Pre-Breakfast Possibilities

[Marco]

My take is that the players control the outcome of the situation. The GM adjudicates the results of actions, yes, but not resolution (of scenes).

I *just* had a lengthy discussion with Valimir about that--but, again, my last posted example in Actual Play ( http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=3308&highlight=marco) is, I think, an exemplary example--which was why I posted it.

Mike and Ralph both thought I wasn't clear about who was making the decisions. There's discussion--if it's still unclear, we can discuss it elsewhere (PM, another thread, whatever).

-Marco

[Gordon C. Landis]

Marco -

Can you post your take on non-Nar 'author', 'story', and 'protagonist', perhaps in a new thread?  It sounds like you worked out something with Valamir (at least on author and story), and it seems to me that would be a good thing for many people to see.  Personally, by using all those words in describing the Impossible Thing, I tend to automatically assume "Narrativisit" - but I've been reading the Forge for a long time.  And early on, banged my head big-time against Nar Story vs. what I might normally think about as story.

John -

I'm not sure on the details of this one. At the time, we thought of it mainly in terms of PC dynamic -- how to get the PCs to act as a group. I think this was actually the key to making the episode into a story. The story took place in the PCs recognizing the issue, and then interacting to come up with a response. Thus, it was really the group decision-making of the PCs which was key to the story.

My guess is that if we un-collapse "PC" into player and character, and look at this game in terms of what the players did in order to get the characters to work together, we'll see someting about how story got created.  The fact that the characters also confronted the group-decision making issue is certainly not irrelevant (perhaps it's quite important in certain play styles), but maybe it's less "key" to the story-creation process that the fact that the players were doing exactly the same thing.

clehrich/(everyone) -

Does any of this reflect on your(his) thinking/conclusions that started this thread?  I'm still seeing a lot of this as thread-hijack, but maybe not . . .

Gordon

[Ian Charvill]

Thanks Marco, that clears a lot up for me with regards to the current discussion.

I can't tell you what Ron meant - only Ron can do that - but for me w/r/t The Impossible Thing for the GM to be defined as the author of an on-going story, they would have to be determining the outcomes of the situations, irrespective of player input.  Otherwise, to me it's a co-authorship deal.

[Marco]

Yeah, well you could read it that way too. :)

I identify that as the problem here.

-Marco

[greyorm]

As it stands, it's broken: a clearly possible thing being called impossible. It's neither impossible nor absurd unless you read as a Narrativist. It needs to say that.

No, it doesn't, because it has nothing to do with Narrativism. I keep saying this over and over again, and time and again it keeps being failed to even be recognized: it isn't about player protagonism or control.

Yet time and again, someone keeps declaring the opposite. I point back to the post I made on page 4 of The Impossible Thing because all I can do is repeat what I said there in light of these tired assertions about style preference and impact on TITBB.

Again: "My actions here make a difference to the ultimate direction of play." "My actions here do not make a difference to the ultimate direction of play." There is nothing in this to indicate a Narrativist or a Simulationist bent, not unless you start twisting definitions; and in point of fact, I can recognize the ITBB problem in the full Sim gaming I used to do precisely because the ITBB is GNS-blind: it can occur in any game of any style.

As I said, this is so not about the ITBB anymore, because what's happened is that the ITBB has gone and been redefined here and then this redefinition used to say, "See, it isn't a paradox!"

[Gordon C. Landis]

Raven,

Let me try this out -

The most extreme version of TITBB - which I have seen closely approached all too often - is where the GM doesn't listen AT ALL to the players about the world, and each player doesn't listen to anyone else AT ALL about their character, but everyone expects that they have full control over what happens as play occurs.  This can only be closely approached, and everyone can only expect they have total control, because as you say it's an IMPOSSIBLE thing.

This simply can not happen.  Taking a whole (what happens in play), splitting it in two (the environment it which it happens and the primary participants in what happens), giving seperate people control that is restricted to those halves (GM/world, player/character), and claiming that they therefore both have total control of the whole, *is* an absurdity.  One that has nothing to do with GNS.

I think everyone agrees on this.

But the actual language used in the description is 'author', 'story', and 'protagonist' (instead of total control of a part and the whole).  Marco is taking exception to that.  For Nar values of 'author', 'story', and 'protagonist', he's (IMO, and I think he concedes) wrong to take exception.  For the rest - maybe he's not wrong.

But maybe we need to explicitly acknowldge that first, most obviously logically inconsistent level of the Impossible Thing, that has nothing to do with GNS.  A GM isn't totally in control of "what happens" if the players are also partly (never mind totally) in control of "what happens."  The lack of precision about what "what happens" means - the fact that the world and the characters are both part of what happens, and therefore no one can be totally in charge of what happens if they're not effecitively in total charge of both those things - is what lets TITBB persist as a supposed ideal.  But in that form, it CAN NOT exist.

If acknowledgement of that is what we need - I say, consider it done.  I think everyone agrees to it.

The next step is - what does that MEAN?  And there we do branch out a bit based on GNS.  At least, that's how it seems to me,

Gordon

[Marco]

Greyorm,

Am I off base that you read "the GM is the author and the players are the protagonist" as saying both make the same decision about the same thing?

-Marco (let's start here)

[clehrich]

Am I off base that you read "the GM is the author and the players are the protagonist" as saying both make the same decision about the same thing?

Ah.  Now you're talking.  TITBB is indeed impossible if certain terms or conceptions are taken as equivalent.  For example:

Given that author = protagonist,

We revise to read:

"The GM is the author and the players are the author."  Problematic, at the very least.

But if author does not mean protagonist, and I do not see why it should, then TITBB isn't impossible.

Raven, you've gotten somewhat wound up here about "simple logic," but I think the problem is that you're not reading the statement.  You're reading it to mean something else, a serious problem or attitude or something, and apparently it's often taken as some sort of GNS confusion, which bothers you.  That's why I started off with a reformulation.  Please re-read Proposition 1, on page 1.

My claim is that this whole argument is going nowhere fast because nobody's actually addressing the statement made.  Everyone's debating some personal version of the statement, with various definitions and political/modeling baggage.  I say, go back to the statement itself:

[*]"the GM may be defined as the author of the ongoing story, and, simultaneously, the players may determine the actions of the characters as the story's protagonists"[/list:u]Now my own read on this is that the difference between author and protagonist, within this limited RPG context, has to do with the temporal perspective from which you examine a play instance.  Apparently nobody's buying.  But at any rate I have seen nothing here to suggest that there is anything fundamentally impossible, or even problematic, about the statement.

Perhaps it ought to be The Confusing Thing Before Breakfast?

[Mike Holmes]

TITBB is indeed impossible if certain terms or conceptions are taken as equivalent.

Yes. Of course that's it. This is a text. It has to be interpereted. That interperetation is different for different people.

Now, the next point that could be discussed if anyone had any hard data is how often it's problmatic. See, Marco want's to argue that it's the Narrativist player's "fault" for interpereting it as he does. But consider that none of this discussion had ever occured wen most of these text were written. This is a very one sided opinion. Why is your interperetation more correct just because it's the Simulationist interperetation, Marco? Because it's functional? Well, that makes you lucky, not right by default.

And the point continues to be that there's nothing wrong with the Sim interperetation, but that you can write the text so that there is much less possibility that what is proposed in the text will be interpereted as TITBB. And, thus players of these games will be dissapointed by this less often that they are, no matter how often it happens now.

Further, it's easy to do. Many games (as recently cited) do this very well. On the Sim side, Arrowflight was given as an example of clear Illusionist goals. On the Narrativist side, games like InSpectres serve as good examples of clear and concise in their description of power splits. Note how a game like The Riddle of Steel makes control work implicitly with good mechanics like SAs which leave no doubt as to who controls the what, in a game that's very much a Sim/Nar hybrid.  

So I can't understand why we'd want to defend these texts. Are they horribly, impossible to play broke? No. Can it be done better? Yes.

Mike

[Marco]

TITBB is indeed impossible if certain terms or conceptions are taken as equivalent.

Now, the next point that could be discussed if anyone had any hard data is how often it's problmatic. See, Marco want's to argue that it's the Narrativist player's "fault" for interpereting it as he does. But consider that none of this discussion had ever occured wen most of these text were written. This is a very one sided opinion. Why is your interperetation more correct just because it's the Simulationist interperetation, Marco? Because it's functional? Well, that makes you lucky, not right by default.

Mike

All I've been trying to say is that when a text named The Impossible Thing is read one of two ways and one way is possible (in fact, pretty standard) and the other is impossible  the name by which we call that text (The Impossible Thing NOT the text in some rpg somewhere) ought to bloody well be changed.

It should be called the Narrativist Paraxdox or whatever. It should specify the actual meanings of the words it uses.

There should not be an entery in the The Forge's glossary that a person will read and go "what the the heck is so impossible about that. These guys are crazy."

Now, mind you, Paul, in another thread is saying that "protagonized play in a Simulationist mode is not possible" (unless I'm misreading him).

But if you agree that 50% of the read makes it possible ... isn't ... it ... possible ... there's ... a ... better ... name for it?

-Marco

[Mike Holmes]

"When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."--Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"

The phrase has come to refer to things that people belive despite their absurdity. So it can only refer to the absurd case, anyhow.

You want it caveated in each case of it's use, that there are interperetations of these absurd things that aren't absurd? Mmm. Ok.

Mike

[Marco]

Actually, as it stands, it's prejorative to the simulationist reader who is told, abruptly that their view-point is absurd--I want that changed.

And as it is, with a 50% hit rate by your and my reckoning, it's just weak, Mike. The words there don't create problems for lots and lots of people and they're told flatly--and with no explanation that the concept itself is absurd? That they're Wonderland's Red Queen for thinking "I don't see anything wrong with that?"

Can you really sign to that? If it was a user interface for a software project you were working on you wouldn't do that.

-Marco

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Marco,

Your reading of the text as pejorative is ... well, it seems to be a personal thing. How many times must I qualify a discussion of "story," specifically using you and your posts of play as an example of non-Narrativist fully-legitimate story creation as an example, before you get off this defensive stump?

You know I'm working on three related essays, right? The first one about Simulationism is already up. Oddly enough, all those gut-ripping Sim debates seem to have vanished! Why? Because I took everything said during those debates to heart.

The Gamism one is going to pre-readers this week. The third one will, shock, be about Narrativism, and wouldn't you know it, all sorts of stuff that you, Bruce, and others are talking about now are in it. This very dialogue is getting processed by me, word for word. You're not speaking into a vacuum.

I think the one that's up already demonstrates that I take objections just such as yours into account, and that I'm not afraid to rip up or even abandon aspects of the "GNS and related matters" essay if it seems sensible.

So come on - let down this whole "I'm being marginalized and I won't stand for it!" approach a little.

Best,
Ron

[Marco]

Re: Defensive.

I was a might defensive about being told off by Valimir--(although I found him far more agreeable in PM's). But really, here, the only reason I think people are against amending the text is that it's beein' takin' personal-like.

Far to the contrary, calling someing that's 50% possible The Impossible Thing and then flatly refusing to re-define terms seems to me to be a bit counter-intuitive.

We can agree to disagree but I'd be satisfied if this happened:

1. The Impossible Thing reads something like "The Narrativist Control Paradox: The paradox inherent in the belief that in the Narrativst sense the GM cannot be an the author and the players the protagonists of a story at the same time."

Disavow the etymology that relates to wonderland. Fix the text so it doesn't seem counter-intuitive to the simulationist reader.

2. We resolve the protagonist issue. Can the word protagonist apply to simulationist play characters (seems obvious to me that yes, obviously it can).

"Protagonized" gets sticker--does the invented "protagonized" apply to sim characters? I say it should or else it's really weak.

-Marco

Edited: I'm really very aware that these things are evolving--which is why I'm in on this. Straighten out The Impossible Thing and a whole breed of misunderstanding will get killed off at the source.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Marco,

Workin' on it together, then.

My take at the moment, though, is that it's not a Narrativist paradox - that a person with play-priorities like your own would encounter contradiction as well with the texts I'm objecting to.

Clearly I have only been able to articulate the problem/paradox such that Narrativist-oriented folks can perceive it. That's an articulation issue, I think.

Your comments on the related thread ("textual examples") have clarified for me how I can put it better. Rest assured that you're on the draft-read staff for the first version of the Narrativism essay. Not gonna happen soon, but it'll happen.

Best,
Ron