Director Stance (more) (split)

[LordSmerf]

Raven (greyorm) mentioned something in the new thread Different Types of Director Stance that really solidified my problems with Stance Theory.  My problem starts with and centers on Director Stance.  Here is how i see things:

We have two (and a half, I guess) functional Stances: Actor, Author, (Pawn, if you want to count it).  Each of these is used to classify how and why a given decision is made.  It is impossible to determine what stance is being utilized based purely on SIS input.  That is, we can not know if a decision is made in Actror or Author without knowing the thought processes of the player involved since the actual decision may be the same in either one.

Then we have Director Stance.  It does not care about intent.  We can identify Directo Stance based purely upon SIS input.  So when you tell me that a crate falls on your enemy's head then I know that you are using Director Stance, when you tell me that you character attacks then I can not be sure whether you are using Actor Stance or Author Stance because I do not know why you decided for your character to attack.

The problem here is that we have a "Stance" that appears to be almost totally unlike all other identified Stances.  So, most Stances measure intent, Director Stance measures something else.  Most Stances require knowledge of thought processes to determine, not Director Stance.  I keep hearing "One of these things is not like the others...  One of these things just doesn't belong..."  Looping in my head.

Now, it is not that I do not find Director Stance useful as a term.  As I mentioned before, I see it commonly used as short hand for "Stuff the GM handles in traditional RPGs" and "Director Stance" is way easier to say.

Let me see if I can get to the point:  We treat the Stances as if they are all related.  We put them in this big category of "Role Playing Stances", but Director Stance is totally unrelated to the other Stances.  If I were to walk up to someone on the street and say: You can determine W, X, and Y by examining motivation and you can determine Z by examining what is manipulated (but not motivation), but W, X, Y, and Z are all the same type of thing I am pretty sure I would get laughed at.

I know something about Stances bothers a number of other people, I think that this is the specific aspect that bothers me.  So, do the other people who are unhappy with Stances see this as a problem, or is it something else?  I also know that some people are perfectlly happy with Stance theory as it currently stands.  To you I ask, do you see where I am coming from?  Does discontinuity not bother you as well?  If not, why?

Now, I am not saying that Stances as they stand are not useful.  It is nice to have a term that essentially means "manipulating something outside of the character", my problem is not with having such a term.  My problem is that current Stance Theory essentially says that Director Stance is in some way conceptually similar to the other recognized Stances, and that seems kind of ridiculous to me.

Thomas

[LordSmerf]

Just a quick note.  Ron split this thread from Stance Theory: The Hegemony of One Character.  Upon rereading I feel that it makes sense outside of that thread, but I believe that you can see me flailing around with this idea there.  Additionally there are a number of other interesting ideas that are related to the idea I have presented here, so I recommend reading the parent thread before getting to heavily involved here (assuming anyone else finds this interesting).

Oh, and thanks Ron.  I am glad that someone is keeping me honest.

Thomas

[Mike Holmes]

I've had similar problems, but, essentially if you want to look at it as how the player made the decision in terms of the character, the answer is that the decision was made irellevant of the character.

Actor - made as though character
Author - made as though author of the character
Director - made without considering the character

Is that any more functional? I'm not seeing where the problem lies, precisely.

Mike

[LordSmerf]

I see what you are saying Mike, but as I read Director Stance that is not the case at all.  In fact, I understand that often Director Stance is used to manipulate the environment with the express purpose of aiding the character.  Thus, as far as I can tell, Director Stance does not specify any sort of decision making with regards to character.  It can (and often is) used with the intent of assisting a character.

Thomas

[WiredNavi]

Bear with me, now, because I've got fragments of what I want to say tumbling around in my head but they haven't quite come to rest in an intelligible way yet... (and what I'm saying may well have been covered in another thread.)

There seem to be two issues here - that of priorities (what the player considers important in his SIS manipulation) and authority (what the player is allowed to do to affect the SIS).  I think that instead of Director Stance being a red herring, it may well be Author Stance that is, and that the distinction between the two is purely based on authority.  Simply put, Author Stance is Director Stance without the authority to speak for anything except a character's actions.

Let's try some other definitions:

Actor Stance:  Deciding how to affect the SIS based entirely on their interpretation of particular character's perspective within the SIS.
Author Stance:  Deciding how to affect the SIS based on non-SIS priorities about what the player wants the character over which they have authority to do.
Director Stance:  Deciding how to affect the SIS based on what the player wants any part of the state of the SIS to be.

These definitions at least - which may well be flawed - imply that Author and Director Stance are essentially the same.  Director Stance says, 'I want X to happen in the SIS.'  Author Stance says 'I want X to happen to the particular part of the SIS involving My Character'.  The latter is just a more limited subset of the former.

In Actor stance, authority isn't an issue - if you are choosing to affect the SIS based entirely on a character's perceptions, then you can't affect anything in the SIS that the character couldn't or wouldn't.  Actor Stance ignores any authority which may have been granted beyond that.  However, when the authority a player has is only for his character's actions, there seems to be no difference between Director and Author stances.  I think Author Stance may be simply an attempt to take Director Stance into games which traditionally rely on Actor Stance and thus have limited authority relegated to most players.

[Mike Holmes]

Thomas,

The GM is a player.

Now how does that impact your understanding?

That is, when the GM plays an NPC, he's using actor or author stance. When he throws a rockslide at the PCs, he's using director stance. If he narrates that in a far off land that there's a storm raging, that's director stance.

Generally only things that are somehow at least tangentially important to the characters in the game are narrated. But it's not to "benefit" or to "harm" them, neccessarily. Director Stance is just manipulation of elements that are not characters.

From another POV, anything can be a character, and here's where I sorta go with something like Jinx's idea. That is, if you drop the idea of character per se, there's only the question of what the player has the authority to affect, and whether he's thinking "Story logic" or "internal logic."

That is, I quite agree that someone using director stance, can be doing so from an "author" POV, in that he's making things happen for dramatic reasons, or he can do so from an "actor" POV, in that he's making things happen purely by "channeling" what "should" happen inb terms of internal causality.

Mike

[LordSmerf]

Wow Jix, you may be onto something here...

If we consider a definition of Stances in which all that matters is what information is used in a given decision (we need a good term for that I think) then there is a clear overlap between Director and Author Stances.  That would bring us back to the parent thread.  It could be argued that Stance Theory supports a Player -> Character, GM -> Everything else paradigm because it essentially has two stances that deal with metagame decision making, one for characters and one for everything else.  Very interesting.

One thing that would probably be really useful to this discussion would be a useful definition of Stance.  From the Provisional Glossary:

The cognitive position of a person to a fictional character.

Which seems to be rather broad...  Cognitive position is such a huge idea that I do not believe that this is a useful definition.

Mike, I think we may agree, but let me run this by you again.  First, yes the GM is a player, if I had not realized it before Universalis taught me that.  Now, you defined Director Stance as: "Director - made without considering the character" and then you said: "Director Stance is just manipulation of elements that are not characters."  I consider these to be different things.  I agree with the second, but not the first.  You can manipulate non-character elements in full consideration of character.  For example: "There's a ladder there so that i can climb up onto the roof and escape."   The ladder is there for the express purpose of aiding your character.

To address your second definition, yes, that is how I see Director Stance currently, and I do not think that it is really all that useful.  It implies nothing about play except that whatever is using it has moved beyond the idea that the GM is sole arbiter of non-character elements within the SIS.  While that is a useful thing to recognize, it is essentially unrelated to the other Stances.  This generates confusion as we have decided to include multiple, unrelated (or possibly peripherally-related) items in one group.  Essentially we say that Director Stance is similar to Actor Stance in some way, otherwise we would not call them both Stances...

Thomas

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I'm starting to get a little tired ...

Folks, I've seen both of these a thousand times.

a) Someone figures out that Author and Actor Stances are limited to the character's actions, and says, "Ooh, let's split them off from Director Stance!"

b) Someone figures out that Author and Director Stances discount the character's outlook/perspective and says, "Ooh, let's split them off from
Actor Stance!"

The observation that both of these insights are repeated over and over lets me know that we are talking about three distinct things.

Couple more details: I do not know where Mike is getting "made without reference to the character." All Stances are conducted toward the/a character, without exception, by definition - that's what a Stance is.

Thomas, that's why Director Stance is a Stance. It is not solely defined by non-GMs providing input about non-character stuff; although that's what knocks entrenched gamers for a loop about the concept, it's really not a big deal. Director Stance refers to a specific positioning of the real person's mind relative to a given character - the position is both "out of the character's head" and "out of the character's body."

It's so easy ... (a) sit in the character's head, (b) sit in the character's body but use your own head, (c) get out of the character's body, but affect the character nonetheless.

Three possible positions to place yourself relative to the character. Three Stances.

All this other stuff is red herring - GM vs. non-GM, my character vs. someone else's character, et cetera. Now it seems to be about merely providing input of any kind.

Best,
Ron

[LordSmerf]

Ok Ron,

First, sorry to retread this same thing over and over.  Thanks for the clarification.  There seems to be the hint of another Stance.  One that would be "getting out of the character altogether", so basically the "Stance" you take when you take actions outside of a Stance.  Now, I am not sure that such a Stance is useful, but I wanted to bring it to your attention.  Has this also been discussed before?

Thomas

[Blankshield]

My take:  If it has nothing to do with a character, it's not a Stance.  It's Color.  Stance relates directly to character.  Description that is not related to character is color.

James

[Mike Holmes]

Ron I admitted that it's a limited viewpoint, hence why I later stated that almost all decisions are things that will affect characters no matter how tangentially.

Thomas, there is very little, if any, "Outside of character."

Let's say that I decide that there's a huge temple on the road. At the very least, the reason that I've made that decision is because I'm going to say, "On the way, the characters pass a huge temple." That affects the characters, even if only in a subtle way. To follow Ron's model, I've made the decision outside of any character's head, and outside of their body.

Even if the GM is making up information that the players of the characters will never know, it's only relevant to the game in the context of the fact that they might know. To suppose that there's something that's created that can't impact a character, even through a player's perception of it, seems to me to be saying creating something that never enters play. The value of which seems lost to me.

Put another way, what would you consider an example of something created Outside of outside of a character?

Mike

[WiredNavi]

Sorry for rehashing old arguments, then.  It's not easy for us newcomers to know what arguments are old.

On the other hand, I still think the distinction between Director and Author may be false.  A stance is a 'cognitive position taken towards a character', right?  What does 'cognitive position' mean?  As far as I can see, it means 'the perspective from which one makes decisions'.  To the best approximation I can find, the intellectual perspective doesn't change between Author and Director stances.  Only the authority to change things in the SIS does, and authority seems like a different issue entirely.

If this's been hashed out before, could someone direct me to a thread that covers it so I can let go?

[clehrich]

Put another way, what would you consider an example of something created Outside of outside of a character?

This is an important question because it potentially breaks the point of Stance in the first place.  If there is nothing outside of outside of a character, to repeat the phrase, then everything is relevant to character, in which case everything is within some Stance.  The only things I can think of that are not relative to character "however tangentially" are certain parts of Social Contract like "who buys the pizza" and the like.  So it seems to me as though if Stance is to be constrained at all usefully there must be a way of distinguishing what is character-relevant more precisely.

What do you all think of James's suggestion that non-character relevant stuff is Color?  I'm not sure about this, but it seems interesting.

[Mike Holmes]

But we do that all the time, Chris. We have SIS, and the elements of exploration, etc, etc.

In any case, it's the question not of what's being created, but the perspective of the person doing the creation (and hence what impact that might have). It passes the use test.

Jinx, perspective is the direction with which somebody looks at something. Which direction must neccessarily include that which is bieng looked at. You seem to be making some semantic argument, but the distinction between character, and not character (but part of the SIS), is a very simple and easy concept to understand. So, is it merely the wording of the definition that bothers you, or is there some real problem with how the term works?

Mike

[LordSmerf]

Mike,

I am going to attempt to address your question.  I am afraid my answer will be a little nebulous and possibly somewhat evasive, please let me know if you think so.

Ok, first, I am going to assume Ron's definition of character.  This means that anything can be a character assuming that it is sympathetic in some way (at least that's what I think Ron is saying).  Taking this definition, nothing can enter the SIS that can not impact a character.  If it can not impact a character then it is not actually in the SIS.

Now, Stance to me implies proactivity.  That is that you are moving forward with a specific goal, and you are adopting a Stance in order to accomplish it.  "On the way to wherever you pass a temple." can easily be done, as James mentioned, purely for color.  I would argue that since there is no goal then there is no Stance.  Building on Chris's point about Social Contract issues it would probably be useful to clarify that to "If there is no goal regarding SIS" there is no Stance.

Hmm... Here's a thought.  What about actions intended to impact the SIS through social interaction.  This would be a step above metagame play.  For example, I buy the pizza in order to positively incline all the players towards me.  This will hopefully result in assistance for my character(s) and assistance (or at least tolerance) toward my personal story goals.  My ultimate (and possibly proximate) motivation in buying the pizza may very well be to forward my character.

Using the idea that having a goal to effect the SIS being the primary motivator seems to imply that that would be a stance, but my intuition tells me that that is pretty silly.

Also, I still think that Jinx may be onto something.  Unfortunatley I can not put my finger one what it is at the moment...  Perhaps some more time to conisder it will make it clearer to me.

Edit: Crossposted with Mike.

Thomas