Fortune and narrative suspence

[Mike Holmes]

I don't think that such a fallacy exists. Yes, for those who may claim that dice are the only way to get suspense, that's an overstatement. I would go so far as to say that amongst commonly played games played in the most common modes of play that dice are the method that most players think of in terms of what does provide suspence.

What we have here is a false dichotomy. That you either have dice and suspense, or no dice an no suspense. There are, of course, other ways to get suspense.

That said, I think that fortune is a great way to get suspense. For some people like myself, it is, perhpas, superior to most other methods. Dice do not surprise. That's just not true. A surprise comes from having no prior knowledge of the impending event. As in the example of the bomb just going off. In all cases of rolling dice, I have at the very least that part of suspence convered. We know that several things could happen, and we await the outcome. In that dice in fact enforce suspense to the extent that it can be.

Now, whether tying your shoes successfully is suspenceful is not in quesiton. It's not suspensefull using either fortune or any other resolution method. The issues of pacing and context are crucial to suspense no matter how things are decided.

Perhaps for you, Johannes, there is some difference between the suspence of a Footbal game and the suspense of a hitchcock film. But for the life of me, the feelings are functionally identical. I'm not sure what making a differentiation between them would enhance.

Human life can be very suspenseful. Opening that letter to be accepted to a university, or waiting for news about a missing relative. Makes my heart pound. Again, what's the difference, and why shoud I care?

No, I think that this is entirely a straw man issue dealing with the Fortuneless agenda. Why can't peole just have preferences, and leave it at that? There has to be a single way that's superior for all? If not, then this is just an opinion.

Mike

[Jonathan Walton]

No, I think that this is entirely a straw man issue dealing with the Fortuneless agenda.

I can't believe you just said "the Fortuneless agenda." :)

That's priceless!   It's like we're a lobby group or a PAC!

"Really, Mr. Stolze, our supporters would prefer it if your next system could rely a bit less on the 'randomness' our opponents seem to prefer.  A 624-page brief explaining our persepective has been delivered to your secretary..."

Later.
Jonathan, anti-Fortune activist

P.S.  Complete agreement with Mike, btw.  The dice or no-dice thing is a red herring, based too much on the personal preferences of the people involved.

[Mike Holmes]

I can't believe you just said "the Fortuneless agenda." :)

I'm not imagining it, am I? I mean, people who prefer this sort of game seem to me to go out of their way to let the masses know of their epiphany. That dice aren't neccessary. That playing without dice is superior. They're only slightly less vocal than the (to me silly) people who want everyone to know that you can play without rules. As though they'd discovered an activity that hadn't been present likely since the advent of language.

Not that Johannes is doing this, neccessarily. He could just be pointing out that neither is spuperior in the face of what he sees as a conspiracy to prevent diceless gaming. But it seems to me that the folks on our side of the fence are doing a lot more defending, and they're doing a lot more in the way of trying to convert people.

I support promoting understanding. But if it's a campaign against my preferences, well then I can be just as activist in return. :-)

As to whether it's a preference or not, well, that's still the subject of the debate.

Mike

[Johannes]

Hi Mike,

Perhaps for you, Johannes, there is some difference between the suspence of a Footbal game and the suspense of a hitchcock film. But for the life of me, the feelings are functionally identical. I'm not sure what making a differentiation between them would enhance.

I can't agree with you here. Game suspence and narrative suspence are different in a fundamental way. This is easily illustrated by watching a film for the second time. There will still be suspence - even more of it, though usually less. Now compare this to watching the Champions League Final 2002 for the second time. There is no suspence. Thats why most people don't watch football games twice. That's why they get angry if someone spoils the result of a game they're going to watch. Narrative suspence can take repetition, game suspence cannot.

I would explain the difference like this. The feelings are not only functionally identical but identical. It's the same feeling in both suspences. The difference lies in the object of the feeling and the position of the feeling subject. In game suspence the object of the suspence is actual - it's on the same level of reality with the subject. In narrative suspence the object is fictional. It's on a different level of reality than the subject who is still actual. The difference is the difference between actually living a situation and considering a situation hypothetically. In game suspence we are in the situation. In narrative suspence we pretend to be in it. We can even pretend to be someone else in that pretended situation (this describes role-playing well). Our emotions do not change if the object of the emotion is pretended or not. We can live actual events only once in our life but we can pretend pretended events many times. *

Otherwise I think that we are pretty much on the same lines. Maybe this thred has now served its purpose and a safe concensus has emerged. I'm satisfied but I don't want to close anybody's mouth so feel free to discuss - especially if you have new insights to the subject.

*
Now for some sosiobilogical speculation which is quite far from the subject of this thread. I'm a student of the arts so I might be way out of my league here but I'll give it a try anyway. Stone me if I'm wrong. The reason why we don't experience suspence if we watch actual events for the second time and why we do experience it in the case of fiction is that in the case of an actual event repeated suspence is not an evolutionary asset but in the case of fiction it is. The ability to consider and simulate potential conflict situations outside the present context was a valuable asset during the period of human evolution. Individual who had this ability had higher survival rate and did better in social power struggles within the cave-man group. The experience of suspence is relevant and possible only inside the situation. Actual situations are not repeatable but fictional situations are. One can be inside the pretended situation many times but on can be inside the actual situation only once - when it happens.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Johannes,

From a sociobiological point of view toward humans, stories are "thought-experiments" - imagined fitness-investment conflicts under a variety of different circumstances. This idea supports your idea about suspense (although I think that this word is being used in many different ways).

However, bear in mind that evolutionary psychology (a branch or application of sociobiology) suffers badly from a lack of rigorous research. Many of its practitioners extend the excellent writings of E.O. Wilson or Timothy Goldsmith into very dubious speculation or poorly-conceived experiments. Therefore the strength of your claim is questionable; it's theoretically consistent but not yet tested.

We aren't going to get anywhere by relying on internal sensations as data. Johannes, if you could provide a recognizable and broadly-applicable definition of suspense as a behavior, then that would help the discussion greatly.

Best,
Ron

[iago]

When I started this thread I had this hunch that many gamers defend the use of fortune because they think that it provides narrative suspence.

Narrative suspense from dice?  Not here, at least.  It's definitely, for me at least, a metagame suspense issue, which honestly I'm quite fine with -- a lack of metagame suspense can, potentially, undercut narrative suspense.  

The two make a good partnership -- telling an intense story that is rushing towards a breaking point, then calling for a roll of the dice that could literally end up anywhere -- that's an enhancement for me, with the two parts yielding a greater whole.  

And it's that greater whole that had me, as a GM, moving away from running an Amber setting game using Amber Diceless.  Amber Diceless was an important, valuable starting ground for me, and it taught me a lot about GMing, as it turned out -- but in some ways it was just as valuable as a point of departure.  These days I run Amber using Fudge (Fate, actually), because the dice produced a more satisfying play-experience overall -- for me, and my players, at least.

The consensus seems to be that there is no necessary connection between fortune and suspence and I agree. It is also a very good point that fortune CAN work towards more suspence and that the contextualization of the die roll (or what ever) is perhaps the key issue on this one. By contextualization I mean things like plot functionality and dramatic rythm.

I agree.  Like any tool, dice can be misused, and can undercut the effect you're going for rather than enhancing it.

[Johannes]

Hi Ron,

Nice that my line of reasoning was not "in the woods" as we Finns say (well I guess it precisely was in a way). I agree that evolutionary psychology as it is now has many problems along with its obvious strenghts. I also recognize my thoughts as speculation only. It was not an empirical truth and I doubt it will ever be because of the enormous time spans involved. I am not equiped to argument rigorously on this field so I'll have to leave this branch of discussion as it is.

We aren't going to get anywhere by relying on internal sensations as data. Johannes, if you could provide a recognizable and broadly-applicable definition of suspense as a behavior, then that would help the discussion greatly.

First, I'm used to working with internal sensations as data so I'm quite satisfied with the discussion as it is, although I see that not much new is being said.
Second, I don't understand what you mean by the phrase "suspence as a behavior". Could you please explain?

[M. J. Young]

I don't understand what you mean by the phrase "suspence as a behavior". Could you please explain?

Maybe I can save Ron a couple minutes by attempting to answer that.

Suspense is rather a vague term in and of itself. Is it a property of the story? Is it an emotional response, a feeling people have? Those are both things we can't really discuss objectively. That would be the critical concept, I think: can we objectify suspense by defining it terms of behavior? What do people do that indicates a state related to suspense? Do they act differently, and if so how?

The difficulty is finding something objective to discuss here. Discussing subjective topics can be enlightening in some esoteric way, but in the end it's all, well, subjective, so we don't have anything tangible. I can say that I felt the suspense of a particular moment; but what is it beyond a feeling? I don't have an answer to that, but that does seem to be the question. Objectively, what is suspense?

--M. J. Young

[Johannes]

I deny the possibility of discussing role-playing games objectively in a meaningfull way. If we stick to measurable properties like natural scienses do we will never get above the dogs of Pavlov in our discussions. Most of the confusion around GNS is because it tries to describe objectively something that is inherently subjective. RPG will be flattened out of existence if we reduce it to its material aspect.

Instead of objectivity we should aim at intersubjectivity hermeneutic understanding. This is what all my threads are about. It will usefull to describe our mental processes even if there will never be a divine judge who tells who's right. Discussing the difference of suspence between a spectator of a football game and audience of a RPG will tell us more about who we are as human beings and more about our hobby as an form of fiction than defining suspence as a certain pattern of electron movement in the brain. What is interesting to me in that patter is how do I experience it.

[Mike Holmes]

I sense that this is about to proceed to the insoluble problem of behavioralism vs. personality theory. At which point we'll have to agree to disagree, right?

Mike

[Johannes]

Yes something like that - and I don't think any of us are on this forum to have that discussion. We spend our time better here discussing RPGs than philosophy of science.

[Gordon C. Landis]

I'm glad everyone is acknowledging we're up against a tough issue here.  I'm gonna try and provide a clarification to the "suspense as a behavior" bit, to see if that provides a way for the conversation to go forward.  But first - I'm not Ron, nor am I an expert on scientific - or any other - philosophy.  I have been down this road before, and I *think* the tricky issues don't *really* matter for the discussion . . . so here goes:

The standard line is that GNS is about "observable behavior."  So "what is suspense as a behavior?" means "what is it that I as an observer see when suspense is happening?"  NOT objective observer vs. subjective observer/participant, just observer vs. internal mental state.  How does an observer know when suspense is happening?  What kind of things happen in the game play, what words are said, what kinds of interactions occur?  E.g., we might say that the group becomes more alert, and is more tense as each die roll is made.  We say that becasue we see the attention become more focused, and hear the sighs of relief/annoyance when the result of a die roll is revealed.

The point of this is NOT to say the internal state of tension isn't important, real and/or valid - some people might have one of those opinions, but that's not relevant to the issue at hand.  It's just much easier and useful to work with these observable things.

And (best as I can tell) that's what Ron's asking - by what observable things are  we going to know that suspense is happening?  Because that's something he can work with, and the internal sensations are (for GNS and Ron) not.  The first step beyond an internal sensation is the external report of that sensation ("Wow, great suspense during that session!"), but I think the hope is we can get even further than that.  I'd really like to see how folks would say they know suspense is happening, as the observer - I bet a lot of interesting stuff would result.  And I don't think we have to go into objective/subjective (terms I've found less useful than I once thought they were) philosophy of science issues in order to have that (much more useful to RPG design, IMO) discussion.

Gordon

[Johannes]

I appreciate your try Gordon but I don't see what we would win. Whats so much better in registering tha physical symptoms of the players and then taking some combination and labeling it suspence and then trying out what techniques of play produce that combination to directly asking them when they feel suspence and how would they describe it? In the first option we will have to resort to the second (my) option anyway if we want to make sense of the empirical observations.