Coercive/Push versus Enticing/Pull Capes Play

[Sindyr]

I think the issue here is that some people are refusing to see what is obvious, and those people are not me.

It's not obvious.  It's not even true.

Sindyr, you aren't smarter than all of us.  You don't have more experience at gaming than most of us.  I seriously doubt you have half the game design experience as many of the people who have disagreed with you and tried to help you understand.  From reading your posts, you certainly don't have near the grounding in RPG theory as most of the people who have engaged you in conversation.  Yet, you resolutely hold on to the somewhat ludicrous belief that all of us are somehow wrong-headed and that if we would just entertain your arguments that'd we'd surely come around to agree with your "obviously" correct viewpoint.  Your arguments aren't new to us.  We've seen them before.  Some of us have actually made them before.  They didn't hold water before.  Your obstinant, insistence on repeating them over and over despite all evidence doesn't make them hold water now.  We aren't going to agree with you most of the time because most of the time you're just plain wrong... at least to this point.

Your entire post above boils down to saying "no, you are (wrong)"

That's fine.

So are you.

[Andrew Cooper]

Your entire post above boils down to saying "no, you are (wrong)"

That's fine.

So are you.

That's true.  Difference is I have actual experience, expert opinion and well-formed argument in my corner.  All you seem to have is persistence, which is a nice personality trait.  I willing to let it go at that.

[Sindyr]

Your entire post above boils down to saying "no, you are (wrong)"

That's fine.

So are you.

That's true.  Difference is I have actual experience, expert opinion and well-formed argument in my corner.  All you seem to have is persistence, which is a nice personality trait.  I willing to let it go at that.

Whatever you have, you haven't made your case, and I have made mine.  Next.

Why is Sindyr so terse and rude? Read the below topic with my apologies to find out:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20593.0

[Andrew Morris]

Do you agree or not that any goal in Capes is about what the player wants?

Yes.  If you mean goal with a small "g".  Whether it's to stop one plot thread, protect another plot thread, rake in more tokens, make yourself look good, make someone else look bad, avoid embarrassment - they are all goals.

Okay, so what benefit is there in creating an artificial separation between goals (your "narrative" and "competitive")?

Anyone can come up with random divisions -- my goals vs. their goals, goals that affect the game world vs. those that affect the PCs,  normal goals vs. preventative goals, massive-scale goals vs. small-scale goals, character-based goals vs. environmental goals, etc. But so what? What significance is there to doing so?

I'd also like to point out that for all your criticisms of Tony and/or his status as moderator, he's let you go on and on about your theoretical concepts without shutting you down. If you did that on the main Forge boards, you'd be moderated right away -- theory has to be backed up by actual play, or it gets shut down. Personally, in Tony's shoes, I'd have required you to back up your theories with actual play evidence, or closed the topic. You'd get the same moderation for comments like your last one in this thread.

[Sindyr]

Do you agree or not that any goal in Capes is about what the player wants?

Yes.  If you mean goal with a small "g".  Whether it's to stop one plot thread, protect another plot thread, rake in more tokens, make yourself look good, make someone else look bad, avoid embarrassment - they are all goals.

Okay, so what benefit is there in creating an artificial separation between goals (your "narrative" and "competitive")?

I am not making an artificial seperation.  I am making a natural seperation.  Can I tell you why?

I'd also like to point out that for all your criticisms of Tony and/or his status as moderator, he's let you go on and on about your theoretical concepts without shutting you down. If you did that on the main Forge boards, you'd be moderated right away -- theory has to be backed up by actual play, or it gets shut down. Personally, in Tony's shoes, I'd have required you to back up your theories with actual play evidence, or closed the topic. You'd get the same moderation for comments like your last one in this thread.

I have lready responded to my thpughts on the AP crap.  I have no respect for that. None *at all*.

[Andrew Morris]

I am not making an artificial seperation.  I am making a natural seperation.  Can I tell you why?

Please do. Then explain why you feel this is important. That's what I've been asking you all along.

I have lready responded to my thpughts on the AP crap.  I have no respect for that. None *at all*.

Your opinion as to whether theory discussions should be grounded in AP is a non-issue. This is not your site. It's not mine. You and I don't get to decide what the rules should be. If you want a site that allows for theory without AP support, go make one.

Railing against that makes as much sense as getting pissed that a college course on 4th century artwork won't you talk about post-modernism without connecting it to the material being discussed in class. It's simply not what the class is about. In exactly the same way that the Forge is not about theory, unless grounded in actual play.

As stated here and eleswhere, however, Tony runs the Muse of Fire forum, and he has allowed discussion of your theory without supporting AP evidence.

[Andrew Cooper]

I have lready responded to my thpughts on the AP crap.  I have no respect for that. None *at all*.

Then why the hell are you here?  This is the Forge.  It might be Tony's little part of the Forge but it is the Forge.  At the Forge, the paradigm is that theory needs to be tied to AP.  If you don't like that, why don't you go to a site where that isn't the paradigm?  There are lots of them.  Why spit in the face of all the people who actually ascribe to the paradigm here and are pulling their weight by contributing to it?  It's not like we've tied you to your chair and we're making you participate in a place with a philosophy you don't like.  You are purposefully interjecting yourself into our community and shouting, "I don't agree with your basic philosophy and furthermore I don't even respect it or by extension you!  I'm still going to jump in here and make a lot of noise anyway!"  Then you wonder why we think you're an asshat.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Andrew, I sympathize and agree, but let's not derail this thread. Maybe a dissection of Sindyr's rhetorical gambits is a thread topic unto itself, but there is a substantive point to be made here:

Okay, so what benefit is there in creating an artificial separation between goals (your "narrative" and "competitive")?

I am not making an artificial seperation.  I am making a natural seperation.  Can I tell you why?

Sindyr, this is not in fact a "natural" separation. In fact, when at one point I asked Ron Edwards (co-moderator and leading theorist of the Forge) whether "competitive Narrativist play" was possible, he said "of course" so rapidly and intensely I was a little taken aback. He's written a great deal in various places on why "competition vs. cooperation" is a red herring in dealing with "Nar" play (aka "thematic," aka "Story Now"), but I think this particular passage, from a thread assessing someone's game design competition entry, is the best distillation I've seen of the approach that manifests with particular intensity, but by no means uniquely, Capes:

My thinking is that local strategizing is useful for any Creative Agenda. It's sitting there as a little turbo-charger.

I suggest that you're scaring yourself a little, saying oh no, if they get to strategize, then they'll want to WIN, and oh no! I agree this is a risk, but you've certainly chosen the right game for comparison: Dogs. In Dogs, as in Sorcerer, dice-strategizing is a big part of dealing with conflicts.

So why don't these games Go Gamist regularly? Why don't Vincent and I have to wave our hands and say, "Oh, a good group won't do that" when someone asks about it?

Because the larger reward system, whether character improvement or crisis resolution (crisis resolution = Kicker in Sorcerer, town in Dogs) will be "fed" by smaller-scale resolution, no matter what happens in the, for lack of a better word, "fights." To be absolutely clear: what happens in a given scene in Sorcerer is absolutely crucial to the story-in-development, and the dice-wrangling is crucial to what happens in that scene. But failure to strategize the dice well, or a bad bounce from the dice in spite of your strategizing, will not ruin the story-in-development. It will turn out differently, that's for sure, but the overall endeavor is not at risk. Look at the reward cycle at the larger scale and make sure it turns over as you want it to.

Read that paragraph at least a couple of times. This is advanced critical-thinking for RPGs and I doubt whether as many as five people who fancy themselves Forge-heads have grasped it. To utilize this concept in play without a pre-set storyline or a story-overseer armed with Force is the essence of Narrativist-facilitating technique.

Here's a related thought, also advanced. In many games, but not all, risks appear in the middle of conflict resolution which become essential ... but were not predictable before the dice (or whatever) hit the table. This is what a lot of people love but cannot articulate about HeroQuest, Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Dust Devils resolution. This feature is absent in My Life with Master, The Mountain Witch, and Primetime Adventures. It is present and explicit, in very different ways, in Trollbabe and Polaris.