one player's quest to recapture the table-top RPG experience...

[Paul Czege]

...in the medium of computer rpgs:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/4/31

I can't decide if I think he failed for the same reasons he thinks he failed.

Paul

[Ron Edwards]

Oh my God, that's horrible. He's looking at it as if the medium screwed things up, whereas it's patently obvious that this group of players is so out-of-touch with one another in terms of Social Contract and Creative Agenda, that they can only play via computer in order to keep potential conflicts muted.

I can't look at it any longer. It's not only like seeing a multi-car accident, but as if the paramedics had arrived and were looking upward, musing about how the "sunspots are pretty damn bad today, to cause something like this."

Best,
Ron

[Adam Dray]

I finished reading the article with a sense of sadness that echoes Ron's. I just wanted to take the guy and give him a hug, alternated with wanting to shake him and the rest of the group.

He sent out a social contract of sorts, his mission statement. But no one followed it, including him. He keeps calling his work his masterpiece, but it isn't a masterpiece. It's a beautiful attempt at Drift, at best, trying to bend NWN into a form it wasn't meant to be bent. He took a powerful Gamist tool and forced a different CA on it, then wondered why it didn't work. It was pure Incoherence.

I loved the lycanthropy bug. That's the kind of thing that can happen at the tabletop. The GM says something and the player misinterprets it somehow and suddenly his interpretation of the SIS is different from everyone else's. He gives hints that he is in a different world than everyone else, and he is -- but everyone else thinks he's being silly (at best) or being psychotic (at worst). The player in the example was having a blast being a wolf; it's too bad they stopped him.

And once the guy used NWN the way it was designed to be used, hey, everyone had a blast, but it was "every other CRPG out there." Except it wasn't, because he had created it custom for his players, and he seems to miss that point, which I think is important.

[Rob Carriere]

As far as I can tell (the description is rather more vivid than the analysis) he thinks he failed because a CRPG is not an TTRPG and therefore attempting to re-create the latter in the former is bound to go wrong.

He may have a point there, possibly even an excellent point, but I don't think his story is evidence for that point.

I think he failed because he did not try to succeed.

He did lots of things, spent impressive amounts of effort and time, but--from his account--none of it was focused on creating what he wanted, the effort instead going into building a very pretty picture with the assumption that very pretty play would follow automatically. For one thing, I think some long talks among all the players about just what it was that they wanted re-captured would have been lot more useful than manifestos, especially manifestos that only go into what standard CRPG things they won't do. (Fine, what will you do?)

Add to that that, if his description is accurate, the other players entered with that same expectation that good play would automagically occur without any effort on their part and I think that, as the Germans say, disaster was pre-programmed.

With this setup, I'd be willing to bet he'd have failed even they had been face-to-face sessions.

SR
--

[Andrew Norris]

With this setup, I'd be willing to bet he'd have failed even they had been face-to-face sessions.

Oh dear God, yes. Spending hours creating backdrops in loving detail, with no thought about whether they'll have any relevance in play? Not saying a word as agenda conflicts mount and mount, until you finally blow up with a "Goddamn it, you guys aren't playing right"? I've played in way too many face-to-face sessions that were exactly like that.

I was hoping someone would pick this topic up here, because I spent, God, a year and a half running NWN games during graduate school. It was the impetus for me to start running tabletop games again.

My experience was a personal recap of the evolution of roleplaying. I was about thirty, and I went from seventh grade basement D&D to "Thank god I found The Forge" in a year. I started by running simple Gamist dungeon crawls, moved on to Sim-by-habit with extensive detail, and ended up a Typhoid Mary (where the players were enjoying "my story"). After that experience, Ron's articles hit me hard. I had some definite "damn, that's me" moments.

I was never as bitter as this guy, though, probably because I didn't have so damn much invested in it. Early on, our GMing troupe ran straightforward dungeons just for the joy of it. We weren't about to do things a certain way to make the players happy, because they were new every time. After a few months of auditions, we put together a cohesive group of people whose playing styles meshed, came up with A Big Story, and worked our way through it. That actually worked pretty well, possibly because we were all wedded to our vision rather than outside social concerns. If you didn't get "the vibe", you could move on your merry way without any hurt feelings.

I'd never go through all that again, but as someone whose tabletop experiences had a ten year gap in them, I think it was a necessary phase to figure out what the hell I wanted out of gaming. I made every mistake in the book, and hopefully a lot of them are out of my system.

Neverwinter Nights left me with one rule of thumb that I'll never give up: Empty detail fucking sucks. I've seen enough of it to last me a lifetime. To this day, if someone starts lovingly describing some detail in game, my eyes glaze over. Talk about shit that matters, forget the rest. Don't try to make me feel like I live there, make me care about it.

[Christoph Boeckle]

(...) He's looking at it as if the medium screwed things up, (...)

While it's true that there was disension amongst the participants, MMORPGs do have a tendency to kill all sorts of RP habit and make people think in terms of "buffs, tanking and PBAoE". (Personal Based Area of Effect)

I'm just stepping out of char gen for three players for my upcoming Paladin game (two more players to go before I post in AP). One is spending a lot of time in World of Warcraft. For the Paladin game, he wanted to play a priestly (group-supporting) figure. For a long time, he wanted to find ways to bend the mechanics to have a spell (that's a modification of Paladin I'll be talking about elsewhere) that could grant bonuses to the whole group. I just couldn't figure out a way to do it mechanically, so I suggested that if playing a more sprititual kind of character was what he wanted, he needn't have spells for it. More importantly, it would be the way the character relates to others and to his faith, which can be of great help to the party (which connects to the group-supporting aspect).
He chewed on that and eventually went for it, creating a completely non-spellcasting "priest". I hope it will work for him.

What I'm heavily suspecting is that his massive play of WoW put him in a state of mind that was distracting. Good thing we play around a table, it could have been harder still via a computer game, where there also is no discussion with the GM for char gen.

So I believe that one of the several things that led to this party's problems where the habits the players got from previous MMORPG experiences, although it's more an issue of the dominant form of the medium than the medium itself.

[Sean]

Killin' deer for xp. Oh how that brings back memories.

I do think this is a pretty exemplary case of GM with Sim CA going berserk when confronted with players with a Gam CA. The experience system in place suggests that the players are in the right though, at least up to a point.

Given that CA clash, though, which he's not really aware of, I think some of the guy's self-analysis is OK. I mean, given his CA, the NWN setup doesn't seem like it facilitates what he wants.

Aroooooooooooooooo.......

[Jason Lee]

That poor bastard.  I wish people who tried to roleplay in online computer games would read System Does Matter.

Well, the MMORPG industry is partly to blame.  Like in World of Warcraft, for example, where they specifically have roleplaying servers.  The only distinction between a roleplaying server and a normal one is that players can file complaints against other players for not roleplaying, and thereby get the support staff to go bitch at the "offending" player.

Talk about dysfunctional in the extreme.  Social penalties for playing how the game encourages you to.  "Here doggy, get the steak, get it, come on."  *beats with baseball bat* "BAD DOG! Bad dog no steak! NO STEAK!"

And then... Is that what roleplaying becomes to those players?

[Resonantg]

Wow, talk about taking the wrong path to "recapture the table-top experience".  This is the bane of CRPGs on the whole "real" RPG community.  I've seen many players who have spent so much time being the hero on their computer by themselves, they are stunted when put behind the dice.  Everything's a target, other gamers are their sidekicks, they are completely immoral or amoral at best and are nothing short of the horsemen of the apocalypse to the poor innocent civilians and treat everyone like crap if they bother to treat them at all.  I've actually grown exasperated with two members in my group I've actually had to ask one to get with the program or quit because of just this behavior. 

And I agree absolutely that the GM should not have gone away from his manifesto.  A few new characters later, players will get the hint.  Remaking characters is a pain in the butt if you've put any effort into it, but also the loss of experience points and equipment, from a gamist perspective.  Although the group was pretty well pooched to begin with, computers I will admit exacerbated the situation quite effectively.  The GM was more interested in the cool design he could make instead of content and story from everything I read.

<rant>
That being said, This has become a giant pet peeve of mine.  No, not a pet peeve, it's a hardcore problem.  I agree this writer's group is a trainwreck of people who have lost the ability to game effectively in a social setting and I wonder about their ability to actually be social.  In a way this is a "Gamist infection" where normal gamist tendancies have gone out of control and consumed the group.  "If you didn't want us to kill the deer..." I just scream at player statments like that.  There is barely a notion of in character as much as a min/max bloodfest of points.  I want to grab them by their greasy tee shirt and shake them screaming "Don't you know how to play a socially well-adjusted adventurer and not a psychotic killing machine?!?  You don't kill everything you see!!  Even Indiana Jones didn't shoot the wildlife and every arab in the street because it was there!!!  Have you ever heard of realistic consequences?!"

IMNSHO, Computers are the antithesis to role playing.  Gamers shouldn't have them at the table to communicate with one another.  Nor IMHO, is online/computer based gaming really role playing.  I've tried it, and the experience was awful.  no creativity or flexibility or true problem solving.  Give the GM a computer so he can play music, show pictures get files fast, and/or print out data for players on demand, but keep 'em out of the player's hands.  They should be more concerned with the scenario and not have a chance to open their browser or put on headphones or other ways of tuning out what they find boring.  Nor can a videogame, no matter how flexible, compete with those who have imagination, or allow for the same degree of flexibility that gives true gaming it's edge over any computer simulation.

So, yes, these wounds were self inflicted because they were based on a flawed concept that CRPGs could even hold a candle to real RPGs.  And playing with those who have been away from the real stuff so long, they no longer remember what it's like to truely role play, is just adding stooges to the fool's wedding... which is what happened.  Solution?  Put the computers away, break out the pencil and paper and dice, and play for real and quit being so lazy, and rediscover your social skills.
</rant>

:c)

[TonyLB]

Nice rant!

But Gamism isn't a disease or infection.  It's just a different style, which is pursued by both socially adjusted or socially stunted people.  Saying that there's a spectrum with "socially well-adjusted" on one side and "avid Gamist" on the other strikes me as a category error.  It's like saying there's a spectrum with apples on one side and the socratic method on the other.

[Resonantg]

Oh no.  Wasn't trying to say that Gamism is a disease or problem.  But when any of the aspects get out of control, it's a problem.  CRPGs are usually very gamist in nature, and therefore encourage Gamist tendancies to go out of control when players are confronted by a real RPG.  That's what I was saying.

:c)

[Sean]

Since there were experience points awarded for killing deer, the players were right to kill them, from the point of view that they were playing this particular game with this particular reward system. I don't see any way around that, personally.

[Sean]

Well, actually, maybe that's too strong on my part. The GM does have this ability to let the setting components interact, so that the Druid gets mad at you and smokes your ass if you kill too many deer. If the players are aware that the setting is interdependent in this sense, then you can leave the xp on the deer and treat that as a kind of 'bait' so that the players wind up with a classic dilemma (short-term vs. long-term gain/loss). But everyone needs to be clear up front that this is how it works. And if they are, then the GM absolutely has to leave them dead when the Druid smokes them.

[Ron Edwards]

Guys. This isn't a place to work out your issues with Gamist play, especially since such issues lend themselves too readily to rants, counter-rants, and emotional revelations.

Paul, can you provide a bit more focus for the discussion?

Best,
Ron

[Paul Czege]

Paul, can you provide a bit more focus for the discussion?

Maybe. What the article got me thinking about was how old school tabletop D&D is effectively a turn-based game. The need to get the DM's attention functions as a bottleneck. It's definitely informal. You might get more than one "turn" in a row, if your social mojo is strong, or very few turns a session if your mojo is weak. But it's still a game of turn after turn after turn. Neverwinter Nights, however, is a game of simultaneous action.

It's easy to focus in on the author's repeated violations of his manifesto. It seems like he failed to apply Forge style wisdom to what he was doing...he contributed willfully to an incoherent social contract. But I'm not sure that's what sunk him. When I was playing AD&D heavily, we sometimes had contracts like his. And if we did, the contract would be at odds with player dedication to the game's reward system, often to a great degree. (If your goals aren't at odds with a game's reward system, do you need a contract?) Those contracts often failed for us, just as the author's contract failed. (The reward mechanics were just too strong.) But sometimes they worked okay for a a dozen sessions or so.

The article got me thinking about how when our contracts were successful for those few sessions, it was because the DM was able to manage each player's activity informally during individual "turn" instances. This guy doesn't seem like he lacks leadership skills. I'm thinking he might have pulled it off if the game had simply been turn based.

Paul