Does System Matter?

[timfire]

Mike, I think a real issue here is that different games provide different levels of explanation for these informal or soft rules/techniques/advice---which I DO consider to be official rules if they're written in the book. In other words, I believe different games have a less or more number of "holes" that have to be filled in. And because of this, I believe the answer to your question is going to vary from game to game.

Like, I'm currently running DitV (which I think is one of the better games in this regard). I really don't feel like I've pulled in many techniques from other games. I'm really trying to follow the advice given in the book and communicated to me by Vincent and various threads on the game... Maybe I've been pushing the moral ambiguity of the situation, rather than make it obviously good & evil, but... but I thought that was kinda the point, to give the players something to judge... Maybe there's a little but of my own interpretation in there, but I don't feel it's very much.

Contrast that with... The Mountain Witch. The system has an inherent flexibility to it, in how players how can create their own Fates as well as choose how & when to bring them out. Also, I didn't do quite as a good a job as Vincent, so players kinda have to pull from past play to fill in the content for bangs and such. So play of tMW can easily be drifted either towards Nar or Gam, though I think it's skewed towards Nar (I haven't readily recognized Sim play of tMW yet, but I don't see why that shouldn't be possible). I've posted about this a number of times.

I think another issue here is that we as a community and as individuals are still trying to get a firm grasp on how to communicate these play procedures. We've definitely made good headway, but I think we still have a ways to go. I think to really answer your question you'll need to wait another couple years and see how look then. I really don't think your argument/theory is very rigorous if you use a bunch of texts that have been recognized as incoherent or "hole-y", like HQ. To really answer your question you need to use texts that are very clear about play procedures, and we don't have very many of those right now.

[Clyde L. Rhoer]

Hi Mike,

I'm having a hard time understanding the question. I know you've tried to narrow the question for folks like two or three times now, but I'm still having a hard time. Let me state what I think I'm hearing. You seem to be asking what part of system promotes creative agenda, the game master and players or the rules? You also seem to be asking more generally does system actually, in truth, support creative agenda? I'm going to risk looking silly and go forward from that assumption. *grins*

So we can play Dogs in the Vineyard as a game where we go to towns (dungeons), we fight with the bad guys (monsters), we take their sentences, and get stronger. I can imagine doing this even with the say yes or roll rule, it really just requires a group who wants to engage in this play-style. Now we could look at this and come to the conclusion that Dogs doesn't support Narrativist play. I think that would be a mistaken conclusion. Dogs does support Narrativist play very well, it's just that creative agenda is more decided by the folks playing than the rule system. This helps to explain things like drift, freestyle gaming, or finding support in Heroquest by interpreting the rules in a specific way to support CA. So how much of CA is the players? Most of it, all of it, or very little of it, depending on the people playing. That's a hard question to quantify in absolute terms. So does system reinforce CA? I think you would be hard-pressed to find an actual case where it doesn't at least a little, but conceptually it doesn't have to. 

[Judd]

So we can play Dogs in the Vineyard as a game where we go to towns (dungeons), we fight with the bad guys (monsters), we take their sentences, and get stronger. I can imagine doing this even with the say yes or roll rule, it really just requires a group who wants to engage in this play-style. Now we could look at this and come to the conclusion that Dogs doesn't support Narrativist play. I think that would be a mistaken conclusion. Dogs does support Narrativist play very well, it's just that creative agenda is more decided by the folks playing than the rule system.

You are basically changing the color in Dogs and saying that due to the game taking place in a dungeon it would no longer support nar play and that just ain't so.

[Clyde L. Rhoer]

Hi Judd,

I'm not talking about color, even though my description can be read as a changing of color. I am saying that I could play Dogs with a Gamist agenda, or a Simulationist agenda if that was the type of play my group was looking for. The Gamist agenda would be easier using the rules of the book, Simulationism might work best with drift or freestyle. The color was a funnier way to state the last sentence, and get the point across... so I thought. I was saying in essence it could be played like D+D, you know? Go in the dungeon, kill the monsters, take their sentences. I've played it Dogs once with some friends and it went much like the way we used to play D+D. Other times it has been a moral examining, shooting up, dramatic game, but that was different folks, and different CA.

Think of it this way, before coherent games you would have had to unconsciously force your groups creative agenda on a game. Likely this was a reason incoherency wasn't something that was even considered, i.e. it had no verbiage, as it was expected that folks would use parts of the game to support their style of gaming. Therefore... Rule Zero.  However that's entering a whole other area of discussion....

Am I making better sense now?

[Mike Holmes]

Clyde, I'm not denying that system can have an effect. That's actually a given here. The question is whether or not system ever pushes people playing the game from using techniques like making Dogs into a dungeon crawl to playing the game in another way. Or do the skill sets and preferences we bring in always end up being the most important part of the equation?

I mean you have a set of players, who've never played anything but D&D, say. And they like their D&D play as a good wargamey set of player challenges. This is what they're used to RPGs being, and know that they like (which isn't the same thing as saying they dislike other things, it's all they know). And they come to play DitV. Will they end up playing the game as Vincent intended? Even if they intend to play by the rules of the game as written?  

My hypothesis is that the rules of an RPG won't actually have much effect in this case. Because the rules actually leave huge amounts of lattitude that has to be filled in with player techniques and ephemera that they have to either create on the spot, or bring in from previous play. And that, in employing this, they'll fall back on what they know in terms of CA.

And that with people who know about CA, and how to manipulate it with technique that this is at least as common, if not more common. The hypothetical group above might actually have a better chance of playing DitV as it's intended, because not knowing that there's another way to play, they won't be working to prevent it, or reinforce their own play.

This is not evidence of the hypothesis, since the hypothetical is not actual play. I only include it to try to explain the hypotbesis.

Mike

[Landon Darkwood]

Clyde, I'm not denying that system can have an effect. That's actually a given here. The question is whether or not system ever pushes people playing the game from using techniques like making Dogs into a dungeon crawl to playing the game in another way. Or do the skill sets and preferences we bring in always end up being the most important part of the equation?

By way of an potential answer, let me tell you a little bit about my recent Fate game.

I've been running a fantasy genre mashup game using the new version of Fate from Spirit of the Century. We had one player, who shall remain nameless, who was absolutely obsessed with the minutiae of his character's personal activities, tactics, gear, timetable, and other habits gained from what I'm guessing is a ton of tournament-style D&D when he was a teenager.

So there were a lot of situations in the game where he wanted to do something cool, and I'd be like, "Okay, awesome, roll for it," and before he'd do that, he'd spend a whole lot of time gearing up on his specific description of tactics and maneuvers. "Right, so I want to sneak into the building, but as I'm coming up the street I change my posture to make me look like a denizen of the neighborhood, and I have my climbing gear ready, and I'm not moving too fast so as to not seem suspicious." And I'd nod and go, "Okay. Roll your Burglary."

Now, in Fate, all that kind of stuff really doesn't mean jack from a mechanical standpoint, but I never discouraged him from doing it because it was good narrational color. But it never *mattered* the way he wanted it to. And I could tell he was frustrated by that, just as I could tell he was frustrated when other people would say, "I do X," with little to no elaboration, and I'd say, "Okay, roll," and they'd perform just as well.

End of the story? This dude is no longer playing with us.

Enter his replacement. Same gaming background, mostly D&D with some smatterings of GURPS and SAGA Marvel play. He has a scene where he's exploring a temple for their stockpiles of food, helping out a village of estranged people in exchange for assistance with his own goals. He makes one Burglary roll to get in unseen, a Stealth roll to get past the six dudes camped in there, another Burglary roll to silently pick the lock on the trapdoor to the basement, and another Stealth roll to get out. Only time any of the description colored the roll mechanically was that on the way out, he had a sack of foodstuffs on his back and was more encumbered.

We had some description between each roll, and he had to invoke some aspects to stay on top of it, but the bottom line is, he made them all. And I said to him, "Awesome. Your character succeeded flawlessly." And he replied, "Awesome."

Now, here's the thing - the type of stuff he was saying in his description was pretty much the same as the stuff that Player #1 would say, except he had no problem with that stuff serving its proper systemic role in explaining the results of the roll instead of trying to influence said roll.

***

So, my answer? Yes, sometimes system can push people into using different agendas, but I don't think it can trump strong, inflexible preferences on the part of the individual. I think that's one of the reasons why we talk about system as supporting one agenda or another - it suggests a continuum where on one end, the rules basically mandate one CA to such a degree that playing with other agendas means you don't really have any fun, and on the other end, where the rules minimally support any agenda and your own preferences and local techniques must take the forefront.

Like, I can't imagine anyone with hardcore Gamist preferences wanting anything at all to do with Primetime Adventures. However, on the other end, I know a schlock-ton of gaming groups who are absolutely convinced that ignoring the rules is the only valid way to get a Narrativist payoff, to the point where they regularly tout GURPS as a game that actively supports storytelling. And when I say this, I'm not talking about 'story-oriented with no story' play like Ron's described before, but real Narrativism, where only roleplay and a desire to push for conflict are used as the means to address Premise. In such play, I've even seen definitive, unconscious signalling devices (like setting aside the dice and character sheets) used to tell everyone "hey, it's Premise time!". I'd go further to say that there's a lot of Nar play out there like this.

Taking it back to my AP example, I really felt bad for Player #1, because I could tell he was in absolutely the wrong game, and that the system (including my desire not to stray from the text) would never give him what he wants. The other part of that is, I knew that his preferences were so inflexible that he'd never deviate from them, and that the most clearly written ruleset that didn't account for those preferences wouldn't do him any good. Contrast that against his replacement, who has been doing something different for a few game sessions now and is totally cool with the newness.

There's that tired adage about leading a horse to water. I think that designers are obligated to point the way to their particular water with huge neon signs. But in the end, no, you'll never really make 'em drink. Part of that's tradition, like Ron said, but in the absence of that tradition, I think it'd still be this way to some degree.

[Paul T]

Mike,

I basically agree with the response that the current language, i.e. system "supports" or "facilitates" a certain CA, sounds pretty much spot on. The GM and players will play, trying to satisfy some sort of Creative Agenda, and they may have more or less trouble depending on the ruleset they've chosen. Specific techniques (like Kickers and Bangs), I think, can't really be considered to be separate from the system they're using. They are effectively rules or procedures from other rulesets that are being added on to the rules they're using from the book to make up their total System in play.

But this is where what I was saying in my previous comes in:

The way the rules are written can have a strong impact on this whole thing. How? Well, I think that if you're aiming for a certain CA, and the game makes that easy, you'll get fast results. A well-written game, therefore, might "sell" a certain way of playing so strongly as to make the players want to play it that way. If reading the "flavor text" of that game you bought makes you want to play a game with that approach, you might end up playing it that way.

So, if the book describes how cool it is to come up with interesting combinations of abilities, or the flavor text really makes you want to play out a fictional story of that sort, you might try to play the game that way. I've always found that examples of play in rulebooks that grab my interest make me want to try to create similar types of things when I play the game. Don't you think that has something to do with why so many people bought Vampire: the Masquerade? Do you think they picked it up, read it, and then started thinking about how they might make the most powerful character, or which handgun was the most effective for its price? I suspect that people imagined some sort of terrible angsty, Premise-laden stories, and tried to do that. If the rules didn't provide them with the tools to achieve that goal, of course, their desire to do so might not last very long.

So, the way the rules are written might (despite the fact that, obviously, they don't have any authority over the players) help "aim" the reader at a certain CA. In that way, the text can influence what play of the game will look like.

Of course, that's just my best guess, my opinion. I don't have any research to back it up or anything like that.

Oh, the other side of the coin:

Do some techniques require a certain learning curve from the players? For instance, will scene framing and stake setting improve certain types of play for anyone who uses them, or only those who can learn to use them to their advantage?

Secondly, does that mean that we should encourage all the players (not just the GM) to read the text of any game they're going to play?

Best,


Paul

[Clyde L. Rhoer]

Hi Mike,

Thanks. I understand better now, but want a further clarification because I still see a couple of meanings. It's your use of skill-sets that's giving me consideration. Are you basically asking if it's system that can force that moment when someone "learns" a new creative agenda, or if that moment is more caused by things outside the system, like these boards, talking with friends about how to play, etc?

[Moreno R.]

I would like to chime in, because some of the things that were said in this thread made me recall the difficulties I had to understand nar games until I tried DitV  [I hope I don't make too many errors, English is not my native language]

Some post above, Clyde said that you could play DitV with a gamist agenda.  Well, I don't think so.

OK, let me explain: I know that EVERY game can be played with every creative agenda. CA are "what we want from this game", in a way, reinforced by social pressure, and you can play DitV "wanting" a Gamist Agenda.  But there are games who make this so difficult to force you to change the system or change the creative agenda. Case in point: I TRIED to use DitV with a gamist agenda.  It happened more that one time. Narrativist is a "new trick" for me, I played gamist for a long, long time, and sometimes when I was tired, or the GM (who has gamist tendencies himself) tried to "beat" my character, I fell back on the old skill and played "to win".

I understand that I am using the word "gamist CA" incorrectly above. It was not social and not for a full unity of play. It was more something like me (and the GM) playing like "in the old days" trying to beat each other, for half a game session. Something so usual and "normal" for us and the other players that wasn't the group pressure that every time stopped us and made we think about what we were doing. No, it was the system.  Because, every time, it didn't support that style of playing. The system, every time, crashed down. Because it you play DitV "to win", you can NEVER LOSE. You can always get another dice, using every object you can think about. You can always call for a different follow-up conflicts. At the end, it became ridiculous and stopped the game cold.
You can't play DitV "to win" because there isn't a shadow of a chance that you could lose, if losing is the worst you can think that it could happen and you do everything you can to avoid it. You can lose (making the game run and not stop cold) only when you accept that you CAN lose and it's not that bad for you.

This helped me to understand nar games immensely. Because every other time I tried before some "nar game", I fell back on my old idea about "what is a rpg" ignoring the "advices" in the book (without wanting to do so. Every time I really tied to play "by the book" but every time I read what I wanted to read, not what it was written really on the page. And played at the end always in the "old way".  Before DitV I tried to play Dust Devils (a couple of one shots as the GM, but I didn't really understand how to play and the games fizzled), tRoS (one one-shot at a convention, where I played "to win" all the time. I liked very much the strategic elements of the game), and some other indie games at various con. I read all the Sorcerer Books, but I had a hard time trying to understand some points of the game, and I didn't understand what was so innovative about it.

But when I tried DitV, it was different. Because it's a hard-line game. It don't give you "advice", it tell you "in this game you have to play like this, and shut up", and when you try to play in a different way it crashes. And when you play it like it's written, even if you think that is a strange, difficult and rather stupid way to play...  at the end it works and you realize that it wasn't really stupid after all...

One example of this is the famous "say yes or roll the dices". It's givens as a RULE, it's not "advice". There is no doubt that if you don't do it that way, you aren't playing the game as written. I tried to play it, it worked REALLY well, and now I think that I will "say yes or roll the dices" in every rpg I will ever play (this from my old game style who could be phrased something like "say no, or roll the dices and still say no")

AFTER I played for months at DitV (with a gaming group that for more than half is not interested in theory and that is now playing nar without ever talking with everybody about creative agenda, but only with the playing of the game), I re-read the indie games I have. And I discovered that I already read "say yes or roll the dices" before. It's in Sorcerer. In the "playing the game" chapter. It's not written with these words, or in so forceful manner. But it says to permit every action and let the consequences (the results of the roll) happen. In another place say to don't roll for something without importance. At the end, all in all, its another way to say "say yes or roll the dices".

But I read Sorcerer years ago, I agreed with that "advice" ("very good advice, yes, but I already do that, no? I say NO only when I really have to say no, after all...") and continued to say "no" all the time.

I really NEEDED a game that told me "no, it doesn't mean that you have to do this most of the time, or that you should try to do this more often. It say that you have to do this EVERY TIME"

I think that a game text CAN teach a different way to play. A different Creative Agenda. (there is a blog post, from Ben Lehman, I believe  - I'm not sure and I have bad memory, so excuse me if I get the writer or the content wrong - that argued that the only really successful indie games - in sales - are the games that do that). It happened to me. To do so, It must:
1) Be really clear about HOW you MUST play the game. Hard rules, not simply advice.
2) SHOW you very soon that these rules WORK.

This would not work if the reader has no reason to trust the game author, and he is used to changing the rules before playing the first time with all the games he play. But about this, don't underestimate the social pressure. DitV has got a kind of "pressure" because is known as a "different" game, and people who try it already know that they are about to play some "strange thing".  And the community around the forge has a similar form of "pressure" to "try the games like they are written".

And a game can call from a different kind of "pressure", from different experiences: for example, Primetime Adventures: just using words like "producer", "budget", "fan mail", "issue", etc, I have seen it "force" (gently) a different agenda on people who would not have played in the same way if "fan mail" were called "power points" and "issue" were called "flaw"...

PTA is another game that, like DitV, can (in my experience) change the way people play, easily.

[Yokiboy]

I mean you have a set of players, who've never played anything but D&D, say. And they like their D&D play as a good wargamey set of player challenges. This is what they're used to RPGs being, and know that they like (which isn't the same thing as saying they dislike other things, it's all they know). And they come to play DitV. Will they end up playing the game as Vincent intended? Even if they intend to play by the rules of the game as written?

My hypothesis is that the rules of an RPG won't actually have much effect in this case.

Last night I finished my fifth session of Dogs in the Vineyard with a group like you describe in the quote above. I can tell you that Dogs' rules definitely help you nail down the CA. I have detailed our trip of learning how to play story now games, by writing a detailed AP of our game, but unfotunately it is in Swedish.

Last night it finally clicked for all the players, they understood why Dogs is so cool, why it supports stories better than D&D. They actually talked about D&D being more of a board game, and perfectly described gamerism, without knowing what that is. It was way cool!

I am 100% sure that rules can push and teach CA,

Yoki

[contracycle]

I think there are two separate issues here.  The first is, CAN a system teach/convey/recquire a CA.  The second is, WILL such a system actually do so.

I think he answer to the first question is yes and that the second depends upon the players, which is to say, if we are talking about players who are already experienced and confident and not actively seeking to change their style of play, then mere text probably will not cause or prompt them to do so.

Arguably, how much of a given text does an experienced gamer actually read anyway, I wonder?  I suspect we "know" what we are looking at, what things we need to get a grip on.  So there may be cases where a system would have had an effect IF it had been read properly, but the assumption was that there was nothing much to be learned.

There are too many variables to expect that mere access to a text will change behaviour.  I think it CAN do so but not that it WILL do so.

[David Berg]

Mike,

Suppose you're designing a game.  And you're under the impression that the people who play your game will do it EXACTLY as you've intended if only you can communicate that well enough.  And you write some clear, inspired text, that really ought to get all players on the same page, using the CA, Techniques, every aspect of system, every style of exploration that you had in mind.

Okay.  Now, suppose you discover that most role-players come loaded with their own preferences on every detail of how to play a game, will drift and ignore your rules and advice when they feel like it, and generally have no interest in how you think the game ought to be played.

How does this awful revelation affect your design choices?

It's easy to envision three different responses:
1) Give up on designing a game for play by anyone other than you and the people you already play with.
2) Design, but give less than your full effort in communicating how you think the game should be played, expending effort only on setting material or gimmicky spellcasting rules or some such.
3) Not change a thing.  Make the game for the .001% of gamers who will follow your intentions.

If you have a more interesting and complex answer than one of the above, I'd love to hear it (and that would make more sense of this thread's purpose in my mind).

Thanks,
-David

[Caldis]

So we have an actual play experience from Brother Blood that seems to validate system does matter without any ambiguity.  I think the question is answered, make rules that actively support one agenda and not others and the system matters.  You cant prevent someone ignoring rules or changing them but you can create rules that support an agenda. The only question left is one for designers, are my rules clear enough to show what I'm going for?

[Ron Edwards]

Three pages to get to that? That seems like where we all started from.

Mike, I'm trying my very, very best. I do see some value to some of the points you've raised, given that a person was laboring under various misunderstandings. But if the person is not, then what you're saying isn't doing anything. It's as if we were all standing on the ship, and you jumped off and froze your ass in the icy sea, and then clambered back on, to tell us, "Stay on the ship!!" I'm kind of looking at you oddly ... yeah, uh, we knew that.

Caldis' post indicates to me that your thread title and instant reversal are posing insurmountable problems for readers. This thread isn't about system mattering or not mattering. You keep saying "system" when clearly you mean rules-texts. So this thread is about texts and gamer culture. It has everything to do with what I've been calling the murk, and especially about what a bunch of concurrent threads are dealing with, incoherence.

I also have a hard time relating to IRC play of any kind, and I consider that in Big Model terms, it's a lot like playing blind and partially gagged. So any observations or critique, for that matter, about anything I've ever written about, doesn't really yank my "must attend to" chain if it comes from IRC play. That's my own limitation of understanding, perhaps, so I'm trying not to let that interfere with my judgment about this thread. I'm stating it here to be up-front about my difficulties.

Regarding your examples, I don't know what to tell you. They don't illustrate anything to me about what "system" does or doesn't do. They seem to me to be about two things. First, about how rules-texts, if they don't match up to what people want or are familiar with, they get ignored. They also seem to me to be about taking a text and inferring what pieces might be missing, given what pieces are present, and adding them. Is that a crapshoot? Sure. It also totally applies to HeroQuest as a text, specifically; I consider any play of that game as written as a bit of a CA-crapshoot requiring a fair amount of inference and addition (or reduction of certain things).

So. I don't know what to do with this thread, as moderator. As discourse, it's not a disaster, but it is definitely a two-spined mutant with a misleading face. I also respect your desire to address something important that you've been thinking about for a long time. I'm strongly tempted merely to say, "start over, with up-front statements about exactly what you mean, and no leading questions." I'm going to leave it up to you, though. I'm good with letting this one continue if you're OK with where it's gone and what to do next with it, and I'm also good if you want to close it here and start a new one.

Best, Ron

[TroyLovesRPG]

Hello,

The Forge is getting interesting with these threads about the gaming "condition" instead of just the gaming "words".

I think that system does matter. The word "system" seems to be ambiguous here, but that's ok. After reading the pages of posts, I understand the system of a game to include the rules, style and agenda. The agenda of a game seems to be the hardest thing to validate. I've played many board games, RPGs, cards, etc. and many of them use descriptive, theme-based phrases to give you a sense of what the game experience will be. Most fail for me because I've been misled.

System matters because it has to appeal to me. I have to get something out of playing the game using the defined system as it is described. And not all systems are the same. Possibly, most systems aren't defined and somehow are secretly embedded in the text. Two games could use the exact same rules (d20 anyone?) but each system could evoke completely different experiences.

Greyorm made a good point about most games not telling us how to play the game. The automobile manual and skill in driving was a very good analogy.

I have not played most of the games listed in the posts. Most sound fun and others don't interest me. The rules were not listed although some brief examples of play were given. Also, enthusiasm about games will gain my interest. I think I would enjoy DitV because it supports my type of creativity. I love stories!

I agree with Ron in that the word "system" could be defined properly for this thread, and tell us why system does or doesn't matter to you.

Troy