'Exhuastion Escalation' in illusionist play

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

GBSteve wrote,

... cliché, to a certain extent is what makes these games playable. It's what provides the common ground from which small departures create an interest ...

Yes! Exactly. Given this outlook as a priority of play, the "escalation" problem becomes rarer and less of a concern. Some role-players aren't looking to create a New Point or to Win or whatever, because they want exactly what Steve is describing. A group with this shared creative Agenda (High Concept Simulationist, strong focus on Situation) is golden. This is where awesome Call of Cthulhu games come from.

Escalation of scale, and the exhaustion problem, come about when ...

1. Other creative agendas, specifically Narrativist and Gamist ones, appear among people at the table. (The Narrativist situation is especially painful, because then you get two or more people wrangling over what they perceive to be a single thing, the "story," when in reality they want two extraordinarily different experiences relative to that story.)

2. Aspects of the game system (most usually the reward/improvement system, as Steve rightly pointed out earlier) upset the tuned and humming dynamics of play that supports the stable Situation. This explains why many game texts oriented toward this mode of play have very slow, halting, and sometimes even hardly-usable improvement systems; they don't fit with the rest of the game, and at some levels I think the authors know it.

Best,
Ron

[Walt Freitag]

Your in-between proposition seems to me to be a paraphrase of my Simulationist description. I'm fine with creative interjections and novel approaches in that context; it's the aesthetic priority that I'm talking about. When you say, "do Lovecraft," that's the key - with all the new plot angles or unplanned outcomes or whatever-you-want, if that's still the goal, then we're still talking about pastiche. Imaginative, fun pastiche, novel pastiche ... but still "doing Lovecraft," as an act of homage.

All of which is a fun way to play, which I enjoy in moderation, and which others enjoy primarily or even exclusively.

Ron, my in-between proposition is not a paraphrase of your Simulationist description because it's a proper subset of it. "Do Lovecraft" could mean what you described in the above quote, but it could also mean "play through the Vault of Cosmic Defenestration scenario without the players contributing any creative interjections and novel approaches," and that would also fit your Simulationist description.

The problem under discussion appears to apply specifically to groups closer to that latter case, when players aren't comfortable within those constraints. If they are comfortable, they're golden. If they're not, problem 1 can occur, but the competing agenda isn't necessarily Narrativist or Gamist. It can be simply wanting more creative input into the pastiche. In my experience, the tendency for Gamist or Narrativist priorities to appear among people at the table, in the course of Sim play, is much reduced when players have greater creative input. Problem 2 is also less likely to occur because the Situation tends to be more dynamic, hence more inherently stable.

- Walt

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Walt,

I buy "proper subset." If you can believe it, I even thought "subset" when I composed the post, but decided I use that word too much. Should have stuck with it.

I also agree with your point that discomfort can arise within the category of Simulationist play itself, without harking 'way out to Gamist and Narrativist priorities. But does that specific sort of discomfort give rise to the escalation + exhaustion phenomenon? Perhaps, but not as often, in my experience, as the G and N caused one. That may be a matter of viewer bias, since I gravitate toward Narrativist play (and did so almost exclusively prior to the past two years or so).

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

Just to be clear about the original point of the thread, the Illusionist GM can avoid the problem with "escallation exhaustion" simply by not escallating. It's an inappropriate response to the problem. That is, you don't engage players simply by making their character's problems ever bigger, when they seem to be losing interest. Because the problem has nothing to do with the size of the conflicts that the character's are facing.

If the player is disinterested in the problems presented, you have a much more fundamental problem. Either the themes that your Illusionism is creating aren't speaking to the player, or he's not interested in that style of play, anyhow. Often the reason for the player burning out is that the GM is just pushing the same theme over and over. So, for the players with the supers defending stuff, it's just "We're the good guys" again and again. No surprise that the size of the conflict doesn't matter. "ooh, look, another fight with the baddies".

OTOH, I'd say that most High Concept games only have a couple of themes built into them for play. As per the discussion of the Cthulhu themes. Basically sim themes only go so far in play. This argues for a couple of things. One, the idea of Sim gaming for campaigns is shot, unless you're playing something like Multiverser, which attempts to fix the problem by giving you more and different settings to explore. Or the game needs something more to keep the player's attention.

So it seems that we're back at the Beeg Horseshoe, indeed, if we're looking at play of single High Concept Sim games in terms of campaigns.

But that's what I've been saying all along. Nobody plays Sim for that long as the sole priority. What ever happened to the idea of shifting and Hybrid play? Heck, in the thread on the Sim/Nar line recently, we've been talking about shifting between modes as a natural result of playing "in character". And given that to have incoherent play, you have to have people attempting to play Hybrid in the first place, it seems that it's indeed very common.

The point I'm making is the same one. Nobody does "just Sim" play. Or, rather, very few, IMO. Take supers. If there are lots of fights, I garuntee that there's a strong Gamist component. Champions, to me, is bits of Sim exposition between Gamist fights. Seen that way, play can go on much longer, as the players are getting one of their other priorities met in play. But that doesn't mean that they aren't getting their Sim jollies as well, despite play, perhaps being more Gamist than Sim at times. The Hybrid ends up being that Gentlemans Gamism sort of Sim (I agree to "handicap" my character to genre, and accept the problems as a greater challenge).

So, again, I don't buy that long term pure Sim games exist. But that's not to say that Sim doesn't exist as a Hybrid priority. It was exaclty the point of the models that I was trying to propose a while back that it's not useful to look at these things in terms of how much they are separate in play, but how much they overlap, and, indeed, conflict.

All this said, I see no automatic problems with alternating Illusionism with, say Narrativism, or Gamism (see lots of functional D&D play; like MJ's described "Trailblazing"). In fact, amongst a good group of players who understand what's going on in these terms, it's actually pretty easy to keep functional. Basically the GM and the players trading off on who has the actual control of creating theme or moving over to Gamism temporarily.

Basically it seems to me that we ought to stop looking at things like Illusionism in the light of pure styles, and consider how well they work in Hybrid styles. Since, to me, Hybrids are more common, and give more thrills in terms of satisfying more priorities.

Mike

[Gordon C. Landis]

For the record, I think we've been 'round the "is Sim real?" issue enough to say with a fair degree of confidence that it is (in fact, if Jared was still around and in the proper mood I think I could reach a compromise with the Beeg Horseshoe - but that's a different issue).  I quoted an old post of mine somewhere around here recently - something like "making decisions in a Sim game is very much a creative act - it's just not primarily oriented towards Nar Premise."

That covers my opinion that Sim is real, but it does beg the question "all right then, what *is* Sim oriented towards?"  And I think therein lies another aspect of the "exhaustion" problem, albeit with a different form of escalation than Ron & Matt point to . . .

One of the things that Sim play reifies (I use a fancy word for "really, really values" because all modes value this, Sim is just unique in seeing it as a goal in and of itself) is consistency with events, issues and/or details previously established through play (assuming those things were "true" to the Sim to begin with, of course).  That is, there can be a moment of pure joy (that is sufficient justification for play in and of itself) simply in identifying the action that feels "just right" given all that has been established so far, and making that thing real in the imagined game world.

The problem is, as play continues, you accumulate more and more details.  The simple act of keeping it all straight can get really . . . exhausting.  This is somewhat balanced by the fact that the payoff for adding a new bit that manages to feel like fate in the context of a TON of old stuff is (for most Sim-folk, I think) larger than the payoff for  something that involves a smaller set of stuff (stuff=Explored elements this Sim-game values), but in the end - as there is no alternate priority to defer to, like Nar Premise or Step on Up, the inevitable small slip-ups in accumulated consistency eventually start to wear on the Sim play group.  

At least, that's how I've seen it happen: the escalating amount of data that ongoing play generates weighs particularly heavy on Sim groups.  For them, it's not just a matter of making sure the Explored elements are sufficiently developed and maintained to support their Nar or Game goals - the Explored elements are the point of play.  Their devlopment and maintenance are the very essence of what why we're doing this.

So, to answer one of Matt's questions - yes, escalation exhaustion has driven me away from illusionist play somewhat, as I realised that a concrete, alternate goal (like Nar Premise) provides a solution to many ongoing play issues.  Over the last few years (contrary, I think, to what some might expect) I've found Sim more satisfying for very short duration games, and Nar better suited in our long heroic campaign-style play.

Gordon

[John Kim]

One of the things that Sim play reifies (I use a fancy word for "really, really values" because all modes value this, Sim is just unique in seeing it as a goal in and of itself) is consistency with events, issues and/or details previously established through play (assuming those things were "true" to the Sim to begin with, of course).  That is, there can be a moment of pure joy (that is sufficient justification for play in and of itself) simply in identifying the action that feels "just right" given all that has been established so far, and making that thing real in the imagined game world.

The problem is, as play continues, you accumulate more and more details.  The simple act of keeping it all straight can get really . . . exhausting.  

I know you distinguish that Sim play considers it really important, but it seems to me that this is a general principle beyond just Sim.  That is, doesn't detailed Narrativist play have the same feature?  For example, what you say does describe my current Vinland campaign.  It has both accumulation of detail and escalation of challenges.  At the start of the campaign, the PCs were dealing with a fairly local problem of a troublesome neighbor.  At this point, though, they are dealing with large problems of the whole Commonwealth (the Vinlander's democratic state along the lines of medieval Iceland).  There is also very extensive accumulation of detail from the 40 sessions of play -- I keep logs of all the sessions, plus family trees and a character list of all the PCs+NPCs.  

My experience with escalation always occurs, though the rate of it varies.  I also don't have a general solution for it.  In my experience, it feels like moving backwards for a character to deal with smaller problems after dealing with larger ones.  Similarly, lack of change in scale can get  monotonous.  So while escalation can be a problem, my impression is that lack of escalation can also be a problem.  Has anyone else felt this?  

Escalation exhaustion has driven me away from illusionist play somewhat, as I realised that a concrete, alternate goal (like Nar Premise) provides a solution to many ongoing play issues.  Over the last few years (contrary, I think, to what some might expect) I've found Sim more satisfying for very short duration games, and Nar better suited in our long heroic campaign-style play.  

A bit of a question -- what do "long-term" and "short-term" mean to you?  Just for comparison, I tend to think of campaigns of more than 5 or 6 sessions as long.  My longest campaign is my present one which has gone for 40 sessions over two years.  Before that my longest campaign was 9 months.  On the other hand, I know of people who have had campaigns going for 10 years and more.

[Gordon C. Landis]

John,

My understanding - yes, the issues of "detail escalation" (not a great term for it, but it does distinguish it from scale escalation, which was - I think - Matt's primary concern in this thread) exist in all modes, really - because all modes rely on Exploration.  I just have seen this as particularly problematic in Sim, because the Exploration is the whole point of play.  Now, a Nar group that really CARED about particular Explorative elements - who do NOT choose to say "hey, it worked for our shared Story Now creation - let the details of what we decided on Norse Laws a dozen sessions ago slide a bit" - well, they are in mostly the same boat as the Sim group.

My "long term" - oh, say more than a couple dozen sessions, up to (my personal longest) 3-4 years of mostly-connected campaign.  Short-term, less than that, probably with an expectation of at least 3, and usually less than a dozen sessions.  Leaving a 12-24 "medium" zone . . .

All that said - and especially with the addition of John's "NOT escalating is also a problem as you feel like you're stagnating" . . .  I'm not Matt, or a moderator, but I'm begining to think we've discussed the boundries and nature of the issue this thread raised sufficiently.  I haven't seen many *solutions* though.  I have none to offer, except "go with Nar/Game goals" and/or "end play at some agreed-upon escalation level."

Gordon

[John Kim]

My understanding - yes, the issues of "detail escalation" (not a great term for it, but it does distinguish it from scale escalation, which was - I think - Matt's primary concern in this thread) exist in all modes, really - because all modes rely on Exploration.  I just have seen this as particularly problematic in Sim, because the Exploration is the whole point of play.  Now, a Nar group that really CARED about particular Explorative elements - who do NOT choose to say "hey, it worked for our shared Story Now creation - let the details of what we decided on Norse Laws a dozen sessions ago slide a bit" - well, they are in mostly the same boat as the Sim group.  

Is this really a GNS issue, then?  There are Narrativists who care about continuity, you seem to feel.  Conversely, are the Simulationists who do not?  My impression is that Sim has been said to include games like, say, Toon or Paranoia or Teenagers From Outer Space -- which do not care about continuity.  

All that said - and especially with the addition of John's "NOT escalating is also a problem as you feel like you're stagnating" . . .  I'm not Matt, or a moderator, but I'm begining to think we've discussed the boundries and nature of the issue this thread raised sufficiently.  I haven't seen many *solutions* though.  I have none to offer, except "go with Nar/Game goals" and/or "end play at some agreed-upon escalation level."  

I would question whether this is really a GNS issue.  My tentative hypothesis is that escalation (of both kinds) may also occur in both Narrativist and Gamist campaigns.  So I think this may be a side issue.  

I'm not sure of this, but here's my two cents.  Really, there isn't anything wrong with escalation.  The described problem is that the players aren't enjoying play, so the GM tries to up the ante by introducing bigger and bigger threats, but that doesn't help at all.  It seems to me that the problem lies in dull play in the first place, not in the escalation at all.  The solution, I think, is simply for play to be more interesting.  Thus, the answer of "go with Nar/Game goals" is correct -- but we can also add in "go with Sim goals".  Essentially, this is just saying "make the game better" -- but that's because the described problem is essentially "the game is dull".

[Gordon C. Landis]

Is this really a GNS issue, then?  There are Narrativists who care about continuity, you seem to feel.  Conversely, are the Simulationists who do not?

Hmm - well, you've about convinced me that my attempted expansion of escalation to include "that which accumulates as play continues" is misguided.  I mean, the answer at one level is "no, Simulationist play is by definition prioritizing the Explored elements - they ALWAYS care about that, first and foremost."  But the Explored elements are not synonomous with continuity/that-which-accumulates, so . . .

I still see some application of GNS here, but I'm not sure how to unpack plain continuity from the prioritization of the Explored elements.  GNS would then NOT be an issue in plain continuity, but it would be in the rest.  Since I'm not seeing how to make that differentiation any better than I already have, time to let that go, I think.

However, I fear that introducing continuity (even though that's not really what I was trying to do) has muddied the waters for the other points, which I think do still hold up as mostly-GNS issues.  The problem with "go with Sim goals" is that . . . well, that's what you were already doing.  If you weren't satisfied with that (and that's certainly not always true - sometimes and/or for some people, it is entirely satisfying), doing it "more" (escalating) is unlikely to fix anything.  You have to do something different - and escalation is usually an *illusion* of something different, not the reality of it.

Which I think was already said by Ron, Walt, and Mike earlier, so - if I (or someone) can think of something clever in distinguishing continuity vs. accumlated Explored stuff, that probably belongs in a new thread.  Here, I'll just add a paraphrase of something Ron posted to the list of "what to do" about escalation exhaustion - make sure everyone is jazzed about the Situation, in particular make sure they are more jazzed about that than they are about Character.  If they are jazzed about the Situation, then the fact that the escalated Situation isn't really different than it was pre-escalation won't matter.

John, if your "go with Sim goals" can also be meaningfully paraphrased that way, I think everyone is in agreement about MATT's escalation, and mine just needs to go elsewhere (To die?  Maybe, but I still think there's something . . . .)

Gordon

[Mike Holmes]

Simply, as always, Exploration of character, setting, situation, whatever are all potentially important to all modes of play.

So, detail, itself is not neccessarily pertinent to one mode or the other. What I think Gordon is trying to get at is that it's the idea of these things being concretely in-game, or their continuity being felt as concrete, as opposed to, say, being injected for thematic reasons, is that in which the Sim priority is interested.

Just as play "in character" doesn't matter to mode, neither does play "about long-term accretion". It all depends on what the players think is the value of these things. At the risk of one of my bad eamples, which would be just an example, and not definitive in any way, would be if something were injected by the GM out of the blue for thematic reasons. Like, if I said, "Suddenly your character remembers a little girl who once gave him her lunch when he was down and out," in a situation where I want to try and promote some Narrativist scene where a player has to make some choice about a child, that would be a Narrativist addition to the continuity. For the Narrativist, the only test that it has to pass is that it "could have happened". It's not an unreasonable sort of fact to establish, and by golly, if it makes the moment work, it's good. The Simulationist, OTOH, sees this as an obvious metagame intrusion that has no connection to the "real" world that's being played in. The addition is internally consistent, it just gives off that metagame "I've been put in to ensure theme gets created" vibe.

Actually rejection of such an addition would indicate a pretty low tolerance for breaking Sim (after all we can't establish everything, and backgrounds are considered open game in many cases). But, again, it's just an example.

Mike

[Jason Lee]

OTOH, I'd say that most High Concept games only have a couple of themes built into them for play. As per the discussion of the Cthulhu themes. Basically sim themes only go so far in play. This argues for a couple of things. One, the idea of Sim gaming for campaigns is shot, unless you're playing something like Multiverser, which attempts to fix the problem by giving you more and different settings to explore. Or the game needs something more to keep the player's attention.

yes

So it seems that we're back at the Beeg Horseshoe, indeed, if we're looking at play of single High Concept Sim games in terms of campaigns.

YES

But that's what I've been saying all along. Nobody plays Sim for that long as the sole priority. What ever happened to the idea of shifting and Hybrid play? Heck, in the thread on the Sim/Nar line recently, we've been talking about shifting between modes as a natural result of playing "in character". And given that to have incoherent play, you have to have people attempting to play Hybrid in the first place, it seems that it's indeed very common.

YES

So, again, I don't buy that long term pure Sim games exist. But that's not to say that Sim doesn't exist as a Hybrid priority. It was exaclty the point of the models that I was trying to propose a while back that it's not useful to look at these things in terms of how much they are separate in play, but how much they overlap, and, indeed, conflict.

OH GOD YES!

All this said, I see no automatic problems with alternating Illusionism with, say Narrativism, or Gamism (see lots of functional D&D play; like MJ's described "Trailblazing"). In fact, amongst a good group of players who understand what's going on in these terms, it's actually pretty easy to keep functional. Basically the GM and the players trading off on who has the actual control of creating theme or moving over to Gamism temporarily.

Heh, sorry about that.

Anyway, our campaign is cruising through year 6 (the last 4.5 play is weekly).  We had some serious issues with exaustion escalation a couple years back.  At the time, illusionism was in vogue and theme was more thin.  Illusionism is still The Way for some, but it's been clashing hard with me personally for a while, so much that I'm up to my evil little psychology tricks with the mechanics to make it difficult.  There is a lot to this, and I'm just going to skim the surface, but a transition to a more solid creative agenda (not intentionally, just happened) seemed to have solved the problem.  Maybe solved isn't the right word, muted maybe? Sometimes some people still fall into the old trap.  Of course, I don't think this particular issue has been discussed in quite some time.  Why that last quote from Mike is above this is because creation of theme does shift, as GM's shift, players introduce internal PC conflicts, and characters come, go and cameo.

Based on my personal experience, I'd have to say initial disinterest isn't the problem.  The escalation can happen even when having oodles of fun (I was at the time), but it gets unrewarding to push through someone elses story, hence the exhaustion; it also tends to get trite.  Nowadays the things that really make me eager for next week are stuff like 'how is X character going to respond when Y happens' or 'how are A character and B character going to interact when they meet'.  Will the characters be fighting evil?  Maybe, probably, but I could probably stay entertained stopping bank robberies for 6 straight months of play as long as the character dynamics kept evolving and the bank robberies had a unique purpose each time (must get money for heart transplant, thrill seeking, decoy for other bank robbery, etc).  Anyway, I hypothesize it's just a weak creative agenda that leads to the problem (which I think has already been said).  I don't mean incoherent, I mean weak - exploration isn't enough.

Our escalation problems nowadays seem to revolve around skill levels, which is a whole different ball of wax. ("Why does that hobo have a base 9?"  "Because all the PC's have a base 8!"  "Um...ok, whatever.").  Hmmm, the other escalation is probably a mismatch of creative agenda internal to the GM.  Why does the hobo need to be challenging?  I say he doesn't, you say he does, but I honestly don't think challenge is important to you...hmmm.

In conclusion, I really just have a semi-educated guess.  I've experienced the problem first hand, and I've seen it die out somewhat.  I wish I knew enough at the time to identify the source of the problem and peg down exactly how the change occured.  I see a strong correlation between illusionist play and the problem, but I think the correlation might just be that the way most people grow into illusionist play has a tendency toward not engaging the players in their own creative agenda.  Seems to end up with the GM trying to poorly engage his own story-driven creative agenda.  If my story is more epic than the last guy's story it's better, and the players will like it more, right?

A sidenote, I was just talking with the little woman about how this springs up in serial fiction as well.  The Anita Blake books seem to have this problem a little.

[Mike Holmes]

Damn, I'll have to try that line of reasoning on my wife. ;-)

Glad that I'm making sense to someone. :-)

Mike

[Gordon C. Landis]

Mike -

Yes, your example illustrates what I was trying to get at.  Thanks!  

Gordon

[John Kim]

Based on my personal experience, I'd have to say initial disinterest isn't the problem.  The escalation can happen even when having oodles of fun (I was at the time), but it gets unrewarding to push through someone elses story, hence the exhaustion; it also tends to get trite.    

Thanks, that's helpful.  In Gordon's hypothesis, the two solutions would be shorter campaigns (i.e. cut off escalation) or switching to Nar/Game.  Do you think shorter campaigns would have helped in your case?  i.e. Would you still be fully satisfied with Sim if it weren't for the escalation?

[Jason Lee]

Thanks, that's helpful.  In Gordon's hypothesis, the two solutions would be shorter campaigns (i.e. cut off escalation) or switching to Nar/Game.  Do you think shorter campaigns would have helped in your case?  i.e. Would you still be fully satisfied with Sim if it weren't for the escalation?

Hmmm...I suppose a shorter campaign would have helped in the throw out the baby with the bath water sense.  If we, the same group, started up another campaign, without a play style change, it probably would have escalated the same in time.  I think shorter campaigns would just dodge the issue, not solve it.

Also, I hesitate to label it Sim...but I would definitely say the focus was on exploration elements over theme.  I guess that technically makes it Sim, but me and the Sim definition haven't been agreeing as of late.  I'm uncertain whether stronger exploration focus in general would also keep interest alive. However, I'm of the opinion stronger exploration requires more player power (work in equals work out), and that's really contrary to what I would define as the common illusionist styles.  Besides, I have trouble believing that more player power wouldn't naturally lead to someone in the group introducing a Gam or Nar creative agenda, especially in a campaign - so the Sim angle might be sort of moot.

Oh, and to answer your other question, no I don't think I'd still be satisfied with the old play style without the escalation.  But, I don't think that's the fault of the escalation, I think it's a priority shift on my part.  The escalation didn't keep me from having fun, it just impeeded it somewhat. It was an irritation.  I'd say I'm having more fun now, but that doesn't invalidate previous fun.

To hit one of Matt's original questions.  I have been driven away from illusionism, but I think the central issues were protagonization issues not escalation issues.

EDIT:  Much fixing.