Control and Restrictions in RPGs

[lpsmith]

So, I wrote an essay about RPG theory:

http://strackenz.spod-central.org/~lpsmith/rpg/essays/ControlAndRestrictions.html

It has two basic premises:  one, that a roleplaying system delegates control over different aspects of the created story to the players (and GM, if there is one), and two, that it can be useful to break down 'story' into four axes:  Character, Plot, Setting, and Tone.  Along the way, I claim that a common resolution to "The Impossible Thing" is simply a matter of control:  the GM is in control of the Plot axis, and the players are in control of the Character axis.  It's (hopefully) a deeper analysis of Illusionism/Participationism.

At some point, I'd like to take a bunch of systems and analyze them specifically in these terms, but these are my thoughts for the nonce.  I started thinking about things in these terms after reading M.J. Young's "The Impossible Thing" essay.  Suggestions/criticisms welcome, of course.

[Callan S.]

Recently Ron said something along these lines of "The idea that rules are to stop arguments like 'I shot you' 'no you didn't' is just stupid". Anyway, that's what I read of it.

It struck me as a good way of debunking what system can and will do for you. The rules aren't there to stop arguments directly. They are there to avoid unwanted arguments, by creating a series of agreements/rules the players have agreed to, and then can use to arrive at further agreements (like agreeing if someone is shot).*

So what would that make of the word 'control'? Like with the GM controlling the plot. I think it means that really, there are agreements/rules about plot management. And they are used by players and GM to arrive at further agreements with each other.

Hope I'm not too far off base in adding this.

* There are of course, arguments that you do want. You just try to eliminate all the ones you don't. The remaining, carefully chosen ones lead to excellent gameplay.

[contracycle]

I'm afraid I'm not convinced, not least becuase "the story" means too many things.  So to discuss who is in control of "the story" is nearly meaningless.  What matters is who is in control of the shared imaginary space, and thats a rather different issue.  Now we re-enter story, and see that while the GM may control plot, the players have so much impact on the SIS that the nominal plot control is not achieveable without denying players the capacity to impact the SIS.  And that, ultimately, is why the impossible thing is impossible - in order to get rising action and climax, the players have to psychically realise where they are in "the story" without the GM telling them, and behave accordingly.  It just doesn't happen.

[lpsmith]

So what would that make of the word 'control'?  Like with the GM controlling the plot. I think it means that really, there are agreements/rules about plot management. And they are used by players and GM to arrive at further agreements with each other.

If I'm reading this correctly, in the scenario you describe both the players and GM have 'control' of the plot.  And there are certainly many games where this is true.  But it doesn't happen very often/at all in the games I usually play--the only person in control of the plot is the GM.

Now we re-enter story, and see that while the GM may control plot, the players have so much impact on the SIS that the nominal plot control is not achieveable without denying players the capacity to impact the SIS.

I simply don't see this.  As you say, 'the story' is *big*.  The shared imagination space is big.  There are plenty of ways to impact one area without affecting another.

When I was the GM for my gaming group, I was thinking about plot all the time.  The pace would slow down, so I'd throw in an encounter to speed things up a bit.  The players would be confused, so I'd hold off on encounters while they pieced things together.  I'd try to come up with intriguing locales for them to visit, interesting people to talk to, and exciting challenges to overcome.

When I'm a player in my gaming group, I don't think about plot at all.  The GM's in charge of that.  Instead, I'm thinking about funny things my character would say in the situation at hand.  I'm interested tactically in how to overcome the most recent given challenge.  I banter with the NPCs and other players, check out the cool places we're going, and see if I can accomplish a few minor personal goals along the way as the group in general accomplishes the main objective.  If something I do throws off the GM's plans, I enjoy a moment of schadenfreude at his plight, but am interested more as an observer than as a participant watching how he gets things back on track again.

I used the word 'control', but perhaps it would be more clear if I talked about 'responsibility'?  As a player, I'm responsible for stuff my character does.  As a GM, I'm responsible for 'plot stuff'.  Sure, they can influence each other, and even overlap.  But, to me, I think differently when I'm in the different roles.

[lumpley]

Hey lpsmith.

Can I recommend a thread to you? It's this one: Why would anybody want to GM?, started by Kat Miller. Oh and here's a follow-up to it: History of theGM? started by komradebob.

What the GM does varies widely, when there even is one!

-Vincent

[Josh Roby]

When I was the GM for my gaming group, I was thinking about plot all the time.  The pace would slow down, so I'd throw in an encounter to speed things up a bit.  The players would be confused, so I'd hold off on encounters while they pieced things together.  I'd try to come up with intriguing locales for them to visit, interesting people to talk to, and exciting challenges to overcome.

Only in roleplaying are these things considered the "plot".  Encounters are simply situations and maybe some immediate conflict; holding off on the next one to let the players/characters catch up is pacing; intriguing locales are setting; interesting people are characters; challenges, like encounters, are situation and a little conflict.  Most of these are elements of plot, but to say they are plot is like mistaking nuts and bolts for a machine.

Plot is the emergent quality that is created through the interactions of most of these elements, primarily conflict, characters, and setting.  If all goes well, the emergent plot will address, explore, or present a theme -- although identifying the theme is not necessarily done or possible before you play and develop the plot.  I won't toe the hardline and say that the characters must address the theme in order to create the plot; I think it's more than possible for a GM to tell a great short story and the players to tag along.

Now, maybe you mean when you list off those elements that you are juggling them all with the eventual goal of creating a plot, but creating that plot is a lot more complex than merely keeping track of NPCs and challenges.  Additionally, things that you attribute to the 'story' in your post above, things that you allow the players to have some control over, are also part of the plot.  Can you give some nice, hard definitions of what you consider a "story", a "plot", and "control"?

[Josh Roby]

After rereading your essay, it seems your definition of plot is actually more about pacing, while your comments here seem to concern the elements of the story outside of traditional players' control (NPCs, setting elements, challenges, etc).  You also seem to imply in your essay that the GM is responsible for making the events of the game "make sense" in a narrative sense, taking in the input of player character actions and weaving them together into something coherent.  This is somewhat similar to the emergent properties I mentioned above.

I get what you're going at, but I think your four 'axes' have more to do with roleplaying as it has been than what roleplaying is or could be.  As you allow in your essay, they are rather arbitrary, and are not exclusive from eachother, leading to bleed-over.  The borderland between Character and Plot is especially problematic, and is where the debate about railroading, illusionism, and participationism takes place.  I don't know if you can make any solid conclusions here until you firm up your definitions of (and the distinctions between) the axes.

[timfire]

I used the word 'control', but perhaps it would be more clear if I talked about 'responsibility'?  As a player, I'm responsible for stuff my character does.  As a GM, I'm responsible for 'plot stuff'.  Sure, they can influence each other, and even overlap.  But, to me, I think differently when I'm in the different roles.

Saying "responsible" would be more appropriate, and I might even agree with you with a few clarifications. But "responsibility" and "control" are two VASTLY different things. "Responsibility" is in no way a substitute for "control".

It's true that in Illusionism/Participationism, the GM is "responsible" for the "plot" and the players are responsible for the "characters". That that doesn't solve the inherent contradiction in "The Impossible Thing..."

Do you mind defining "Setup", "Conflict", "Rising Tension", & "Climax" a little more? I'm not exactly sure what you mean by them. It sounds to me like some sort of mixture of what we here would call here "situation" and "pacing".

[lpsmith]

Hi, Vincent!  I read those threads, and were interesting.  Sadly, I was not able to figure out their relevance, which probably means I'm not communicating something.  Can you say what it is you meant point out?

Hmm, clearer definitions.  Maybe an example will help?  Let's take the plot of Cinderella:

Setup:  Cinderella lives with her stepmother and stepsisters.  They make her work like a maid and do little work themselves.
Conflict:  There's a ball, and they don't let Cinderella go.
Rising action:  Cinderella tries to get to the ball, and is variously thwarted and helped along the way.
Climax:  The prince find out who she really is
Denoument:  They get married; the stepmothers/sisters get their just deserts.

In contrast, here's the character of Cinderella:

Who she is:  human, female, beautiful
What she can do:  work really hard, dream, dance
What she does:  Makes a dress in her spare time, dances with the prince, leaves the ball at midnight.

There are a wide variety of Cinderella characters who would fit the plot above, while leaving their own particular mark on the story; the one I listed is perhaps the most common, though there are others that emerge from different re-tellings of the story.  I might be a GM with that plot in mind, and a player might come up with a Cinderella who's a cleaning robot, and we could still work out a 'story' together with my original 'plot' at least vaguely intact (and changed in ways that I decided, as opposed to ways Cinderella's character decided).  This is, it seems to me, a reasonable way to describe the 'Participationism' solution to 'The Impossible Thing'.

I'm not terribly familiar with what 'situation' and 'pacing' might mean locally, but I imagine that 'situation' would be 'setup and initial conflict' while 'pacing' would be a large part of the 'rising action' bit.  In my head, if you're in control of/resonsible for 'the plot', you're in charge of taking the action somewhere.  If you're in control of/responsible for a character, you're in charge of having there be some action (among other things).

'Control' probably needs work as far as a good definition.  Perhaps it could be defined in the negative:  if you're in sole control of some aspect of the story, and you don't do something with that aspect of the story, nothing happens there.  If you're in sole control of a character, and don't say what that character does, that character doesn't do anything.  If you're in sole control of the conflict, and you don't introduce a conflict, there is no conflict.

Tim, is there something specific you see in the difference between 'control' and 'responsibility'?  There's a concept in my head that usefully can be associated with both terms; I'm more than willing to change vocabulary if it maps to that concept better.

I'm certainly not trying to say that Participationism is the only way to go.  I was trying to organize my thinking along certain lines, while using participationism to illustrate my points, since that's what our group mostly does (as I understand the term, at least).

My motivation for writing this in the first place was simply to say, "There's a lot more you can do when creating a story than control the plot."  The corollary is, "There's a lot more you can experiment with in rpg design than re-distribute plot control."

Like, I dunno, imagine a rpg where all the characters were pre-defined.  Maybe the plot was pre-defined, too, or at least highly restricted like "My Life With Master".  And when you played it, no one person controls the protagonists, but eveyone gets their own piece of the Setting to do with whatever they want.

Or have an rpg based on the 'many GMs, one character' scenario, where one person controls a single protagonist, and everyone else comes up with the plot and setting for them.

-Lucian

[contracycle]

When I'm a player in my gaming group, I don't think about plot at all.  The GM's in charge of that.  Instead, I'm thinking about funny things my character would say in the situation at hand.

OK, but then consider this situation which you will probably recognise.

The GM, thinking about plot, wants to impress upon the players the Eviltude of the villain by having them perform some despicable act in view of the characters.  This serves to escalate the tension of the piece and frame the reasons for the climax.  You, as a player, are thinking of witty remarks, even IC, and you come up with one and everyone corpses.

Quite possibly the theme and mood the GM was trying to create are shot to hell.  Possibly, as a result, instead of tension rising it is defused.

Thats why ultimately the GM cannot be in full control of plot, because plot is not just the notional structure of what happens when, but the actual content of what did happen.  In Lit you would not exempt the viewpoint characters actions when considering "plot".  The GM simply cannot guarantee that their intention will come out because players are players, and the only way around that is to suspend player freedom - as we saw in the Gencon thread about the game with the incredible shrinking NPC.

[lpsmith]

The GM, thinking about plot, wants to impress upon the players the Eviltude of the villain by having them perform some despicable act in view of the characters. This serves to escalate the tension of the piece and frame the reasons for the climax. You, as a player, are thinking of witty remarks, even IC, and you come up with one and everyone corpses.

What I was trying to do was to parcel out the parts from the whole here, with the caveat that there is of course overlap.  The situation you describe I tried to cover in my 'Tone' axis, where rules like "Don't make Monty Python jokes" or "Bonus XP for using your character's catch-phrase" apply.  It clearly affects the 'story' (the word I'm using to apply to the whole gamish), but it will affect what I'm calling the 'plot' only if the GM (in this case) allows for it.

Now, if I as a player had more direct control of what-I'm-calling-plot, maybe I could make the villain start to laugh at my joke, recant of his evil ways, and join the party for a rousing game of Tiddly-winks.  (Which I could do in a game of Universalis, if I'm remembering correctly.)  As the GM, I could respond to the shift of tone in exactly the same way, or I could stick doggedly to the script.  I would use my control of what-I'm-calling-plot to create the best what-I'm-calling-story.

Is there a better word than 'plot' for 'the notional structure of what happens when'?  Because that's pretty close to the concept I'm trying to use it for.

[Josh Roby]

Hmm, clearer definitions.  Maybe an example will help?  Let's take the plot of Cinderella...

Okay, so really, I'm not trying to be a pedantic ass here, but examples are not definitions.  I really think that both your own thinking and this discussion would greatly benefit if you sat down and defined as in a dictionary what you mean by these terms.  This will give you and us a sense of where one starts and stops, and how they are related.  See the Provisional Glossary for an example of what I'm talking about, at least in terms of format.

[lpsmith]

OK, keep in mind that dividing things up and defining them is supposed to be useful, not prescriptive, but here goes:

Plot:  Setup, conflict, rising action, climax, denoument
  Setup:  The facts that pertain to the situation before the story begins
  Conflict:  The events of the crisis that set the plot in motion
  Rising action:  A series of events that move the action closer to or farther away from the climax (aka victories and setbacks)
  Climax:  Events that resolve the majority of the remaining conflicts.
  Denoument:  Events that follow from the climax, resulting in a new set of facts that pertain to the situation now that the story is done.

Character:  Who you are, what you can do, your attitude, and your actions.

Setting:  Truths about the universe where the story takes place.  There's a continuum between this and the 'setup' of the plot, but it's probably not worth hashing out exactly where that boundary is.  If different people/entities are in control of 'setting' and 'setup', than the boundaries of their control are the best line to draw.  If the same person/entity is in control of both, there's no useful distinction at all.  In other words 'stuff in the book' vs. 'stuff the GM made up' is a helpful line

Tone:  Things that evoke feelings and emotions in the story's viewers and/or participants.  Exactly the same events, when portrayed with different styles, can evoke different tones.  Various OOC things can affect tone, too, like distractions or music.  Tone is about *how* the game is played, not what.  Its parallel in literature is 'writing'.

Different things that people do can have repercussions on different axes, either directly (if they at least partially 'control' that axis) or indirectly (if the person who is in control of an axis chooses to respond).  The example of a joke made by a character in the presence of a villain affects Character (the PC becomes the type of person who would make a joke in the presence of a villain) and Tone (because it makes people laugh/groan/growl).  It does not affect Plot, because there was no movement towards or away from the climax--unless someone in control of Plot chooses to make this happen.

Again, I'm not trying to say, "This is what 'plot' means."  I'm trying to say, "This is what I mean in my essay when I use the word 'plot'."

[Josh Roby]

Again, I'm not trying to say, "This is what 'plot' means."  I'm trying to say, "This is what I mean in my essay when I use the word 'plot'."

Does your definition of plot have a predefined climax, or is the nature and characteristics of the climax undetermined until it happens?

Depending on your answer, the question then becomes, is the GM (or whoever is responsible for plot) responsible for making the events in the game resolve to a particular conclusion, or is the GM just responsible for making the events in the game resolve in general?  In other words, is the GM responsible for movement towards a specific endpoint, or is the GM just responsible for making sure that there is movement, wherever it may be going?

[lpsmith]

Does your definition of plot have a predefined climax, or is the nature and characteristics of the climax undetermined until it happens?

That's up to whoever controls the plot.

If that person wants a predefined climax, there are a variety of techniques available to them to bring that about, from railroading to cajoling to making things blindingly obvious to deus ex machina to cows from space.  Some of these work better than others, both in terms of efficacy and in terms of evoking player enjoyment.

If that person wants to create a climax out of what they see as the trajectory of player actions, that's also a possibility.  But if you're in control, it's up to you.

Another way to put this:  When a player attempts an action, their success or failure to perform the action is restricted by the system.  But their success or failure to advance the plot towards the(/a) climax is (traditionally) up to the GM.

There are newer systems where the system itself dictates "If a player does thus-and-so, and the dice say this other, that is a step towards the climax of the plot."  Here, the system has given control (with certain restrictions) of the plot to the players.  "Metal Opera" even goes so far as to have a rule that says, "When the dice say this, you have reached the climax of the story--wrap things up."