Fatalism and Narrativsm

[Marco]

Hi Ron,

Sure, I know that's an issue which is why I stipulated lots of actual play to define the character. And I never said I had no intention of changing it. Judge Dredd doesn't (didn't) have stats anywhere--but if you read, say, four or five of the comics, you have a really strong sense of where his character stands and it would be highly inconsistent to have him act outside of it (humanitarian pardon).

Since you've said that consistency of the world/character is important (or even crucial?) to all modes of play, I'm invoking it here.

A character who has been shown to act as a samurai will be highly inconsistent if he goes back on his word for something that's not uber-important, yes? And if the guy has already established that his word is more important than the life of his "true love" and then he just goes breaking it for what (to the observers--and maybe even to the player) appear to be trivial reasons, then the consistency of play will be hurt--wouldn't you say? (If not, okay--but I'd think consistency is in the hands of the players through their characters as well as the GM through the world).

So that means that if the player is given a choice of "saving the noble bandit" or upholding his word to the daymio ... and the bandit doesn't turn out to be noble enough to engage the player's threhold for changing the established character, then you get narrativism ... or inconsistency (he let his true-love die last year, but this year he lets Joe the Bandito go? What the hell?).

Now, you might say that this opportunity is a chance for the Samuari to change his ways and realize his word isn't that important--and I'd agree if the case was very dramatic--but that's where the thresholds come in. The bar would have to be pretty high for the player to want to change his character (and assume he finds the at-least-so-far word-bound samuari interesting and fun to play). If the situation doesn't push that limit then I can't see how you get narrativism: Game rules or no.

And if by social contract you mean "an emphasis on continunity" then I guess we do agree. I'd prefer to play in a game where the world behaves at least moderately consistently and the characters (players and NPC's) behave as consistently as people do in real life. But that's IMO, a weak appeal to social contract.

-Marco

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Marco,

Sorry, man - you just went swinging off through the branches, as far as I can tell. I can't understand a word of what you're talking about. Not one of your "therefores" or "wouldn't you say's" make any sense to me.

With respect, a lot of your input tends to create little whirlpools of extended clarifications that never seem to resolve, but rather create sub-whirlpools, at least in terms of how I experience them. This may be strictly a problem on my end. I'm going to bow out from this instance and hope that one day we can find some other way to discuss these issues.

I also think our dialogue is creating a sub-thread within a thread, which in itself is more than enough reason to close that particular issue, without any reference to my lack of comprehension. If you'd like, we can start another thread - slowly - although I suggest waiting for an upcoming major thread I am currently composing.

Continued posts on this thread should address the issues discussed by John, Peter, Christopher, and (of course) Nathan, aka Paganini.

Best,
Ron

[Marco]

Hmm ...

It's not that difficult. If my character has a pattern of behavior established by a lot of play (but no game rules) and the presented moral question doesn't give me any reason* to consider changing that pattern then it seems to me you don't get Narrativist play.

It would follow that the stronger that established mode of behavior of the character is, the more dramatic the situation must be to get Narrativist play.

* This may be because the delima doesn't engage me as a player or because changing my character's behavior for the present delima would be dramatically inconsistent with previously established behavior patterns for that character.

-Marco

[Ron Edwards]

Grrr!

Marco, didn't you read my post all the way through? We're not discussing the issue further in this thread. Later. Slowly. Not here.

Please work with me here; we have a lot of new people being active in this forum and the last thing they need is some bleeding-edge nuance getting (however incompetently on my part) dissected by people who've been mulling over this noise for years.

Best,
Ron

[John Kim]

Actually, I think that at least what Marco is trying to get at is exactly what Nathan asked as the topic of the thread.  Maybe he's not discussing it clearly, but I think it is relevant.  Nathan's suggestions at the start was:

Moving on from there, I'm pondering the definition of Narrativism.
...
I would suggest that Narrativism be expanded to include the addressing of theme on a meta-level, by the players via narrative device and the like, rather than limiting it exclusively to PC action.

This is the question of PC action.  The samurai example from your (Ron's) Simulationism essay is a good one, I think.  My interpretation of Nathan's question is that in a fatalist game, you have a PC whose actions are circumscribed just like the samurai in your example.  As he puts it, Premise in this game is addressed on a meta-level through narrative device and the like -- not through the PC's choices.  The player has free choice at the start of the game on what his PC is like, but he decides on a character which embodies certain behaviors in an over-the-top manner, thus leaving little doubt as to what the PC will choose.  The group decides at the start to hold to this choice.  (Nathan -- is this right?)  

This seems to be the essence of the question.  In a fatalist game, the PC actions themselves do not dynamically address Premise, since the choices that the character makes are a foregone conclusion.  However, Nathan suggests that perhaps Premise can be addressed on a meta-level (?) through "narrative device and the like".  (I'm not quite sure what he means here, though I can make some guesses.)  

Christopher Kubasik made an interesting distinction: that a character who keeps making the same choice over and over again is Narrativist, but a character who is locked into those choices is not even really a character (creating a "shadow play of a story" or somesuch).  It seems tricky to me how to draw the line here.  Suppose, following the samurai example, that I the player privately decide to hold a GURPS-like fixed trait of Code of Honor -- but I don't tell anyone else?  Have I lost choice and the character becomes a non-character, or is it still choosing the same thing over and over?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi John,

Thanks for clarifying Marco's point for me. I see it now.

However, I've addressed this issue before, with the concept that private player choices (or anyone's notions at all) are irrelevant for GNS except insofar as they are demonstrated through actual play. Creative Agenda is a subset of Exploration, and Exploration exists only in the medium of communication among the people who are role-playing together.

That ought to clear up quite a bit about this topic, I hope. It boils down, now, to this question:

Is Nathan's concept of a "fatalistic game" consistent with the kind of circumscribed, fly-in-amber, shadow-play that Christopher (in my view) describes so well? If so, then my response both to you and to Marco is "Yes" - Simulationism. Not even remotely controversial, I think.

If not, though (and I ask Nathan to clarify), then Christopher's and my points apply - Narrativist play is indeed possible, regardless of whether the character is "consistent" and "would never change" in terms of concept. My current impression is that Nathan was approaching the question from this angle, based on his reference to devices that clarify to the group that the question is indeed open.

Let's see if an example near and dear to your heart will help. Gunnar, in Njal's Saga, is of course a fixed-in-amber character because of the medium (an already-created character in a story being told to us, the audience). But let's say instead that he is a character in a role-playing game, which even now has reached the point where he has knuckled under to various aggravating provocations, several times ... and yet another one comes along.

Does he turn on his wife (who's responsible for many of these hassles)? Does he leave for a far-off land? Does he knuckle under again? Does he finally snap and call feud?

What I'm saying is that at this point of play, we do not know whether Gunnar is (a) a take-no-shit man who has been acting "against himself" for a while now and is thus ready to explode, or (b) a wimp, despite his physical prowess, who's been showing his true colors all along lately. Even the player, who might well have been playing Gunnar exactly as he imagined him incontrovertibly to be in these terms, doesn't know until the decision-points of play really happen. Even if the player just rolls along and plays Gunnar "as conceived," without even self-examining the significance of the decision, that is still a decision.

That would be Narrativist.

The non-Narrativist version is simply that everyone knows and reinforces, during play, the written-down or verbalized agreement that Gunnar is X and that is all there is to it. Even a more complex game system like Pendragon, in which shifts from X to Y and back are explicitly structured, falls into this category.

I hasten to add that both methods of play are fascinating, fun, and rewarding, for entirely different kinds of aesthetic satisfaction.

Best,
Ron

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi all (and cross-posed with Ron's latest response),

John, here's how I see it:

(But, first, quickly, the "locked in" characters I was referring to were in a style of play advanced by one person -- the idea that the player finds out he's going to now enact an already told story wiht his PC.  Now, that's really specific, I've never had any specific experience with it, so I'm ready to drop that sliver of things and move on to matters that I've seen everyone deal with.)

Let's look at the samurai with Code of Honor.

If the player really, really has decided that his guy will budge for nothing... ever, no matter what comes his way through play... Well, I'm not going to be the one to say he's not a "character" because then we're all going to get in a big huricane about trying to define "character."  I can say that a character that is played without the possibility of choice is more like a chair or a bullet -- he takes up physical space, responds to phyiscs -- but each time its his or her time to do something, everyone at the table already knows what's going to happen, so its kind of dull.  (We'll get to the secret part in a moment.)

Say, on the other hand, the novel and the movie The Godfather had never been written or made, and Gabrial Marquez like, a group of role players were actually playing out incidents of that family in a role playing session, with all the characters of the movie intact.

When the character Sonny got the phone call from his sister that his brother in law had just beaten her (ie, the GM provides the Bang of the phone call to player), we, as fellow players, already know that he's an emotional, violent hot head.... There are a million things he might do in response... And to charge out to her place to confront the brother in law alone is one of them... And when he does that we can think, "Well, there he goes again..."  As he does the same thing again.  But its still a choice.  The player could have Sonny affected by his father's injuries and think, "This is getting crazy.  I'm not running the family well, I' better talk to Tom first, get some advice.  Bring some body guards, anything."  Ultimately, the fact that he does *exactly what his enemies expecte him to do* so they can kill him doesn't change the fact that he could have done something different.  And it's those choices that keep us leaning forward (or leaning back -- oh god, here comes the train wreck) while watching a movie or playing a compelling Narrativist game.

As for keeping it a secret from the other players... I have no idea, again, if he's a "character" or not.  Relentless, yes.  Loyal, yes.  But as the GM threw more and more options at him (will you stay loyal even if it means your son's death, this village's death, the death of your family), he would be one hard-assed son of a bitch.  

I simply think it would be more fun as the player of the character to not make that decision and discover the choices as I go.

For example, Beowulf lives for heroic honor.  He really doesn't know what else to do with himself. By the time he's an old man and his lands are falling apart there's this dragon that shows up.  

He's got a choice.  Deal with it or not.  If we were playing a similiar story as an RPG, say with a guy call Abrack, and Abrack sits back down and says, "My time is over," we get one kind of story.  There are limits, apparently, to this heroic honor.  He thought it was going to sustain him, and apparently it didn't.  Ba-dum.

If he says, "And this one, too," we get a different kind of story.  We get a story where apparently it's not about the results of the heroic action, but the need to live it out no matter what -- not because of the results (there's a really good chance he's going to die this time around), but becuase that's the only thing to do.  

If I were the guy playing Abrack, I'd like to have had those options from start to finish, if only because not knowing and discovering (for me) is more fun than already knowing.  I mean, I can end up being the Samurai hard-ass -- but each time the GM throws the next Bang at me, I'm actually engaged in sorting out what's going to happen next.  (Your milage may vary.)

Christopher

[John Kim]

Even if the player just rolls along and plays Gunnar "as conceived," without even self-examining the significance of the decision, that is still a decision.

That would be Narrativist.

The non-Narrativist version is simply that everyone knows and reinforces, during play, the written-down or verbalized agreement that Gunnar is X and that is all there is to it. Even a more complex game system like Pendragon, in which shifts from X to Y and back are explicitly structured, falls into this category.  

OK, this is an interesting expression of the difference, which changes my perspective on the GNS split between Nar and Sim.  So it is group involvement in the decision which makes it Simulationist.  The player can agree to himself that "Gunnar is X and that is all there is to it" (as you say).  He could do whatever he likes to make decisions -- even, say, quietly use the Pendragon mechanics.  As long this isn't agreed to by the group, it is still Narrativist.  However, if this is opened up to the group then it becomes Simulationist.  Is that right?

[Walt Freitag]

I'm beginning to appreciate why Ron is always insisting that more information about the actual play is needed to judge GNS creative agenda.

Early on I took the basic concept of "GNS is about decision-making" to heart, which means I tend to assume that the only really important thing to observe is the decisions the players actually make. Sure, Ron talks about other observable aspects of play behavior like social approval/disapproval signals and OOC commentary, but Creative Agenda is still mostly about the players' decisions about what the characters do, right?

And it just hits me today, aw crap, no it isn't.

And assuming that it is leads to confusion and problems. For instance, the topic at hand.

When a player makes a predictable decision, that is, a decision that conforms to (someone's, let's say the observer's) prior expectations, it might create a false appearance that the player was not engaged, at the moment of decision, with the issue about which the decision was made. But concluding this, on the basis of the decision alone, is unjustified.

We have to ask: is it possible for a decision to be [fill in an adjective of your choice:] real, meaningful, important, interesting, dramatic, Narrativist-Premise-addressing*] and still be predictable? (*That's not to imply that all these adjectives are synonymous, only that the question could be posed about any of them.) For instance, could a player who predictably chooses that his character, a soldier in a dirty little war, consistently acts so as to maximize expediency at the cost of humanity, possibly be addressing a question of emotional import about the morality of war? I believe the answer, for all those possible adjectives, is yes. That is, it is possible, though it is not assured (since Gamist or Simulationist play could also result in predictable character decisions, for many different reasons).

I have a perhaps far-fetched personal example for how predictability and meaningful choice can coexist. Six months ago I decided I was ready to lose a lot of weight. Subsequently I took certain actions toward this end, such as eating very few snacks very infrequently. If you'd observed me during this time, focusing only on what I did and didn't actually eat, you'd probably conclude that I was on a diet that prohibited me from eating snacks. But if you'd observed my overall behavior more carefully, a few clues contradicting that hypothesis might have become apparent. For instance, I didn't dispose of or lock away the snack foods; I continued to buy my favorite snack foods at the supermarket; and when I did eat snacks, I made a big production out of it rather than sneaking them.

I explained to my wife (in almost exactly these words) that I preferred to decide thirty times a day not to eat a certain snack, than to tell myself that I wasn't "allowed" to eat it. For some reason related to my own personality, this little technical distinction made a great deal of difference to me.

There's plenty of diet advice that runs entirely contradictory to that, telling you to put snacks as much as possible out of your mind, don't even consider the possibility of eating them, don't buy them, don't keep them around. Don't, in Forge terms, "address them." That's probably good advice for many. But I was deliberately and consciously "addressing" them: thinking about them, talking about them, all but outright obsessed with them, and constantly making decisions about them.

A simple synopsis of my behavior, if you limited it to what I ate, would be indistinguishable from the behavior of someone following the "put it out of your mind" advice. In both cases, you could reliably predict non-snacking and you might therefore mistakenly conclude that snacking wasn't being "addressed" in either case.

Similarly, if you observe a player playing a character whose depicted decisions never deviate from a predictable expression of a character's fate or behavior pattern or moral stance, and are never portrayed as an internal moral struggle for the character, and are not difficult for the player to make, you might conclude that Premise is not being addressed. But you might be mistaken. Looking at the decisions themselves will probably not tell you whether that's the case or not. That's why you have to also observe the details of the processes by which players are making their decisions, and all the other behavior that makes up play.

(This is going to require a bit of rethinking of the concept of Congruence.)

- Walt

[Ron Edwards]

What Walt said.

And yes, it throws Congruence all kerflooey. That's why I always argued against an over-atomized, one-player-at-a-time approach to GNS issues.

John, all I have to say is that it's group involvement with anything in play that makes it anything in terms of GNS (assuming that "thing 1" is appropriate for such an analysis). I'm getting used to the idea that nearly anything presented in terms of "My character does this" and "I felt like X when I did it" will be completely inadequate for GNS-talk.

Best,
Ron

[Gordon C. Landis]

Let me make sure I've got it, because this strikes me as an interesting way to get at an important GNS issue (and a great thread - thanks, everyone):

Player Sue has a character named Simon, who ALWAYS makes choice Y.

Sue "knows" from the beginning that she will always have Simon make choice Y.

After a fair amount of play, all the other participants become very clear that Simon is always going to make choice Y.

The question is, can all that still result in Narrativist play?

The answer is - sure, it possibly can.  Because what we ask when looking at play to determine if G, N or S is happening is "what is being prioritized by the group as they play?"  If we see people reveling in the issues that arise because Simon always does Y, it's Nar.  If they're grooving on how neat it is that Simon is just like the typical hard-case character in the genre/setting in use - it's Sim.  If there's some sort of esteem-reward being reinforced - because Sue is so "good" at being Simon, or because there's some reward to Sue for playing Simon this way, or etc. - then we've got some Gamism happening.

The appearance that having "pre-decided" actions (having an unconflicted character) means you can't address Nar Premise is false, because the addressing of Premise occurs as a social event amongst the real people as play occurs.  Nothing you decide about a character ahead of play can remove the possibilty that the participants will get excited about Premise as play occurs.  Some decisions (maybe even Sue's "always have Simon go Y" choice) might make it harder to do Nar, others might make it easier, but you can neither prevent nor ensure Nar in this manner.

What matters is how the participants as a group (including Sue) react to what Simon does.  Which includes what they say to each other, what the players have their PCs do, what the GM has NPCs do - everything.  That's what we'll look at to see if G, N or S is prioritized.  Prioritized, because some stuff consistent with each of G, N and S will (or at least can) always be going on, in all play.

The context in which the Judge deals with the kill innocents vs. obey The Law situation has the potential to engage the participants in looking at interesting aspects of a Premise, no matter if we already know that the player would never have her Judge kill innocents.  At least, I hope that's the way it works,

Gordon

PS - Ron says that "My character does this" and "I felt like X when I did it" will be completely inadequate for GNS-talk," and I agree (inadequate being - IMO - an important word to use rather than "useless") - but I do NOT think that means GNS is unable to help us address questions like "what should I have my charcater do" or "how can I get myself/my players to feel like X when we play."

[Paganini]

This is the question of PC action.  The samurai example from your (Ron's) Simulationism essay is a good one, I think.  My interpretation of Nathan's question is that in a fatalist game, you have a PC whose actions are circumscribed just like the samurai in your example.  As he puts it, Premise in this game is addressed on a meta-level through narrative device and the like -- not through the PC's choices.  The player has free choice at the start of the game on what his PC is like, but he decides on a character which embodies certain behaviors in an over-the-top manner, thus leaving little doubt as to what the PC will choose.  The group decides at the start to hold to this choice.  (Nathan -- is this right?)

John,  yep. The specific reference thread I linked to dealt with a game in which, by virtue of a character creation technique, would produce theme via purely causal play. In other words, during character generation, the characters were constructed with such thematic strength that, if they behaved "as expected," they *would not deviate* from the dramatic course. Simply doing "what my guy would do" was sufficient to produce theme.

[M. J. Young]

A lot of this revolves around some disagreement regarding what exactly fatalist play is; and in reviewing Fusingate's metatextual play ideas it has occurred to me that I have experienced something like it. Bear with me, and perhaps I can illuminate the matter.

In Multiverser play, I've several times run players through The Prisoner of Zenda. Although few have read the book, the story is still familiar to most in one form or another--and that matters. Because in Multiverser you're playing yourself, there's very little of what is usually called "out of character knowledge"--you're on your honor, usually, not to use information you have learned since you started playing, but in the main if you know it your character knows it. Thus it is entirely likely that the character will recognize the story.

The question is what will he then do?

Here is a non-exhaustive list of possibilities:

[*]Perceive that he's on the cusp of getting in a heap of trouble, and look for a way to get out of it entirely.[*]Recognize what's happening and attempt to prevent it from the beginning--find a way to persuade the king not to drink the wine his half brother sent, and so see to it that the king makes it to his own coronation.[*]Failing that, decide to take what he knows and use it to work to his advantage--play the loyalists until you're in a position to seize the throne for yourself, execute Michael, set yourself up as king, and marry Flavia, all without ever letting on that you're not the real king.[*]Embrace the situation, and set out to do at least as well as Rudolf Rassendil in preserving the King's throne and returning him to his rightful place--but by using your own abilities and plotting your own course through the situation.[*]Recognize your place in the Rudolf Rassendil role and play out the story as closely to the original as you can manage.[/list:u]
I think that the metatextual play examples are in some ways analogous to this last option (with the caveat that the names and settings have been changed to obscure the story). In that play style, it appears that recognizing your role in the story and playing it out as closely to the original as you can is the preferred choice; this of course means that the game is now fated, as presumably if you did what Rassendil did, you'll get the same outcome and complete the story as written.

There is still the choice involved in deciding whether you're going to follow the fated path; indeed, there is a sense in which that choice is ongoing (as presumably at any moment the player could change his mind, reject the known story,  and strike out in a new direction). But if we assume that the referee is running a known story and the player has committed himself to bringing his character through that story as accurately as possible, we have fatalistic roleplay.

It isn't merely (as some have supposed) that the player has constructed a character who will always do the noble (or ignoble) thing); it goes beyond that to include that we already know all the situations which will come, how the character will respond to those situations, and what the outcome of this will be.

I join those who scratch their heads and wonder whether this is really a role playing game at that point. It sounds more like it falls into the same category as Civil War Reenactments (whatever category that is). Yet I recognize that in both Fusingate's metatextual play examples and my Prisoner of Zenda example there is real play leading up to the moment of recognition, where the player makes the choice as to whether to pursue the fated story or take a different course. Further, certainly in my play, and I suspect in Fusingate's as well, there are still the issues of whether the player can and will stick to the course as plotted--he might fail in his effort to do something at which the hero of the story succeeded, or he might balk at some point and take a different path. Thus even though play is said to be "fated" at this point, it is only so because the player continues to choose to follow the ordained path.

Anyway, I hope this clarifies the "fatalist play" concept to some degree.

--M. J. Young

[fusangite]

Nicely put, MJ. Also, in my games, the idea is to give people multiple options of fitting into the myth so that choice is not narrowed so dramatically. It's good to work with a myth system where there are multiple conflicting accounts of the cataclysmic event and some ambiguity about how precisely it resolves.

Stuart.

[John Kim]

The question is, can all that still result in Narrativist play?

The answer is - sure, it possibly can.  Because what we ask when looking at play to determine if G, N or S is happening is "what is being prioritized by the group as they play?"  If we see people reveling in the issues that arise because Simon always does Y, it's Nar.  If they're grooving on how neat it is that Simon is just like the typical hard-case character in the genre/setting in use - it's Sim.  

I don't think it's that simple.  For example, Pendragon may easily be absolutely full of moral issues -- and the players revel in it.  However, it is apparently not Narrativist because the others in the group are involved in the PC's choices (by enforcing the Personality Traits and Passions).  

I'm still sorting this out myself, but that's what I understand at present.