you could swim, that's not a problem. I'm quite willing to accept that you're an average swimmer if you say so. I'm even willing to accept that you're an above average swimmer if you earned your Red Cross Life Saving card or Boy Scout Swimming Merit Badge. What I'm not willing to do is allow you to win in a race against Mark Spitz because suddenly you happened to remember that you're an Olympic level swimmer who just didn't put it on his paper.

Of course, in this case we have an objective reality: we're assuming that the character can do everything the player could do at the start of play, plus anything learned during the game. The player becomes our reference template.

To do something similar in play, you'd need something of a character concept that has similar ramifications; you'd also need to be willing to explore those ramifications. For example, if the player wrote in background that the character spent summers on the farm, it's fair to assume that he's got a bunch of skills related to animals and plants. If such a character tried to ride a horse, I'd give it to him based on that farm background. Similarly, if he did a lot of camping in the mountains, I'd include such things as rope use and swimming and foraging as reasonably related to what he did. This means that you've got to create this sort of distinction between those primary skills at which the character is especially proficient, the ones listed on the sheet, and those secondary skills at which the character has limited but real ability, which are inferred from what is known about him. Such a system could do what you want, as I understand it: allow for both detailed pre-play character creation and creative expansion during play.

Is this what you're seeking?

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

Oh, one more thing.

Ron's work on Sorcerer turns a lot of the Imrovisation rules into game rules.  Kickers for example, start the story off and make everyone aware: "This is what the story is about; every scene builds off of this scene."

Compare this to other styles of play (whether to gain competative advantage or experience the world), where there's no need to stay focused on *adding* to what has come before.  With a Kicker, you start with a situation, add to that situation scene by scene, and finally resolve it.

Exactly.  My proposition, and that of four willows I blieve, is that the former should be done even more vigorously, more completely, more overtly.

Useless detail is just that, useless.  Worse, it is distracting.  Therefore, for any given game event, which resolves A Particular Story, I would say that NONE of the characters should have any details which are not pertinent to THIS story.

If the detail is there, it is because (or, must be because) it WILL be used to give a thematic answer to premise.  Systems should be built to make that happen; IMO, to express those things which focus on the resolution of whatever conflict drives the story.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Ron's work on Sorcerer turns a lot of the Imrovisation rules into game rules.  Kickers for example, start the story off and make everyone aware: "This is what the story is about; every scene builds off of this scene."

I was about to respond to this:

On the other hand, building the rules set that would Encourage GMs to Respond to Players Bits and all other items I think make a great session ad nauseum would be as clunky and patched at AD&D -- except with a Narrativist slant.

but then you said the above.

I mean that, I doubt if the rules to have the GM respond to player bits would be as clunky as you think. They would be, pretty much, "Have the players come up with interesting features of their characters and build the story around these." As opposed to "buy our adventure module," to use an extreme example.

I think what we're dealing with here, the daughter and parent threads, and several other threads that are going on right now is that there are many, many ways to play an RPG. Part of the problem with some of the early RPGs is that they were not very clear on exactly *what to do* when you played. What many game groups had learned, like Christopher's, is that if everyone was like-minded enough, it really didn't matter what the rules said. Use 'em when you needed 'em. Otherwise, just do what you like.

This is great for people who are lucky enough to find a group of a similar mindset. The rest of us are aptly described in the GNS essay:

My straightforward observation of the activity of role-playing is that many participants do not enjoy it very much. Most role-players I encounter are tired, bitter, and frustrated.

The tragedy is how widespread GNS-based degeneration really is. I have met dozens, perhaps over a hundred, very experienced role-players with this profile: a limited repertoire of games behind him and extremely defensive and turtle-like play tactics. Ask for a character background, and he resists, or if he gives you one, he never makes use of it or responds to cues about it. Ask for actions - he hunkers down and does nothing unless there's a totally unambiguous lead to follow or a foe to fight. His universal responses include "My guy doesn't want to," and, "I say nothing."

I have not, in over twenty years of role-playing, ever seen such a person have a good time role-playing. I have seen a lot of groups founder due to the presence of one such participant. Yet they really want to play. They prepare characters or settings, organize groups, and are bitterly disappointed with each fizzled attempt. They spend a lot of money on RPGs with lots of supplements and full-page ads in gaming magazines.

Last time I read that, I looked out the window where my group meets to see if Ron was sitting outside watching me like Jane Goodall.

It strikes me as odd that the idea of an aestetic reward is being made into a big thing, here and in the daughter thread Good Taste, because my response is "well, of course. What else?" This makes sense since I have some heavy leanings toward Narativism. Naturally I think that the story being told through play is its own reward. What else would be the reward? Experience points? Ha. That's just the mechanical reward and mechanical rewards are kind of like car bumpers made out of tempered glass. Eventually they won't do what they were meant to do.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Listen guys,

I don't know if this is being treated as a "big deal."

I do know that I'm responding to Andrew Martin's post from the first page.  There he suggests that the reason GMs might not know how to facilitate the kind of story the Players clearly wanted because of the rules didn't tell him how to do it, and because the GMs simply didn't know how to do it.

All I'm trying to do is tease out is how some GMs did it without being told, or, are doing it today after having picked up clues either from Ron's work or Sorcerer in general.

This bafflement and "Huff! What's the Big Deal?" response from folks like Ron and Jack seem especially strange since all one has to do is go look down at the recent Star Wars Actual Play threads and see plenty of people have no friggin' clue how to break out these idea and apply them to their play.

Am I after a whole new "Thing"?  Um, no.  I was doing it decades ago in High School.  (Welcome to my club.).  I'm simply trying to write about it from different perspective then is sometimes used here (using a different style of writing, a certain change in vocabulary) so that folks who may not have taken a logic class might still get a game closer to the style of play they want.

As far as I knew, we aren't scientists trying to get published first.  We're trying to help each other play better.  If I think that by being explicit about techniques borrowed from improvisation or writing will help a story go better for player who don't know these things yet, I'll do it.  (Or, perhaps, in the future, not.)

Take care,
Chrstopher

[Marco]

It seems to me I keep depending on some sort of aesthetic sensibility to carry the day (which, we all know doesn't make any sense, since System Does Matter).
Christopher

It makes perfect sense to me. And I don't think system is all that important. It's like soylent green, guys, it's PEOPLE!

-Marco (spits the RPG book out of his mouth)