Useless Detail?

[Shreyas Sampat]

This obviously doesn't belong in its parent thread.

Anyway, John Kim and I started to discuss the value of the "useless detail", as I've called it.

To define, the details important to this discussion are those not relevant to the story at hand - Little Red Riding Hood has a severe peanut allergy, for example, or an encyclopedic knowledge of the local psychotropic flora.

John poses that these details are valuable, because they have the potential for future utility, both in direct usage and also in informing play.

Jack Spencer and I both objected, on similar grounds:
There is a lot of emphasis, in a particular school of RPging (both design and play), on having everything "figured out".
This has two effects:
It creates a broad separation between creation and play.
It can create deprotagonized, 'irrelevant' characters.

Meanwhile, the technique of characters emerging through play has the opposite qualities:
Play is uninformed by the absence of detail.
On the other hand, it is free to create stuff,
and characters don't become deprotagonized through wastage of mechanical ability.

So, both the techniques have their benefits and drawbacks.

My question is, can they both be used in a game, simultaneously, without stepping on each others' toes?

[Rob MacDougall]

Can I ask: Which thread was the parent to this?

[Jason Lee]

Can I ask: Which thread was the parent to this?

Damn the continuing story

...if I'm not mistaken

[Jason Lee]

Meanwhile, the technique of characters emerging through play has the opposite qualities:
Play is uninformed by the absence of detail.
On the other hand, it is free to create stuff,
and characters don't become deprotagonized through wastage of mechanical ability.

Emphasis mine

I have a bit of personal objection to the emphasized statement.  The value of a trait is determined by which actions the player chooses to take with the character.  I'm not talking about worth like combat skills being less useful in an intrigue game.  I'm talking about the character using the skills he has to solve his problems.  
Example:  By traditional thinking a Gardening skill seems pretty friggin' useless.  Proper play can create a lot of solutions based on Gardening.  Are you ill? the Blegpth flower from Peru can help.  Need to get past a gaurd? bribe the cook to slip some Merfmerfaha root into his coffee.
Some mechanical ability obviously has more worth than others - teleporting is better than walking.  However, down at the level you seem to be discussing (stats, skills, merits, flaws) I think attaching worth to 'character detail' actually deprotagonizes character concepts that fall outside the game designer's definition of 'useful'.  In my mind this leads to a repetition of character types.  If the game is designed so combat skills are more 'useful', then the game will be implying a combat character is the correct character for the game.

I also think predefined details are indeed handy, particularly as 'idea seeds' for plot.
Example:
Little Red's peanut allergy may put her in the hospital, where she can wonder about the strange noises coming out of the surgery center in the middle of the night.  Once Jack and Jill come to visit her they can be drawn into the mystery as well.

This is not to say I disagree with you in totality.

Now, to actually address the question.
I think they can coexist.  In a traditional approach you may define all the details of the character, but once you actually get into playing them you may want to change things.  In my experience post-charGen alterations are not frowned upon if the trait has not been used.  The unused traits are treated like undefined-maybe traits as opposed to something written in stone.  Four sessions into the game you may decide a peanut allergy isn't fitting, and I see no reason for the GM or game system to deny altering it if it hasn't been addressed yet.

- Jason

[John Kim]

To define, the details important to this discussion are those not relevant to the story at hand - Little Red Riding Hood has a severe peanut allergy, for example, or an encyclopedic knowledge of the local psychotropic flora.

John poses that these details are valuable, because they have the potential for future utility, both in direct usage and also in informing play.

Jack Spencer and I both objected, on similar grounds:
There is a lot of emphasis, in a particular school of RPging (both design and play), on having everything "figured out".
This has two effects:
It creates a broad separation between creation and play.
It can create deprotagonized, 'irrelevant' characters.

Well, I agree with the first part.  A common problem in my RPG experience is conceiving a character one way prior to the campaign, and then finding out in play that he is very different.  However, I really don't follow the second point.  How can having a peanut allergy "deprotagonize" the character?  It seems to me that being deprotagonized is about core concept, not extra detail.  A character is made irrelevant if, say, she is a diplomat on a commando raid.  But that is a central trait that is almost assured to be defined.  

On the other hand, it is true that sometimes a detailed character lacks coherency.  In contrast, a simple character defined by only primary traits like "diplomat" is easy to get a handle on.  However, some detailed characters never have this core -- they are a large collection of skills and history which have no clear hook for engaging in the story.  That is a potential pitfall, but I don't think it is inherent to having detail.  

Meanwhile, the technique of characters emerging through play has the opposite qualities:
Play is uninformed by the absence of detail.
On the other hand, it is free to create stuff, and characters don't become deprotagonized through wastage of mechanical ability.

So, both the techniques have their benefits and drawbacks. My question is, can they both be used in a game, simultaneously, without stepping on each others' toes?

I see this mainly as a player preference issue.  On rgf.advocacy, we hashed out a while back that some players preferred "Design-At-Start", while others preferred "Develop-In-Play".  There's nothing wrong with mixing these, and indeed there are some benefits.  Design-At-Start characters provide strong hooks for early adventures, because they provide a lot of details.  Develop-In-Play characters help the campaign run more smoothly later, because they will evolve to fit the nature of the campaign, and can fill in roles that would otherwise be lacking.  

As an additional note on compromise, as a GM I always allow players to go back and edit their characters during the first few sessions of a campaign -- both mechanically and in terms of background.  I have also done this as a player a number of times, often doing a complete about-face.

[Andrew Martin]

I see this mainly as a player preference issue.  On rgf.advocacy, we hashed out a while back that some players preferred "Design-At-Start", while others preferred "Develop-In-Play".  There's nothing wrong with mixing these, and indeed there are some benefits.  Design-At-Start characters provide strong hooks for early adventures, because they provide a lot of details.  Develop-In-Play characters help the campaign run more smoothly later, because they will evolve to fit the nature of the campaign, and can fill in roles that would otherwise be lacking.

As a player and GM, I'd like to have both methods in the one game.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

The thing about "extra detail" that always bothers me is that it is extra detail, not especially important of relavant. It also seemed like an almost despirate attempt to make things "work" in an RPG on some level. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it seems to be something like "we need to have something happen, here's this detail. maybe it will be useful later...maybe.

If it's used, then great. If not, then why have it?

[Le Joueur]

If it's used, then great. If not, then why have it?

Um, because some players just can't stop themselves.  I had one hand me a folder with 12 pages of detail on a character they wanted to play, history, descriptions, interests, and et cetera.  What did I do with it?  I graciously accepted it.  I later gave it the equal amount of attention when developing the background for that game as I gave the one page writeup I got from another player.  It was great for plot hooks when I needed them, but the player was so aggressive I never needed it.

Fang Langford

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi.

What are we talking about?  I have no idea what we're talking about.  What is this useless detail we're talking about?

If Little Red Riding Hood has an alergy to peanuts, why, for it's-an-imporovised-story-goodness sake wouldn't the GM take advantage of that fact.  The only way a detail could be usless is if it's ignored.  Why ignore it?

The only way I can see a detail being useless is if the GM already knows what skills/traits/whatever will be useful before the start of play and hews only to those.  Is this true?  Am I getting this right?  Wouldn't that be a kind of willful persnickitiness lacking all sense of fun of building a story with fellow players.

In improvisation, you are taught during the first ten minutes of class to say, "yes, and..." when a scene partner tosses a new detail into the improvisation. You never contradict a new fact, you never deny.  You build on it.

I may be odd in this regard, but I've always done this with my players in RPG games.  If a player adds an alergy to a PC, it means he wants me to confront his PC with the implications of the allergy.  Why wouldn't I?

Again: unless I know everything that's going to happen already, why not pick up fun leads from the players.  Is this, then, a matter of GM style and technique: the plotted-it-all-out-won't they have fun being run through my adventure GMs on one side, and the well, here-we-go bass player GMs on the other.

Cause if not, I don't understand at all what's being said here.  Please, for God's sake, help me.

Christopher

[Cassidy]

My question is, can they both be used in a game, simultaneously, without stepping on each others' toes?

From my experience I'd have to say no, I don't think so.

This issue cropped up recently. I'm running a short game, 3-4 sessions, based on The Pool. It is a very "detail lite" game wherein the scope of the characters abilities are largely explored and developed through continued play. From previous experience I knew in advance that a couple of the players would have problems with this approach and suggested they sit this one out. They would have just got pissed off by the looseness of the game much preferring to have virtually everything about their characters nailed down right from the start.

I have trouble seeing how a single game could accomodate players who are on opposite sides of the 'detail' divide.

[Cadriel]

I think the problem with Useless Detail is not when it exists (read Egri; his dialectic method to character development for a play has you give a full physical, sociological, and psychological write-up), but when it has a cost in Currency.  I think that just about anything paid for at character creation ought to be held to the "Loaded Gun Principle."  If there's a loaded gun in the story, it should go off before the end.  Does this put your typical Design-At-Start character generation methods, especially in a Sim game, at a disadvantage?  Absolutely!  I think the kitchen-sink method of developing a character's skills, as in say GURPS (where it strikes me as most severe), is just asking to make trouble - you've got all these capabilities saved up for a rainy day; the problem is, you paid for all of them and if one of them never gets used, the Currency is wasted!

Perhaps that's why I have a preference for games like Over the Edge and The Pool.  Firstly, their "define your own stuff" categories escape the tedium of hundreds and hundreds of skill descriptions (again I turn to GURPS for an extreme example).  But more than that, in a distinctly Nar game, I think the amount of Director stance that is appropriate goes a long way to ensuring that the character is useful, in that it takes the burden off only the GM's shoulders (it is likewise tedious to have to run everything so as to make certain that the player characters all use their capabilities).

I think it's a positive thing that game design is slowly moving away from the sort of roulette game that traditional Sim skill systems have you play with Currency:  you're guessing, "Will this be useful, or am I just throwing points away?"  That's a bizarre element of the metagame that I am personally more than glad to be rid of.

-Wayne

[clehrich]

I think Christopher has hit the nail on the head here.  Without wanting to turn this into a GNS discussion, I think that in both Nar and Sim games, an important part of the GM's job is to make use of whatever resources are available, and player-designed character detail is a crucial part of such resources.  So if I design a character with a detailed background, I expect the GM to make it possible for me to draw on that background in play.  (In Gamist play, one could perhaps argue that this is entirely the player's job, as a way of "beating" the scenario.)

Of course, it is also the player's job, no matter what the style, to try to draw on such detail to make the session more interesting and fun.

But Cadriel's point about Resources is essential as well.  If I have to pay for my background, that encourages me either to spread myself thin (lots of things just in case) or to specialize wildly (I have a 100 in machine gun, but a 0 in breathing).  I think, though, that there are really two different kinds of detail here: those paid for and those not, and both exist even in GURPS.  For example, while I have to pay for my skill as a sharpshooter, I don't probably have to pay for having a brother who's in a wheelchair (I mean this not as a question of whether my brother is "powerful," but as an emotional issue for my character).  The question is whether, having spent time thinking about my brother, I will ever see him enter the campaign, or whether he'll just remain entirely on my character background sheet.  As to my sharpshooter skills, if I pay for them, the GM had better realize that I'm going to use them, like it or not.

Regardless of Resource expense, detail is "useless" when either (1) the GM makes it impossible to utilize in play, or (2) the player is uncreative about utilizing it.  Both can occur, obviously.  I was once in a campaign where everyone was told to develop detailed backgrounds, with lots of history and contacts and friends and whatnot, and then the GM took us to a foreign country with no links back home, and everything home-based in our backgrounds was simply irrelevant and couldn't be used.  This sucked.  But it sucked a good deal harder because we paid for this stuff.  The effect was that players were rewarded for ignoring background and designing min/maxed skill monsters, while players who devoted a lot of effort to background (as requested) were simply weaker.  Not that balance is always an important thing, but I think you can imagine that in a game where the GM doesn't care a damn about character background but makes you pay for it, roleplaying per se is often less important than skill numbers.

[greyorm]

How can having a peanut allergy "deprotagonize" the character?

Excellent question, John.

It is if that peanut allergy never gets used.

Take, for example, the following typical scenario: I have developed boatloads of characters in traditional pre-play with all sorts of interesting tidbits and backstory and whatnot. Yet almost without fail, these tidbits never get used...and I feel rejected, abused and deprotagonized every single time.

Could I have voiced it like that before I came to the Forge? No. But the feeling was still there, the aggravation and disgruntlement with the situation.

When the tidbits are used in a game, I feel elated and interested in the game during their occurence, because I'm not searching for my motivation or my role -- it's right there in front of me, it's something so important to me that I wrote it down.

But those points of use occur only rarely, rather than being at the center of the game, so I end up playing to get to those points, rather than enjoying the whole experience.

It's rather like the GM throwing you a bone on occasion: it isn't what you really want, but it's something to gnaw on for a bit and forget about what you really want. But the question remains: I've got stuff, so why aren't we using it?

That, of course, is the key.
I write down or spend points on "a peanut allergy," and then it never gets used in the game; the point is that I might as well never have taken or created that item if it is irrelevant to play.

In fact, I've mentioned this topic before, about the way back-story is used in most games: it's casual toss-away fodder for "maybe later" rather than being the very stuff that's important right now.

In most games you play through the GM's scenario...you do not play through a scenario specifically crafted to deal with your character's conflicts and background. Those character conflicts only exist as backstory or loose motivation to the current events.

In fact, the backstory and its conflicts may as well not even exist! Such a game would (and does) flow more smoothly if the characters shoe-horn themselves into it during the game...creating their relevancy to the events of the scenario during play.

I'm going to posit something here about one of your statements, about characters who end up playing differently than they were developed: I'm going make the claim that many of these pre-developed-post-altered characters -- characters who turn out differently in play than in conception -- are suffering from a lack of the campaign speaking to the character as concieved, hence the character is altered to fit the game (rather than the game being altered to fit the character).

But what are we really talking about here, is it just about when you prefer to develop your character, given that either method works and often can work fine together in the same game?

I've been getting ready to release a rules-adaptation, and I'm readying myself for the outraged cries of certain of my fellow gamers, because I know -- KNOW, mind you -- that this very subject will come up on the relevant list and complaints will be filed about the lack of skill lists, multiple attributes and so forth, for I'm advocating ditching all the unecessary grit in the character creation system.

I will say, "He's good with languages, has a rank 5? So what? Is it relevant to play?" "But," a particular they will boldly state, "That extraneous stuff might become relevant! You never know! The GM could use it!"

Poppycock. This is just another turn of the old "we might get a story out of this someday" or "just stick around, it will all be cool later" tired schtick that has been around for years.

You may have noticed the keyword in there: could.
Unless the GM is definitely going to use it, the argument is no good. The GM could do anything; the question is what will she do?

Not using the stuff you designed your character with is deprotagonizing because it ignores the character as written, so your GM either must allow you to create the scenario by creating the character, or create the scenario himself and allow you to create your character from that scenario.

If the GM wants to run a game where the players do not have creative development of the scenario, then giving them the opposite, creative input into their characters during the scenario, is the best thing to do for the sake of a good gaming experience.

As I question above, the problem we're really discussing isn't characters being developed pre-play or during play -- that's so not the important or even relevant issue -- it's with how the game itself is played, with the understanding between player and GM about what each wants out of the experience and how the pieces of the game tie together to fulfill that for each individual.

If a player wants to develop a character pre-play, then the GM must be willing to create scenarios that highlight that character's story and conflicts specifically. If a player wants to develop their character in play, then the GM has to have a system in place that allows character creation on-the-fly.

It boils down to functional play...not just "play happening" but functional play happening.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi All,

The comments about Currency cleared everything up for me.

At least in terms of mechanics. I still can't fathom why a GM would do the things to players described above, but that's a seperate issue.

I suppose, at this late stage of the game, where I can't imagine playing many of the types of games descibed above anyhow, why anyone *would* play such games when they seem to encourage such discord and potential frustration -- but, again, another issue.

Thanks for the replies,
Christopher

[Andrew Martin]

I totally agree with Greyorm.

At least in terms of mechanics. I still can't fathom why a GM would do the things to players described above,...

Because it's not in the rules of the game! :)

I suppose, at this late stage of the game, where I can't imagine playing many of the types of games descibed above anyhow, why anyone *would* play such games when they seem to encourage such discord and potential frustration...

Because it's not in the rules of the game! :) :)

Basically the GM doesn't know any better. I know this because I played and GM-ed in the same way as Greyorm described. Background detail was nice (I did it as a player as well), but it never seemed to come up in play, and as GM I didn't know how to include it in play.