The Forge dialectic - how do I boil this down?

[Dotan Dimet]

Hi,

The community wherin I operate (organized Israeli gamerdom) has a strong simulationist-illusionist attitude. They've read the books, they believe in The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast, Deep Roleplay and GM-as-Storyteller with great sincerity. At least as far as rhetoric and discussion go (theoretical talk has more-or-less ground to a halt with the usual dice-versus-diceless thrashing and its wildly abstract tangent of what is a game?.

Now, our only surviving theoretician (the only one who still bothers to sally forth into the kiddie-overrun forums, I mean) is a heavily illusionist GM struggling with the question of free-will in a cosmos with GM as absolute god. And I want to take this discussion to another level, by introducing Ron's GNS ideas, the concept of metagame, narrativist concerns, and Illusionism-the-idea.

However, posting a couple of messages saying "go read 20,000 words on the Forge"  can only influence people so much.

So I want to either (1) write an essay or (2) put together a talk/lecture. However, I can't for the life of me imagine sitting down and digesting all Ron's 3-4 big essays into something lecture-sized and comprehensible. I need to pick and choose, and dig out the main ideas, or the ones most easy to present.

I'd appreciate pointers on how to do this.

Also, I'm a bit split here between the issues as presented in Ron's articles (player concerns, outlooks, goals, stances) and the nuts and bolts of narrativist play-style - which, as I understand it, is what I'm doing, and what Ron does and describes. On the one hand, this is a style of play I can offer as a concrete example of an alternative, and on the other it may cause audience alienation ("we don't play like that") - perhaps attacking the Dominant Paradigm ("we play like that, what's wrong with it?") might be better.

Thanks,
Dotan

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Hello, Dotan.

Welcome to the Forge.

If I understand you correctly, you wish to impart some of the information on the Forge to members of an RPG forum you're a member of? In which case, my heart goes out to you. I think you would have an easier time telling a bunch of non-roleplayers about this stuff than a bunch of roleplayers. You will meet with resistence. Plain and simple. You'll just have to accept that.

One tactic you could take is to drop Forge terminology into exsisting discussion.

For example, for the old roll-play vs role-playing discussion, you could point out that this is just Exploration of System vs. Exploration of Character which are both valid mode of roleplaying. Neither is better than the other. Both are a matter of personal preference. This will cause some people to ask you what the hell you mean by that. This is good because the ones who asked are the interested parties. The others may come around later but these are the ones whom you can show this to now and build a group who will learn, use and discuss in Forge terms. I would suggest you handle it carefully. When the ask you to explain Exploration, don't just give them a series of links, explain it. Only give the links when they ask where you got this from or it otherwise would be beneficial for the person to read the original essay.

Handled well, you will manage to inject Forge terminology into the discussion and then you will (hopefully) see the benefeit of such before too long.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Dotan,

This thread is for you! Class in RPG Theory by Tor Erickson. Tor, was there a follow-up thread, or am I mis-remembering? Also, feel free to post from our private correspondence around that time as well, if you have any of it on file.

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

Dotan, you've suggested a lecture as one form of interaction through which you could present the ideas; but they're rich ideas, and you worry that they are more than a lecture could present. I've got an idea for something that might work for you in that context.

Get a copy of Sorcerer, or another solid innovative narrativist game, pull together a gaming group, and run it. Then do your lecture or article or similar communication on that game and the sessions you ran, looking  at it as examples which challenge the (local) mainstream concepts of games. Give specifics of how the game went against the norms, and why that was fun.

In the process, you'll of course introduce a lot of concepts very briefly, because they'll be relevant to play.

At the end, provide a bibliography in the form of links to relevant articles and the web site of the game you played.

As a frequent article writer, I think this gives you a context that lets you limit and focus your work on something other than trying to explain a very large theory to a hostile audience. Anyway, it's worth a try.

--M. J. Young

[Bankuei]

So I want to either (1) write an essay or (2) put together a talk/lecture. However, I can't for the life of me imagine sitting down and digesting all Ron's 3-4 big essays into something lecture-sized and comprehensible. I need to pick and choose, and dig out the main ideas, or the ones most easy to present.

Funny enough, words rarely penetrate people's minds...If you want to get folks to understand what you're talking about, I'd suggest subjecting some of the more experimentally minded folks to some different games, in particular games which really break away from the standard Sim/Illusionist mentality.

I find The Pool/The Questing Beast, Inspectres, Donjon, Universalis, and Trollbabe to be excellent ways of:

1)proving that Sim/Gam is not the end-all, be-all
2)Ways to play other than the typical Impossible Thing before Breakfast
3)getting this across without theory involved.

I've listed the games I did, in the above order, in sort of an "easy to difficult" to grasp sort of manner for the typical gamer, plus the Pool is free.  Grab 3 or 4 players, get together for a one shot, or 3 session mini, and play.  Ask them what they like, don't like, check out where the biggest confusion/assumptions kick in, and clarify.  Don't go deep into theory, just concentrate on making it happen in play, and show them what they "won't believe" in terms of functional play.

Chris

[Dotan Dimet]

OK, reviewing what I wrote in light of the responses, I think I did my people a disservice in my brief presentation (as much as I can refer to a whole community of roleplayers in broad generalizations). So I'll elaborate. Here's some background on the history of (organized) roleplaying in Israel.

It starts (if anywhere) in the early 90s, when Mitzuv, a commerical company first starts importing and translating D&D (the boxed sets and later 2nd Ed AD&D). They also begin organizing conventions, which brings out the existing gamers from their little holes and niches.
Those experienced gamers run back shrieking to their holes when they notice that Mitzuv has seized on 12 year-olds as the ideal demographic for their cons...
Anyway, 'the scene' has now been kicked to life, and shops selling various RPG products become meeting points for geeks who previously thought that they were the only gamers in the universe. New groups form, and cross-pollinate, and a brisk LARPing craze sweeps the gamer underground, and people begin expanding their fellows' horizons with stuff beyond The Books Of Gary, games like Champions (Hero system, really) and Call of Cthulhu and Rolemaster get mentioned, and then the big cult hits become  Vampire and Amber.
Now, here's an interesting take. Ron has repeatedly cursed Vampire for it's incoherent design, but it's not like that at all in this case, because Amber (and LARPs) served as a corrective to Vampire's clumsy rules-set. Basically, people read that bit about "the GM can change anything" and "you can use Dicelss resolution", and proceed to merrily skip all the "roll Manipulation+Firearms" rubbish and just dig in to the color.
At least the progressive, edgy, "we are cool" folk do. Lots of old-schoolers still used systems, even if (as I find when I start running GURPS Supers and discover the system stinks worse than a Nosferatu's breath) we try to avoid them during play.

The kicker is when a group of these guys, who have been discussing RPGs through an online BBS called Ghostwheel - you know BBSes, right? what we had before the Internet? - decide to set up a convention, as a reaction to Mitzuv's money-grubbing, lowest-common-denominator kiddie-cons.

We call this IGOR, and though the first con is a minor event taking place in a freezing building in the middle of nowhere, we hold a 2nd one, and a third.

I'd like to pretend this revolutionizes gaming in Israel, but it doesn't. It just gets some more socializing done among adult gamers, and some more of them moving into diceless/freeform. But we're still mostly system-oriented, although we discover that when you are running con games, SYSTEM HURTS (try writing 6 GURPS characters the night before the con, and then explaining the rules to people. Hurts.)

And then it all sort of goes quite for a while, until some enterprising soul decides to get organized, forms a non-profit organization to back this con-going movement, and we all get on the internet, and start talking about this in forums. And we start doing more cons, and pretty soon everyone is running their games freeform, ditching commercial systems and settings left and right, and we have people running Delta Green who've never seen Call of Cthulhu, and 16-year olds running freform games about the Holocaust, and cats and dogs living together.

So, what's the "state of the art" in organized Israeli gaming?
(I say "organized", because there are still isolated nests of D&Ders scattered about, like stone-age tribes in New Guinea. They're just not part of the community dialogue).

Well, there's a pretty broad consensus that freeform rocks. Freeform here means pretty much systemless, DM decides what happens thingie (Drama rules), although dice are common (Fortune), and Karma too. Most people just settle on their favorite fortune mechanic and go with that, although one cutting-edge GM I know actually makes new thematically appropriate mechanics for each game he runs. If he wrote those games, someone might have heard about him. I understand now why gamers design games - they need the cred.
The "system people" are hold-outs, I tell you. They defend system in both gamist ("challange", "fairness") and simulationist ("physics", "force the GM to be fair") terms. They're not the ones I'm interested in preaching to.

So, what do I mean by illusionist-simulationist? One fascinating thread on our Hebrew forum, which spilled into a face-to-face discussion/get-together, iillustrates the prevalent attitudes. The question on the floor was "Is the GM entitled to do anything to a PC?" or in other words, what are the boundries between GM as total master of story and world, and the player as total master of his/her character. What emerged from this discussion is the axiomatic view of immersive play with GM as storyteller.

Now, to my point: writing this in light of Ron's latest essay (dissecting Simulationism), it dawns on me that an excellent place to open the discussion is to introduce the topic of players' meta-game agendas, and how a game can serve them. I can mention stances, I can use player problems with PC background as an example - you know, those cases where a player comes up with 13 pages of written background, only a fraction of which can be expressed in play (this is player-as-novelist rather than GM-as-novelist, but is an ailment of the same mind-set, I think).

Thus, I can introduce narrativism without messing about with new systems,  just as a critique of unanswered player needs in the current model - and how these can be satisfied.

- Dotan

[Marco]

Hi,

They've read the books, they believe in The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast, Deep Roleplay and GM-as-Storyteller with great sincerity.

I believe in all of that. Sincerely.

If you have a question and a "floor" to discuss it on, and someone's (you?) asking the question can a GM do anything to a PC, you can start with "The way most people read it yes--but there's this concept ..."

In other words: if you're having the discussion already, why not just *teach.* If they're interested they'll listen (and from your writing you're obviouly capable of communicating in a pretty lucid manner). If they're *not* interested you'll really annoy them.

-Marco

[Mike Holmes]

So basically you're looking to make converts to Narrativism from the Sim base of players that seem to be present. OK, that's probably not accurate. You're trying to allow those who may have an unfulfilled Narativist bent to understand their preferences thus allowing themselves to be free of their Simulationist shackles? As it were?

I think you're on the right path. That is, discuss simply the validity of the idea of players allowing metagame agendas into the RPG arena. Because that's central. If they don't buy that, they'll never buy into Narrativism. Start with the fact that "Immersion" is itself a metagame agenda. Second, ask them if they like playing chess. If so, point out how purely Gamist D&D, can be completely functional, including the use of Pawn Stance. Once they've accepted that, point out that they can do Actor Stance and not have the external distractions that Pawn Stance implies. Which leaves you with a Stance towards play that is coherent with story, and only interfers with the feeling of Immersion, if it even does that (Immersion being a very nebulous term).

Then point out the advantages of Author Stance in terms of forming a story. Point out how almost certainly they've been using it all along in some measure. For example, PC comes to a fork in the road while travelling in Brigand infested woods. He notes some people down one road, and the other is clear. Now, either option seems viable, really, in terms of "what the character would do". He might avoid the people who may be brigands. He may go to check it out surreptitiously to have better intelligence on the situation. Whatever. In that case, what you'll find is that quite often player preference takes over. The "story-oriented" player may choose to go to the brigands because it's a more tense option rife with opportunity for conflict. Or he may even choose to go the safe rout as he's interested in displaying the character's issues with safety. The point is that the decision is being made on player driven issues.

That happens in play all the time, and nobody even notices it. As such, all you'll be advocating is that people realize that it happens, and don't fight it unneccessarily. Because there's nothing wrong with it if it doesn't break the players sense of Immersion (to the extent that they even have one).

Does that all make for a coherent argument?

Reading your history is interesting. Are you aware of the currently popular ideologies of play in Finland? They seem to me to have come to the same set of conclusions that your player base has. That "Immersive Sim" play is the end-all of gaming. I wonder if this phenomenon says something about a common source for the belief in the superiority of these styles of play in these localities.

Mike

[Emily Care]

Now, here's an interesting take. Ron has repeatedly cursed Vampire for it's incoherent design, but it's not like that at all in this case, because Amber (and LARPs) served as a corrective to Vampire's clumsy rules-set. Basically, people read that bit about "the GM can change anything" and "you can use Dicelss resolution", and proceed to merrily skip all the "roll Manipulation+Firearms" rubbish and just dig in to the color.

Thanks for the history, Dotan. Very interesting to hear about the trends and development of rpg in different places. The above description is similar to the kind of gaming I've participated in--though without the strict GM/player dichotomy you discuss later in your post.  For some reason I feel like the Israeli gaming world is like an alternate dimension of gaming reality to the US, one in which the wierd, fringy pocket of gaming I personally inhabit became the mainstream.

Sounds like you have an angle:  introducing more conscious metagame elements into your gaming community.   Since people there have been open to the idea that system is arbitrary (ie the GM can do what she wants, doesn't have to get "permission" from system to do it), you may also wish to introduce the extension of this: that the GM ain't the only one who may hold this power.  Typical GM powers may be allocated differently, held by many or even by all.  I have found this to be extremely compatible with "immersionist" character or setting oriented sim gaming, and a certain aspect of this is required for narrativist gaming, so it could be a good bridge between them.  

Good luck selling them back onto system, though.  I second (or third) the idea of introducing friends to specific, high-quality examples of narrativist and other alternative systems.  You can put it this way: system can be an incredible tool.  Never hurts to have access to more and better tools for a given task.

Regards,
Emily Care

[Dotan Dimet]

Mike, Emily - thanks for helping me get a grip on this. Yes, starting a discussion (or lecture/teach/demo) about player metagame agendas sounds like the right way to proceed; Highlighting this with some meta-game mechanics is also a possible idea; people aren't completely anti-system here, and most accept that sometimes there's nothing more apropriate to say than http://www.hoodyhoo.com/kodt04.htm">prenez les dice, monkey boy!.

Mike, I've read the Turku group/manifesto/Dogma, if that's the Finnish ideological thing you're referring to. I think in both cases, it's the pretty clear influence of LARPing (of the Mind's Eye rather than foam weapon variety), which encourages and rewards strong immersion.

Your comment made me think of the issue of Player vs. Character (i.e., emphasizing that the player has a different agenda from his/her character). I understand this is expressed mechanically in Elfs as direct opposition between the two, but the conflict is pretty universal to any game because the Player is trying to draw enjoyment out of the character's troubles ("Interesting Times"). The funny thing is that I've seen and heard of several cases where strongly immersive/simulationist players confronted this issue in-game: Whether because of the strong post-modern bent of certain GMs, or simply because that's just the way strongly immersive roleplayers handle meta-game issues, they contrived situations where the characters actually confronted their players and discovered their harmful influence on their lives. Generally, the characters responded with anger and hatred, and sometimes (when given a fighting chance), beat the crap out of their players...

Again, I'm not sure if I'm being fair to other Israeli gamers here, because a lot of them do recognize various levels of player input and modes of shared game control, although in many cases this is by flipping all or nothing switches, for example letting a player narrate or simply assume the role of GM for a scene. When the mechanics and paperwork of GMing are out of the way, i.e, when the GM isn't the arbitrar of the rules but the narrator of events, such switches become more easy.

So, I think we're less hardline than the Finns, as far as our gaming goes.

And yes, Emily, the Israeli RP scene is where the cool weirdo fringe gamers assumed power, simply by being better organized than anyone else. I've no idea why this would be, because we have mandatory military service at 18 to forcefully make us give up games and childish things. Perhaps that's precisely what encourages some of us to dig in to our escapist hobby. Or perhaps (like my explanation for why there's a higher precentage of cool gamers that are women) the added adversity ensures that the people who stick to the hobby are those who have a very strong enthusiasm for it.

- Dotan