Engaging New Worlds with New Imagination

[Christopher Kubasik]

Okay,

So here's how I ended the first post of this thread:

"Leaving aside the desire to build religions like genetically engineered cultures on a petri dish, what about this issues: The responsibility to play with a different view and logic when playing in a different world?"

That's what the thread is about.  Any takers?

Take care,
Christopher

[Kester Pelagius]

Greetings Christopher,

Okay,

So here's how I ended the first post of this thread:

"Leaving aside the desire to build religions like genetically engineered cultures on a petri dish, what about this issues: The responsibility to play with a different view and logic when playing in a different world?"

That's what the thread is about.  Any takers?

It all depends.  After all the one thing that we can not get around is perception, everyone knows what they know, or think they do, and that comes with a load of preconceptions.  And that, when distilled, means that the departures in internal game logic can not be so pronounced as to be unapproachable to the understanding of players and referees.  Otherwise what will happen is a comis disconnect followed quickly by alienation.

Read:  Too far a shift from the basic cultural paradigms and world view of the players and the more a world setting risks falling flat.  However pepper the world with the marginally familiar, in unexpected ways, and that gives everyone something to relate to.  However marginally.

Thus, no matter how "different" an author may try to make a world appear it has to have, under the hood, enough recognizable crunchy bits so that the reader can relate.  This holds true for novels and role-playing games, throw philosophy and religion into the mix and what you get is an unstable alchemical substance with a potential kinetic force equal to a powder keg.

And religion, for many, is inseperable from culture.  In fact that is really all either is, a collection of mores and standards.

Thus, if you set up a cannabalistic society, it is not likely to be one that the players are going to want to know anything more abot than how much "XP" the individuals are worth.

Or something.

How is that for a opener?


Kind Regards,

Kester Pelagius

[Christopher Kubasik]

Actually, Kester, I already covered my response to the "familiar enough" issue in my answer to Walt.

You're spending many words making statements that could be summed up much more quicky, usually skimming over what the discussion actually is at hand so you can trot out the fact you have.  This seems to give you some pleasure.

By the way, upthread you stated clearly you didn't understand one of my paragraphs in one of my posts.  You than stated that though you didn't understand the paragraph, it didn't "sound" friendly.

Then, instead of asking me to clarify, you proceded to quote from a greek classic in response to a paragraph you had already claimed before all the world not to understand.

Here's some bad news: taking the time to quote literature in the context of a conversation you've already acknowledged you can't actually reply to because you've already said you don't know *what* you're replying to will *lose* you credibility, not gain it.

Slow down, my friend, slow down.

***

I thank all who have participated.  As always, I gain a lot from the conversations on the Forge.

Take care,
Christopher

[Gordon C. Landis]

For what it's worth (I think this responds to both Kester and Christopher's last posts/points)-

If we'd set up a game world in which some form of cannibalism would be seen as "normal" and acceptable (say, consuming those you know who happen to die as a form of respect), I'd fully expect everyone involved in the game to run with that.  I'd also expect an above-average amount of prep work in terms making sure that everyone was OK with it, and a certain amount of during-game OOC comments about how wierd it is.  

Same with religous views/logic, at least in most play groups I've been in over the last stretch.

Gordon

[greyorm]

the Sophisticated and the Naive mindset.

This distinction, or the terms, bother me, because they seem opposite what they should be. The sophisticated individual can take things as they're meant, without overanalyzing them or judging them based on their own prejudices.

That is, using your terminology, the "Sophisticated" individual will judge a story not as a story, but on their own personal criteria, usually how much "logical" sense it makes or how "real" it is.

The "Naive" individual will judge a story as a story, because it doesn't make any sense to judge a thing as something other than what it is, and so avoids the above trap.

Note, I would take issue with anyone who states the above mentioned "Sophisticated" method is a valid method of judgement. It is not, as has been shown time and time again.

And note that the "Sophisticated" method is not about "internal consistency" because it uses external criteria to judge the item being discussed.

I admit, this is a side issue to the point -- which I agree with -- but the terms do bother me a little because of the above.

[Kester Pelagius]

Actually, Kester, I already covered my response to the "familiar enough" issue in my answer to Walt.

You're spending many words making statements that could be summed up much more quicky, usually skimming over what the discussion actually is at hand so you can trot out the fact you have.  This seems to give you some pleasure.

Uh... huh?

It seems my posts have rubbed you wrong, fine, happens.  But now to say I'm doing this purposefully as some means to derive pleasure from it... and from what, exactly???

Guess it's rather moot.  As, apparently, are my posts.

Nothing more to really say then is there.


Kind Regards.

[erithromycin]

If one wishes to encourage players to experience a game through characters that endorse a particular set of values and beliefs, then one should, within the game, endorse those values and beliefs.

If that means granting people status for partaking of the flesh of their enemies [or taking it from those who consume the flesh of their kin] then so be it. If it means something else, as long as something happens as a result of acting [and refusing to partake is almost certainly an action too].

If one wishes to place a certain measure of responsibility upon someone then my suggestion is to pair with it some right or another, or, indeed, the reverse.

In a cannabilistic society people may have the right to eat the flesh of others, but have a correspondent responsibility, to with, protecting the flesh of their loved ones from being similarly consumed. I'm sure that we can all smell the roleplaying opportunities from that particular set of carcasses.

Or, the other way around, people may have the responsibility for eating the flesh of others. The hows and whys of this strange practise are not for us to ponder, save to say that I can think of a few regarding idolatory, avoiding participation in necromantic rituals, and punishment for transgressions and that is before I have had a second cup of coffee or my fourth cup of tea. The correspondent right, of course, is that one may determine who is allowed to eat ones corpse when it seems as if death is about to call.

Before we even start to enter the complexities of system, of gains or penalties at a mechanical level for supping others, of complexities between tribes and differences of interpretation of dictums or prophecies or whatever else, there are stories here that can be told about families, and friends.

Of course, we're only playing with one building block here. An alien mindset isn't the kind of thing that we can reach at one remove. So we add more, and ensure that there are rights and responsibilities around those, and then we start looking for friction. Where there is conflict, there is opportunity, no?

- drew

[contracycle]

I would disagree with the idea that it cannot be too unfamaliar.  I bet, players can identify with any human in plausible surroundings.  To my mind, there would be no point building a game which featured such a spectacualr attention-getter as cannibalism and then shuffle it off into the background; surely, that would be part of the point of playing, to expose yourself to this concept, to quite literally think the unthinkable becuase you have a structured and comfortable environment in which to do so.

Therefore: from the design point of view, I would say that such a game should mechanically reflect some of the structure of the perceived universe, and should contain significant volume text dedicated to this cannibalism both in character and out of character, so that everyone has a framework from which to approach the situation.  It should be a strong feature, openly discussed.

[M. J. Young]

Much has flowed from my use, in another thread, of the phrase "Idiot Player". The context there was that I would need the answer to some particular problem (I think the matter of how the sun really crossed the sky) because some "Idiot Player" would find a way to find out.

The phrase was not intended as more than a facetious statement of frustration. I did not mean that this player was trying to be difficult, or acting inappropriately, or getting out of character, or bringing the wrong mindset to the game. What I meant was that it is frustrating sometimes for the referee to be confronted by the fact that players very reasonably become incredibly interested in some part of the world to which little or no attention has been given.

I've got a Multiverser world published in The First Book of World in which the player character finds himself in the cargo hold of a cargo spaceship on a regular route. The usual course of events is that he's taken as a stowaway, invents some plausible explanation for his presence, and take a job with the crew to work off his passage, which turns into an ongoing career in this dangerous and constantly changing world. I've run it for probably twenty different players by now, and I'm running it for one of them right now on our forum game. The one port that is in a sense the anchor of the trade route, a place called Emerald, is valuable because of a mineral abundant there. It's also populated by some sort of primitive primate/humanoid (very australopithicine) tool-using carnivore that attacks miners, shippers, even space ships docked on the ground. This makes it unlikely that anyone would want to stay there, as it's a pretty rough place. Suddenly on this running of the game, the player character involved takes an interest in this place. He wants to know the geography, geology, climatology, history of the planet, any anthropological or biological studies done on the creatures, habitablility, problems with settlement--a laundry list of data which logically must exist but which I quite frankly don't have and never needed. O.K., that's not a particular problem. I know a few things about the world that are easily extrapolated into the points that matter, and I can invent the rest. The point is that you can never be certain which direction a player is going to suddenly take the game, and it can be rather frustrating for the referee to have to fill in the information in those areas he never expected would matter.

So my so-called "Idiot Player" is not an idiot or a problem. He's just the guy who at this moment is frustrating me because I've got all this material set up over here and he's suddenly become fascinated by that little snippet of nothing so he's looking over there.

It reminds me of my first year as a dungeon master, when I created a log bridge over a fast-moving current, worked out the probability of safely crossing it and the consequences for falling off, accounting for dexterity, armor, class, strength, and more; and when my players got to it, they decided they were not going to risk crossing my slippery log bridge, and found another way across. Every once in a while you have to pull a page out of your notes and just burn it, because it was wasted effort; every once in a while you have to grab a sheet of paper and invent an entirely new country on the fly because the players decided to go see what was at the other end of the road. You have to roll with the punches. You'll still see my sardonic smile when that happens, at least once in a while.

--M. J. Young

[Jack Spencer Jr]

the Sophisticated and the Naive mindset.

This distinction, or the terms, bother me, ...

I agree. Got a better idea for terms?

[damion]

To a degree, I thnk the 'Mr. Wizard' approach is accurate.  (We'll ignore the problem of peole why try to apply modern knowlege they shouldn't have. Like a fantasy characther trying to combine saltpeter and sulfer. That is disfunctional.)

There were people who tested the world, ect.  This is the origin of scientific tradition. The result of this was that myths only survived about  features of the world that were not testable. IIRC only about 3 people visited Hades and came back.  

To answer Christophers question:
There are two answers:
1)A world can enforce it's viewpoint, in game, or world mechanics. So an attempt to test a myth, should fail, or produce a answer that does not contradict anything.  
I believe Feng Shui (sp?) gives bonuses to  cinimatic actions and penalties to repetative 'safe' actions.  Thus, if a world encourages the viewpoint it wants, people will buy into it.

[erithromycin]

With reference to the current furore around the 'Naive' and 'Sophisticated' styles of play, is anyone reminded of the whole 'Immersion' debate?

The central conceit of each appeared to me, an outside observer, to revolve around the role of the player with regard to their interpretation of what their character encounters.

The 'Naive' player takes it on faith, to coin a phrase, that the world being presented to his character is internally consistent.

The 'Sophisticated' player takes it on faith that the world being presented by the GM [note key perceptual distinction] is internally consistent.

This then starts to seem a bit like a 'Social Contract' issue. As has been pointed out, Pendragon got round this by saying that magic was a GM's prerogative. D&D seems to get round it by saying that magic does this 'because', and that still seems to be enough for lots and lots of people.

What confuses the issue, I think, is the preponderance of religions that people have enough basic knowledge of to see contradictions between them. I'll point out that, historically, such contradictions usually resulted in conflict, and that, in and of itself, seems reason enough to continue to play with it. That said, if we were having the same argument about non-Euclidean mathematics or non-i calculi I'm not sure if we'd see the same difficulties.

Another possible obfuscation revolves around the accuracy of the mythologies in question. Are they believed to be true? Or simply relevant as fables? Perhaps the easiest thing to do is to interpret the function of the religions within the societies that you are attempting to represent. Thus those who have a constricting religion that forbids might face mechanics that punish, while those that have a loose code of moral instruction that encourages might enjoy bonuses in certain situations.

Of course, you might find yourself with play balance issues in those circumstances, but, frankly, life sucks, and then you get a boat ride.

To reiterate, if you want to enforce or encourage a mode of play, no matter what you want to call it, use the system and the social contract to pull or push players down the path you want them to tread.

Of course, to do that, you have to figure out what you want them to do.

If, as you've said, it's to make players responsible for operating within an alien viewpoint, then you should do your best to ensure that operating within that alien viewpoint gets results.

- drew