Sim-Diceless thread search

[clehrich]

Sean,

You're right, I don't think there's a fundamental disagreement with Ron.  I certainly didn't intend there to be one.  If you want to look at it as an ontological issue, that's fine with me.

But if you're playing Simulationist, as you rightly indicate, what you want to 'do' with the SIS is just get into (certain elements of) it more, to explore it more and more deeply. Now where I agree with Ron is that there's no reason mechanics can't help you do this, for particular kinds of exploration. But where I think you're really on to something is to point out that the actual time spent handling that mechanic, as a real-world interaction, does cut against actual participation time in the SIS for the Simulationist. That's what I was suggesting with the 'schizophrenic' bit above.

Yes, this is handling-time.  The more time you spend on handling, the more potential there is for mechanics' getting in the way of the Dream.  And I agree, SIS is of course constructed by mechanics; that's the Lumpley Principle.

And further, the style of mechanics can support or get in the way.  This is why some of the examples cited by Jonathan and Eero and Ron are mechanics that are in some way included in the game.  My own Shadows in the Fog plays with this, in that the Tarot cards have some sort of analogue within the SIS.  And so on.

My interest is in these strategies.  How do you downplay the potential rupture caused by mechanics?

Your point about "real-world processing" hits the nail on the head.  The more of this you have to do, the less "SIS-processing", as it were, you can do.  It's as simple as that.

I'm delighted that you think this is "on to something," but maybe I was over-reading Ron.  Isn't this essentially explicit in "Simulationism: The Right To Dream"?

---

John,

The distinction between meta-game and in-game mechanics makes no difference, as far as I can tell.  I do see the difference, but I don't see what it has to do with this set of issues.  In-game mechanics are not, as you say, part of the SIS.  They may be representational, and that is an interesting move toward the analogy between in-game and out-of-game, but I think we can all agree -- I hope -- that in-game mechanics are still at some level not part of the SIS.  That's all I'm saying.  What interests me is how some mechanics try to downplay the rupture.

What I mean by "perfect interiority" is simply that the ideal of "pure" Sim is one in which all mechanics are in-game, and all in-game mechanics are so deeply woven into the Dream that you can think them through your character and the Dream-world.  That would be nice.  That's sort of why Sim is ambivalent about mechanics, especially meta-game mechanics: they'd really rather not step out.  Of course nobody much plays like this, because (a) it's impossible, and (b) they have other goals, i.e. aren't playing "pure" Sim but have other notions.

Let me take Ron's famous Star Trek example.  One sense, at least, of "pure" Sim would be one in which you are Star Fleet officers in the Star Trek universe, and causality happens, just "as it really would."  This is often called realism  [cf. Hyphz's recent Actual Play thread about a GM who's into "realism" in D&D].  In that kind of Sim, you're not allowed to decide, as a player, to do X instead of Y because X would make a cooler story, because "he wouldn't do that."  Thus all the various rantings and ravings about "my guy syndrome" and the like.  I think that over time, more and more Sim players have added the Star Trek show to their sense of what is to be simulated, so that you can choose X over Y if it would make a more Star Trek-like story, but there are still story-types that can't happen because they're not how Star Trek "really goes."  Do you see?

I do think that Ron periodically wants to stress this as a deal-breaker between Nar and Sim.  If you say, "We're playing Star Trek, and it's just like the show, because everything happens just as it really would and we always get a really amazing story," this is bordering on the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast.  When it's not that, what it probably is is Nar: your goal is Story Now, and you do it within the Star Trek universe.

As to sensory deprivation and whatnot, no.  Absolutely not.  There is a clear recognition that the SIS is not the real world, I think, and I don't know that anyone's claimed otherwise.  You want a powerful experience within the Dream, but that doesn't mean you want actually to live within it as such.  You want to imagine it with minimal filters.

Out of interest, do you suppose that every gamer who went to see The Lord Of The Rings, and I suspect just about every gamer went, did so simply for the story?  How many also wanted to project themselves into the fantasy world?  Is that really so odd?  Isn't this why it's called "escapist literature"?

---

I really think some folks here are over-thinking this.  You're convinced that I'm making some kind of very subtle distinction or challenge.  If I am, I'm not aware of it.  My sense is that Ron and I are on the same page, although we have different opinions about the implications.  If I've said something new, could you all please point it out to me?  Because I really don't think I have.

[clehrich]

Whoops, x-posted with Ron.

Ron, am I being clearer now?  Am I actually getting something flat wrong here?  My plan was simply to deal with what you said in your essay, but if I've gone way off the rails I'd like to hear about it.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Well, either you escaped from the mother ship and killed the alien who was impersonating you ... or you altered what you were saying ... or I just grabbed a clue.

I still think the pack of us needs to keep thrashing it out, but we're getting somewhere. A thread about Simulationist play that accomplishes something? Let's hope!

Best,
Ron

[clehrich]

Ron,

Can you follow up on that?  I mean, can you sort of explicate a little bit what you thought we were all confused about or something?  I'm genuinely lost as to what all of this is about, since as I say, I didn't think I was saying anything whatsoever that was new.

Am I?

[C. Edwards]

Hey Chris,

I've been dredging my memory in an attempt to recall any games (not just Sim facilitating) that don't use dice. Most of the ones that I'm familiar with have already been mentioned. I'll just add Soap and Active Exploits to the list. As far as I know, Active Exploits is still a free PDF. Soap isn't free any longer, but it's way cheap.

On another note, it strikes me that learning a new resolution system mirrors in a way being a toddler in the in-game environment in regards to how much effort and thought you must put towards the (game imposed) physics of the world in order to accomplish what you want to do. In the case of a toddler, that is often just walking without falling. And, like the toddler, the longer we are exposed to that particular physics the more natural its use.

While the "invisible engine" is likely an impossibility, between finding a resolution method that draws from and enhances the SIS and the eventual transparency of use, I think that it's possible to get as close as one can get to that ideal with the tools currently at hand.

-Chris

[Jonathan Walton]

Maybe we can clarify this a bit by talking about what Exploration of System is like in Chris' Ideal Sim Game?

So, Exploration of Character, Setting, Situation, Color and the like aren't a problem in Chris' Ideal Sim Game.  They are all easily retconned into the Dream with no real awkwardness.  Even the communication stuff that John was talking about (which is part of System), players interrupting and discussing what's happening, all works to facilitate the Dream, since the point is NOT to Dream by yourself, but to share the Dream (and control of the Dream) with others.

However, what Chris is saying, I think, (and my own experience agrees with him here), is that, sometimes, Exploration of System seems not to be the kind of Exploration demanded by Story Now.  You don't want to explore that particular area of System.  You find it tedioius and uninteresting and it doesn't support the Dream at all.  But in order to play the game as written, or as determined by the Social Contract, you find yourself pushed into handling bits of System.  This is a subjective aesthetic ideal here, but I agree that it's common enough to be worth talking about.  There are so many games designed to handle just this problem.  Fudge, particularly, stands out to me as being particularly verbal about this.

Fudge looks at numbers and sees System that it doesn't want to deal with.  But it looks at Singing: Excellent and sees System worth Exploring.  It looks at dice rolls that give a boolean fail/succeed result and sees System is doesn't like.  But it looks at a result like "Good" or "Terrible" and sees something that's much easier to keep the Dream moving forward in an mostly unbroken fashion.  It even standardizes the number of dice rolled, so nobody has to even think about what mechanics might be required.

There is, then, an effort it some branches of purist Sim design to not ever have to think about OOC issues at all.  You dream a deep Dream, much like the heavy Immersionist tactics of our Nordic neighbors, and this Dream is somehow supported by an (impossible?) invisible system, which handles everything in a rational manner but doesn't require anyone to think about metagame issues.

Chris, am I close?

[Sean]

'Ontological' was probably the wrong word - Heidegger flashback there. But I think what I was getting at was clear enough from context.

I sort of think Chris' central point got clarified, and it might be time to move on towards examples.

John Kim suggested that some resolution systems can be 'representational' in the same way that e.g. roleplaying is 'representational'. This is a powerful idea and exactly what would be needed to overcome the very real (IMO) phenomenon Chris is pointing to.

However, I'm not seeing very many good examples except to some degree the traditional ones where you invest things with color (special dice, costumes, whatever) so that even while you're spending time on mechanics you've at least got dream-evoking stuff in the background as support.

Here's one that might work: if you've got a game with magic scrolls, you hand out actual scrolls to characters, with spells, curses, maps, etc. on them, prepared in advance. Then opening the scroll itself activates the curse, gets you the new spell, whatever. That's a pretty minor one, but it does seem to qualify as a trick that would count as representational a la John and would not break the dream as per Chris. But such methods are relatively few and far between, it seems to me.

I note with some amusement that all four U of C vets are heavily represented in this thread. Maybe we should take it over to Jimmy's?

[clehrich]

On another note, it strikes me that learning a new resolution system mirrors in a way being a toddler in the in-game environment in regards to how much effort and thought you must put towards the (game imposed) physics of the world in order to accomplish what you want to do. In the case of a toddler, that is often just walking without falling. And, like the toddler, the longer we are exposed to that particular physics the more natural its use.

Nice analogy!  I like that.  It's a nice complement to my notion of this as tradition.  I think both are at work at once.  For example, when someone new to RPGs is put into a traditional die-based game, he may find the mechanics system difficult and annoying because it is new -- like a toddler, he hasn't really mastered the techniques required.  If that same new gamer asks others at the table, "Why dice?" I think that a fair number of gamers would tend to reply, "Because that's how it's done," particularly in the old days before Drama and Karma systems became more common; this is in effect saying, "It's traditional; that's why."

So, Exploration of Character, Setting, Situation, Color and the like aren't a problem in Chris' Ideal Sim Game.  They are all easily retconned into the Dream with no real awkwardness.  Even the communication stuff that John was talking about (which is part of System), players interrupting and discussing what's happening, all works to facilitate the Dream, since the point is NOT to Dream by yourself, but to share the Dream (and control of the Dream) with others.

I was never very clear on these sub-types of Exploration, but this sounds right.

However, what Chris is saying, I think, (and my own experience agrees with him here), is that, sometimes, Exploration of System seems not to be the kind of Exploration demanded by Story Now.

Did you mean Right To Dream?  My sense is that Right To Dream has a tendency toward ambivalence about mechanics, I guess about Exploration of System, whereas I don't think that's particularly true of Story Now or Step On Up.

You don't want to explore that particular area of System.  You find it tedioius and uninteresting and it doesn't support the Dream at all.  But in order to play the game as written, or as determined by the Social Contract, you find yourself pushed into handling bits of System.  This is a subjective aesthetic ideal here, but I agree that it's common enough to be worth talking about.  There are so many games designed to handle just this problem.  Fudge, particularly, stands out to me as being particularly verbal about this.

Thanks for providing a nice concrete example.  I've only glanced at Fudge, but yes, I think that's the point precisely.  The whole idea is to create a mechanical system that won't get in the way, which necessarily means that for that set of game designers and players, mechanics often do get in the way.

.... It even standardizes the number of dice rolled, so nobody has to even think about what mechanics might be required.

Yes: "nobody has to even think about" mechanics is precisely the point.

There is, then, an effort it some branches of purist Sim design to not ever have to think about OOC issues at all.  You dream a deep Dream, much like the heavy Immersionist tactics of our Nordic neighbors, and this Dream is somehow supported by an (impossible?) invisible system, which handles everything in a rational manner but doesn't require anyone to think about metagame issues.

By pointing to Deep Immersion, I think you're hitting the nail on the head.  I don't think that Deep Immersion is a necessity in Sim, by any means, but it is I think true that Sim lends itself to that goal more readily.  One reason for this is that Sim does tend to want to avoid OOC mechanics, and if you want Deep Immersion that's the way to go.

Chris, am I close?

Oh yeah, definitely.

Think for a sec about all those assumptions that newcomers to the Forge, ones who have mostly played Sim-type games (coherent or incoherent), tend to bring with them.

[*]Immersion
[*]Emphasis on IC vs. OOC
[*]Deterministic mechanics
[*]Realism
[*]Meta-game stuff, particularly Director Stance narration, is cheating
[*]... and so on[/list:u]I find it interesting that this complex is relatively consistent.  I think, in fact, that this is part of what Sim is about.  Not that these things are inflexible or required in Sim, but that they are implied by the concepts built into its very core.  And I think one of the things people find so exciting and liberating about Nar and Gam play is that these same things are absolutely not required.

Consider how many folks first approach GNS and think, "Gamism?  That's being a munchkin weenie, I hate that."  But then, quite commonly, they learn that they don't have to feel that way, and can in fact let their hair down and play with the system and try to win and generally Step On Up.  And that's very exciting and liberating, because they've previously thought this was inherently a bad thing.

Again, how many see Nar the first time and think, "Wait, you're going to do something your character wouldn't do just to make a story?"  And it can take quite a long time to see that "something my guy wouldn't do" isn't necessary, that Story Now and meta-mechanics (which aren't the same thing) don't necessarily violate character.  But why the dread of violating character?  Who said that the character was inviolable?

I think these things come from the nature of Sim, not from incoherence or confused traditions of Heartbreakers.  I do think that this means that Sim is intrinsically a little incoherent (not in Ron's technical sense), but that the incoherence just drives people to build new systems and new techniques for getting around the issues.

What Ron's looking for in Nar and Gam, I think, is an efficient, clean way to produce exactly what you want, no messing about.  And in Nar and Gam, he's right: you can do this, and do it well.  See all those wonderful examples around here.  Notice that in InSpectres, for example, the mechanics do not get in the way, not just because they're simple but because they're not at issue in the basic goals.  Same in Sorcerer and MLwM and so forth.

In Sim, however, I don't think you can win this battle.  What you can do is defer the issues, come up with strategies to make yourself not focus on them in play.  And these strategies work by hiding the mechanics, making them deterministic, and flinging the player as deeply into the Dream as possible (not Immersion, necessarily, but deep).  

From this basic strategic problem, one can in effect predict:

[*]Very detailed settings
[*]Mechanics that are called "realistic"
[*]Discussions of mechanics that explain why they are the best ever
[*]Explanations of gaming that say it is completely natural, a built-in human behavior
[*]One True Way-ism
[*]Heartbreakers
[*]Concern about "cheating"
[*]Focus on non-violation of character
[*]Focus on IC-Now, as it were
[*]Interest in Immersion
[*]Assertion that all this produces great stories
[*]Assertion that manipulating System is munchkinism
[*]The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast[/list:u]And we could come up with more, of course.

What interests me is how Sim naturally lends itself to all these things, whereas Gam and Nar really do not.  Not that Sim is bad, but that these things arise from the nature of Sim, not from people being caught up in "bad old days" gaming.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

In the last two or three posts, Chris, you have effectively shown me that I did manage to say what I wanted to say in the three supportive essays. Yes, we are agreeing, or rather, you are agreeing with the author of those essays in full. (Hats, remember. Trying to be clear.)

Now, all of my confusions and objections earlier in the thread, especially as they accorded with Sean's and John's posts, stand as posted ... but that's earlier in the thread, not now, and not toward your last two posts.

Best,
Ron

[clehrich]

Well, I'm glad we're on the same page again.  I don't think I shifted ground here, but maybe I wasn't putting things clearly before.  I was beginning to wonder if I had my head up an orifice!

[M. J. Young]

Thank you, Chris, for calling attention to my other thread; I needed to get that resolved sufficiently to consider this.

In part, I think I disagree with your premise; but that's not a fatal objection to the discussion, which I think is quite viable. What I think you're noting is the degree to which an immersive experience is desired as part of play. Disruptive mechanics break that immersive experience, and so efforts to create immersive games must find ways to avoid such disruptions. Where I disagree primarily is the equating of immersive play with simulationism; and I disagree in both directions. Thus, as you note, there is simulationist play in which immersion is completely irrelevant and thus in which any complexity of mechanical rules is quite acceptable to the degree that it better confirms the input through the output (if I am correctly using Ron's phrase). I would also suggest that highly immersive narrativist play occurs (Marco's contention of his own play, which I think correct), as well as highly immersive gamist play (I've been in such games). Thus your interest lies not so much in simulationism as in immersive techniques, and the desire to design systems such that they do not disrupt immersion.

At least, that's how I understand it.

I think it's been at least hinted already that familiarity supports immersion, even with mechanics that seem rather disruptive. There are systems in which the players quickly grasp the meanings of die rolls, knowing what rolls are good or bad without thinking about them. In Multiverser's referee's hints, we call attention to the fact that in ongoing play a referee should be able to spot whether four out of five rolls are pass or fail without crunching any numbers at all, because only about twenty percent are going to be close enough to check. Similarly, when I roll a 3d10 general effects roll, I know the means, the extremes, and a couple of points between these. Thus for example if I roll 12 (low is good) I know that the chart says "Good enough"; and if I roll a 10, I might not know what the chart actually says, but I know it's a bit better than that. In a sense, we teach ourselves the language of the game mechanics. D&D players speak of rolling a natural twenty, and that has meaning to them. Multiverser players will talk about the time they had the GE 3, or say they got a GE 25 or something, as part of the language of the game.

This sort of thing is disruptive to the degree that you need to break from the game world to the real world to understand it. My contention, however, is that the numbers generated by the dice are themselves part of the game world, as the players understand it--as are the probabilities of success. Thus "You have a 68% chance of hitting him" is the answer to the question "How good is this guy at defending himself?" and "You're down to five hit points" is the answer to "How badly hurt am I?"

In my http://www.mjyoung.net/dungeon/adr.html">ADR's and Surv's materials, I provide information for pre-3E D&D games that explains how to calculate your best weapons, taking into account adjustments to hit, damage, and number of attacks. Some people think that kind of approach takes the fun out of play. I don't. I think that being able to say that I will do an average of 4.53 points of damage per round to this opponent with my sword versus 5.68 with my bow at short range makes up for the fact that I can't actually see the opponent or feel how easy or difficult it is to fight with the imagined weapons. These numbers are in a very real sense properties of the weapons known to my character translated into a language that conveys to me what I need to know.

If you play a video game, you're looking at a screen that presents an image. The computer or console doesn't really know what that image looks like the same way that you do. It has a mathematical model telling it the color and position of each pixel, how they move in relation to each other, and what impact those movements have on other pixels on the screen. In a very similar way, the mechanics of the game are a mathematical model of the game world which reproduces in the minds of the players certain aspects of the nature thereof that are not so easily described without the use of numbers. I think many gamers expect this and are accustomed to it. The numbers define the world for them. The Onion's old gag about Bill Gates granting himself a 19 charisma demonstrates that within our gamer culture we're quite accustomed to defining the world numerically and grasping what that means, and this without seriously disrupting our feeling of being there, often rather enhancing that feeling because having the numbers in our minds we have a more precise conception of what it is we have agreed to imagine.

A lot of gamers do not like Fudge because of the descriptors. The impression I have is that these gamers think that "good" is fuzzy, and does not adequately inform their imaginations to the same degree as "14 on 3d6". The latter is a practiced familiarity with a specific language, but the former is an effort to make established general terms function as specific ones.

Thus the trick in all this is to work out what is disruptive and to whom.

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

I'm a bit ambivalent about the ambivalence.

Lets imagine the perfect sim game according to the claim that the utilisation of resolution systems, dice, challenge the Dream.  This perfect game then would have all its "rules" invisibly embedded in the setting.  They would be inherent to the setting as it exists.  They would then appear as true physics in the SIS, I think: they would be the rules governing the way the game space moves and acts.

But then, if you were to immerse into this game space with physics-like rules, how would you distinguish between this game world and the real world?  I don't think you could - if the mechanisms really were that invisible.  But given the content of most SIS's and the dramatic conventions that require a pile of bodies by final curtain, this SIS may well be absolutely terrifying.

In that light I feel the externality of the resolution systems to the game space serves a function, makes the game space safe.  It is precisely becuase the game space exists as a consensual construction that denies its objective reality, and thus its capacity to terrify or injure.  We can, instead, explore these topics from safe persepctive, even when undergoing immersion to a substantial degree.

It occure to me now that I'm making an argument here somewhat like that of the safewords in gaming thread; I'm suggesting that the control system, whether that be dice-and-charsheet or mouse-and-monitor, serves to bound the game space and project it out of reality.

A perfect simulation game would be so perfect that I don't think we could experience it as a game; we would only experience it as a reality.  And while I think that a Trek-style holodeck might be a perfect vehicle for the exploration of sundry subject matter, I think it would be much less a game and rather unlike RPG as we know it.

[Vaxalon]

What was that movie, I think Martin Sheen was in it, where he signed on for some freaky entertainment thing that involved him getting chased around in the real world?

I don't want my sim THAT sim, thanks...

[clehrich]

Please note that this is a very long post!

References:
why immersion is a tar baby
immersion and story
The Provisional Glossary on "Immersion"

M.J.,

When I read your post, my first thought was, "No, this isn't about immersion."  But after reading back over these threads, I think actually it is.  The problem is that most of us are using "immersion" in a relatively narrow sense, whereas these threads listed work toward a much broader notion.  I'm not quite sure which you mean, so I'm going to be guessing a bit here.

To my mind, immersion is first of all negatively defined: it's not artifice.  John Kim follows up on this in the second thread above to focus on "plausibility" and "consistency."  Extending outward, you could read the Sim emphasis on causality as an emphasis on immersion, because the point is to avoid violating plausibility or consistency, which artifice tends to do because in our normal experience of the world such artifice is extremely abnormal (hand of God and so on).

But for some reason, my mind rebels against seeing immersion this way; for me, immersion means a fairly extreme "in the moment" kind of thing, supported by absolute IC perspective and the like.  If I recall correctly, the Turku (sp.?) manifesto is about this kind of immersion.  It's also, incidentally, something quite big in the Performance Studies/Ritual Studies literature dominated by Richard Schechner and Ronald Grimes; I happen to think it has nothing to do with ritual, but for those interested I mention them as potentially interesting.

In order to continue intelligently here, I'm going to refer to this extreme form of "in the moment" "in the character" immersion as Immersion, with a capital I.  If I seem to be totally off the rails in what follows, check to be sure we're using Immersion the same way; if we are, then I may well be off the rails.

I don't think Sim is necessarily about Immersion.  I don't think it's an uncommon goal, and I do think it's particularly common in Sim, but it's definitely a subset of the broader type.  I am interested in why it's so common as a Sim goal, but that's subsidiary to my main interest.  And I think your objection here is that you think I'm saying that Sim is normally pushing toward Immersion, which is contrary to your experience.  If I get them right, contracycle and Fred (Vaxalon) have the same objection.  

So let me clarify.  This is going to be pretty provisional, because it starts touching on what I'm working on, not what I've been posting thus far.  I do think that the thread has moved in this direction, so it's not drift (besides, I started this thread), but if others think this belongs as its own thread I'm amenable.

- - -
The Dream, which is at base the point of Sim, is something we all have to work together to keep afloat.  Because it's something we create primarily in our imaginations, it can be violated and broken quite easily.  Lots of techniques of various kinds are used to help us keep it going; more importantly, such techniques are used to strengthen and support the Dream, to make it a more powerful Dream for everyone at the table.

But "powerful Dream" doesn't necessarily mean one in which we Immerse.  What it means is one in which we can explore freely, without constantly feeling the interference of the various necessary artifices that keep the thing going.  To use an analogy, we're exploring an exciting and vibrant new world, and we don't want to turn in the wrong direction and suddenly realize that the thing is like an old Hollywood set, all façades with nothing behind them; we don't want to go through the wrong door and find a back lot and a sign saying, "Pardon our dust!  Under construction.  We apologize for the inconvenience."  That breaks the Dream, because it forces us to admit very powerfully that the whole thing is artificial.  We know that, of course, but we don't really want our noses rubbed in it.

Now one way to avoid this experience is to Immerse, trusting always that the GM has built a complete set and that he's going to keep the cameramen out of our line of vision.  That's fine, of course, but it's not the only way.

Another way is to decide, in advance, that certain things are invisible.  So long as these aren't huge, this isn't a problem.  We can decide that if we catch sight of a sound boom for just a second, it's not going to "count."  And because we decided that in advance, it's not a problem.

Another way is to decide, in advance, certain things we're not going to do.  We know that only five buildings in the set are complete, and that the rest are façades, so we agree in advance that we're not going to go into any but those five buildings.

Now all of this is analogy, but I hope it's reasonably clear.  Let's get back to gaming and just use the analogy for clarification.

The first point is the distinction between player and character.  The player can decide not to notice things, but in Sim that's difficult for the character, because the character lives in a causal and consistent universe.  So when my character walks into the saloon in the Wild West town, the character actually encounters a living saloon; the player knows that there isn't anything through that back door, and won't be anything unless and until the character walks through it, but the character doesn't know this.  This is the point about the Dream being a shared experience: until what's behind the back door enters the shared space (SIS), it isn't there.  But the character does not know this.  The character assumes that there is something back there, and simply decides whether it matters or not to his current situation.

The next point is something I talked about long ago in my Not Lectures on Theory thread.  When there is a disjuncture between what the player expects and what the character encounters, there is some potential for Dream-breaking, but there is also a lot of potential for Dream-supporting.  That sounds paradoxical, but here's how it works.  When Doc, the Wild West gunslinger, walks up to the bar, the player may be thinking, "Okay, Wild West saloon, got it, so there's this fat sweaty guy behind the bar, so I'll talk to him and get a shot of rye."  But when the player says something about this, the GM says, "Nope, the bartender is a young, pretty woman in a gingham dress.  She smiles at you.  'Get you something, stranger?'" Now there is a conflict between what the player expected and what the character encountered.  The character didn't have this problem: he saw the lady when he walked in.  But the player has just had his expectations challenged.  The thing is, so long as the challenge isn't so strong as to break the Dream, this actually strengthens the Dream; very simply, you might say that by adding a lot of color and detail to the setting, this little change has fleshed out the saloon as not just a stock location but as a specific, real place.  If the challenge to expectation is really strong, that's a problem: in a reasonably normal Wild West game, for example, if the bartender turns out to be a 60-foot giant robot, the Dream starts to shatter.  (If you care, I talked about this previously in terms of semiotic logic, as abduction and deduction.)

Okay, so what does all this have to do with mechanics?

What I'm saying is that there are a lot of mechanics, in a very broad sense of the word (see also the current discussion of play and design), by which we players work out how not to notice things, how to avoid violating the Dream.  In Sim, this is critically important, because your character cannot be the one to make these decisions: the character must live in a causal, consistent universe.  So there are these strategies Sim designers and players use to ensure that the conflicts that necessarily occur between player expectation and character experience produce a stronger Dream rather than shattering it.

One important aspect of these strategies is to keep handling-time down.  The more time the player has to spend dealing with issues outside the character's experience, the harder it is to maintain that clear sense of what the character is experiencing.

Another aspect is to keep the mechanics focused on what's going on within the character's experience.  As you say, M.J., a die roll that says, "This is whether the character spots the guy in the corner drawing the gun" is a nice efficient way to do this.  But a die roll that says, "This is whether this scene is going to be a gunfight or a love story" isn't, because it's not a character question but rather a player one.  In Nar, for example, you could do exactly that, no problem, because the point is Story Now, not Dream.  But in Sim, this would be a problem.

One strategy you can take is to have the mechanics colored by the character's world.  The dice are magic bones, you use karma in a world like Amber, and so on.  All those examples people mentioned.  This is helpful because it makes the mechanics slide toward being part of the Dream.

Here's why I was asking about diceless systems, though.  Let's suppose Doc is in that saloon chatting up the pretty bartender.  The GM announces, "You know, I think this is boring, I think a gunfight would be a better story.  So forget the bartender, okay?  This guy behind you draws a gun, and you just catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye.  What do you do?"  My point is that this is a violation of Sim principles, although it isn't necessarily of Nar or Gam (it's a pretty extreme way to do things, but it's plausible).

In Sim, this imposes a strong artifice that the player cannot ignore, because the reason for this artifice is an external aesthetic principle, not internal causality of the Dream.  If the GM says, "Roll dice.  Good roll!  Okay, you see out of the corner of your eye that the big lug in the corner is going for his gun," there's no basic problem.  The presumption is that there is some reason for this behavior, and probably it's going to emerge later on what this is all about.  Maybe the guy in the corner is in love with the bartender, maybe he's the brother of some guy Doc killed, maybe it's a case of mistaken identity, whatever.  But there is cause and effect here: this isn't just a random event that happened because we've decided in advance that gunfights are cooler than chatting.

To come full circle and wind up this exceedingly long post, I think dice are often used mechanically for a few reasons:

[*]They're completely arbitrary, not determined by an exterior principle
[*]They're potentially quick, clear, and determinate
[*]They're traditional, so we're used to ignoring them as artifice[/list:u]What I'm interested in is how Sim designers strategically produce these same effects without the benefit of tradition, and in fact try to improve on them.  So for example, I think one of the reasons some Sim games announce that their diceless system is better than dice-using systems is because, they claim, you don't have to ignore them the way you do dice.  This isn't exactly true, but the claim is that without dice the Dream is purer and there is less potential for handling violations.  And from there, you start saying that without dice and with your mechanics colored in a way that fits the universe of the Dream, your system is The Best Way.  And so on.

Ultimately this projects a hypothetical "pure" Sim, never in practice achievable, in which the mechanics are completely arbitrary, fully determinate, and 100% built into the Dream universe.  That really does probably lend itself to Immersionist manifestoes, which is probably why Immersion is so much more common as a goal for Sim games.

Last but not least, I'm interested in the fact that such a "pure" Sim is not actually achievable, whereas an ideal of Nar or Gam actually is achievable.  This produces all these strategies to get around the problem, and I'm interested in what those are and how and why they arise.

Contracycle mentions that an actually achieved "pure" Sim like this would in fact be indistinguishable from reality.  True – that's why it's not achievable.  To go farther, contracycle mentions that this is really a sort of scary goal, because it has the capacity to hurt us in a way that we probably don't want; Fred emphasizes this strongly.  I agree, actually.  But I think that the edge of possibility, in which the capacity to hurt gets damn close to real, in which the capacity to hurt emotionally is very real, is one of the most powerful and exciting things about Sim.  It makes playing risky, but the potential rewards increase.

Does that clarify matters?  Sorry to go on so long, but there's a lot in your posts (here and on your other thread) to deal with.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Chris, what do you think of this idea:

1. Achieving Sim play just as you describe, and as we can see over and over in game designs which purport to be "transparent" only through reducing handling time. Fudge is a great, great example. Usually associated with phrases like "storytelling" or "getting to the story" or "not letting system get in the way."

2. Achieving Sim play by focusing more on representative mechanics, rather than less, and aiming for an elegance of among-mechanics causes. This elegance is intended to act as a tool among the participants for the keeping the Dream afloat, because it "works" in the sense of a set of imaginary physics. (Note: I use the term "physics" loosely, because the mechanics can be about anything.) Best example that comes to mind at the moment is Pocket Universe, although EABA can certainly go this way.

My claim is that #2 is indeed the same overriding aesthetic goal as #1, but wants to get there through embracing representative tools, whereas #2 finds those tools distracting.

Best,
Ron