Illusionism: Nothing up my sleeve

[AnyaTheBlue]

Hi, all!

In my quest to work out how GNS is put together, I'm finding myself trying to figure out where I fit.

After reading the Sim article, I thought I was sim.  After reading the Gamism article, I thought maybe I was a Gamist.  I briefly thought I might be Ron's mythical female bitterest gamer in the world, except I'm not bitter.

Rereading the Illusionism bits, I think this is where I fit, and where most of the group I consider my 'formative gaming group', where my adult gaming experiences and methods crystalized, ended up.

Illusionism is supposed to be a Sim technique (I think), but I'm pretty sure we were playing Gam/Sim Illusionism.

I'll explain.

From early 84 to late 87 I lived in Reno, Nevada.  At my high school there was an actual, honest to god school-sanctioned gaming group.  I started playing with it my freshman year of HS, and by my sophomore year I'd convinced some of my other, non-club gaming friends to join up.

Each year we'd start with about 20 people there.  After two or three months, we'd winnow down to five or so who would game every week, and another five or so who were a sort of amorphous cloud who would show up at irregular intervals.   We gamed through the summers.

This five or six person core wasn't the same each year, but tended to be quite stable for any one given year.  A core of people were in the hard core of the group for multiple years, and people who were in that hard core at least one year tended to remain in the larger nebulous cloud.

The net effect was a more or less socially ept group of people who socialized outside of the gaming table, and frequently gamed in other groups outside the club.

The system was AD&D1e + UA + some random Dragon issues + The Best Of Dragon issues.  No Survival Guides.  Many of us played other games, too, but this club played only AD&D1e.

Over the three years I was in the club (fall 84 through summer of 87), a single campaign ran with rotating DMs.  With occasional hiatuses (hiati?) that campaign ran at least another four years after I moved away.  During the three years I was involved with this group, the most common DMs were Roy (the original founder of the club) and I, with occasional fill-ins from various other members, rarely for more than a single adventure.  The general trend was to rotate after a single 'arc', but that frequently meant Roy and I swapping off.  After I moved away, Joe stepped in and things alternated between him and Roy.

I only played with the extended campaign a couple of times, during visits, after leaving, so I don't know all of the eventual fate.  Aside from me and the few friends I managed to convince to join up, the other identifiable 'block' of people were the ROTC members who generally made up half the overal group (but usually most of them were in the nebulous cloud of intermittent players).

In actual play, the most common stances were Actor and Pawn, with a general preference for Pawn which only very occasionally leaned towards Author, and Director was uncommon enough that I can't remember any explicit instances, although I'm sure it was lurking around somewhere.

I'm pretty sure we were doing Illusionism because those of us who were GMs actually discussed it as a priority, although we didn't call it that.  The priority was something along the lines of, "Well, we want everybody to have fun, but it's no fun if I just haul off and kill you, even if you do something stupid.  Of course, there are ways of really asking for it, but in general it's not fair to kill you, so we have to keep you alive, cushioning you from the consequences of whatever decisions you make."

This was an explicitly understood part of our social contract, developed more or less independently by all the DMs -- it made sense to all of us and we never argued that it wasn't a reasonable way of approaching play.  Those gamers who never DMed probably never realized it.  Certainly, I know I didn't discuss it with all of the other DMs specifically, but I definitely observed this behavior in all of them, so I know we were all doing it.

Sounds pretty Sim so far.

The gamism comes in from the, ahem, Monty Hall factor of a lot of our gaming.  At some point in the 80s this got renamed Munchkinism, and seems to have lost some if it's connotations in the renaming process.

By the middle of the second year of the campaign, we had a pretty solid spread of 10-15 level characters in play.  I think my character had the worst armor class in the bunch at -1.  I was actually one of the very few casualties in the game, but because it came about through the actions of other players, the DM of the time didn't feel he could apply Illusionism techniques even though it was an unfair death BECAUSE it was a side effect of gamist interactions between the players.  In fact, I think all of the actual character deaths that arose from this particular campaign (that I was aware of, anyway) were actually the result of one player killing another, either through accident or malice.

Here's why I think we were having Gamist play.  Because we didn't avoid this Hard Core of Step On Up.  We aimed for it and relished it.  We had all sorts of Step On Up lying all over the place, between characters, between players and the DM, and so forth.  Our characters were min/maxed and had tons of monty haul/monty hall-originated features and equipment.  Sure, I only had a -1 AC, but I was psionic (rolled fairly, with witnesses).

When I was killed (sniff), we had a system whereby you'd take 1 million experience points, divy it up (if you wanted to multi or dual-class), and pick 10 magic items (subject to DM approval).  So, your character was going to not be as good as the characters who hadn't died, but at least you weren't resetting to 1st level.  There was a (mild, yes) consequence to dying, but it was real and it was possible, and if you died and were 1st level, that meant you couldn't really participate in any sort of Step On Up without getting creamed, so your returned character had to be able to be minimally survivable.  (Hm.  Maybe that's a simulationist priority.)

During one memorable arc, I decided that the players were a little too invulnerable, so as DM I started targetting their equipment -- one of our unstated standard modes of play was to more or less ignore item saving rolls when you got hit with stuff like Fireballs.  Well, I made it clear I was going to actually require them during this arc.  My buddy Joe ended up being, for no particular reason, a fireball magnet, and the Force Was Not With Him when rolling his saves.  His character was a Cavalier, with all the disgusting Munchkinism that the UA Cav class had, including the newly introduced wacky platemail that allowed you to get to AC -1 at first level.  Gak.

So, after the first fireball, not only was his armor a nice pile of slag, but his horse didn't live.

Of course, he had well over 100 HP, so he shrugged it off and bought some more at the next town (or borrowed some from one of the other players -- I don't remember), and he started a tally.  Every time he lost a horse, down went a tally.  Every time he lost a suit of armor, down went another mark in a different spot.

Roy started keeping track, too.  Joe won, though.  Krondor Krypt the Slayer ended up going through something like 20 horses over the next year of play.  It was part of the fun!

So, my reading of all this is that we were engaging in primarily Gamist play, with a strongly Illusionist Sim as a subordinate premise, and we were all in tune enough and aware enough to actually carry this off for an extended period of time, fairly easily incorporating new players into the mix by not letting them Step Up in ways where they would get creamed until we could tell they knew what they were doing, as well as sublimating some of the Gamism to provide them with more Sim so they could get used to us.

The thing about this that I find interesting is that most of the play focus of the GMs in these games was focussed on the Illusionism aspect of play.  Yes, they would dip into Gamism, too, but everybody at the table saw the DMs primary purpose as being the Illusionist.  They were king of the Illusion, but just another player in the Gamist arena.

So while Gamism was the central priority in many ways, the actual prep and play was Illusionist in the service of the Gamism, which was mostly spontaneously constructed in play by improvisational creativity.  Even if the DM didn't bring any gamism to the table explicitly, it didn't matter.  The rest of us took care of it amongst ourselves in ways that respected the DMs priorities, whatever they might have been, and the DM was expecting and counting on that.

In my personal experience of D&D and gaming in general during the 80s, this kind of play was extremely common.  I played it in Minnesota, I played it in Nevada, and I played it in College in Oregon with a guy from Hawaii.

This may have been a function of drifting AD&D1e, which was the core game that you played if you were a gamer during this era.  The game text itself was so incoherent, you had to drift it to play it.  I've never met a 1e AD&D player who actually played by the rules.  They very commonly used only a very slim subset of the text (roughly analogous to what was in the original Blue-Book Basic rules, mechanics-wise -- combat, but not the weapons vs. armor table (except Tony, who required it when he DMed); magic, but not rigorous spell-components or memorization rules; all the monster, spell, and character-class write-ups anybody could find; No (or heavily fudged) encumberance rules ("Hey, you found X, Y, and Z.", "Geez, hope I can carry it!"," Oh, and a portable hole!")).

This was a very easy and powerful drift to make, and it was reasonably adaptable to other systems with other system-level priorities.  Many of the games of that era were similarly incoherent, so once you had a game style that would work for the people involved, you could port it amongst lots of different systems, in each case dropping or adding different stuff to be left with a core of mechanics that basically behaved the same way.  Thus leading experienced gamers of the day to decide that "System Didn't Matter", since all their play with all their systems was pretty much the same (once they'd done a little monkeying, and figured out which parts of the system weren't important, just as everybody had done with AD&D1e -- after all, that's how you played), and one of their big goals was to put an Illusionist Curtain between what they were doing and what the players were doing, something which also looked pretty much the same no matter what system they were using.

At least, I think that's what happened to me and the gaming groups I was involved with.

What do you think, sirs?

Have I made any characterization or terminology errors?  Is this kind of descriptive analysis of experience something useful?  Is it the kind of useful that should really only be dealt with at home, alone, behind closed doors instead of being posted to a Web Forum?

I'll just add that I started gaming in Minnesota in 1981 with blue-book basic, my younger brother, and a couple of guy friends, graduated to AD&D over the course of the next year (at which point D&D consisted of FOUR hardbacks... Ahem), and managed to experience the rest of the TSR ouvre of the time (specifically, Top Secret, Gamma World, and Boot Hill), as well as Traveller, Champions, TFT, Car Wars, FASA Star Trek, James Bond 007, a single unsuccessful dalliance with playing Diceless (I blame Karl Knutson.  Hi, Karl!), and V&V over the course of the next 3 years.  And it just kept snowballing =)

(Edit to clarify the Illusionist cushion around the character's actions)

[Marco]

Great post--I enjoyed reading it (it recalls my own high school pretty distinctly with the exception that we were all playing Fantasy Hero).

As per the illusionism--it looks like there was a safety net in terms of "terminal conditions" (death) but you were happy to slag a character's gear--so while there might be some illusion in place I'm not sure that a moritorium on death counts as strongly illusionist in this context.

IME illusionism is more used to describe the forced adherence to plot and theme than simply not killing a PC (although that might be a sub-set).

-Marco

[AnyaTheBlue]

Hey, Marco!

As per the illusionism--it looks like there was a safety net in terms of "terminal conditions" (death) but you were happy to slag a character's gear--so while there might be some illusion in place I'm not sure that a moritorium on death counts as strongly illusionist in this context.

Actually, while that was the example I emphasized in my long ramble, there was a general sense that you needed to cushion the characters from most if not all the consequences of their actions, unless they were Stepping On Up to something, and even then if the DM was the 'opponent' or 'driver' of the Step On Up, then in reality the character generally wouldn't 'lose' in a permanent sense (The characters were so overloaded by the time I started slagging items that the characters tended to just switch to the 'backup armor', or whatever -- it made no difference to the in-game tactics or overall effectiveness of the characters.  It was almost color.  In fact, it was a 'safe' way of threatening the characters without endangering them, now that I think about it -- the players saw it as a threat to their effectiveness since their armor class ratings and damage-deailing abilities were modified, when in fact it didn't have much effect at all since their effectiveness was essentially mandated by whomever was DMing at the time.)

One way of looking at it, if I'm remembering it all accurately, was that the DM had a certain set of ill-defined stages and encounters for the players to go through or run into.  Then, play was subtley guided so that those encounters more or less happened in the order and manner they were intended, and there was a sort of unstated part of the social contract that the DM wasn't going to really kill or significantly impair any of the characters in the process of moving from scene to scene.  Not only were the characters more or less protected from death, but they were protected from any sort of failure to achieve the endgame state the DM more or less intended.  The players mostly provided color, while the DM moved the play forward from scene to scene.

That's how I saw it (and ran it), anyway.

[Marco]

Okay--I agree that sounds like illusionism at work.

But remember: Poker would be a much less successful "gamist" game if you got *shot* every time you got caught bluffing--I think that Step-On-Up is probably *most* appealing when failure is very unlikely to be absolute (ultra-lethal games, IME, tend towards intra-player competion so as not to be the one to die first ... that's just IME).

-Marco

[M. J. Young]

Anya, it's a bad weekend for me, and I'm skimming, so I might miss something--but as I'm reading, let me hit a few points.

First, Illusionism is not simulationism; it's not strictly tied to simulationism. It is a technique which can be used or abused. Illusionism means that the players make choices, but they don't control anything, and they don't know that their choices don't matter.

My best example of an illusionist technique I describe as Left or Right? You come to a T; it can be a dungeon corridor, a road, a hallway on a space station, or anything, but at this point the player characters must go either left or right. Further, they have absolutely no information on which to base their choice. In reality, this choice could make all the difference in the world. One path leads to the dragon, the other leads to the treasure--something like that. In traditional play, there is a right choice and a wrong choice. In Illusionism, though, the choice is illusory--it isn't which way the players go that matter, but which outcome the referee has determined that decides things. If the referee wants the players to face the dragon first and then discover the treasure, then whichever way they turn will take them to the dragon. As long as the players don't know that their choices don't matter, it's illusionism. (If the players know it, it's participationism.)

Illusionism can be used in small doses as I just described very effectively. It becomes dysfunctional if the referee is actually controling and determining everything, and the players are acting on the assumption that their choices matter. This becomes a violation of the social contract, because the players think that the referee is offering them meaningful choices which will determine the outcome of the game, and the referee has already determined the outcome of the game.

A play example I offer involves a player whose character had through a series of accidents and choices attempted to finagle having a vast inheritance fall into his lap. The referee was overheard discussing with a few of the other players exactly what was going to happen, why the inheritance would not get there, and how it was going to fall apart, and the player realized that there was no choice he could make that would actually influence the situation beyond mere color, so he quit the game.

Second, plot immunity is not illusionism. It may be supported by illusionism, but it may as easily be openly declared. If player characters cannot be killed by setting or situation elements, that's plot immunity. If they don't know it, it's supported by illusionist technique--but if they do know it, it may be any of several techniques, including participationism, director stance, or merely an inherent survival mechanic.

I played (and still play) OAD&D by the book, except for the weapon speed factor and weapon/AC adjustments. The other aspects you mention were always enforced in my play; equipment sheets were done on computer spreadsheets so that encumbrance could be automatically updated. Don't rule it out.

I hope to be back in a couple days to follow up, but that should at least throw some light on things.

--M. J. Young