Quick question on in game consequence

[Marco]

This basically agrees with your position.  I think we disagree about the extraordinary case in which everybody forgets about the vase, but since it's difficult to imagine a circumstance in which that would actually happen in play, I can't get too worked up about it.

Bill

Agreed, Bill--except that in the case where everyone forgets about it, I'm still agreeing that one can correctly say "nothing happened--system wasn't invoked" or "there was no adjudication"--but I'm also pointing out that that's a purely academic stance. The reality of the situation is that most people I know don't apply that same rigor to other media wherein they treat the fictional universe as though it were a real world.

Also: I think that in most cases the GM is implicitly tasked with the responsiblity of running a consistent world and doing otherwise would be seen (by me, at least) as a breach of agreement. This is why I expect most players to blame the pusher of the vase rather than the GM who was complicit in having it fall despite the lip-service given to the GM being "responsible" for gravity (i.e. the GM may be tasked with running it but is not held personally culpable for damage incurred by it if the parites agree that his call was reasonable).

-Marco

[TonyLB]

It seems to me that everyone agrees that when a vase is thrown from the balcony, the SIS must now include either a broken vase, an "exception" of some sort, or an ambiguity that could resolve to either, based on later evidence.  What I'm not sure people agree on is what evidence (for the players) proves or disproves the existence of an exception.

So, follow-up question for people:

If a vase goes over the balcony, then I...

[*](a) Assume my character hears a crash a few seconds later unless specifically told otherwise[*](b) Assume my character does not hear a crash unless told otherwise[*](c) Assume nothing, and ask whether I hear a crash.[*](d) Something else[/list:u]
EDIT:  Crossposted with Marco... to link more directly to current emphasis... the GM clearly has some authority over exceptions.  So he is equally responsible for the vase breaking if people commonly assume (b) or (c) but not if they assume (a).

[Praetor Judis]

Honestly, I think in the real world, if we're going to make blanket assumptions. we can only assume that the answer will vary depending on the the group's dynamic.

We cannot come up with a definitive answer, as so many factors come to play around the table.  How important to the story is the vase?  How much do the players trust the storyteller?  Who's the biggest influence on the SIS?

I've played with groups where the players work together to generate the SIS, and I just guide them.  I've played with groups where I'm in nearly complete control of the SIS, with players asking questions about the most minute parts of the experience.  And this is all with the same system.

[aplath]

1. I declare this action.
2.

So what happens in #2? What happens next. Can you apply certain principles to determine the outcome?

The simple answer would be that according to the Lumpley Principle the outcome will be determined by System.

Lumpley Principle

System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play.

In the end this means that there is no single answer for your question. And that's probably why you got so many diferent answers. :-)

But it also means that the answer to your question is YES, you can apply certain principles to determine the outcome. Basically that's what System is afterall. And given one instance of System in a particular game group, the results would (should) probably be consistent throughout.

Andreas

[Bill_White]

Now we're getting somewhere.  We use "System" to tell us what happens to the vase...which, if we buy Lumpley's Principle, directly suggests that how we figure out who gets to say what happens in the game world tells us what happens to the vase.  The next question is "Well, how exactly does system do that?"

(And you can't just say "It depends," because it depends on something)

What it depends on, of course, is how the system apportions responsibility in the IIEE (Intent, Initiation, Execution, Effect) cycle.

Let's go back up on the balcony.  Noon is the player, Midnight is his character, and I'm the GM.

Bill:  "There's a vase on the railing of the balcony."
Noon:  "I push it off."
Bill:  "Roll a d20."
Noon:  "I rolled a 1.  What happens to the vase?"

My system will tell me which of these is an appropriate response:

(1) INTERVENTION AT THE LEVEL OF INTENTION

Bill:  "The vase is sitting there on the railing."
Noon:  "Huh?"
Bill:  "It's too beautiful.  Midnight wants to keep it."

(2) INTERVENTION AT THE LEVEL OF INITIATIVE

Bill:  "Before you can move, a Vase Guardian appears and puts you in a full-nelson.  It throws you off the balcony."
Noon:  "If we forget about this, do I ever hit the ground?"

(3)  INTERVENTION AT THE LEVEL OF EXECUTION

Bill:  "You miss.  In fact, you miss so badly you hurl yourself off the balcony by accident."
Noon:  "Well, when I get back up to the balcony, can I try again?"

(4)  INTERVENTION AT THE LEVEL OF EFFECT

Bill:  "The vase falls and hit the ground, but it doesn't break."
Noon:  "Huh?"
Bill:  "It made its save vs. breaking."

My point is that a more precise answer is possible than, "It depends on the group."  We can ask, "How does the system hand out the ability to intervene in the player's IIEE, and to counter other people's interventions?"  And, once we know the answer, we can say (for our particular game), whether or not that's the way we want to do it.

[Marco]

So he is equally responsible for the vase breaking if people commonly assume (b) or (c) but not if they assume (a).

When I asked about responsiblity I meant in terms of being held culpable for a vase being broken (in the sense that I stipulated that another player had his character push the vase and you felt mildly wronged by its loss or potential loss in-game).

Would your ire be equally directed at the GM in the case that he doesn't narrate a crash as the player who had his character push it?

-Marco

[Callan S.]

So the current arguement is, is that if I declare I push the vase and then look to my GM for a reaction...

The result is so predictable that the GM's responce is a consequence of that. Or looking at it from further out, the Systems responce is a consequence of that.


Keep in mind I'm not going to say that magic becomes involved, or some mysterious factor comes in. In fact it's all just like the RL world example. In fact, to confirm that lets assume the GM says "The vase falls and breaks on the ground".

This is a consequence of my declaration.


No, that is an illusion, like a magicians trick. A magician can produce 'consequences' from certain actions. They aren't true consequences though. He did perform actions, and the results seen are the consequences of them. But these actions aren't seen by the audience, and the actions he did show to the audience have nothing to do with the consequence produced.

My declaring that I push the vase and the GM declaring it broke? They are not associated in the least. And by association, and be careful to read this part without skimming, I mean associated like pushing a vase in real life and its associated shattering.

Expecting the GM to be plausible? No, that doesn't link the two at all. It's the trigger for a number of hidden actions which aren't anything at all like the actions of a vase tipping and falling.

I'd go into more detail, but I don't want to second guess the following posts question angles, which usually don't cover what I thought they would.

[TonyLB]

Marco:  Of my (a), (b) and (c) the only one where the vase can break without direct GM intervention is (a).

So no, I don't equally direct my ire at the GM in the case that the narration happens by default (i.e. if he doesn't specifically create an exception there is a consensus understanding that the logical consequence holds).  It's a sin of omission, not one of commission, and that makes a difference on a social level.

[eef]

I've been trying to figure out the context of this thread.  I'm not saying that there isn't a context,  or an invalid one, just that there is an unarticulated context and this lack of articulation is causing confusion.

What I believe the original point to be is that 'causation' is a meaningless concept is RPGs.  RPGs are rituals and the SIS is a convienient fiction that has no existance and hence no grounds for causation.

A classic principle of philopsophy is that theories will often have a version that is trivally true, but the 'trivial trueness'  also makes the theory profoundly uninteresting.  The standard example is Hedonism, the philosophy that everybody acts for their own pleasure.  Hedonism has trouble explaining people that suffer for others, say in wartime.  The 'trivially true' version of Hedonism says that when you take all of their desires and pleasures together, soldiers in wartime still get more pleasure from being in combat than they would being at home.  You can't argue with logic like that; I mean literally, it turn the theory into a tautology and the act of making it true makes it a basically meaningless statement about the human condition.  The interesting version of Hedonism, that people should act for their own pleasure, is probably false but at least worth talking about.

I think we have a similar situation here.  It is trivially true that causation is meaningless in RPGs.  It's also boring.  It's much more interesting to allow for causation to exist in SIS, and agrue about the nature of that causation.

--eef, who is planing on chanting "There is no vase, there is no vase ..." the next time my character needs to do something really crazy.

[Marco]

Marco:  Of my (a), (b) and (c) the only one where the vase can break without direct GM intervention is (a).

So no, I don't equally direct my ire at the GM in the case that the narration happens by default (i.e. if he doesn't specifically create an exception there is a consensus understanding that the logical consequence holds).  It's a sin of omission, not one of commission, and that makes a difference on a social level.

I'm not sure I fully understand. What about if he narrates the breaking of the vase--then is he complicit with the pusher (in terms of culpability)?

-Marco

[M. J. Young]

Your character pushes the vase off the third floor balcony toward the lawn. Given the distance and the surface, maybe it wouldn't break, and maybe if it did break you wouldn't know it. I'm the referee; I don't say anything more about the vase, but I'm about to have a non-player character ask you, in a rather angry voice, why you did that--when the doorbell rings.

I pay the pizza guy, we split up the pizza, and then after the usual disruption we get back to the game, but I forget about the interaction over the vase. You do something else, have your character leave the area, and then suddenly you say, "By the way, what happened to the vase?"

I haven't a clue. The fact is, though, that at this moment I don't need to know. There's no way your character can find out what happened to the vase, and no particular reason for me to tell you what happened to the vase, so I don't have to make that decision.

I will probably reply, "How would you know?"

I actually do this all the time when I run games. I do it when I do know the answer to the question, but sometimes I do it when there has been no reason for me to worry about that question.

Next session, a month later real time and a week later game time, you return to the house. One of us remembers that vase. Maybe you say something about it; maybe I just remember it. At that moment, I can roll the dice or use whatever mechanics I think apply to the situation, or I can make the decision--and at that moment it is determined that last month, a week ago in the game world, the vase broke. In one sense, at the moment I made the decision, it broke in the past.

Schroedinger's Cat.

In The Mouse That Roared there is a moment when the Q-bomb, capable of clearing most of Europe if it detonates, starts to make noise, and the person holding it tosses it in the air. We get this silly idea that if it hits the ground it's going to explode. Yet it keeps getting tossed around, making more and more noise, as representatives from governments all around the world in turn catch it, realize it's live, and throw it away (as if not having it in your hands when it destroys all of Europe will save you). Ultimately it is caught by someone from Grand Fenwick, and the designer of the bomb shuts it down.

If you didn't see what happened to the vase, and you didn't hear what happened to the vase, you are assuming it hit the ground and broke. It might have landed in the hedge, or been seen and caught by the gardener, or passed through the leaves of a tree to be slowed and deposited on the grass below.

Until someone with the credibility to determine what happened to the vase makes that determination, the thing has not yet happened in real time; at the moment that determination is made in real time, the thing has happened to the vase at the appropriate moment in game time, and is only now being realized within the shared imaginary space. Whether that fellow who was going to yell at you about the vase does so now, and tells you that it broke (or that you were lucky it didn't break), or whether you swing past the grounds and find shards of the broken vase, or whether you ask what happened to it and apologize for knocking it over, now is the time at which we determine what happened then. Until that determination is made, nothing happened then; once that determination is made, it retroactively defines those past events.

As far as who causes it, I think that the legal concept of intervening cause may apply. No one would say of someone thrown from a third story window that gravity killed him; we would say that the person who threw him killed him. If I shot him before he hit the ground, and he died of the gunshot, then I killed him, because I intervened. If I caught him before he hit the ground, then I intervened and prevented him from being killed. If I could have caught him but I didn't, I'm not responsible for his death--I may have let it happen, but I didn't cause it.

Your action of pushing the vase off the balcony is inherently your request to have system act upon the vase in the expected way. I as referee might try to find a means to prevent the most probable outcome from occurring, but if I fail to adjudicate it according to system I've violated your expectations. You initiated the interaction of system with the objects in the shared imagined space. If it hits the ground and smashes, it's due to your decision to involve that part of system, not due to my failure to derail the outcome.

The player is responsible.

--M. J. Young

[TonyLB]

Marco:  I would say that if the expectation is that things do not happen in the game world unless and until the GM says they happen then yes I would view the GM as more culpable than if he just held veto power over a consensus view of cause and effect.

This is an emotional, not a logical, response.  The GM not acting to save a vase that is globally assumed to be breaking unless otherwise described, and the GM affirming the players intent explicitlyfeel like different situations, to me.

[Marco]

Marco:  I would say that if the expectation is that things do not happen in the game world unless and until the GM says they happen then yes I would view the GM as more culpable than if he just held veto power over a consensus view of cause and effect.

Okay, understood. Which is your actual assumption in general play for traditional games? Does it change from setting to setting? Do you have a standard as a GM and another as a player?

-Marco

[Doug Ruff]

Marco:  I would say that if the expectation is that things do not happen in the game world unless and until the GM says they happen then yes I would view the GM as more culpable than if he just held veto power over a consensus view of cause and effect.

Hmmm... the GM may be responsible for the breaking of the vase, but (in this example) the players have previously agreed (Contracted, even?) to give the GM that power.

IMHO, the players therefore have to share the 'culpability'.

Compare this to a setting where the players exert more responsibility for resolving events:

Player: "I push the priceless vase off of the railing; it tumbles to the ground, smashing into a thousand pieces. That will teach him to insult my honour!"

In this example, the player is responsible, but if the GM has given 'permission' for this style of play - guess what? Culpability is still shared.

If you buy this concept, the only time someone is to blame is when they 'break' the accepted pattern by narrating (or failing to narrate) the effect that follows their action.

BTW, how does this fit in with G/N/S, CA, Social Contract etc? Please help the newbie!

Doug

[Bill_White]

So the current argument is, is that if I declare I push the vase and then look to my GM for a reaction...[snip]...lets assume the GM says "The vase falls and breaks on the ground".  This is a consequence of my declaration.

This is not exactly what I was arguing.  I was trying to say that "consequences" (i.e., "outcomes") emerged as a joint production of, in this case, player and GM.  This production is mediated (i.e., shaped and constrained) by system, and indexed to common-sense, real-world expectations.  This is a little more subtle than "Player proposes, GM disposes."

No, that is an illusion, like a magician's trick. A magician can produce 'consequences' from certain actions. They aren't true consequences though. He did perform actions, and the results seen are the consequences of them. But these actions aren't seen by the audience, and the actions he did show to the audience have nothing to do with the consequence produced.

What you're tweaking to here is that, by our native theory of language, we use words to represent reality.  When we face the conundrum of no actual reality against which to compare our verbal representations, our native theory has a hard time guiding us.

But that's no more (and no less) illusory than the rest of our language use, which relies on our ability to manipulate symbols, not real things.

Let me put it this way:  Imagine we're sitting at a table, and I ask you to pass the salt, and you do it.  In what sense is your salt passage not a consequence of my request?  And how is that different from, in a game, you telling me that you're going to push the vase off the balcony?

You have to remember what Plato once said:  Language isn't magic.  Asking you to pass the salt isn't like casting a "create salt" spell.  In the latter, I get the salt because I say the words correctly.  It's only because there is a social context in which saying "Pass the salt, please" has meaning and a common-sense reaction that I can expect it to be more-or-less effective.

Similarly, saying "I push the vase" is consequential in exactly the same way:  The effects are jointly constructed by participants, mediated by "system" (rules for manipulating language) and indexed to common-sense expectations about how the world works.

Bill