Game Master IS System: One (of many) Types of Gaming

[Doctor Xero]

Vladimir: Wonderfully put application of contract/negotiation to the gaming experience in your first posting to this thread!  Cool!

Matt Snyder: You're right that no one can be truly objective.  What I was trying to emphasize was how changes in labels of game master ("fellow player" or "system utility") results in differences in group perspective, thereby modifying expectation and interaction.

What I expect from and accept from a utilty differs from what I expect from a fellow player.  How I interact with a player will be shaped according to whether I see myself as fulfilling the role of a fellow player or fulfilling the role of a utility.  How much of my self I dare invest in my interactions differs according to whether the social contract designates my niche as fellow player or as utility.  How my players will treat me when I game mastering changes according to whether they perceive me as a fellow player with whom to jostle and tease or as a game system utility to be made use of as they need it.

That difference is the one which particularly fascinates me!

Errath of Kosh: You write "When the GM has the least control is when he is most likely to be a part of system."  I would argue the reverse is also true.  And when the game master has little control, accusations of force and deprotagonization become recognizably faulty.

(Based on your handle, I keep hearing in my mind's ear your sign off as *ring tinkle chime* [whispery voice] "Cheers" *tinkle chime* -- or has it begun that I have forgotten something? < grin>)

TonyLB: "I know this is nitpicky, but I think it may be usefully nitpicky, since I think the same principle holds importantly in Social Contracts. An explicit social contract that simply claims "The players will assent to GM rulings" is less useful and communicative than "The players will assent to GM rulings in exchange for smooth and uninterrupted play of the game"."  Well put!

M. J. Young:  You make some excellent points (at least I think you do).

"Authority rests in those books; if anyone wants to know the rules of the game, the books can be referenced as an authoritative statement of those rules. However, credibility rests with me--specifically, I have the credibility to interpret and apply those rules, and in a very real sense (unless there is a serious challenge from the players) those rules mean what I say they mean, and they impact play the way I say they do." -- you present an interesting parallel between game master and Supreme Court justice, with gaming  books the equivalent of The Constitution and the body of legal precedents (I don't recall the technical term for that right now).

I have game mastered as per that model as well, although I am referring to a different model.

"I think the virtue in what Doc describes is his ability to be a good neutral referee; that is, he can be the authority and exercise the credibility fairly without bias. That's distinct from several other types of referees, many of whom can also be quite good--a good oppositional referee has to be able to exercise credibility fairly but with a certain type of bias that makes it possible for him to play against the players while still rendering unbiased judgments on resolutions. A good participationist referee exercises his credibility by taking over all outcomes and bringing the story to its intended conclusion."  Exactly!  You express it far better than did I.

What is 'OAD&D', by the way?  Oriental AD&D or Original AD&D or what?

Vladimir: I will have to disagree with the applicability of your statement about "Fiduciary Law requires me to act prudently in the best interest of the client" in that it applies only if the game master can be seen as parallel to fiduciary lawyers.  The same basic concern applies to your statement about "You can't enforce a contract to commit a crime. If I offer to pay you $10,000 to kill someone and you accept and perform the job, no court would help you collect that money. I don't consider limitations of that sort to be an infringement."

In some models, your parallel holds, and in those cases, I would agree with you.  I would especially agree with you apropos official Hackmaster, in which mistreated players can turn to a ?higher court? to have a hackmaster lose her or his official credentials to run a game if the hackmaster can be proven to have violated the letter of the rulebooks.

I am trying to present a different model, one which varies from the more common ones treating the game master functionary as judge/moderator/conductor by instead treating the game master functionary as a role taken up by someone willing to suspend her or his humanity in obedience to the will of the players.

Even I don't always follow that model -- but my recognition that such a model of the game master functionary even exists fascinates me, and I wonder about its ramifications.

Keep in mind that in many cultures around the world, the United States ideal of self-expression and individuation as a major goal would seem self-indulgently absurd -- they follow the ideals of complete submersion of the individual within her or his ascribed role.  So let's not forget that the idea of transforming from person into role, from individual into functionary, from player into game master, is logical and intuitively "proper" to many cultures which have successfully carried on for thousands of years.  (And even in the United States, for decades people have argued that one cause of adultery comes from a married man or married woman privileging his or her individuality over his or her role as spouse.)

Doctor Xero

[Matt Snyder]

Doc, that's cool. I see now what you're intrigued by in posting this thread. I haven't really come to my own final conclusions about it, but that's ok, too.

(My reservations are pretty subjective. *I* find that situation generally negative in how people treat their fellow GM as "not a player." But, I can see how, say, Gamists would want that tool without interference from the GM's "human factors.")

[ErrathofKosh]

Errath of Kosh: You write "When the GM has the least control is when he is most likely to be a part of system."  I would argue the reverse is also true.  And when the game master has little control, accusations of force and deprotagonization become recognizably faulty.

Perhaps, if you look at it from the players' point of view, when all of the authority and most of the credibility are present in the GM there can be a case made that he is the system.  But, in my mind, this must be entirely from the players' point of view!  

When you look at from the GM's point of view, he is not the system, he is using a system.  Even total Illusionism is system (I invoke the lP, ohm). :)
So, I understand your stance, I just take a slightly different one.

(Based on your handle, I keep hearing in my mind's ear your sign off as *ring tinkle chime* [whispery voice] "Cheers" *tinkle chime* -- or has it begun that I have forgotten something? < grin>)

<snicker>

Jonathan

[ErrathofKosh]

AS for use in actual play, I really like the idea of the GM being the black box 'round the system, i.e. you just tell the GM what you have in mind and he resolves it without showing off the metagame structure.  Of course, this would have to be almost a stated part of the Social Contract.  If I were writing rules for such a game, I would make that one of the first ideas introduced.  

Maybe, somewhere in my busy schedule, I'll find time to work on something like that.  Great post and ideas Doc.

Cheers,
Jonathan

EDIT: BTW, my manners come from my English side.  My bloodthirstyness is all Scottish...

[Valamir]

I am trying to present a different model, one which varies from the more common ones treating the game master functionary as judge/moderator/conductor by instead treating the game master functionary as a role taken up by someone willing to suspend her or his humanity in obedience to the will of the players.

Interesting.

So you are envisioning a GM striving to be more like the role of the computer in a computer RPG or MMORPG?  That the GM's sole effort should be to provide information about the immediate surroundings based on some model of what information can be known and to implement the resolution system as accurately and unbiasedly as a computer tracks results in Everquest or Baldur's Gate?

If so, I'm somewhat puzzled by the purpose.  It seems to me that the biggest advantage that table top roleplaying has over computer roleplaying (after the social factor) is that there is a human being able to exert human judgement over elements of play to a degree that no machine has yet acheived.

If you systematically strive to purge that human judgement from the GM's role, then what you have left seems little different from what you'd get with a computer GM except that the human is slower, less well organized, and doesn't come with pretty 3d graphics and flashy spell effects.


In otherwords, in any GMing model where the GM is expected to think like a human I believe my analogy holds.  

In a GMing model where the GM is expected to think and act mechanistically (where perhaps my model doesn't hold), I'm left wondering "why not just play a computer RPG?"


BTW:  Its been brought to my attention that we are chronically misspelling each others names.

You are Xero with an "r"
I am Valamir with an "a" and no "d"
:-)

[M. J. Young]

What is 'OAD&D', by the way?  Oriental AD&D or Original AD&D or what?

Sorry; I've been thrown by alphabet soup at times, too. The "O" stands for "Original", and I am told that this is the abbreviation Mr. Gygax now uses for what we have been calling "First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" to distinguish it from AD&D2 and AD&D3E (and now AD&D3.5).

--M. J. Young

[Doctor Xero]

I'm somewhat puzzled by the purpose.  It seems to me that the biggest advantage that table top roleplaying has over computer roleplaying (after the social factor) is that there is a human being able to exert human judgement over elements of play to a degree that no machine has yet acheived.

If you systematically strive to purge that human judgement from the GM's role, then what you have left seems little different from what you'd get with a computer GM except that the human is slower, less well organized, and doesn't come with pretty 3d graphics and flashy spell effects.

I concur . . .

Now, I don't feel dehumanized by the request, because I know that I've been asked to do this as a gesture of deep trust in my fairness with this gaming group, and we've all known each other for three-plus years in the heated intimacy of university life, but still, being told that I am trusted in the same way as a die-20, while a testament to trust, also feels . . . well . . . odd . . . < laughter>

On the other hand, I really do think that one of the major causes of arguments over the likelihood of game master force or deprotagonization or intrusion or whatever comes from multiple models assumed to be the same model :
is the game master just a fellow player, a first among equals? --
is the game master an exalted gamer, with greater authority and import than a player? --
is the game master a human striving to be more like a creative addendum to the game mechanics and system? --
is the game master an auteur director or story leader?

People hold different default models of the game master, yet argue about the game master functionary without ensuring they hold the same model.

Also, this new model intrigues me because it treats the game master as part of a system, less a member of the social group and more the hired help or commissioned performer.

You are Xero with an "r"
I am Valamir with an "a" and no "d"
:-)

Ah, so your name has no Transylvanian antecedents, and you weren't making a pun off my name and Zeno's paradox?  Wow!  No offense given nor taken on this end nor the other, I hope.

Doctor Xero

[Valamir]

Ah, so your name has no Transylvanian antecedents, and you weren't making a pun off my name and Zeno's paradox? Wow! No offense given nor taken on this end nor the other, I hope.

Heh, I wish I was clever enough to have thought of that on purpose...

Valamir was an Ostrogoth King who fought in Atilla's army and then led the Germanic coalition against the Huns after Atilla's death.  He was the uncle of the more famous Theodoric who defeated Odoacer and conquered western Rome.

In one of those strange and vaguely eerie coincidences, Valamir did send Theodoric to be a hostage in Constantinople...to Emperor Zeno...

[tani autumnwood]

i read the thread and i'm stumped on how applied contractal law gets applied to the relationship between players and gm.  now i'm not criticizing because i have never actually played pen and paper rpg in the place to actually comment on what ought to be the relationship between the players and gm.  however, i remember something i read on the topic of jurisprudence, there was a doctrine that says the body of laws as we have now are actually internally inconsistent and therefore all sentences made thus far in history are basically judges making their own laws.  not that i necessarily believe in it, but it is something to think about... and gm, from what i have read so far, seem to be considered as a judge.  and so i want to ask:

this is especially regarding to valamir's point - that systematically eliminating human judgement from the process constitutes an antithesis to having a human gm -  is the judge's purpose to descibe the law and make only deductive judgement from that? or is he in the position to prescribe what is ought to be done?  the other question is about the players: do they refer to the gm to describe what is going on or prescribe what is ought be going on?  and do the players decided what is to happen that is in the realm of physis (nature) rather than just thesis (artifical stuff, espeically confined to their own actions only)?  shouldn't the gm be in the place to decide what is to happen that is in the realm of physis (nature), yet only in the descriptive way, or is it fine to mod physis in a presciptive way - as in descibe nature normatively?

my opinion on the matter is that a gm prescibing what the world "ought" to be doesn't make much sense.  since the players in that case would not be exploring the world per se but only exploring the gm's fiat and perhaps his taste.  if the players were to involve in prescibing what's in physis, it would even make less sense because then they are not exploring but creating a world - basically an excercise of their fiat in a supernatural context (they are prescribing what ought to be in nature after all).  on the other hand, the gm do excercise some judgement but i cannot see why it would be done outside of moderating players behaviour or acting in npcs' proxy.  also, i am skeptical about human being necessarily worse in moding if the human judgement is taken out - after all, computers needs programmers and programme are as good as their programmers.  in order to program in some set rules for a game, someone has to enumerate the rules that would describe all possible "worlds" that can happen in the game.  the problem is that much of our experience are ad hoc impressions rather than some epiphanic realization of some consistent physical laws - so the summation of our experience, which is properly induction, does not let us reliably iterate some form of laws that would allow us to describe all possible worlds.  with a human gm, i can envisage how sometimes those ad hoc experience would help to facilitate what would be otherwise missed in a generalized law people created prior to the event.  however, i couldn't quite grasp how it can rather be benificial if the gm use this to prescibe rather than descibe the physis of the world.

it is in this sense that i guess i also feel that the gm is only part of the "system" in that its duty is to sort out deductively what the rules describe in any given situation - the gm actualizes the general rules into particular instances.

then again, of course, a pnp rpg session could be understood as a creative process for creating a collective fiction.  but i'd think that would preclude activities such as "exploration" since, by definition, fiat would not be something one explores - may be the effects of exercising one's fiat, but not fiat itself.

after saying all that, of course, it may be me that is totally off base here.

[M. J. Young]

Welcome to the Forge, Tani. You raise some good questions, and I'm not going to attempt to address them all; but a couple of clarifying points might help.

First, in relation to the role of the "GM", a good part of this thread is based on the fact that there is not a single definition of what the role of a GM is, and that such a definition is not possible because that will vary from game to game. It's a bit like asking what are the win conditions in a card game--obviously, that depends on the card game. Around here we tend to refer to "GM Tasks" or "GM Responsibilities" or even "GM Credibility", and then attempt to distinguish the many and varied things that game masters do in role playing games, so that we can consider which tasks necessarily should be in the hands of some sort of game leader and which ones should be distributed among the other players at the table, to best satisfy the objectives of a particular game. Thus in some games referees are going to be fair judges of outcomes, and in another game they're going to be strategic opponents for the players, because the games have different objectives.

In regard to the use of "exploration", it has taken on a rather complicated meaning here which may take a moment to grasp; but if you'll permit I'll attempt to put it in perspective.

We agree that all play involves the creation of events within a shared imaginary space; that is, everyone at the table is attempting to imagine the same thing happening. In most more traditional play, one of those players, called the GM or something similar, describes all the elements of setting, all the antagonists, all the critical points in the situation; the other players each describe the actions of one character. Note, however, that in describing the actions of their characters, those players are creating within the shared imaginary space. Thus exploration is inescapably creation in role playing.

The question that this raises is simple: what are the limits of creation for the various participants in the game? The answer is not so straightforward, however. It relates to levels and types of credibility. To illustrate this, consider the following exchange:

Referee: The room is a bedroom, apparently of a woman.

Player: I walk over to the dresser and look in the top drawer for a scarf or something similar with which I can bandage my hand. While I'm there I'll look at the knick-knacks on the dresser to see what they might tell me about the owner.[/list:u]
Note that the referee said nothing about a dresser, nor about clothes in the dresser, nor about knick-knacks anywhere in the room. The player took the statement that the room looked like the bedroom of a woman and extrapolated from that, creating the dresser, the scarf, and the presence of knick-knacks, all of which are at least highly likely to be in a woman's bedroom.

In some games, that would be outrageous; the player would have to ask the referee whether there was a dresser, and where it was, and whether there was anything on it, whether the drawers opened, and what was in them. In most games, though, it would be taken in stride that the player was acting within the parameters established by the referee.

In

some games, the players would have the credibility to go far beyond that, "exploring" the shared imaginary space by creating anything that was appropriate within it. "I look in the top drawer and find love letters; I'm tempted to read them, but for the moment I pocket them."

I hope that helps.

--M. J. Young

[Callan S.]

Hi Tani, welcome to the forge.

my opinion on the matter is that a gm prescibing what the world "ought" to be doesn't make much sense. since the players in that case would not be exploring the world per se but only exploring the gm's fiat and perhaps his taste. if the players were to involve in prescibing what's in physis, it would even make less sense because then they are not exploring but creating a world - basically an excercise of their fiat in a supernatural context (they are prescribing what ought to be in nature after all).

This is, in my opinion, like a belief paradigm I had that had to crack so I could move on. Here's an example of why it should crack.

Imagine a group of gamers who don't know that gun powder is basiclly ruined when it gets wet. Their PC's run around with muskets in a swamp, dunking them all day then firing them.

However, they are adhering perfectly to physics as they know it. They can honestly say there is no fiat being used here.

Now, just one of them finds out gun power is ruined when immersed in water. He plays in the game and now he can't honestly say no fiat is being used.

But say he researches further and finds out some gun powders are water resistant and there's a good chance the PC's have been using that all along.

What happens to fiat now? Are they? Aren't they? Are they just making it up, aren't they?

Really, your always working with belief. The GM making it all up doesn't make it more or less a matter of belief, instead his interpretation is more or less to your taste/belief or mine.

[Doctor Xero]

At the risk of writing what may appear to be a silly "applause" posting, I make the following comments :

Around here we tend to refer to "GM Tasks" or "GM Responsibilities" or even "GM Credibility", and then attempt to distinguish the many and varied things that game masters do in role playing games, so that we can consider which tasks necessarily should be in the hands of some sort of game leader and which ones should be distributed among the other players at the table, to best satisfy the objectives of a particular game. Thus in some games referees are going to be fair judges of outcomes, and in another game they're going to be strategic opponents for the players, because the games have different objectives.

I've read a number of efforts in my time at The Forge to clarify the relevance of the innumerable discussions on game master function, and this has to be the clearest explanation I have come across yet!  Well done!

Referee: The room is a bedroom, apparently of a woman.
Player: I walk over to the dresser and look in the top drawer for a scarf or something similar with which I can bandage my hand. While I'm there I'll look at the knick-knacks on the dresser to see what they might tell me about the owner.[/list:u]
Note that the referee said nothing about a dresser, nor about clothes in the dresser, nor about knick-knacks anywhere in the room. The player took the statement that the room looked like the bedroom of a woman and extrapolated from that, creating the dresser, the scarf, and the presence of knick-knacks, all of which are at least highly likely to be in a woman's bedroom.

In some games, that would be outrageous; the player would have to ask the referee whether there was a dresser, and where it was, and whether there was anything on it, whether the drawers opened, and what was in them. In most games, though, it would be taken in stride that the player was acting within the parameters established by the referee.

In

some games, the players would have the credibility to go far beyond that, "exploring" the shared imaginary space by creating anything that was appropriate within it. "I look in the top drawer and find love letters; I'm tempted to read them, but for the moment I pocket them."

Similarly, I've read many efforts in my time at The Forge to explain the variety of possible levels of player-game master interaction when it comes to the creation of the shared imagined space, and again, this has to be the clearest explanation I have come across yet!  I wish I had encountered it when I was first struggling to understand the notions of GM-less play and author's stance!

Doctor Xero