Does System Matter?

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

As far as I can tell, all of this is pretty consistent with my standard caveats through my reviews and essays and play-posts. So if anyone finds this difficult or weird to understand, well, consider it a learning experience. Mike's right, but I don't see it as a problem. It's only a problem for people who think I (for instance) take out my little label-gun and go, "ker-chunk! you're a Narrativist game!, ker-chunk, you on the other hand are a Gamist game!" I'm pretty tired of dealing with invented versions of what I do, think, or say, so I'll stop with any judgments of such concepts right now.

So Mike? I figure my answer is ... 75%, for myself. That's based on the looks of annoyance I got from Ralph and Jake when I insisted we keep using the written rules of a game we were playtesting, after they had decided those rules were ass.

Best, Ron

[Callan S.]

Given a group using a system, which is informed by many things - including the textual rules of the game as they've adopted them, and the techniques and ephemera that they bring to play that are not informed by the text (two things amongst potentially many more) - which of those things is most important in forming the creative agenda for how the group plays? Do some things overshadow others? Can we as designers create text that makes a difference to how people play in terms of agenda, or does previous play experience, tradition, preference, and knowledge of particular techniques tend to overshadow even that which we do adopt from the written text?

I've always got a crap metaphor or analogy:

You've got a cake in front of you - does that force you to have tastebuds? What if you were a robot - could the cake be made tasty enough that it would create tastebuds in your mechanical jaws?

If you're cognizant of these issues, especially if you're very cognizant of them like I am, does this understanding tend to make it more likely that your personal proclivities will come through?

You having tastebuds tends to make you gravitate toward the sweet parts of the cake and not the parts which (for some reason) are made of crude oil.

I reckon more actual play account on 'using all the rules' would be good. I mean, it's possible to use all the rules, but at the same time player take certain options which only lead them into certain parts of the game rules, so other bits don't ever get use. It's not throwing the rules to the wind, but by tactically avoiding certain rules through the options given, it has a similar effect.

A lot of Ron's most effective work has been in creating and enumerating the use of techniques that work to reinforce the narrativism agenda. And I've studied them a lot. So if I'm taking and using them to create narrativism in play, to what extent can the rules that I use from the text be said to be causing the effect, if at all?

It's a bit dysfunctional, but can you imagine a male player using the game to chat up a female players character, as a way of establishing something to build on in real life between them? Would that have been created by the rules? No, it's an entirely metagame thing brought into the game even as the game facilitates it.

I've liked Ron's description of exploration being a wooden platform, and then nar or gam being an entirely alien subtance on top, like aluminium or plastic. My hypothesis is that nar and gam are exactly as alien as the chat up from above - it's just that the hunger for nar or game can be ignited by basic exploration play. But since basic rules use/basic exploration awoke it, it doesn't feel alien from basic rules use/basic exploration. It just doesn't seem the same as meta game flirting.

This also means that the rules have no effect at this level, really. The rules can't make you want to flirt with another player. And the rules can't make you want nar. A situation they help to generate might, on the off chance,  ignite the hunger in you 'Oh my god, my PC would rather die than let the lich awake! I quench the death flames with my body!!!'. But I think that hunger was more like a landmine the game trod on, rather than an explosion the game caused.

[Mike Holmes]

Well, Callan, that's a completely opposite idea than what I think Ron is saying above. He's saying that in his play something like 75% of the CA comes from the rules, and only 25% from his techniques and such. You're saying it's at a different level, and there's no doubt in my mind that it is. But the question is how much the CA is informed by the rules used. Like, for example, if there's an EXP reward system for killing monsters, does it cause you to change your decision-making process from "Should I kill the monsters - is it morally right?" to "How should I best kill the monsters?" (as with all such examples, it's meant to be informative, not definitive here). If so, that's the rules informing CA. If the GM frames the scene like, "The pitiful looking orcs will be easy to slay, and their children look on with sad eyes realizing that their parents may be mowed down momentarily...do you swing your swords?" And if this then causes you to go back to making decisions based on the moral conundrum, then this is technique (perhaps ephemera) informing CA.

Now, if you're saying that somebody can force their CA on the game, well, that's been in Ron's essay from day one. We know this can happen. Now if what you're saying is that the rules never inform CA, that the player always puts his CA on top of the rules no matter how they inform...well that's sorta my hypothesis here. But I would think that it's unlikely that the rules never have any effect.

And, to be clear again, we're talking about the "rules played" here. Ron's saying, I believe, that when he's testing a game out, he's playing the rules as close to the what he figures the text means, even if there is agreement that the rules are bad. So it can't be said that what we're talking about in this case is drift. That's not to say that I'm only looking at cases where drift hasn't occured. It means that, if drift has occured, then the question becomes how much do the new drifted rules affect CA as compared to the techniques used?

The only problem with drifted rules sets, is that in those cases we can't comment about how the text is affecting play. Since, by definition, the rules have been altered from those in the text to fit the CA.

Mike

[Caldis]

The only thing I have to add is that the rules text is much more informative in showing CA than just the rules themselves are.  I was recently rereading DITV and sure the rules themselves may have a narrativist bent but it's more the explanation of how to use the rules and examples of them in action that show what CA Vincent was going for.

[Mike Holmes]

That's a good observation. And an interesting one. See, I and others have contended that such text doesn't really do much in terms of delivering CA. Sure, as you say, it explicates CA. But it's only advice, not rules. And, as such, it's only going to do anything if the player takes the advice. Which, I contend, they often do not. If they do, I think that it's likely that they were intent on creating the intended CA anyhow.

The question is also whether or not the rules, once in use, will push one towards a CA, even if one doesn't understand what CA they are intended to inform the player to produce. Yeah, I'd agree that most players won't (and probably shouldn't) bother to analyze this, and that it's often not clear at all on simply reading the rules. But once they're in play, the argument goes, they tend to have a specific effect on CA, even if the people involved aren't aware that it's having that effect.

Mike

[Paul T]

Does the text of the game inform CA?

Well, how do you think your players will play the most recent game you've picked up together if the text includes comments like:

"By the way, the clever reader may have noticed that combining this ability with a certain other ability from Chapter 5 results in an extremely powerful combination... we'll leave that as an exercise for you. If you figure it out, try it, but don't tell your friends; instead, see their faces when you pull it out in that climactic scene!"

Or more subtle, like:

"Your character will face deadly threats in the game, so be prepared to see a hero die now and then. However, this might happen less often once you get familiarized with the Character Creation rules. It might not hurt to read over them more than once."

I think that Narrativist flavor text and game examples may have a very similar impact on play, or at least on how play is viewed.


Cheers,


Paul

[Mike Holmes]

Paul,

I've always thought that text like that actually has very little effect on play. First, there are no rules there to be adopted. It's just advice. Meaning that people are free to ignore it, and not be violating the social contract to be playing by the rules of the text. Meaning that, in practice, I think that most RPG players will just go about their business as usual.

For example with the "be prepared for deaths" part, the already narrativism playing player will just look at that and scoff, "Given that I use the technique where death is never a stake in this game, that's never going to happen."

Rules are far more informative for several reasons I think. But my hypothesis here is that even rules aren't as important as the techniques carried in that are not from the text.

Mike

[Valamir]

I'm really not sure where you're going with this Mike.

It almost sounds like you're saying that groups are going to play how they play and attempting to write solid rules test is pointless.

I can't imagine that's what you're saying, but if not, I can't figure out what you're point actually is.


I personally think rules texts are supremely important.  Sure, you're going to have players who play every game they encounter the same way as they play d20 (or their game of choice) regardless of what the texts says...but that's not a reason to not write good text. 

I believe in writing text that exactly outlines how the rules are supposed to be used.  Some folks do very little hand holding in their rules relying on people who "get it" to not need it.  To me...that's exactly the mentality that got us into the mire to begin with.  When all those poorly written old school texts were written, they were targeted at people who "already got it" too.  Thing is, most of the folks playing those game didn't "get it" and we spent decades flailing around with crappy rules. 

10 years from now are gamers going to be encountering our indie games and stuggling with crappily written "Conflict Resolution" and "stakes" text the same way as we now mock The Impossible Thing?

I advocate doing as much hand holding as needed so that someone who is paying attention to what is written can play the game as close to how the designer plays the game as its possible to get.  If they choose to ignore that text that's their privilege, and of course we as designers will have greater or lesser success at it, but not even trying to write it is IMO a cop out. 

[Danny_K]

I think that Narrativist flavor text and game examples may have a very similar impact on play, or at least on how play is viewed.

Yes, but if and only if the flavor text and game examples mesh up seamlessly with the rules. 

Here's a thought experiment: imagine that Vincent published Dogs in the Vineyard in a D20 version.  Dogs D20! Imagine reading that.  You'd have all this great GM'ing advice and flavorful descriptions of conflict, and it would be hanging out in a vacuum because there would be no support in the ruleset for it.  It would be just another game promising the Impossible Thing and delivering the same-old same-old. 

Danny

[Mike Holmes]

Ralph you're making an extension of my hypothesis that's not anything I intended. I think the only way a designer can affect play is through his rules (other text, as I've said, is less relevant).

But let's put it this way, then. What percentage of players are going to, as you put it, "play every game they encounter the same way...?" Rather my question is, given that most people coming to a RPG come from previous play, to what extent will the techniques that they must neccessarily bring to the game to fill in the gaps be more important to establishing their CA than the rules? On average.

You can draw whatever conclusions you like from the data, I'm only interested in the question at hand. And it's a hypothesis, not a claim. If your answer is "techniques don't mean squat as compared to rules" that's a fine answer.

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Mike,

The trouble with that issue is thirty years of tradition that says "ignore the book," and furthermore, of single-person centralizing regarding the majority of the creative work of the process. What I observe in many, many groups is that someone says "Hey, let's play game X," and goes to all kinds of work to internalize and express stuff from game X, but everyone else just shows up and figures out how to shoehorn doing what they always do into the process. And that's the positive version of events. Under those circumstances, as well as the negative versions, we can talk about rules and text and CA until we die of starvation, and nothing we say will mean a damn thing.

I'll say this: I have no confidence that hobby role-playing as currently constructed, both socially and commercially, will attain even the most basic relationship between text, rules, and play that even the easy-kiddy card games have. Not across the board, not as a phenomenon in the sense that you seem to be asking about. So if you are saying, "do text and rules consistently promote the CA that they purport to do (when that even applies," then the answer is to shrug and say no, on the average, they don't. There's thirty years of tradition that says not to and an embedded subculture which is determined to avoid any such thing.

My unit of interest is the individual and the operative game group who'd prefer to buck that trend. Considering the sea of blah-fumble-mutter that many people seem to be playing within, procedurally speaking, if one person, or one group, is unhappy with it and gets some benefit out of what's been worked out here at the Forge, then fantastic. That's value added. I have no interest and see no point in the question you're asking.

---

I will now extend that concept to an immediate concern. You haven't discussed actual play at all. That means that if I don't see some immediately, the thread shuts down.

I also want you to tell me straight-up whether any of this arises from some third-party discussion that you haven't mentioned.

And finally, if that's the case, I am specifically asking, is this all about the age-old, absolutely stupendous bullshit that Forge theory has something to do with telling people they play wrong?

Best, Ron

[Callan S.]

Hi Mike,

I have a specific AP request, but I requires a little explanation and an AP of my own.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'inform' when you say CA is informed by the rules. Are you working along the lines that the only thing rules do is bring out a CA, and now your thinking they don't even do that?

To use another analogy; I don't know if you ever ate raw pastry when you were a kid, but I did. It was pretty tasty. It didn't cause me to sprout taste buds, but never mind that. However, tasty as it was, when it was cooked it became something else, something that would never be experienced had I just kept to eating raw pastry.

Do any AP accounts come to mind where you delt with an game world issue or topic - but you felt that perhaps it could have been taken futher?

A quick example from my own play, where I'd made up the wizard of this dangerous area in Rifts (for a group I don't play with anymore) - he was supposed to be pretty powerful and his power would mean doing a bunch of other activities in the area was supposed to be more viable than simply attacking him head on (what activies I didn't know exactly - that was supposed to be fun to find out in play). I tell you, the player had a shit load of attacks (side note; he actually forgot the total and kept doing extra attack rolls  every so often - it really frustrated me that not only was he killing the opportunity but at the same time he was giving a piss poor performance at even remembering his resources).

It was supposed to be gamist, but think of my life with master - can you just attack the master straight away? From what I know of the rules, no. So that 'bakes' the situation, letting you explore things/taste things you wouldn't get to if you just ate the raw pastry/attacked him straight away, so to speak. So there's a quick AP example, do you have one similar?

[Mike Holmes]

So if you are saying, "do text and rules consistently promote the CA that they purport to do (when that even applies," then the answer is to shrug and say no, on the average, they don't. There's thirty years of tradition that says not to and an embedded subculture which is determined to avoid any such thing.

OK, that's a great answer.

Now to extend on that. From the actual play examples which I've given, would you say that I am playing somehow by the rules of, say, Hero Quest? Or am I using technique in order to look like I'm playing by them while actually drifting them to achieve the sort of play I like.

More generally, how

My unit of interest is the individual and the operative game group who'd prefer to buck that trend.

Great point. My question may be interpreted then as "How many people really fall into this category. Even amongst those who are here at The Forge?"

Or, rather, it seems to me that it could be that even amongst players who are intent on following the rules that, because technique has to come into play to fill holes, that the technique that's used is really what's causing the CA.

How many players come to a game with no preference extended this way? Willing to allow the rules to inform how they use the techniques, rather than using the techniques to mold the rules around to play the way that they want?

It's not so much a willingness to ignore the rules, as finding the "wiggle room" that rules leave, and filling that gap with techniques that guide play to be what the players expect.

That's not the same thing as saying that, given a player who has no such pre-selected agenda, that the rules won't promote him to go to some place. I think the rules do have the ability to promote in such a case. I just think that case might be rare to non-existant.

I will now extend that concept to an immediate concern. You haven't discussed actual play at all. That means that if I don't see some immediately, the thread shuts down.

I thought I had with a couple of examples of how I've used IIEE techniques in my IRC game to create a CA. Given the room that it seems to me that the rules leave. These are not fictitious, but actual examples (I'd like to hear from Fred what he thinks of the mind-control case in particular, because in actual fact he refused to decline the contest - which seems to me to be him employing his own preferences for CA to counter mine).

But let me give another example. In play on Monday night, I had set up a very typically sim situation where the players are presented with a base that they have to infiltrate to destroy the bad guys. Heck, it could be taken as a gamism dungeon, as it happens. In fact I was really disappointed in what I'd done, because it was such a fallback to earlier technique. The previous session I'd introduced Ruin House as the place where the bad guys hang out, and where all the plots that ail them seem to emanate from. Classic Shadowrun style mission set up - go in there and clean house.

Now my intent had been to run them through this dungeon and to set up some bangs when they got inside. But I didn't even have to wait, Thomas Robertson, being the veteran narrativism hawk he is, simply has his character walk up to the front door and knock on it. Very James Bond of his character to simply waltz into the danger. Here he'd taken what was a potentially very gamism or sim looking set up, and just circumvented all of that, and placed things very quickly back on the narrativism track. Immediately I grabbed hold of what he'd given me, and presented one of the characters with a bang that involved one of the house servants, sent to poison them, turning out to be beholden to the PC for her life, and informing them of the poison. After which she was dragged away by the guards for "pestering" the PCs.

Even the players here are using their simple control of their characters to create narrativism producing situation (just narrativism to decide to do the tactically unsound but cool thing to waltz in). One of the players who is new to the group. Charlotte, and has, I suspect, a more traditional background had her character gawk at the audacity of the plan. I suspect this was in in-character way of saying that she thought that Thomas was crazy for doing this tactically ridiculous thing. This is just further evidence of the nature of Thomas' decicsion.

Now, we could speculate that this is because HQ has shown Thomas that this is the right sort of action to take. And I've touted that HQ makes failure fun in the past, so maybe that's the case. But knowing Thomas as I do, and recalling the first sessions of HQ I played with him, he'd have done this whether or not he'd ever played HQ before, or had a chance to understand what the system promotes.

Now, the case is problematic in a way, because we could say that this is a case of not being able to determine if the rules are promoting anything, because what they promote, and what his preferred agenda are, happen to coincide. Except I'm not sure at all that the HQ rules really promote this sort of thing all that much. (And, again, all of these cases are problematic, given that HQ is probably incoherent).

But, unfortunately, these are the most common and recent examples I have.

A more telling case is the actual example I've cited many times before of the last time I played D&D. To recount quickly, a friend of mine who plays with me regularly (mostly in my sim games of old), and I joined up with another group of our friends who we wargame with regularly, in their weekly D&D game. When creating characters, we just couldn't get ourselves to engage with the 3E tactical choices, and instead ended up deciding that we were "slavers" by profession. He with his warrior specialized in mancatcher, and me with my wizard with spells like charm person, and sleep.

Our use of character choices and techniques strongly made our play sim or nar. To the extent that the other players, who's regular game was very gamism oriented classic D&D play, really had no idea what to do with us. The GM, to his credit, rolled with it, understanding that somehow what we were doing was allowed under the purview of player control of their characters. But not understanding how it was that we were playing D&D, really.

Now, I'm willing to be tossed into that culture of people who are determined to avoid having the rules tell us how to play. If that's what this example is. I'll even admit that, knowing what I was doing when I did it, that it may have been a tad irresponsible. But I don't think I'm all that unusual in this, even amongst the many players who might claim to be about following the rules most of the time.

I also want you to tell me straight-up whether any of this arises from some third-party discussion that you haven't mentioned.

Nope. It's been something rattling around in my brain for quite a while, an observation that I've made watching lots of play at Indie-Netgaming, and at GenCon and other conventions.

For example, I played The Princes' Kingdom at Origins with Clinton (great game), and I think he may have been exhibiting some of what I'm talking about there. It's hard for me to comment, because I'm not familiar with the DitV rules all that well, actually. And, more complexly, I'm pretty sure that Clinton is following Vincent's general advice from the book about how to play (is "Say yes or roll" a "rule" per se, or advice?). But consider his use of framing techniqe. He uses classic "scene framing" technique.

As an actual example, I recall at one point, when confronting the villain, our characters were saying how bad he was, and he was protesting, and Clinton flashed us over to a new scene in which he was showing our characters how the technology that he'd brought to the island was saving a woman's life (leading to Brendan's character getting the trait "Sometimes Bad People Do Good Things" subsequently). This was done, I believe, without asking player permission to move the characters to this different location where the woman was. Just a kick in the gut move using a lot of GM authority.

I'm pretty sure that's not in the book. Great narrativism reinforcing technique, because it moved us right along to an escallation of the quandry back from being "he's bad, we're good" to something more morally grey. But I doubt that there's any specific rule in TPK that allows him the power to do this. It's an exploitation of an area of GM judgment left open by the rules.

Rather another player from a more traditional play history would probably not play it this way. They'd probably have said, "Now he asks you to move along so he can show you something. Do you go?" This technique, in conjunction with ones like it especially, can be strongly sim supportive. So even if the player in question is intent on following what the rules promote, might his training in the generalities of RPGs not lead him back to a more familiar style of play in this case?

Or will the rules make that technique unimportant because of the reward cycle of DitV style games, and make play narrativism even with that technique in play?

Now the latter case is not actual play, but fictitious. I'd also accept it if you say that such a player will probably alter his techniques to fit the rules better. But I think that's unlikely, no?

And finally, if that's the case, I am specifically asking, is this all about the age-old, absolutely stupendous bullshit that Forge theory has something to do with telling people they play wrong?

No.

Mike

[Mike Holmes]

Following up on the above reply to Ron...

Callan,

I'm making no such claim that the only thing that rules do is to promote CA. I'm saying that the claim is that they do this amongst other things, and I'm trying to get a feel of how often, and to what extent, they really do affect CA, and how often they are made irrelevant to the CA by people's use of techniques and understandings of decision-making procedures brought in from sources other than the rules.

As for the request for similar AP experiences to yours...I'm not sure what quality the example you give is supposed to show, so I can't give you a similar experience. In fact your example leaves me wondering whether the wizard was a PC of yours with you as player, or an NPC with you as GM, a PC for another player with you as GM, or something else. It's very confusing just what you're describing, much less what it's supposed to illustrate.

Mike

[Calithena]

I have a friend who's a pretty serious amateur game designer and long-time gamer who doesn't participate here but has bought and read a lot of the games and talked about them with me at length. His take on the designs here and the theoretical breakthrough he finds most impressive is the way that the designers here are able to talk about, articulate, engineer, and address something he and I call "play-procedures". That is, the mechanics, a lot of them he thinks are cool and all, but what he thinks is really unique about the kind of games coming out of here are their extreme clarity about play-procedures.

I've found that many, but not all, of the Forge play procedures can, with some thought and effort and sometimes with a certain amount of patch ruling - but less than one might suppose - be transferred to mainstream games. For example, the Dogs adventure prep guidelines are transferrable to many traditional systems. You lose some things - the way the Dogs character progression system ties into escalation and imbues conflict choices with additional danger and moral weight, etc. - but in fact you can run the 'come in to the fucked up town and pass judgment' adventure very successfully for a D&D party led by a paladin, or a classic Champions superhero group, just for example. To do that you need the Town Creation guidelines, the advice about having NPCs just spill stuff, and a few other things, but you don't need the whole system.

This is where some of what I've thought hooks up with what I think Mike is getting at here. A really well-designed game will integrate play-procedures with mechanics with how-to-play text in a way that the whole thing functions well. But one surprising discovery, for my friend and I, that's come out of our interaction with some local designs and theory, is that just as mechanics are often portable as patch rules, play-procedures are also often portable.

This portability also explain why you get such widely disparate play in traditional games: some people doing extremely well at recognizably Narrativist play with a traditional system that doesn't particularly support it. My theory, which I think dovetails with Mike's, is that these people have learned or hit upon play-procedures that direct the mechanics towards that kind of play, one way or another. They often don't know how to say what they are because articulating what we do is actually very difficult for human beings where there's not a preexisting language and because of some gaming traditions; and even if they do know how to say it other people often don't know how to translate it into their own experience.

I don't see myself as disagreeing with Ron or Mike here but this is how I navigate between the various issues being discussed. Play-procedures are the most dominant aspect of system and because many early games are bags of resolution mechanics, disparate techniques, and color they can be turned in a lot of different directions.

Mike's additional point I think with the example of Clinton's GMing is that there are a very big arsenal of portable techniques that go from game to game for which it's unclear how they interface with the concept of 'system' as game-specific play-procedures.