Sim-Diceless thread search

[clehrich]

Hi gang,

I'm working on something at the moment, which you won't be surprised to hear is wildly theoretical and probably completely bizarre, and I won't talk your eyes off (like talking your ears off but on a screen, maybe) until I have some idea what I'm talking about, BUT

I'm wondering what's been said about Sim and Diceless.  So that could be Sim with Drama or Karma mechanics, I guess.  I'm really looking for something where the GM adjudicates the final result, but it's not done through dice at all.

Has there been anything discussed 'round these parts?  I did a search, but got kind of swamped, because Sim and Diceless kind of tend to come up a lot, and I didn't find anything immediately obviously useful.

I'm trying to theorize this out, and I'd rather not reinvent the wheel.  Besides, it's always more interesting to be part of an established conversation than to be a voice crying out in the wilderness.  Amen.

Any suggestions?

Yes, before you ask, I have read Ron's essay on Sim: The Right to Dream.

[Trevis Martin]

I would suggest looking up Theatrix as that is what I believe it is.

Trevis

[Jonathan Walton]

And Nobilis, which is resource-driven, GM-determined-target-number-based Sim.  And the recent (and now dead) Marvel Universe, though it throws in some strategic Gamism with the Sim.  I assume you're familiar with Amber's GM-arbitrated-Karma-based Sim/Nar beastie.  And, then, of course there's Everway and the equally interesting Drama/Karma/Fortune hybrid of Feder & Schwert's Engel (which is available as a free PDF in English, since White Wolf dumped the original system).  And, recently, there's Code of Unaris, the heavy-Karma-with-dramatic-editing game made specifically for chat.  Diceless games are my thing, if you can't tell ;)

As for threads on the subject, I don't recall any in particular.  If you're heading towards heavy Drama/Karma mechanics with GM arbitration, you're approaching the limit of freeform (to use a math metaphor).  You can see this at work in Engel, actually, where the authors seek to tack on some fairly superficial mechanics around a system that is essentially freeform with tarot-like interpretation as a tool/crutch for figuring out where narrative authority lies (GM or individual players?).  I don't know how much freeform play you've done, Chris, but, in my experience, freeform is almost totally Drama-determined (though this is subjective, so individual players can have different ideas about what would be the "coolest" thing to have happen), with a bit of Karma thrown in, often in the form of "but my swordsman could totally have dodged that!"

Despite what many Fortune-hounds will tell you, these kinds of freeform systems can be quite functional, assuming a strong social contract where the details of "who-determines-what" are understood by all.  Online roleplay of the "collaborative fiction" variety often takes this form, and I've run several tabletop games in this style that were very enjoyable.  In any case, I would suggest that you try to look more into this kind of thing, since it seems a strong parallel to your stated goals.

[timfire]

Has there been anything discussed 'round these parts?  I did a search, but got kind of swamped, because Sim and Diceless kind of tend to come up a lot, and I didn't find anything immediately obviously useful.

I don't have much to add, other to say that I did a search for "Sim AND diceless" in the general forums and only got 16 hits (this thread included). But none of seemed immediately helpful, though I didnot read all of them.

[clehrich]

Okay, let me try this differently.  I'm mostly wondering what the options are in terms of structuring an arbitrary decision-making process such that it is as close to transparent as possible, and I'm interested in what gets done with and embedded within such resolution systems.

As I understand it, Sim basically doesn't want to have mechanics, because they screw with the Dream.  But Sim also kind of needs mechanics, because otherwise you have to hand over the authority to decide to a non-arbitrary decision-maker, like a GM.  And as soon as you start thinking, "hey, the GM is making all his decisions based on a notion of how a cool kung fu movie ought to go," you are on the verge of saying, "our causality is toast and the GM has hijacked it to make a silly movie we don't want."  Does this make sense?  I'm talking about theoretical limits here, purist Sim (not exactly Purist for System, but purist).

In theory, purist Sim doesn't want dice either, because you have to step out of the Dream to roll them, figure out what they mean, and then go back to the Dream.  But that may be preferable to a system in which the Dream is actually broken rather than put on "pause."  Do you see?

Basically what I'm trying to pick at is the nature of decision-making in Sim: what it has to do, what it shouldn't do, what the priorities are, and so forth.  I think this is actually quite complicated.  It seems to me that most of the diceless stuff I know about skates close to the limit of Story Pretty Soon, if you will, and could perhaps lend itself to the Impossible Thing criticism.  In other words, if you decide to avoid overt resolution arbitrariness by shifting to a biased resolution, the biases generally seem to be kissing-cousins with Nar or Gam.  On the other hand, the stuff that has dice always has to have a kind of magic sign up that says, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"  Everyone knows that the dice aren't part of the Dream, but one of the required special points is that you pretend you don't see that.  I don't really think either Nar or Gam have this kind of deep-rooted ambivalence, and I'm interested in what that's really about.  

But the point for this thread is to ask if other people have suggestions about how different Sim diceless resolution systems work, what effects they have, what claims their proponents make about them, etc.

Ideally, I'd rather not have to buy a whole stack of games, either, since if I had book money I should be spending it on quite different books, but since I don't have book money the point is moot. :)

Neel K. PM'ed me a fascinating article he wrote about causality and modal logic and such, which I don't fully understand yet but is really intriguing.

Any other suggestions?

[Jonathan Walton]

But the point for this thread is to ask if other people have suggestions about how different Sim diceless resolution systems work, what effects they have, what claims their proponents make about them, etc.

Well, why didn't you just say so? :)

I have the most experience with Nobilis, so let me start there.  It often works like this:

----

GM: When the sun rose today, the sky remained black as pitch, a dark background upon which the sun blazed down like one engorged star shining in the night.  Scientists and meteorologists scrambled to come up with an explanation for the phenomenon, but the global community of spirits and principalities turned to you, as the Power of Light, for an answer.

[GM pitches a situation out, building/supporting the Dream.]

Player: I use a Greater Divination of Light to figure out where all the light has gone.

[Player declares an IC action, fully within the Dream still.]

Karma & Resource Management: A Greater Divination is a Level 5 Miracle, and the Player has an Attribute of 3, say, so she spends 2 Miracle Points to accomplish the Miracle.

[Here's the point of Dream Breakage that you mentioned, where the players have to think about things that aren't part of the game world.  You're right that I think most heavy Sim games, and especially diceless ones, try to minimize this step as much as possible.]

GM: All of the light spirits are hiding just on the edges of the horizon, out of the eyesight of the sun, who they are deathly afraid of.

[And then the GM comes it to restore the Dream and get the action moving again.]

----

So the way Nobilis deals with the problem is just minimizing the amount of OOC stuff that has to happen.  You compare two numbers and then pay resource points up to the value you need.  Still, it's mostly based on a traditional resolution model, where you have multiple players declare things and then resolve via some kind of OOC mechanic.

Another method, used by Engel and, to a lesser extent, Everway, it to make the tools of OOC determination part of the game world as much as you can.  Engel uses a special deck of cards which have images from the game world on them: the Abbott, the Archangels, the Lord of the Flies, etc.  So when you pick up a card and get "the Abbott Reversed," you don't have to step out of the Dream much.  You can read it as "something's wrong with the Abbott" or "what occurs in this scene is a reversal of the values that the Abbott represents."  In both cases, you're still thinking relative to the Dream, so the break (if it even occurs) isn't very jarring.

Another completely IC mechanic, which I just thought of, is the fencing rules in Skotos' online game, Castle Marrach.  The players type in things like "I feint deftly" and "I thrust gracefully" and then the computer handles all the resolution, with the adverbs just adding color for all the people watching, including the dueling players.  Is that something more like the GM-driven resolution system that you're imagining?  Where the players never have to break from the Dream at all?

Neel K. PM'ed me a fascinating article he wrote about causality and modal logic and such, which I don't fully understand yet but is really intriguing.

Hmm, I'll have to get a copy of that.  I haven't read anything from Neel in a month, since the PRC seems to have decided to block 20by20room.com as a danger to national security...

[clehrich]

Well, why didn't you just say so? :)

Yeah, bite me.  Because I'm still grasping toward what I'm looking for, you stinker.  :)

So the way Nobilis deals with the problem is just minimizing the amount of OOC stuff that has to happen.  You compare two numbers and then pay resource points up to the value you need.  Still, it's mostly based on a traditional resolution model, where you have multiple players declare things and then resolve via some kind of OOC mechanic.

Okay, so Nobilis keeps the actual task determination with the player, who simply ascribes numbers to success or failure, and those numbers have some in-character meaning.  The GM restores the Dream by moving from task determination to task narration.  Something like that?

Another method, used by Engel and, to a lesser extent, Everway, it to make the tools of OOC determination part of the game world as much as you can.  Engel uses a special deck of cards which have images from the game world on them: the Abbott, the Archangels, the Lord of the Flies, etc.  So when you pick up a card and get "the Abbott Reversed," you don't have to step out of the Dream much.  You can read it as "something's wrong with the Abbott" or "what occurs in this scene is a reversal of the values that the Abbott represents."  In both cases, you're still thinking relative to the Dream, so the break (if it even occurs) isn't very jarring.

I clearly have to read Engel, since this was my own aesthetic principle for Shadows in the Fog: make the determination system a part of the game-world, such that there is an analogy between player and character in determination and resolution.  The goal here is to downplay the "jar."

Another completely IC mechanic, which I just thought of, is the fencing rules in Skotos' online game, Castle Marrach.  The players type in things like "I feint deftly" and "I thrust gracefully" and then the computer handles all the resolution, with the adverbs just adding color for all the people watching, including the dueling players.  Is that something more like the GM-driven resolution system that you're imagining?  Where the players never have to break from the Dream at all?

Yes, I suppose, but the fact that the determiner is a computer doesn't really help much, because it's in effect a black box.  It may not be very jarring, but it's still having recourse to an exterior arbitrary system.

See, what interests me is that you have these opposed poles.  On the one hand, you want the determination system not to be arbitrary.  The reason being that the Dream is a web of meaning into which you, as player, precipitate yourself, through character.  And if you allow arbitrariness, this suggests that not everything in the Dream is meaningful, but the point is that the Dream is nothing but meaning, so an arbitrary determinant is a problem.

On the other hand, you want the determination system not to be constrained by a limited aesthetic of what meaning ought to look like, something like Step On Up or Story Now.  The reason here being that the Dream is supposed to have its own internal causality, and be driven by that alone, and such aesthetic principles as Story Now or Step On Up are exterior to the causality system of the Dream, for the same reason that our actual lives are not particularly like stories unless we choose to twist how we re-tell them, and in actual experience they're simply one damn thing after another.

Now I don't actually think there's a practical way of having your cake and eating it too, but I'm quite interested in things like what you've mentioned here as work-arounds (works-around?).  A traditional form of dice system I get; it's an arbitrary determinant that tradition has hallowed such that you can relatively easily say, "That doesn't matter."  If all such RPGs had started as card games, and that were normative, then dice would seem weird and a little jarring but cards would seem obvious.  But I'm more interested in the principle of the thing: how do you make an end-run around the problem?  And these examples are very interesting for this reason.  They also suggest, by their very existence, that there is at least an unconscious recognition of this perpetual problem as perpetual, in that nobody is really entirely happy with what has been done already and they keep trying new ways.  Veeeery interesting.

Hmm, I'll have to get a copy of that.  I haven't read anything from Neel in a month, since the PRC seems to have decided to block 20by20room.com as a danger to national security...

If Neel says it's OK, I'll email it to you.  [Neel?]  My own experience with the PRC, and that of my many friends in Chinese studies, makes this ban totally unsurprising.  Forge?  Yes.  20x20 Room?  Heck no.  Why?  Don't ask.

Eat some good sleazy street food for me, and keep thinking about diceless Sim.  Thanks!

[Jonathan Walton]

Yeah, bite me.  Because I'm still grasping toward what I'm looking for, you stinker.  :)

Yeah, I know.  That was a pot-calling-kettle maneuver.  I always post before I know quite what I want, as well.

Okay, so Nobilis keeps the actual task determination with the player, who simply ascribes numbers to success or failure, and those numbers have some in-character meaning. The GM restores the Dream by moving from task determination to task narration.  Something like that?

More of less.  Rebecca pulls a few more tricks too.  The entire range of Miracles (i.e. all possible system-supported tasks) is predetermined by a set of ranks that players and the GM are both familiar with, ideally, so there shouldn't be too much disagreement about what Level a specific task is.  None of this GM-chooses-a-target-number shit.  Everyone knows what pulling the sun out of the sky should cost.

Also, and this is a major stroke of genius, there are no rules for doing things that aren't Miraculous.  The system just assumes that you're going to freeform your way through that, in the way that Erick talks about in his Dicelessness essay in the Articles section (Paraphrasing: "Everybody plays diceless/freeform; they just punctuate it with bits of Fortune").  So there's an emphasis on only using the OOC task resolution for things that are really important, which makes another shot at minimizing the jar.

I clearly have to read Engel, since this was my own aesthetic principle for Shadows in the Fog: make the determination system a part of the game-world, such that there is an analogy between player and character in determination and resolution.  The goal here is to downplay the "jar."

I'll email you the PDF of the original Engel rules.  I think this is quite a cool method.  De Profundis takes this route too, incorperating letter writing into the fabric of the game, much like Code of Unaris tries to do with chat.  The Torches in Shreyas' Torchbearer are also similar.  I plan on writing a heavy Sim PBeM game at some point, pulling the same trick, maybe to finally finish Fingers on the Firmament, since I promised Shreyas I'd do that.  This is definitely one of Sim's traditional problems, and I agree that many games have tried to get around it, consciously or unconsciously.

It may not be very jarring, but it's still having recourse to an exterior arbitrary system.

Is it really any more arbitrary than drawing a card from a deck?  Surely it's a lot less jarring than the "You can't use that item here," responses from first-gen electronic roleplaying games ("Damn it!  I should be able to stick the coat-hanger into the electrical socket!").  I see it just as another variation on the external arbiter.

But I'm more interested in the principle of the thing: how do you make an end-run around the problem?

See, I think I would articulate the problem a little differently here, partially because the way I articulate and think about Sim is a bit different than Ron (though we're ultimately talking about the same idea).  I don't really think Sim relies upon an arbitrator to uphold the inherant causality of the game world, because you already have that in the players' minds (which can arbitrate just as well as any external computer).  The problem is the subjectivity of the Dream, which requires something to arbitrate between different visions of "what happens" in a fashion that appears reasonable and plausible to everyone involved (this is the Lumpley Principle, yet again).  If this arbitrator is another person, people worry that their own vision isn't getting a fair hearing.  If the arbitrator is some Fortune mechanic, that fear is not there, but it break the Dream.

So, I would imagine that a combination of GM arbitration with lots of player empowerment and the potential for "dramatic editing" or whatnot gets closer to succeeding (and this is what many of these games are leaning towards but not actually doing).  You just need a new model for negotiating the Dream in a "fair and reasonable" fashion, and you've got the potential for some great Sim play.

Eat some good sleazy street food for me, and keep thinking about diceless Sim.

Yessir!  I guess it'll be sheng jian bao again tonight, then.  It's fun when they explode in your mouth and squirt juice on the guy sitting across from you...

[neelk]

Chris: sure, go ahead -- but also forward Geoff Skellam's article. It's the same general idea, but presented differently, and I think multiple angles on are good.

Just as an aside: for me, (lower case) sim-style gaming isn't about "forgetting" the real world for the dream; it's about what you might call the step from artifice to artifact. I (with the help of the other players) build a situation and some rules, and then we can use it to play what-if? games. Having a strong internal causality means that all of the players will be on the same page about "what would happen if", and that lets us spin out long chains of action, consequence, and possibility. But outside that single chain of events, there's a TON of table-talk about alternate possibilities and hypothetical cases and the constraints of the setting. Part of what we're doing is making and editing the material and causal relationships between them that will be used now and in future play.

[Sean]

Hi Chris -

I think I see what you're looking for, but as an incorrigible pedant I have to disagree a little bit with the idea that Fortune is the thing that's responsible for dream-breaking. Jonathan's example of moving back to Karma (resource allocation) in Nobilis as dream-breaking, if correct, is another case in point.

An obvious example comes from Sim-facilitating wargames. You're asking a question like "how might this battle have gone given..." but at the same time you recognize some randomness in warfare, so you want a Fortune mechanic to adjudicate the 'close' unit contests. Some RPG combat systems are like this too, actually, though they tend to have more Fortune on the 'weak guy always deserves a chance' principle.

I kind of don't see how any resolution mechanic, including Drama, can fail to 'break the dream' if I understand what you mean by that correctly. About the best you could do would be to have a computer feed through the GM (or directly to the players in the SF conceptual limit) with the result, based on its calculations of what the players were doing, their capacities, etc.

In other words if you have mechanics at all, any kind, then you're going to have to spend play-time on the mechanics, and that will necessarily involve at least enough outside the game thinking to handle that resolution step. One principle I see some of the designers around here suggest in response to that is to have the mechanics serve the purpose of intensifying the CA rather than being an annoying barrier to get to the next thing. If you really care about the Story or the Step on Up this makes sense, but I see how Sim is harder.

Is that another way of putting your question then? How could we use, maybe, diceless mechanics to intensify the dream rather than interrupt it (again as in JW's Nobilis example)?

I do think that at the conceptual level your diceless issue is probably a red herring, but at the level of the design you might have in mind it may not be. Or maybe there's something as yet inarticulate here that gives the absence of Fortune a special significance I'm not seeing.

One other point - putting as many explicit mechanics onto the GM, of whatever kind, and making them run fast, is one method for accomplishing a minimum of dream-breaking in the traditional RPG format.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Let me tell you about the Temple, a game of mine. It has an embedded sim decisionmaking system used by the GM. The point of the game is elsewhere, the system is only used to give consequences for nar decisions. The game's currently practically finished, I might sell it as PDF at some point.

For the system, let me give a short outline:

When a player wants his character to do something, he tells what the character does. The GM may comment or any player may interrupt, but otherwise the action goes through as described. If a player interrupts, the GM right away decides what happens. He uses the following principles in support:
§0 If no character resists and the action is possible, it succeeds. If the action is impossible, it fails. If it is resisted, see §1.
§1 If a character has not yet done anything similar in the game, he succeeds. If both characters are tied, see §2.
§2 If one character has succeeded in similar actions twice already, he succeeds. If both characters are tied, see §3.
§3 If one character has more characters supporting him than another, he succeeds. Other edges can be considered if the GM prefers. If both characters are still tied, see §4.
§4 If none of the above resolves the conflict, it is a tie and the characters have to fall back or give in.

As you can see, the system is diceless and GM-driven. It's simulationist because the only point of the system is to emulate certain abstract conventions of storytelling with minimum amount of fuss and no player handling time.

The system gives slightly strange results (for example, any character can automatically kill any other), but that's all in-genre for the game, the point being immersionist lovecraftian horror: when the kind of uncertainty you'd need a system for enters the picture, the situation can really go whichever way the GM desires, and the system above just takes the burden off him. An important note is that the players don't know the rules and the game is one-shot, so it's unlikely that anybody would bother to deduct the principles.

Admittedly not a standard approach, but works well for the game in question. I could imagine applying it to other genres as well.

As for whether pure Karma works for the Dream... I deem it a must for hard core immersionism, so for a certain kind of Dream it indeed works. The above demonstrates also how mechanics do not need to break the Dream just by being mechanics (a retort to Sean, that one).

[Jonathan Walton]

Eero, do you know the board game Diplomacy?  Because the rules to your diceless game sound suspiciously like Diplomacy the RPG.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Eero, do you know the board game Diplomacy?  Because the rules to your diceless game sound suspiciously like Diplomacy the RPG.

Yeah, I'm the upcoming president of the Finnish Diplomacy Association. So I know the game, and even get to play it more than enough.

Regardless, I hadn't myself noticed the resemblance. It's quite clear, though, when you mention it. You'd get even more Diplomacy-like by stripping away the dramatic assumptions here (steps 1 and 2) and just counting supports: each character is equal in strength, and the side with most supports wins. You could even go with the GM building a metaphorical map of a given situation to get some limitations for support and attacking, and stronger and weaker positions... Strange, but workable.

[clehrich]

I think I see what you're looking for, but as an incorrigible pedant I have to disagree a little bit with the idea that Fortune is the thing that's responsible for dream-breaking. Jonathan's example of moving back to Karma (resource allocation) in Nobilis as dream-breaking, if correct, is another case in point.

If I said this, I was being unclear.  Let me put it like this.

There are basically two ways of resolving a contested situation: within the Dream and not within the Dream.  

To do it entirely within the Dream, you need some sort of principle of internal causality that can produce a determinate result, the way the actual real world works.  In my experience of Sim, this sort of thing is usually done by putting decision-making into the GM's hands and using various techniques to disguise what he's doing.  The point being that you are not actually resolving matters within the dream, but only making it appear that you are doing so.  One of the tasks of the GM, in that sort of gaming, is to be the guy who doesn't get to live the Dream because he's the facilitator of others' Dreaming.

To do it outside the Dream, you want an exterior mechanism that is (1) determinate; (2) quick; and (3) completely arbitrary.  Dice and other Fortune mechanics are a well-established way of doing this, and they can be made to fit all the criteria, but there are other methods.

The down-side of using the GM is that his decisions may become non-arbitrary, since he is a person using some sort of aesthetic criteria rather than the arbitrary causality of the universe; even if he actually remains arbitrary, the very suspicion that he might not be can break the Dream.  In either case, this spins your resolution system toward aesthetic goals, such as telling a good story or having exciting challenges -- in other words, GM decision-dominance tends to spin the game a tad toward other CA's.

The down-side of exterior arbitrary systems is that they do break the frame of the Dream.  One can wallpaper over the cracks, but at base you cannot claim that the dice you are rolling really are within the game-world.

What interests me is that I think this is a fundamental bind for Sim gaming.  Either it must make an aesthetic constraining decision about the nature of causality in the Dream or it must enclose within the Social Contract the claim that we will all pretend we didn't see those dice rolling.

But the ideal for Sim, in a true purist sense, is therefore inachievable: it would be a system that has no visible mechanics whatever, yet is completely determinate and fully arbitrary, constrained by no aesthetic principles except those we can explain as necessarily part of the Dream's internal causality.

In other words if you have mechanics at all, any kind, then you're going to have to spend play-time on the mechanics, and that will necessarily involve at least enough outside the game thinking to handle that resolution step. One principle I see some of the designers around here suggest in response to that is to have the mechanics serve the purpose of intensifying the CA rather than being an annoying barrier to get to the next thing. If you really care about the Story or the Step on Up this makes sense, but I see how Sim is harder.

Yes, exactly.  I think in fact that Sim may border on theoretical impossibility, which is simply not the case with Story Now or Step On Up, which is why I'm investigating different kinds of mechanics that seek to suppress their own existence within the Dream.

I do think that at the conceptual level your diceless issue is probably a red herring, but at the level of the design you might have in mind it may not be. Or maybe there's something as yet inarticulate here that gives the absence of Fortune a special significance I'm not seeing.

The reason I chose to focus on Fortune was simply that it's become extremely traditional in large-scale Sim gaming, so every other choice is to some degree a choice against the norm, and that interests me.  I have no design in mind; my interest here has nothing to do with a design as such, but rather with a peculiar classification issue.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

That's an interesting perspective about out-of-Dream vs. in-Dream resolution, relative to Simulationist play. I'm not sure I'm getting it.

The last game I played with a fairly determined Simulationist slant (which is to say, our slant) was Hidden Legacy, in which the resolution procedure has two interesting features.

1. It usually includes a sequence of rolls rather than a single one, denoting in-game time and points of reflection for "how'm I doing" by the character.

2. It has four possible results depending on the accumulating dice results: success, failure, dismal failure, and "pull out" (choosing to stop the re-rolls before one of the other three happens)

The basic concept was actually quite a lot of fun, as it generates a sense of desperation and determination on the parts of the characters; it also seems to me to enlist the player's commitment strictly via the lens of the character's fictional experiences (i.e. no "bonus points" are involved). Neither of these are definitionally Simulationist (they are merely Techniques), but they are, as far as I can tell, definitionally in-game cause oriented.

Is merely the use of dice per se supposed to break the Dream? That seems like an awfully restrictive concept for ideal Sim play to me.

If this is thread-Drift, stop me now and we'll call this post a "confusion footnote."

Best,
Ron