thesis : the two approaches to RPG player enjoyment goals

[Alan]

1) A paradigm of collaborative writing.  This allows re-writing of past details, going backwards and forwards in fictional time.  So the secret passage is never considered "real" until the story is published.  

2) The storytelling paradigm suggests that once announced openly in play, the secret passage is considered "real".  

3) The experiential paradigm suggests that the secret passage is considered "real" when the person who has authority over it is sure within her imagination that it is "real".  Some things may require announcement and approval, but many things may not.  For example, PC thoughts or beliefs could be validated by the player, while external world details could be validated by the GM.  In troupe-style play, the world may be broken up into the authority of different players.  

Your 1) and 3) don't ring true to me.

1) Collaborative Authoring.  I've done collaborative writing and the "Secret passage" - or whatnot - comes into existance when one of the authors communicates it to the other one.  It doesn't have to wait for publication.  Once the two (or more) authors agree that something exists in a shared work, then it does.

3) Experiential paradigm.  This sounds like the classic GM authority paradigm, where the GM knows the passage exists, but only reveals it when the players do something to find it.  

This is about the boundary issues I was talking about earlier - who gets to decide what.  I think it's generally agreed that player character emotions, thoughts, intents, and motives should be under the sole command of the owning player.  Perhaps this is even a defining element of role-playing games.  (This issue is perhaps what keeps Universalis in a grey zone of categorization.)

Now consider: I've run plenty of games where I had a secret passage on a map, but because the players never found it, it never came into play.  To my mind, it never existed in the shared fantasy, only in my plans.  In one or two cases, I've decided to write such a passage out, even placing it elsewhere.  I wasn't dissapointed that I had to retcon.  No one else knew about it.

Likewise, as a player, I've conceived of many things I'd like to have declared into existance in the shared fantasy, but events have occured which headed my ideas off.  Again, I didn't feel cheated.  I knew that my idea was just in my head and that it couldn't have reality until I shared it with the group.  I think it would be unreasonable for any player to feel violated in this situation - dissapointed, sure; robbed, no.

An issue some people have with #2 is that this means that the game can in principle trample over people's individual imaginations at any time.  Maybe I have thought of some cool background, and the addition of the secret passage means that the backstory I had thought of now makes no sense.  Now I have to go back and rethink it all.  Similarly, facts about my PC may be rewritten, forcing me to internally re-process my character.

We can certainly draw a boundary around a player character's internal process, but can we do that for elements that might appear in the exterior world of the shared fantasy?  I don't think so.  As long as a player hasn't mentioned his imagining in some way, it will always be vulnerable to overwriting.

Now if you want to address this in the process of deciding what becomes real in the shared fantasy (the Lumpley System) that's fine.  That process would be:

1- Proposal
2- Objection
3- Negotiation
4- Resolution
5- Entry into shared fantasy

I think that this process is central to role-playing and unavoidable.  It's best to assume that nothing exists in the external world of the shared fantasy until it's communicated to the players, then agreed on - either tacitly or through some formal system.

I've also noticed a general rule of "play it where it lies" in actual play.  Once some element has been shared and accepted by the group it has great credibility, and will rarely be retconned.  Instead, NEW facts entered into play must be consistent with it.

Retcon in these processes does occur: usually within seconds of a decision being made, much more rarely even five minutes later.  A "fact" gains more weight as time passes.  Exact useage of retcon varies some according to social contract, but I've never seen a game where existing "facts" are trampled over easily.

So I think all role-playing must accept that what is unshared in a player's mind may be overridden by what HAS been shared - at least as far as "external" items in the shared fantasy goes.  This is not a bad thing.  It's part of the game - the negotiation that makes play interesting, adds tension, and sparks creativity.

[Doctor Xero]

This is about the boundary issues I was talking about earlier - who gets to decide what.  I think it's generally agreed that player character emotions, thoughts, intents, and motives should be under the sole command of the owning player.

I'm not too worried about that level of respect -- when such respect is in the social contract, I imagine that VoINT games and VoIND games are both equally respectful.

I'm more concerned about jumping across a chasm, almost killing myself, and then the next player declares he found a safe foot bridge.  Unless my character is a complete moron, she would have seen the foot bridge instead of jumping almost to her death.  The instability of such changes makes it difficult to interact with the world since interaction requires the ability to perceive everything which is relevant and that relevance changes with each spontaneous summoning.

for some people and/or from a certain perspective, there literally is NO fundamental difference between VoIND and VoINT as you describe them.  Dealing with a secret passage created by the GM before hand or dealing with one created by a player at the time of play - eh, either way you're interacting with something that is created in the shared imagined space of the game.  Just because the GM drew it on a map hours/days/weeks ago doesn't mean it's REAL - it's still just an imaginary creation that "exists" for the purpose of playing the game.

Actually, that surprises me.  But it might explain why a point which seems crucial to me might seem non-existant to some others.

In a game set in LOTR, before I decide to interact with Lothlorien, I need to be assured that Lothlorien will not retroactively cease to exist.  Before I decide whether to play a dwarf or an elf, I want to know what stereotypes and cultural reputations I will be facing with each race, and that is only possible if those races pre-exist.  Since unearthing the pre-existing cultures of a fantasy world is one of my primary pleasures in gaming, it makes a difference to me whether that race existed from the start, woven skillfully into the world before I first began the campaign so that I have something stable to interact with, or whether that race was ad-libbed into existence and may have no niche or historic ties to anything else right off the bat.  Similarly, if the secret door existed from the start, I can pat myself on the back for finding it -- I have successfully interacted with the dungeon, psyching out its dungeon makers and recognizing the patterns which make identification possible.  If the secret door exists simply because I said so, it feels to me like I've done nothing, really.

Creative improvisation is easy, IMHO.  Identifying patterns, recognizing cultural and psychological tendencies, reading between the lines, listening to the silences between words -- those are all intriguing to me.

Maybe I have thought of some cool background, and the addition of the secret passage means that the backstory I had thought of now makes no sense.  Now I have to go back and rethink it all.  Similarly, facts about my PC may be rewritten, forcing me to internally re-process my character.  

The experiential paradigm means that you are trying to protect people's individual imaginations from this sort of clash or retcon.

EXACTLY!  PRECISELY!  That is key to what I've been trying to reference in my defense of Vision of Interaction!  From a VoINT perspective, I can not interact with a world which can have its history, geography, or basic cultural norms potentially altered at any time.

But I can still creatively participate in it, so long as I keep my sense of character independent from that reality and therefore unaffected by such retroactive changes.  That enjoyment, independent of an immutable and unmalleable game reality, is Vision of Independence play, I'd guess.

I've also noticed a general rule of "play it where it lies" in actual play.  Once some element has been shared and accepted by the group it has great credibility, and will rarely be retconned.  Instead, NEW facts entered into play must be consistent with it.

Retcon in these processes does occur: usually within seconds of a decision being made, much more rarely even five minutes later.  A "fact" gains more weight as time passes.  Exact useage of retcon varies some according to social contract, but I've never seen a game where existing "facts" are trampled over easily.

That makes a great deal of sense, and I'd imagine it would provide the needed stability to a VoIND game.  I didn't see that in DonJon or Fungeon much, but I saw it in Soap and other heavy-player-input games such as InSpectres.

Now here're my questions :
-) How do those of us who enjoy investigation and unearthing historical and cultural aspects of a campaign operate in a VoIND campaign when our pleasure is not in summoning into existence that secret passage but in finding it because we cracked the cultural puzzle or solved the architectural mystery of how the dungeon was laid out?  I'm sure that VoIND players do something I'm missing to obtain that same sense of investigation.  I would be afraid that I would have to constantly vocalize every line of reasoning/speculation I had about a mystery culture so that I would not constantly be run ragged trying to syncretize other players' random details into a coherent whole.

-) How do VoIND players know what to take for granted?  Does this mean whoever names the starship's system of propulsion first gets to determine what it is (assuming no one objects or outbids her at the time)?  Does this mean I must start a game with a checklist of all the things I have to establish ASAP so that I have a sense of confidence in the default assumptions through which I am interacting in that campaign reality?  Or is the initial set-up expected to be that thorough with VoIND gaming?



Apropos my use in this thread of the terms immersion and interaction throughout this thread :

I'll try to respond briefly (so I apologize if I don't cite sources or such).

I have been using the terms immersion and interaction as they are used in some schools of literary scholarship and theatre.

The ideal immersion in a book is such that, when I read about the bread baking in the next room, I can actually smell bread, and when I read that the identification character has cut his hand, for a moment my own hand experiences genuine pain.

The ideal immersion in character in a play is such that, if I loathe the taste of broccoli but I am playing a character who loves broccoli, I will actually enjoy the taste of broccoli if I eat it while I am playing that character.

Those are the experiences of immersion to which I aspire in my roleplaying experiences.

Reaching that level of immersion in a book is the result (in part) of my interaction with that book.

Through my interaction with that book, the book's elements become springboards for my imagination.  For example, reading LOTR as a child, I dreamt about Lothlorien, had nightmares about Shelob, and in my moments of fancy played out adventures as a member of the Fellowship.

However, that kind of interaction is possible only if the author maintains continuity and a stable reality.  My interaction and immersion will both be disrupted if the author describes Bilbo as a hobbit in Chapter 3 but as a gnome in Chapter 6.  To have that springboard for my imagination, I need a reality I can trust and rely upon for my interaction.  In literature, this is the combined work of author and editor or continuity cop.

So when I first begin playing roleplaying games, it seemed to me that the reliability needed for me to interact with the game world would  be guaranteed by the editor/continuity cop we call a game master.

The above is the Vision of Interaction approach and is why I refer to it with the term "interactive" -- I am using a literary studies meaning of that term.

Doctor Xero

[Alan]

I'm more concerned about jumping across a chasm, almost killing myself, and then the next player declares he found a safe foot bridge.  Unless my character is a complete moron, she would have seen the foot bridge instead of jumping almost to her death.

You forget, once again, that all face-to-face role-playing involves group negotiation.  If I were in that situation, I would challenge that on the "Play it where it lies" principle for just the reasons you mention.  The other player has to acknowledge that the crossing is difficult, or come up with a damn good explaination that doesn't belittle my character.

I'm beginning to think a lot of the concerns expressed here about "VoInd" arise from experiences with on-line or email play, which, as someone else pointed out, often has a lack of functional interaction between players.  This produces unfair characterization of techniques that being labelled "VoInd."

Frankly, I don't think Vision of Independant play exists.  From my own experience, I can say that I really like many of the player-empowering techniques that you seem to categorize as "VoInd," but I enjoy them most when their used to create something to interact with.  

In a game set in LOTR, before I decide to interact with Lothlorien, I need to be assured that Lothlorien will not retroactively cease to exist.

Hunh?  Why would Lothlorien retroactively cease to exist?  If players had agreed that it does exist, then it's a violation of group contract to make it go away.

Creative improvisation is easy, IMHO.  

This reminds me of a layman's statement to an experience writer of fantasy fiction: "Writing fantasy is too easy: you can just invent a magical solution to every problem."

The reason this is a bogus observation is because the fantasy writer must first establish the rules by which the fantasy works, then remain true to them.  The same applies in a role-playing game - regardless of it's ilk.  Players - or in some styles of play, the world creator alone - establish the framework of the universe.  Play after that must follow the established rules.

Again, I emphasize: for any functional RPG play, everybody has to play within the established rules of the fantasy - in some cases, the players themselve may have established those rules and then develop them later.

As a poet once said: you can't play tennis without a net.

Identifying patterns, recognizing cultural and psychological tendencies, reading between the lines, listening to the silences between words -- those are all intriguing to me.

Myself I like a mix - some pre-established world and situation detail to hang ideas from - but with room to fill in ideas (that don't conflict with existing material) as the creative spark hits.

In fact, I would assert that, even in the most player-created worlds, there must be a solid foundation of situation/setting before meaningful play can begin.  In some games, like Sorcerer, one spends the entire first session creating characters and agreeing on a framework of world and situation.  This sort of thing is required and recognized.  

I think that VoInd / VoInt is not a useful distinction for face-to-face roleplaying.  All role-playing interacts with established fantasy material. And in face-to-face RPGs, all players must respect and interact with the creations of other players.  If they don't they're dissing you and that's dysfunctional play.

I think the useful distinction is who creates the material and when.  Doc Xero says he really likes a large, detailed body of data to exist in advance of play, and that he'd rather learn new bits of data than add to it himself.  Others, like myself, like to start with a moderate body of material and build on it.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi,

Let's see if we can cut to the chase here.

Instead of everyone being obliged to disprove what I suspect is a non-existant negative, how about this:

Does anyone have any actual play or textual examples of the rules or play being used to Pooch Reality?

This seems to be one of Doc's greatest concerns with his VoInd thing..., and John backs him up that it would suck.  And I agree it would suck.  And I suspect retrofitting races mid-game and removing pre-established pieces of geography willy nilly would suck for everyone reading these boards.

So... Does it acutally happen in face to face play?  Can anyone provide any actual examples, from actual play, actual text?  Until then, we simply have to assume that this characiture of play simply doesn't exits and Doc's afraid of...  nothing that actually happens.

There are other issues at hand here, but this seems to be the one getting the most attention and head-nodding from John and Doc, so let's address this first.

And let's be clear for the purposes of this exercise: Pooching Reality doesn't mean adding more detail (by whomever); it is the explicit negation of reality so far established, without rhyme or reason.

Anyone?

Christopher

[John Kim]

1) A paradigm of collaborative writing.  This allows re-writing of past details, going backwards and forwards in fictional time.  So the secret passage is never considered "real" until the story is published.  

2) The storytelling paradigm suggests that once announced openly in play, the secret passage is considered "real".  

3) The experiential paradigm suggests that the secret passage is considered "real" when the person who has authority over it is sure within her imagination that it is "real".  

Your 1) and 3) don't ring true to me.

1) Collaborative Authoring.  I've done collaborative writing and the "Secret passage" - or whatnot - comes into existance when one of the authors communicates it to the other one.  It doesn't have to wait for publication.  Once the two (or more) authors agree that something exists in a shared work, then it does.

3) Experiential paradigm.  This sounds like the classic GM authority paradigm, where the GM knows the passage exists, but only reveals it when the players do something to find it.  

OK, yes, #1 is perhaps named badly.  It is entirely possible for collaborative writing to immediately lock in everything as it is spoken.  I was speaking more about a particular kind of collaboration -- where there is a lot of outlining, revision, and brainstorming.  i.e. "Scene 3 isn't working for me.  What if we make it on a catwalk instead, and we change Joe's claustrophobia to a fear of heights?"  

As for #3, yes, that's right.  It includes classic GM authority, but also any other arrangement where one player is given authority in advance.  For example, a player might be given authority to determine the layout of his PC's castle.  He can map it out without consulting anyone else.  The only requirement is that it has to be deterministic who will decide whether the secret passage is real.  

In fact, I would assert that, even in the most player-created worlds, there must be a solid foundation of situation/setting before meaningful play can begin.  In some games, like Sorcerer, one spends the entire first session creating characters and agreeing on a framework of world and situation.  This sort of thing is required and recognized.  

I think that VoInd / VoInt is not a useful distinction for face-to-face roleplaying.  All role-playing interacts with established fantasy material. And in face-to-face RPGs, all players must respect and interact with the creations of other players.  

I disagree.  Take Pantheon (by Robin Laws, 2000) as a perfect example.  There is zippo established material except the words "In the beginning, there was nothing."  SOAP is pretty similar.  Moreover, these also allow challenging of statements made.  

This is about the boundary issues I was talking about earlier - who gets to decide what.  I think it's generally agreed that player character emotions, thoughts, intents, and motives should be under the sole command of the owning player.  Perhaps this is even a defining element of role-playing games.

Well, I tend to prefer that -- but it's not a universal by any means.  Lots of RPGs for a long time have included personality and narration mechanics which can temporarily take the PC out of the control of the player, or put restrictions on it.  You might check out Kirt Dankmyer's http://ivanhoeunbound.com/unsung.html">Unsung as a recent example.

[John Kim]

Does anyone have any actual play or textual examples of the rules or play being used to Pooch Reality?

This seems to be one of Doc's greatest concerns with his VoInd thing..., and John backs him up that it would suck.  And I agree it would suck.  And I suspect retrofitting races mid-game and removing pre-established pieces of geography willy nilly would suck for everyone reading these boards.

So... Does it acutally happen in face to face play?  Can anyone provide any actual examples, from actual play, actual text?  

I think you're not quite understanding the difference.  You are talking about retro-fitting of statements which have been verbalized and clearly negotiated among everyone at the table.  i.e. For you, anything which hasn't gone through this process isn't "reality" and thus can freely be "pooched".  But that's just based on one paradigm's view of what "reality" is.  In truth, none of this is physically real.  

For the experiential paradigm, the issue is retro-fitting of one's own mental image.  It is what is in people's heads that matters, not what is spoken.  i.e. I had pictured X in my mind's eye, but then something is declared which contradicts that and I have to retro-fit in Y.  In my experience, this happens all the time.  For example, I find that without a map, combat is generally full of little shufflings about and renegotiations.  

Liz: OK, I'm going to tackle Dot to drop us both into cover.  
John: Wait, what cover?  The reason why I was fighting maniacally was because I thought there was no cover.  
Liz: Can't there be a ditch nearby that we could flatten ourselves into?  It seems reasonable that there'd be something there for irrigation.  
...

Even given the same description, everyone will picture things slightly (or even majorly) differently.  Thus, people's imaginings are constantly clashing and being re-formed based on communication.  It happens on a small level constantly, and happens on a more major level pretty often.  More deep and detailed imagination is on one level good -- but this inevitably means that there will be more clashes and negotiation.

[Alan]

I disagree.  Take Pantheon (by Robin Laws, 2000) as a perfect example.  There is zippo established material except the words "In the beginning, there was nothing."  SOAP is pretty similar.  Moreover, these also allow challenging of statements made.  

I've played Pantheon.  It's not what I would call a role-playing game, but even so it follows the pattern I mentioned: first establish the rules, then play within them.  Likewise SOAP.  Sure you can invent anything that matches the sentence rules, but you also have to build on existing "facts", you can give existing "facts" new meaning, but you can't rewrite them.  

BTW, it's interesting to note that all the games mentioned here as points of concern: Pantheon, SOAP, and Donjon are all gamist in design intent.  I begin to wonder if the objection is really just to the meta-game elements of challenge - ie, the fact that they aren't sim.   "VoInt" may just be "the kind of play I prefer" vs. "VoInd" "that heathen stuff some of you like that I don't understand" - or synecdoche, as Ron calls it.

This is about the boundary issues I was talking about earlier - who gets to decide what.  I think it's generally agreed that player character emotions, thoughts, intents, and motives should be under the sole command of the owning player.  Perhaps this is even a defining element of role-playing games.

Well, I tend to prefer that -- but it's not a universal by any means.  Lots of RPGs for a long time have included personality and narration mechanics which can temporarily take the PC out of the control of the player, or put restrictions on it.  You might check out Kirt Dankmyer's http://ivanhoeunbound.com/unsung.html">Unsung as a recent example.

Hey, you're right.  I hadn't thought of that.  There's also other examples, like various Mind Control and Charm spells in other games, and wounding in almost every game.  When a character is knocked unconscious, he's no longer under the player's control.  I guess it's a matter of social contract - rules established in advance of play - that sometimes in some limited situations - you'll lose control of your character.


EXAMPLES?

I notice that no one has yet met Chris's challenge to provide an example of actual play where one player overwrote the reality established previously by another.  I think he's right.  If you can't produce an example, it's not a concern.  Step on up!

[Christopher Kubasik]

John,

I do understand the difference.  That's why I was very explicit to seperate out this one specific concern, Pooching Reality, from a lot of other concerns on the table here.  When Doc says he's afraid hobbits are going to become gnomes, he's talking about Pooching Reality as I've defined the term.  I'm asking for anyone to Step On Up and name it.  (Doc may or may not arrive saying, "But that's the extreme case!  Not anything I would actually expect to happen in a game!"  In which case we can casully slide it off the table, forget about it, and never speak of it again -- moving on to whatever issues actually do occur in play.)

Now, I didn't realize *you* were making that explicit different from the post I read of yours were you created the dizzying and hypothetical example where the player created secret passage wiped out a fellow player's PC concept.  I now know you meant that there was no way the secret passage creating player could now he was about to hit the delete button on his fellow player's character concepts -- because as of yet they hadn't been verbalized.

But, John, this is where the negotiation comes in. All moments in RPGs run this risk.  That's why negoatiation is happening all the time.  If we're in the fight, and someone thinks one thing about the availability of ditches, and someone thinks another -- well...  It's got to be worked out.  I mean... That's just part of the hobby.  As you yourself pointed out, there is no reality to work from -- even if there's only a GM spitting it out, peopel at the table are still going to have to work it out as the go.  So you're trying to set up an end run around an activity which is one of the primary activities of RPGS -- definding a shared reality.

Finally, I think Alan is right.  I had been thinking the same thing about the Gamist element of Donjon, but wasn't familiar with the other games mentioned.  I think some games use the improvisation of reality as part of a spirited, competative play.  (I'd add Baron Munchausen to the mix.)  But the very nature of the games isn't to provide a solid-state reality.  No, such games don't allow Doc to expereince the "silence between the words," or whatnot.  But that's not their point.  Neither is their point to steamroll over what has been established (Munchausen is explicit in this point).  The goal is to *win*, using improvisation, if you will, as a resource to win.  (Note again, that Pooching Reality, as Doc is concerned about it, isn't a part of these games.)

So what Doc seems to have come up with is a lable for gamist games where everyone uses additional elements of reality to drive their play toward victgory.  There's no overwriting of shared reality.  And it has nothing to do with Sim or Nar styles, and so his nightmare concerns are not at all applicible to the kinds of games he likes.  This style of playing also has nothing explicitely to do with games where players get to add in details on the fly in Sim and Nar games, and most Gamist games.  It's a very specific, narrow and unique form of play -- and if this style of play is introducted into others styles of play it pretty much ruins them.  Which is why it rarely happens, and if it does happen, everyone walks away quickly feeling icky.

Finally, he asked why anyone might like such a game.  I think I now have the answer.

If all the preceding is correct (and it seems damned fine to me), the answer is simple -- but tricky.  The best example I can give is this: the bard/magician contest where the two competitors shapeshift with words or actual form, competing to see who can find the right object/animal to overpower his opponent.

I'd offer that this kind of delight is exactly the kind of delight found in these kinds of games -- imagination cut loose, but still fettered by logic and rules of what has come before.

Again, these kinds of games (Donjon, Munchausen) have *nothing at all to do* with building a Sim environment, or the veneer of reality needed for Nar play.  If such Sim games are "infected" by this style of play, most folks would balk, realize the whole thing had gone terribly amok, and, I hope, calmly put the brakes on it.  

So, Doc.  How's that?  The fun is in the aspect of the bard/magician contest.  It's a Gamsit strategy, meaning that people are using improvisation the way people use money in Monopoly in order to move their way to victory.  And these kinds of techniques have nothing at all to do with Sim or Nar games, (like HeroQuest, Sorcerer, The Pool), and even most Gamist games (D&D, Age of Heroes and more), where improvisation as tool for victory isn't on the table.

It's a very, very narrow and specific type of play, for a very specific mode of play (gamist).  And while one could (and probably should) start a whole new thread about whether or not players should be adding to reality alongside the GM and the problems of "consistant" reality, I think the concerns about a kind of "competing" reality have been answered in this post.  Yes, it exists, in very specific kinds of games, but not all games where players add in reality are these kinds of games.

Yes?

Christopher

[Walt Freitag]

Does anyone have any actual play or textual examples of the rules or play being used to Pooch Reality?...

I think you're not quite understanding the difference.  You are talking about retro-fitting of statements which have been verbalized and clearly negotiated among everyone at the table.  i.e. For you, anything which hasn't gone through this process isn't "reality" and thus can freely be "pooched".  But that's just based on one paradigm's view of what "reality" is.  In truth, none of this is physically real.  

For the experiential paradigm, the issue is retro-fitting of one's own mental image.  It is what is in people's heads that matters, not what is spoken.  i.e. I had pictured X in my mind's eye, but then something is declared which contradicts that and I have to retro-fit in Y.  In my experience, this happens all the time.  For example, I find that without a map, combat is generally full of little shufflings about and renegotiations.  

Liz: OK, I'm going to tackle Dot to drop us both into cover.  
John: Wait, what cover?  The reason why I was fighting maniacally was because I thought there was no cover.  
Liz: Can't there be a ditch nearby that we could flatten ourselves into?  It seems reasonable that there'd be something there for irrigation.  
...

Even given the same description, everyone will picture things slightly (or even majorly) differently.  Thus, people's imaginings are constantly clashing and being re-formed based on communication.  It happens on a small level constantly, and happens on a more major level pretty often.  More deep and detailed imagination is on one level good -- but this inevitably means that there will be more clashes and negotiation.

But, that can happen in any style of play. It can happen if the GM is describing the setting in strict adherence to pre-existing notes, it can happen if the GM is describing the setting by improvising (which, I'll warn Doc Xero, is something many GMs do a lot even in -- or especially in -- completely traditionally structured games), and sure, it can happen if players are using Director Stance to describe the setting. But it's never appeared to me any more likely to happen, or to happen any more severely, in one style of play versus another. What matters is the individuals: When the GM improvises, how good at it is he? When the players use Director stance, how mindful of the shared imaginings are they and how well do they communicate? When the GM describes from prepared notes and plans, how well thought out and internally consistent are those notes and plans? (And what happens if the players make unexpected choices that make those notes and plans obsolete?)

Doc Xero and Gordon are both right, in a sense. Gordon is accurately representing the prevailing view in the Forge community that there is no fundamental difference between a secret door that comes into play because it's on a GM's map and a secret door that comes into play because  a player narrates its presence. And at some level that's correct. But that equivalence shouldn't be overstated. The two techniques are very different in their ability to fulfill Creative Agendas in certain preferred ways. The placements of secret doors can have certain meanings in one case that they can't have in the other, and vice versa. If we assume Gamist play, for instance, the Gamist meaning of a secret door's placement on a map can be to challenge the player to figure out the most logical location where a secret door might be, and search for it there, with the reward being finding it (or finding it more quickly or less expensively). It cannot (without great difficulty) have that meaning if placed by a player using narration rights. The Gamist meaning of a secret door placed via player narration rights can be to challenge the player to make a wise allocation of narration rights resources (as in, which is most needed now: access to more locations (e.g. a secret door), more fighting resources (e.g. some arrows found on the floor), more enemies to fight (e.g. the arrival of a wandering monster), or what? It cannot (without great difficulty) have that meaning if its presence has been fixed on the GM's maps all along.

So, I agree with Doc Xero that there is a difference between a secret door from the GM's map and a secret door from a player's narration. It's not just a matter of different Techniques that get you to the exact same place (like, say, getting to a park by taking a train or driving a car). The two secret doors are different because even when within the same G/N/S mode of Creative Agenda, their meaning to the participants is different.

Where I disagree with Doc Xero is the terms "interactive" and "independent" for the two types of preferences in play (that is, for pre-established setting vs. improvised setting). I don't think either term accurately or fairly describes either preference. And I'm curious as to how Doc would place a GM improvising setting on the fly, within a traditionally GMed style of play using a typical system (let's say, d20), on the hypothetical VoINT-VoIND spectrum.

- Walt

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Walt,

I, too, had a bit of trouble wrapping my head around Independent and Interactive as useful labels.  But, given my last post, it seems to me what Doc had intuitively picked up on was a Gamist agenda -- the act of improvisation in Donjon or Munchausen is *more* "independent" than, say in a game of Sorcerer or AD&D.  

The fact that Doc wanted to know why anyone would want to play this way in a game with a presumed consistent and *cooperative* reality is where everyone kept getting whiplashes reading his posts -- no one would want to play that way with most games.  That's why there are very distinct kinds of games to handle The Bard's Game Style Play (tm).  

I think I now see where Doc's coming from.  But I also hardly see this as the "This  / Or This" split he started at the top of the thread.  As far as I can tell, this is a tiny option among many, many options of ways of playing -- and for reasons noted in my last post -- having fun.

Christopher

[Caldis]

I think there is something to the distinction made initially though it is horribly labelled.  As has been pointed out interactive and independant dont really fit the bill because to be socially functionally all games must be interactive.  However there are two different modes of play that seem to be related to but not directly linked to any GNS mode and not really at the creative agenda level.  The best terms I can think of to describe the modes would be proactive and reactive.


Someone playing in the proactive mode would be someone who wants to be creating the elements of the story as the game goes along.  There are a lot of narrativist tools that do this but its not directly linked because Donjon and other gamist games have used them as well.

Someone playing in the reactive mode would be reacting to a precreated world and/or plotline as is typical in the one gm multiple player roots of rpg's.   Again this stretches the gamut of gns modes because it can occur in vanilla nar, definitely sim, and gamism.

From my experience there are people who fit into both seperate categories.  Even with experience in narrativist games some people just dont like, dont want to, or cant be bothered to put in the effort to create story during play, they'd rather just react to what the gm has created.

Of course I'd have to add the caveat that it's unlikely that anyone is purely one or the other so that it's not unreasonable that someone who prefers to react would like to have a situation that interests them come up in the game.

[Doctor Xero]

I was going to respond with a lot of quotes, but really, I think it will be both more respectful and more to-the-point if I simply make some comments.

Thank you all for the postings.  I now have the answers to my questions -- I think.  Let me explain and then correct me if you disagree.

But first, three repeated misperceptions have been obscuring what might otherwise have been a more straightforward discussion, and I would ask everyone to make an effort not to repeat those misperceptions again.
First, as I wrote in my very first posting, I was establishing VoINT and VoIND as extreme ends of a spectrum -- with the implied hope that people more experienced with DonJon and such could help me understand the less extreme games since the polar parameters had been set.
Second, as I explained earlier, I had chosen the term "interactive" because that is the term we use in literature studies for what I have been describing about the relationship between reader and text.  I have not once intended VoINT to refer to player-to-player interaction, only to player-to-text interaction (except when the latter influences the former).  This confusion makes me eager for a Forge lexicon ; the idea that this definition of "interaction" might be particular to literary studies honestly never occurred to me.
Finally, I have not been attacking VoIND play -- I have been presenting examples of VoIND and VoINT in the sole hope that people would use these as springboards for explanation.  I enjoy VoINT play but would like to try out VoIND play.  However, I realize that I do not yet know the proper mindset to play and I do not yet know the proper mindset to avoid dysfunctional VoIND groups.  I had hoped to learn those mindsets from The Forge participants as well.

With that out of the way . . .

Alan mentioned something about not being able to play tennis without a net first.   I know where to look for a net in a VoINT game -- the game master handouts and such, and if I forget where the net is, I can always ask her or him.  I know how to interact with the net in a VoINT game.  What I wanted to know was how to find the net in a VoIND game.  The VoIND games I've read seemed to imply that the net is woven strand by strand throughout the game, and it reminded me of a time I played tennis with a friend using a netless court : we imagined where the net was, and we had a great deal of fun arguing over whether the volley would have cleared that imaginary net,  but we were not really playing tennis.  Just as we were not playing authentic chess that time we decided to alter the functions of the pieces according to die rolls.

If I understand the posts here, VoIND games still have a net -- they establish the basic parameters via group consensus on the spot rather than asking one person to establish it ahead of time.  The rest is negotiated or improvised as the games are played out, something which happens in most RPGs it seems to me.

Alan and Chris also brought up two things I hadn't considered.  They're right.

The online VoIND and convention VoIND games I've experienced involved people with no connection with each other outside the game of the moment, so there was less social contract for player-to-player support and cooperation.

More importantly, now that I think about it, I realize those convention sessions were gamist -- but when I had been asked to join, I had been lead to expect simulationist and/or narrativist  (although I'd never heard of the G/N/S terms at the time).  I've been trying to understand how to play the Lord of the Rings using DonJon and Fungeon, and the answer is not that I'm missing something -- it's that no one uses DonJon or Fungeon to play epic fantasy tragedy or such.

Some critics have noted that, in The Professor's LOTR epic, the world itself is a character in its own right, in some ways more so a character than some of the elves or humans.  (Critics have said the same thing about the Enterprise in Classic Trek.)  So in a game, changing the world in LOTR would be like changing a player-character.   RPGs such as DonJon and Fungeon have dungeons which are merely playing spaces or pallettes for the imagination, not characters.

Chris had mentioned magical battles.  This fits in with an insight from a friend of mine.  I was reading to a fellow grad student some of the postings on this topic, noting with frustration that I could think of no RPG which seems to be both VoINT and VoIND.  He then said to me something like, "Doesn't that describe that Mage game you told me about?"

I once watched (but never got to play in) over several weeks a series of wonderful Mage games which began with a game master and a firmly established setting for the players to use as springboards for their characters (i.e. Vision of Interaction).  The players were not into power trips or such, so the game master could trust them with a great deal of latitude.  As their characters become more powerful, they were able to have secret doors appear where they had not or such -- the gameworld become malleable -- and players established areas of mutable reality not unlike dream-time in Changeling (i.e. Vision of Independence).  As the mutability of the world increased, the game master became more and more a rules referee and fellow player and less the director(?) or author(?).

Have I got it?

Doctor Xero

P.S. Thank you for your insights, and I apologize for my part in any confusions apropos this subject.

P.P.S.  I enjoy expressing creativity, but I reserve my original creativity for the stories I write and hope someday to publish.  My gaming is where I express my creative impulses which would not work for my professional efforts.  I think of gaming and writing in the same way that Victor Buono described the campy 1960s Batman series and working in theatre: in theatre (for me, writing) he was an artist, but in Batman (for me, gaming) he got to have fun being a ham, the secret vice of any actor! <laughter>

P.P.P.S. I will steadfastly defend the legitimacy of the term "interaction" as I have used it when it comes to literary studies.  However, that is apparently not the term to use in game studies nor on The Forge.  What is the accepted term here for the reader-to-text relationship which we call "interactive" in literary studies?

[Caldis]

. I will steadfastly defend the legitimacy of the term "interaction" as I have used it when it comes to literary studies.  However, that is apparently not the term to use in game studies nor on The Forge.  What is the accepted term here for the reader-to-text relationship which we call "interactive" in literary studies?

I dont think there is a probably with the term interactive, I think the problem is with your use of independant as opposed to how you are using interactive.  The examples given showed players that were not only independant of any source material but independant of each other, something that is not typical of the games you were trying to describe.

I do feel the distinction you are making is a valid and interesting one, and one that I've seen in a lot of players, I would however change the language.  I suggested proactive and reactive above but calling what you term interactive as reactive may sound like a slight, how about interactive and creative?  One method is trying to interact with whats there the other is trying to create it all?

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Doc,

You wrote:

"I've been trying to understand how to play the Lord of the Rings using DonJon and Fungeon, and the answer is not that I'm missing something -- it's that no one uses DonJon or Fungeon to play epic fantasy tragedy or such."

I think that's pretty much it right there.  Or if they do, it's gonna be one weird ass version of the normal "fantasy campaign."

For myself, before I take off, I just want to be clear that Bardic Competition example I gave wasn't meant to be an analogy for "in game" magic, but a metaphor for the fun had while building reality as you go, often in a competative manner.  It's not just wizards using magic in the game, but the *players* using the magic of language, on the fly, in clever and creative ways.  

The fun, of course, is that there's always a net.  In the "literalized" version of the bardic competition, one man becomes seed to avoid being spotted by the hound, and then the hound becomes a chicken, because we know chicken pick up seeds with their beaks.

Not that you didn't understand all of this, or imply it some way.  But I want to be clear about this.  You asked about the fun of playing in something along the lines that you're calling VoIND.  And it's not just a matter of "in game" logic.  It is the fun of competing with the other players, riffing with language to build on what has come before to your own advantage.

Good luck with your gaming,

Christopher

[Alan]

Hi Doc,

I've always understood that you mean interaction with "text."  In fact, I've found it frustrating that you don't seem to understand that the "text" in a role-playing game is the agreed on content of the shared fantasy, not what the GM plans or the content of some published setting.  When a GM hands out information, or explains the setting, he's just entering material into the "text."  His material is not the "text."  Traditionally, this has been a major roleof the GM, but the process is no different if players are given the right to enter material into text - or to object or negotiate the entries of others.

So the simple answer to your question is that, in a game where players have the broad ability to create content, they interact with content already created.   In an extreme case, they may even start by putting up the net, but once that's done, they play over it.

This is also why worries about "pooching reality" are bogus - because players do interact with the "text" and revisions can only be made with the agreement of the other players.

For these reasons, the distingtion interaction vs. independant is meaningless, because, as you can see, all role-playing requires interaction with the "text."