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Topic: Sim-Diceless thread search
Started by: clehrich
Started on: 9/25/2004
Board: GNS Model Discussion


On 9/25/2004 at 4:44am, clehrich wrote:
Sim-Diceless thread search

Hi gang,

I'm working on something at the moment, which you won't be surprised to hear is wildly theoretical and probably completely bizarre, and I won't talk your eyes off (like talking your ears off but on a screen, maybe) until I have some idea what I'm talking about, BUT

I'm wondering what's been said about Sim and Diceless. So that could be Sim with Drama or Karma mechanics, I guess. I'm really looking for something where the GM adjudicates the final result, but it's not done through dice at all.

Has there been anything discussed 'round these parts? I did a search, but got kind of swamped, because Sim and Diceless kind of tend to come up a lot, and I didn't find anything immediately obviously useful.

I'm trying to theorize this out, and I'd rather not reinvent the wheel. Besides, it's always more interesting to be part of an established conversation than to be a voice crying out in the wilderness. Amen.

Any suggestions?

Yes, before you ask, I have read Ron's essay on Sim: The Right to Dream.

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On 9/25/2004 at 10:54pm, Trevis Martin wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

I would suggest looking up Theatrix as that is what I believe it is.

Trevis

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On 9/26/2004 at 2:52am, Jonathan Walton wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

And Nobilis, which is resource-driven, GM-determined-target-number-based Sim. And the recent (and now dead) Marvel Universe, though it throws in some strategic Gamism with the Sim. I assume you're familiar with Amber's GM-arbitrated-Karma-based Sim/Nar beastie. And, then, of course there's Everway and the equally interesting Drama/Karma/Fortune hybrid of Feder & Schwert's Engel (which is available as a free PDF in English, since White Wolf dumped the original system). And, recently, there's Code of Unaris, the heavy-Karma-with-dramatic-editing game made specifically for chat. Diceless games are my thing, if you can't tell ;)

As for threads on the subject, I don't recall any in particular. If you're heading towards heavy Drama/Karma mechanics with GM arbitration, you're approaching the limit of freeform (to use a math metaphor). You can see this at work in Engel, actually, where the authors seek to tack on some fairly superficial mechanics around a system that is essentially freeform with tarot-like interpretation as a tool/crutch for figuring out where narrative authority lies (GM or individual players?). I don't know how much freeform play you've done, Chris, but, in my experience, freeform is almost totally Drama-determined (though this is subjective, so individual players can have different ideas about what would be the "coolest" thing to have happen), with a bit of Karma thrown in, often in the form of "but my swordsman could totally have dodged that!"

Despite what many Fortune-hounds will tell you, these kinds of freeform systems can be quite functional, assuming a strong social contract where the details of "who-determines-what" are understood by all. Online roleplay of the "collaborative fiction" variety often takes this form, and I've run several tabletop games in this style that were very enjoyable. In any case, I would suggest that you try to look more into this kind of thing, since it seems a strong parallel to your stated goals.

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On 9/26/2004 at 3:03am, timfire wrote:
Re: Sim-Diceless thread search

clehrich wrote: Has there been anything discussed 'round these parts? I did a search, but got kind of swamped, because Sim and Diceless kind of tend to come up a lot, and I didn't find anything immediately obviously useful.

I don't have much to add, other to say that I did a search for "Sim AND diceless" in the general forums and only got 16 hits (this thread included). But none of seemed immediately helpful, though I didnot read all of them.

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On 9/26/2004 at 3:38am, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Okay, let me try this differently. I'm mostly wondering what the options are in terms of structuring an arbitrary decision-making process such that it is as close to transparent as possible, and I'm interested in what gets done with and embedded within such resolution systems.

As I understand it, Sim basically doesn't want to have mechanics, because they screw with the Dream. But Sim also kind of needs mechanics, because otherwise you have to hand over the authority to decide to a non-arbitrary decision-maker, like a GM. And as soon as you start thinking, "hey, the GM is making all his decisions based on a notion of how a cool kung fu movie ought to go," you are on the verge of saying, "our causality is toast and the GM has hijacked it to make a silly movie we don't want." Does this make sense? I'm talking about theoretical limits here, purist Sim (not exactly Purist for System, but purist).

In theory, purist Sim doesn't want dice either, because you have to step out of the Dream to roll them, figure out what they mean, and then go back to the Dream. But that may be preferable to a system in which the Dream is actually broken rather than put on "pause." Do you see?

Basically what I'm trying to pick at is the nature of decision-making in Sim: what it has to do, what it shouldn't do, what the priorities are, and so forth. I think this is actually quite complicated. It seems to me that most of the diceless stuff I know about skates close to the limit of Story Pretty Soon, if you will, and could perhaps lend itself to the Impossible Thing criticism. In other words, if you decide to avoid overt resolution arbitrariness by shifting to a biased resolution, the biases generally seem to be kissing-cousins with Nar or Gam. On the other hand, the stuff that has dice always has to have a kind of magic sign up that says, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" Everyone knows that the dice aren't part of the Dream, but one of the required special points is that you pretend you don't see that. I don't really think either Nar or Gam have this kind of deep-rooted ambivalence, and I'm interested in what that's really about.

But the point for this thread is to ask if other people have suggestions about how different Sim diceless resolution systems work, what effects they have, what claims their proponents make about them, etc.

Ideally, I'd rather not have to buy a whole stack of games, either, since if I had book money I should be spending it on quite different books, but since I don't have book money the point is moot. :)

Neel K. PM'ed me a fascinating article he wrote about causality and modal logic and such, which I don't fully understand yet but is really intriguing.

Any other suggestions?

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On 9/26/2004 at 6:07am, Jonathan Walton wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

clehrich wrote: But the point for this thread is to ask if other people have suggestions about how different Sim diceless resolution systems work, what effects they have, what claims their proponents make about them, etc.


Well, why didn't you just say so? :)

I have the most experience with Nobilis, so let me start there. It often works like this:

----

GM: When the sun rose today, the sky remained black as pitch, a dark background upon which the sun blazed down like one engorged star shining in the night. Scientists and meteorologists scrambled to come up with an explanation for the phenomenon, but the global community of spirits and principalities turned to you, as the Power of Light, for an answer.

[GM pitches a situation out, building/supporting the Dream.]

Player: I use a Greater Divination of Light to figure out where all the light has gone.

[Player declares an IC action, fully within the Dream still.]

Karma & Resource Management: A Greater Divination is a Level 5 Miracle, and the Player has an Attribute of 3, say, so she spends 2 Miracle Points to accomplish the Miracle.

[Here's the point of Dream Breakage that you mentioned, where the players have to think about things that aren't part of the game world. You're right that I think most heavy Sim games, and especially diceless ones, try to minimize this step as much as possible.]

GM: All of the light spirits are hiding just on the edges of the horizon, out of the eyesight of the sun, who they are deathly afraid of.

[And then the GM comes it to restore the Dream and get the action moving again.]

----

So the way Nobilis deals with the problem is just minimizing the amount of OOC stuff that has to happen. You compare two numbers and then pay resource points up to the value you need. Still, it's mostly based on a traditional resolution model, where you have multiple players declare things and then resolve via some kind of OOC mechanic.

Another method, used by Engel and, to a lesser extent, Everway, it to make the tools of OOC determination part of the game world as much as you can. Engel uses a special deck of cards which have images from the game world on them: the Abbott, the Archangels, the Lord of the Flies, etc. So when you pick up a card and get "the Abbott Reversed," you don't have to step out of the Dream much. You can read it as "something's wrong with the Abbott" or "what occurs in this scene is a reversal of the values that the Abbott represents." In both cases, you're still thinking relative to the Dream, so the break (if it even occurs) isn't very jarring.

Another completely IC mechanic, which I just thought of, is the fencing rules in Skotos' online game, Castle Marrach. The players type in things like "I feint deftly" and "I thrust gracefully" and then the computer handles all the resolution, with the adverbs just adding color for all the people watching, including the dueling players. Is that something more like the GM-driven resolution system that you're imagining? Where the players never have to break from the Dream at all?

Neel K. PM'ed me a fascinating article he wrote about causality and modal logic and such, which I don't fully understand yet but is really intriguing.


Hmm, I'll have to get a copy of that. I haven't read anything from Neel in a month, since the PRC seems to have decided to block 20by20room.com as a danger to national security...

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On 9/26/2004 at 6:43am, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Jonathan Walton wrote: Well, why didn't you just say so? :)
Yeah, bite me. Because I'm still grasping toward what I'm looking for, you stinker. :)
So the way Nobilis deals with the problem is just minimizing the amount of OOC stuff that has to happen. You compare two numbers and then pay resource points up to the value you need. Still, it's mostly based on a traditional resolution model, where you have multiple players declare things and then resolve via some kind of OOC mechanic.
Okay, so Nobilis keeps the actual task determination with the player, who simply ascribes numbers to success or failure, and those numbers have some in-character meaning. The GM restores the Dream by moving from task determination to task narration. Something like that?
Another method, used by Engel and, to a lesser extent, Everway, it to make the tools of OOC determination part of the game world as much as you can. Engel uses a special deck of cards which have images from the game world on them: the Abbott, the Archangels, the Lord of the Flies, etc. So when you pick up a card and get "the Abbott Reversed," you don't have to step out of the Dream much. You can read it as "something's wrong with the Abbott" or "what occurs in this scene is a reversal of the values that the Abbott represents." In both cases, you're still thinking relative to the Dream, so the break (if it even occurs) isn't very jarring.
I clearly have to read Engel, since this was my own aesthetic principle for Shadows in the Fog: make the determination system a part of the game-world, such that there is an analogy between player and character in determination and resolution. The goal here is to downplay the "jar."
Another completely IC mechanic, which I just thought of, is the fencing rules in Skotos' online game, Castle Marrach. The players type in things like "I feint deftly" and "I thrust gracefully" and then the computer handles all the resolution, with the adverbs just adding color for all the people watching, including the dueling players. Is that something more like the GM-driven resolution system that you're imagining? Where the players never have to break from the Dream at all?
Yes, I suppose, but the fact that the determiner is a computer doesn't really help much, because it's in effect a black box. It may not be very jarring, but it's still having recourse to an exterior arbitrary system.

See, what interests me is that you have these opposed poles. On the one hand, you want the determination system not to be arbitrary. The reason being that the Dream is a web of meaning into which you, as player, precipitate yourself, through character. And if you allow arbitrariness, this suggests that not everything in the Dream is meaningful, but the point is that the Dream is nothing but meaning, so an arbitrary determinant is a problem.

On the other hand, you want the determination system not to be constrained by a limited aesthetic of what meaning ought to look like, something like Step On Up or Story Now. The reason here being that the Dream is supposed to have its own internal causality, and be driven by that alone, and such aesthetic principles as Story Now or Step On Up are exterior to the causality system of the Dream, for the same reason that our actual lives are not particularly like stories unless we choose to twist how we re-tell them, and in actual experience they're simply one damn thing after another.

Now I don't actually think there's a practical way of having your cake and eating it too, but I'm quite interested in things like what you've mentioned here as work-arounds (works-around?). A traditional form of dice system I get; it's an arbitrary determinant that tradition has hallowed such that you can relatively easily say, "That doesn't matter." If all such RPGs had started as card games, and that were normative, then dice would seem weird and a little jarring but cards would seem obvious. But I'm more interested in the principle of the thing: how do you make an end-run around the problem? And these examples are very interesting for this reason. They also suggest, by their very existence, that there is at least an unconscious recognition of this perpetual problem as perpetual, in that nobody is really entirely happy with what has been done already and they keep trying new ways. Veeeery interesting.
Hmm, I'll have to get a copy of that. I haven't read anything from Neel in a month, since the PRC seems to have decided to block 20by20room.com as a danger to national security...
If Neel says it's OK, I'll email it to you. [Neel?] My own experience with the PRC, and that of my many friends in Chinese studies, makes this ban totally unsurprising. Forge? Yes. 20x20 Room? Heck no. Why? Don't ask.

Eat some good sleazy street food for me, and keep thinking about diceless Sim. Thanks!

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On 9/26/2004 at 7:30am, Jonathan Walton wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

clehrich wrote: Yeah, bite me. Because I'm still grasping toward what I'm looking for, you stinker. :)


Yeah, I know. That was a pot-calling-kettle maneuver. I always post before I know quite what I want, as well.

Okay, so Nobilis keeps the actual task determination with the player, who simply ascribes numbers to success or failure, and those numbers have some in-character meaning. The GM restores the Dream by moving from task determination to task narration. Something like that?


More of less. Rebecca pulls a few more tricks too. The entire range of Miracles (i.e. all possible system-supported tasks) is predetermined by a set of ranks that players and the GM are both familiar with, ideally, so there shouldn't be too much disagreement about what Level a specific task is. None of this GM-chooses-a-target-number shit. Everyone knows what pulling the sun out of the sky should cost.

Also, and this is a major stroke of genius, there are no rules for doing things that aren't Miraculous. The system just assumes that you're going to freeform your way through that, in the way that Erick talks about in his Dicelessness essay in the Articles section (Paraphrasing: "Everybody plays diceless/freeform; they just punctuate it with bits of Fortune"). So there's an emphasis on only using the OOC task resolution for things that are really important, which makes another shot at minimizing the jar.

I clearly have to read Engel, since this was my own aesthetic principle for Shadows in the Fog: make the determination system a part of the game-world, such that there is an analogy between player and character in determination and resolution. The goal here is to downplay the "jar."


I'll email you the PDF of the original Engel rules. I think this is quite a cool method. De Profundis takes this route too, incorperating letter writing into the fabric of the game, much like Code of Unaris tries to do with chat. The Torches in Shreyas' Torchbearer are also similar. I plan on writing a heavy Sim PBeM game at some point, pulling the same trick, maybe to finally finish Fingers on the Firmament, since I promised Shreyas I'd do that. This is definitely one of Sim's traditional problems, and I agree that many games have tried to get around it, consciously or unconsciously.

It may not be very jarring, but it's still having recourse to an exterior arbitrary system.


Is it really any more arbitrary than drawing a card from a deck? Surely it's a lot less jarring than the "You can't use that item here," responses from first-gen electronic roleplaying games ("Damn it! I should be able to stick the coat-hanger into the electrical socket!"). I see it just as another variation on the external arbiter.

But I'm more interested in the principle of the thing: how do you make an end-run around the problem?


See, I think I would articulate the problem a little differently here, partially because the way I articulate and think about Sim is a bit different than Ron (though we're ultimately talking about the same idea). I don't really think Sim relies upon an arbitrator to uphold the inherant causality of the game world, because you already have that in the players' minds (which can arbitrate just as well as any external computer). The problem is the subjectivity of the Dream, which requires something to arbitrate between different visions of "what happens" in a fashion that appears reasonable and plausible to everyone involved (this is the Lumpley Principle, yet again). If this arbitrator is another person, people worry that their own vision isn't getting a fair hearing. If the arbitrator is some Fortune mechanic, that fear is not there, but it break the Dream.

So, I would imagine that a combination of GM arbitration with lots of player empowerment and the potential for "dramatic editing" or whatnot gets closer to succeeding (and this is what many of these games are leaning towards but not actually doing). You just need a new model for negotiating the Dream in a "fair and reasonable" fashion, and you've got the potential for some great Sim play.

Eat some good sleazy street food for me, and keep thinking about diceless Sim.


Yessir! I guess it'll be sheng jian bao again tonight, then. It's fun when they explode in your mouth and squirt juice on the guy sitting across from you...

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On 9/26/2004 at 4:45pm, neelk wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Chris: sure, go ahead -- but also forward Geoff Skellam's article. It's the same general idea, but presented differently, and I think multiple angles on are good.

Just as an aside: for me, (lower case) sim-style gaming isn't about "forgetting" the real world for the dream; it's about what you might call the step from artifice to artifact. I (with the help of the other players) build a situation and some rules, and then we can use it to play what-if? games. Having a strong internal causality means that all of the players will be on the same page about "what would happen if", and that lets us spin out long chains of action, consequence, and possibility. But outside that single chain of events, there's a TON of table-talk about alternate possibilities and hypothetical cases and the constraints of the setting. Part of what we're doing is making and editing the material and causal relationships between them that will be used now and in future play.

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On 9/26/2004 at 6:27pm, Sean wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hi Chris -

I think I see what you're looking for, but as an incorrigible pedant I have to disagree a little bit with the idea that Fortune is the thing that's responsible for dream-breaking. Jonathan's example of moving back to Karma (resource allocation) in Nobilis as dream-breaking, if correct, is another case in point.

An obvious example comes from Sim-facilitating wargames. You're asking a question like "how might this battle have gone given..." but at the same time you recognize some randomness in warfare, so you want a Fortune mechanic to adjudicate the 'close' unit contests. Some RPG combat systems are like this too, actually, though they tend to have more Fortune on the 'weak guy always deserves a chance' principle.

I kind of don't see how any resolution mechanic, including Drama, can fail to 'break the dream' if I understand what you mean by that correctly. About the best you could do would be to have a computer feed through the GM (or directly to the players in the SF conceptual limit) with the result, based on its calculations of what the players were doing, their capacities, etc.

In other words if you have mechanics at all, any kind, then you're going to have to spend play-time on the mechanics, and that will necessarily involve at least enough outside the game thinking to handle that resolution step. One principle I see some of the designers around here suggest in response to that is to have the mechanics serve the purpose of intensifying the CA rather than being an annoying barrier to get to the next thing. If you really care about the Story or the Step on Up this makes sense, but I see how Sim is harder.

Is that another way of putting your question then? How could we use, maybe, diceless mechanics to intensify the dream rather than interrupt it (again as in JW's Nobilis example)?

I do think that at the conceptual level your diceless issue is probably a red herring, but at the level of the design you might have in mind it may not be. Or maybe there's something as yet inarticulate here that gives the absence of Fortune a special significance I'm not seeing.

One other point - putting as many explicit mechanics onto the GM, of whatever kind, and making them run fast, is one method for accomplishing a minimum of dream-breaking in the traditional RPG format.

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On 9/26/2004 at 8:26pm, Eero Tuovinen wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Let me tell you about the Temple, a game of mine. It has an embedded sim decisionmaking system used by the GM. The point of the game is elsewhere, the system is only used to give consequences for nar decisions. The game's currently practically finished, I might sell it as PDF at some point.

For the system, let me give a short outline:

When a player wants his character to do something, he tells what the character does. The GM may comment or any player may interrupt, but otherwise the action goes through as described. If a player interrupts, the GM right away decides what happens. He uses the following principles in support:
§0 If no character resists and the action is possible, it succeeds. If the action is impossible, it fails. If it is resisted, see §1.
§1 If a character has not yet done anything similar in the game, he succeeds. If both characters are tied, see §2.
§2 If one character has succeeded in similar actions twice already, he succeeds. If both characters are tied, see §3.
§3 If one character has more characters supporting him than another, he succeeds. Other edges can be considered if the GM prefers. If both characters are still tied, see §4.
§4 If none of the above resolves the conflict, it is a tie and the characters have to fall back or give in.

As you can see, the system is diceless and GM-driven. It's simulationist because the only point of the system is to emulate certain abstract conventions of storytelling with minimum amount of fuss and no player handling time.

The system gives slightly strange results (for example, any character can automatically kill any other), but that's all in-genre for the game, the point being immersionist lovecraftian horror: when the kind of uncertainty you'd need a system for enters the picture, the situation can really go whichever way the GM desires, and the system above just takes the burden off him. An important note is that the players don't know the rules and the game is one-shot, so it's unlikely that anybody would bother to deduct the principles.

Admittedly not a standard approach, but works well for the game in question. I could imagine applying it to other genres as well.

As for whether pure Karma works for the Dream... I deem it a must for hard core immersionism, so for a certain kind of Dream it indeed works. The above demonstrates also how mechanics do not need to break the Dream just by being mechanics (a retort to Sean, that one).

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On 9/27/2004 at 5:59am, Jonathan Walton wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Eero, do you know the board game Diplomacy? Because the rules to your diceless game sound suspiciously like Diplomacy the RPG.

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On 9/27/2004 at 9:02am, Eero Tuovinen wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Jonathan Walton wrote: Eero, do you know the board game Diplomacy? Because the rules to your diceless game sound suspiciously like Diplomacy the RPG.


Yeah, I'm the upcoming president of the Finnish Diplomacy Association. So I know the game, and even get to play it more than enough.

Regardless, I hadn't myself noticed the resemblance. It's quite clear, though, when you mention it. You'd get even more Diplomacy-like by stripping away the dramatic assumptions here (steps 1 and 2) and just counting supports: each character is equal in strength, and the side with most supports wins. You could even go with the GM building a metaphorical map of a given situation to get some limitations for support and attacking, and stronger and weaker positions... Strange, but workable.

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On 9/27/2004 at 2:02pm, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Sean wrote: I think I see what you're looking for, but as an incorrigible pedant I have to disagree a little bit with the idea that Fortune is the thing that's responsible for dream-breaking. Jonathan's example of moving back to Karma (resource allocation) in Nobilis as dream-breaking, if correct, is another case in point.
If I said this, I was being unclear. Let me put it like this.

There are basically two ways of resolving a contested situation: within the Dream and not within the Dream.

To do it entirely within the Dream, you need some sort of principle of internal causality that can produce a determinate result, the way the actual real world works. In my experience of Sim, this sort of thing is usually done by putting decision-making into the GM's hands and using various techniques to disguise what he's doing. The point being that you are not actually resolving matters within the dream, but only making it appear that you are doing so. One of the tasks of the GM, in that sort of gaming, is to be the guy who doesn't get to live the Dream because he's the facilitator of others' Dreaming.

To do it outside the Dream, you want an exterior mechanism that is (1) determinate; (2) quick; and (3) completely arbitrary. Dice and other Fortune mechanics are a well-established way of doing this, and they can be made to fit all the criteria, but there are other methods.

The down-side of using the GM is that his decisions may become non-arbitrary, since he is a person using some sort of aesthetic criteria rather than the arbitrary causality of the universe; even if he actually remains arbitrary, the very suspicion that he might not be can break the Dream. In either case, this spins your resolution system toward aesthetic goals, such as telling a good story or having exciting challenges -- in other words, GM decision-dominance tends to spin the game a tad toward other CA's.

The down-side of exterior arbitrary systems is that they do break the frame of the Dream. One can wallpaper over the cracks, but at base you cannot claim that the dice you are rolling really are within the game-world.

What interests me is that I think this is a fundamental bind for Sim gaming. Either it must make an aesthetic constraining decision about the nature of causality in the Dream or it must enclose within the Social Contract the claim that we will all pretend we didn't see those dice rolling.

But the ideal for Sim, in a true purist sense, is therefore inachievable: it would be a system that has no visible mechanics whatever, yet is completely determinate and fully arbitrary, constrained by no aesthetic principles except those we can explain as necessarily part of the Dream's internal causality.

In other words if you have mechanics at all, any kind, then you're going to have to spend play-time on the mechanics, and that will necessarily involve at least enough outside the game thinking to handle that resolution step. One principle I see some of the designers around here suggest in response to that is to have the mechanics serve the purpose of intensifying the CA rather than being an annoying barrier to get to the next thing. If you really care about the Story or the Step on Up this makes sense, but I see how Sim is harder.
Yes, exactly. I think in fact that Sim may border on theoretical impossibility, which is simply not the case with Story Now or Step On Up, which is why I'm investigating different kinds of mechanics that seek to suppress their own existence within the Dream.

I do think that at the conceptual level your diceless issue is probably a red herring, but at the level of the design you might have in mind it may not be. Or maybe there's something as yet inarticulate here that gives the absence of Fortune a special significance I'm not seeing.
The reason I chose to focus on Fortune was simply that it's become extremely traditional in large-scale Sim gaming, so every other choice is to some degree a choice against the norm, and that interests me. I have no design in mind; my interest here has nothing to do with a design as such, but rather with a peculiar classification issue.

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On 9/27/2004 at 2:23pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hello,

That's an interesting perspective about out-of-Dream vs. in-Dream resolution, relative to Simulationist play. I'm not sure I'm getting it.

The last game I played with a fairly determined Simulationist slant (which is to say, our slant) was Hidden Legacy, in which the resolution procedure has two interesting features.

1. It usually includes a sequence of rolls rather than a single one, denoting in-game time and points of reflection for "how'm I doing" by the character.

2. It has four possible results depending on the accumulating dice results: success, failure, dismal failure, and "pull out" (choosing to stop the re-rolls before one of the other three happens)

The basic concept was actually quite a lot of fun, as it generates a sense of desperation and determination on the parts of the characters; it also seems to me to enlist the player's commitment strictly via the lens of the character's fictional experiences (i.e. no "bonus points" are involved). Neither of these are definitionally Simulationist (they are merely Techniques), but they are, as far as I can tell, definitionally in-game cause oriented.

Is merely the use of dice per se supposed to break the Dream? That seems like an awfully restrictive concept for ideal Sim play to me.

If this is thread-Drift, stop me now and we'll call this post a "confusion footnote."

Best,
Ron

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On 9/27/2004 at 2:41pm, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hi Ron,

Ron Edwards wrote: The last game I played with a fairly determined Simulationist slant (which is to say, our slant) was Hidden Legacy...
Interesting, I'll take a look. Sounds like a good concept!

Is merely the use of dice per se supposed to break the Dream? That seems like an awfully restrictive concept for ideal Sim play to me.
Well, it's deliberately a little extreme, yes. I guess it's related to, or a version of, your notion of "handling time." What I find interesting is that handling time is not intrinsically a problem for Nar or Gam. I mean, practically speaking it can be a pain in the ass to have a high handling time, but exterior mechanics do not in themselves work against the aesthetic goals of those CA's. It's a matter of having mechanics that support your goals, which I think was a big part of your whole point with the original GNS essay and, I think, with the Big Model itself: you sit down and construct mechanics of whatever sort that support your aesthetic goals and don't construct mechanics that do not support -- or worse, work against -- those goals. And if I get you right, part of the point of the CA level of the Big Model is to help define the nature of your aesthetic goals so that you can do this efficiently.

The interesting thing to me is that in Sim, the ideal mechanic is purely arbitrary causality within the Dream, and this is not actually achievable. The ideal mechanic in Nar, for example, is one that does nothing at all except to facilitate Story Now; this is achievable, if exceedingly difficult. But with Sim, you may have a theoretical impossibility on your hands. So I'm interested in how various Sim games try to work around the problem.

Think of it like engineering. You have a goal clearly in mind, and you construct a machine that achieves that goal as efficiently as possible. If the goal is something that cannot be done with the tools at hand, you design new ones. If the goal is not achievable at all, you either give up on the project or build a machine that approximates the desired solution. Maybe you want a machine that requires no energy to maintain, i.e. runs by itself forever; this is not achievable, so you work to cut down friction and all that in order to produce an approximation -- a machine that will run by itself for a very long time.

In Nar or Gam, as I see it, your goal is achievable, and so the question of the engineer is how best to achieve it. In Sim, your goal is not achievable, so the question is how best to approximate it.

The goal in Sim has to do with the machine itself, you see. The ideal is a machine that doesn't exist but produces perfect results, to be simplistic about it. Obviously you can't have a machine that works and also doesn't exist, so what you want is a machine that produces perfect results and is as close to invisible as possible, and there are a number of ways of going about achieving this. But you cannot actually completely succeed.

The goal in Nar is a a machine that produces Story Now very efficiently, but there is nothing about the goal "Story Now" that says what the machine has to look like, only what it has to do. This is achievable, and there are lots of ways of going about it. And you can actually completely succeed, at least in principle.

Does that help?
If this is thread-Drift, stop me now and we'll call this post a "confusion footnote."
It isn't thread-Drift, so no worries.

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On 9/27/2004 at 2:48pm, Sean wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

I do think there's a sense in which resolution systems can at least schizophrenically amplify Sim play, which Ron's post suggested to me.

That is, let's say you're doing a resource allocation moment, or even some dice. You're in one sense 'out' of the dream; but in another sense you might be thinking this is the crucial moment, where something is going to happen in the SiS based on what has come before. So if you have dice, you respect their randomness as the genuine randomness of outcome in the SiS, the 'physics' of the game. If you have resource allocation or just lots of stuff to look up, you calculate everything very carefully, because you want the right outcome.

This is dream-breaking in one-sense, because you are coming back to reality to resolve things, but if you perceive your work in reality as devoted to what's happening in the SiS, as aiming at reaching an appropriate causal outcome relative to the imagined reality, then there can be a certain kind of Sim-facilitation that happens here. Again, I think of historical wargamers who want to understand what really happened or could have happened.

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On 9/27/2004 at 3:01pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hello,

Also, my perspective tends to focus on the "shared" in SIS, which is to say, our communication about the stuff being imagined. So the dice are a form of communication; we're all watching them, we may be talking and commenting, we're all enjoying our version of what's happening and communicating it to one another. It's not like the one guy is doing all this imagining while the rest of us wait and do nothing.

So from this perspective, it seems to me that what you're calling "external," Chris, isn't definitionally disruptive to the Dream.

Best,
Ron

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On 9/27/2004 at 3:14pm, Sean wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Your Big Model-Fu is strong, Ron. (Which does make sense, given...)

I find this exchange extremely illuminating of some of the connections and misconnections people were making in Ralph's big thread on Immersionism from a while back, actually. But even with Immersive play, there is a big difference between players who like being Immersed with a group, sharing the IC action as a way to create a SHARED imagined space, and those who just get into the details of their own immersion. The latter but not the former are Ralph's selfish Immersionists, I think.

I'll be interested to see what Chris says about this.

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On 9/27/2004 at 4:03pm, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Ron Edwards wrote: Also, my perspective tends to focus on the "shared" in SIS, which is to say, our communication about the stuff being imagined. So the dice are a form of communication; we're all watching them, we may be talking and commenting, we're all enjoying our version of what's happening and communicating it to one another. It's not like the one guy is doing all this imagining while the rest of us wait and do nothing.
I don't see that this distinction between shared and individual really comes into it; I guess I'm not getting your point.

The social negotiation that must go on to make the SIS shared is part of every social interaction, RPG or otherwise. Without telepathy, we have to do this to work toward an adequate understanding of what other people are on about.

But when we disagree in ordinary conversation, we do not normally move to a mechanical arbitration system. If you and I come to a point of disagreement, we don't say, "Okay, we'll flip a coin, and if it's head I'm right and if it's tails you're right." And let's face it, when they do this in the legal system (or arbitration), while both sides agree in advance that they will abide by the decision so made, they do not agree -- and often in fact deny after the fact -- that they will agree with the decision. If you lose in court, you can appeal, or you can go around bitching about how stupid the jury and your lawyer were.

In an RPG, we all agree in advance not to do this, and we commonly accept from the get-go that it is normal to use an arbitration system.

Continuing the legal parallel, a Fortune system in effect announces, "We make no claims whatever to justice or truth. We only claim that there will be an absolute decision. You agree to accept it as true, not merely to abide by it but to accept it." With me thus far?

A system founded on an aesthetic principle, for example a Nar-supporting system, says something like this: "We make no claims about justice or truth. We claim that there will be an absolute decision, and that the decision will support Story Now."

Okay, now in Sim, the ideal system would say: "We make no claims about justice or truth. We claim that there will be an absolute decision, and that it will be completely arbitrary. There will be no fear nor favor, no aesthetic principles, no nothing that will make the decision anything but arbitrary." The reason being that the Dream functions on its own internal causality, and does not permit the insertion of exterior aesthetic or whatever principles. Life isn't fair, for example, so a Sim game that hasn't changed this as a fundamental setting-design principle should not be fair; it's just what it is, period.

At the same time, the process of shared construction of and interaction with the Dream is one that should depend solely on our interactions, that is should be a solely social process of shared imagining. It's not a question of Immersion; the point is that we are the ones doing the imagining.

To take an extreme example, consider a fairly straight D&D-style fantasy setting. Imagine that we've been working together to keep this SIS going, ever richer and more interesting, and we're excited about it. Now some random dude walks into the room and says, "Okay, I've just decided that there are no gods and no races and no alignments." If you actually have to live with that, the shared part of SIS breaks down. You can start with such a principle, but as a rule you cannot make a drastic shift without its being a shared process. If the game system has a special mechanic by which you draw a card, let's say, and produce a statement like this random guy's statement, and again you have to live with it, the process is again not shared: it's handed over to an exterior power (the cards) to which you have granted the authority to make the decision. These things can be done, but they do put the Dream on rocky ground.

Now what I'm saying is that when we come to a conflict of some kind in our social process of constructing the SIS together, the perfect Sim solution would simultaneously be totally arbitrary (not based on exterior principles like aesthetics) and also completely shared (not handed over to some exterior power or authority like luck or a GM).

I'm saying that this isn't possible, at base, but that Sim is in some respects founded on trying to get there anyway. Nar isn't like this, because you don't have to have a totally arbitrary system: you want your system to be based on Story Now. Just so, you want a Gam system to be based on Step On Up. But Sim wants the system to be simply the Dream itself.

Does that help?

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On 9/27/2004 at 7:37pm, Vaxalon wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

clehrich wrote: ...what you want is a machine that produces perfect results and is as close to invisible as possible...


No, it's a machine that produces results as close to perfect as possible, as invisibly as possible.

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On 9/28/2004 at 1:01am, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Vaxalon wrote:
clehrich wrote: ...what you want is a machine that produces perfect results and is as close to invisible as possible...

No, it's a machine that produces results as close to perfect as possible, as invisibly as possible.

Does this matter? I mean, do you have a point or is this trying to pick at the semantics? Because I don't see the distinction you're proposing.

I meant what I said, unless you want to clarify what you mean by the correction.

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On 9/28/2004 at 1:47am, John Kim wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

clehrich wrote: The social negotiation that must go on to make the SIS shared is part of every social interaction, RPG or otherwise. Without telepathy, we have to do this to work toward an adequate understanding of what other people are on about.

But when we disagree in ordinary conversation, we do not normally move to a mechanical arbitration system. If you and I come to a point of disagreement, we don't say, "Okay, we'll flip a coin, and if it's head I'm right and if it's tails you're right."
...
In an RPG, we all agree in advance not to do this, and we commonly accept from the get-go that it is normal to use an arbitration system.

I don't agree with this parallel. In most RPGs, I would say that negotiation is purely social, with no parallel to an arbitration system. A typical in-game mechanic is not an arbitration system at all -- it is a tool which produces a result. In Forge jargon, it doesn't assign credibility to a particular player, and thus it doesn't resolve disputes.

For example, suppose a player says that her PC attacks a monster. The player and the GM then roll dice to determine the result. This isn't necessarily a dispute between the player and the GM. Maybe the GM wants the PC to succeed just as much as the player does. Or maybe the player would prefer it if her PC missed. The point is, I don't think this roll amounts to an arbitration procedure between disagreeing parties. Rather, it is a process which the player and the GM both use cooperatively.

clehrich wrote: Okay, now in Sim, the ideal system would say: "We make no claims about justice or truth. We claim that there will be an absolute decision, and that it will be completely arbitrary. There will be no fear nor favor, no aesthetic principles, no nothing that will make the decision anything but arbitrary." The reason being that the Dream functions on its own internal causality, and does not permit the insertion of exterior aesthetic or whatever principles. Life isn't fair, for example, so a Sim game that hasn't changed this as a fundamental setting-design principle should not be fair; it's just what it is, period.

This doesn't seem to apply to GNS Simulationism. GNS Simulationism allows that pre-created theme or genre may be used as principle by which the Dream should be patterned. Indeed, the whole point of GNS Simulationism may be to celebrate the imposition of those exterior aesthetics. Read Ron's post from Narrativism: not a Creative Agenda.

clehrich wrote: Now what I'm saying is that when we come to a conflict of some kind in our social process of constructing the SIS together, the perfect Sim solution would simultaneously be totally arbitrary (not based on exterior principles like aesthetics) and also completely shared (not handed over to some exterior power or authority like luck or a GM).

I'm saying that this isn't possible, at base, but that Sim is in some respects founded on trying to get there anyway.

I think in some respects that rgfa Simulationism is based on principles like this, though I'm not sure GNS Simulationism is. rgfa Simulationism is based on rejection of meta-game input, which is inherently impossible. i.e. The meta-game will always affect the in-game. However, those who use it feel that the effort of trying to reject it produces interesting and fun results.

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On 9/28/2004 at 2:45am, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

John Kim wrote: I don't agree with this parallel. In most RPGs, I would say that negotiation is purely social, with no parallel to an arbitration system. A typical in-game mechanic is not an arbitration system at all -- it is a tool which produces a result. In Forge jargon, it doesn't assign credibility to a particular player, and thus it doesn't resolve disputes.
Argh. Yes, sure. Agreed. Did you like any of the previous versions?

[BRIEF SLIGHTLY UNFAIR RANT ON!]

Look, folks, I'm not writing an essay making an argument here; people keep asking what I mean about external arbitrary system, and all I mean is a pretty rough-and-tumble notion of Mechanics. Don't overthink this.

Mechanics are exterior to the SIS. Got it?

Mechanics. Like dice. Which are arbitrary. Because nobody controls them. And are external. Because they don't exist in the game-world.

OR

Mechanics. Like "GM fiat." Which is controlled by a person's agenda. And is external. Because the GM doesn't exist in the game-world.

Is this really so hard? Are dice arbitrary? Well, at base, so are all mechanics. Are dice exterior to the game-world, i.e. the Dream? Well, at base, so are all mechanics.

Sim calls for perfect arbitrariness -- perfect causality and authority handed to that --

...and for perfect interiority -- no need ever to leap out of the Dream.

I'm willing to debate the rest with you, John included, because that's about exactly what Sim is and how it works and what the limits of arbitrariness are and all that. But can we stop asking whether really, really, really dice are exterior to the game-world? Yes, except in some weird reflexive pseudo-pomo game where you play RPG gamers, the mechanics of your RPG are exterior to the game-world, and even then they would be which is why it's more interesting as a gedanken experiment than actually a thing for pseudo-intellectual idiots to do.

The mechanics and stuff are exterior. In all CA's. In all games. The Lumpley Principle does not actually run the universe. Suck it up.

[UNFAIR RANT OFF!]

This doesn't seem to apply to GNS Simulationism. GNS Simulationism allows that pre-created theme or genre may be used as principle by which the Dream should be patterned. Indeed, the whole point of GNS Simulationism may be to celebrate the imposition of those exterior aesthetics. Read Ron's post from Narrativism: not a Creative Agenda.

Well, yes; bringing in exterior agendas, principles, aesthetics, or whatever is perfectly legitimate so long as it isn't required. That's what Drama mechanics usually lean on, for example. If it's something selected deliberately for inclusion, whether it's that the Gods have decided that certain aesthetic principles of fairness or justice will reign, or that there are certain kinds of mechanics we will all agree not to look at within the Dream, that's not a problem.

This is, in fact, exactly where I started. I am interested in how Sim games do this. One easy way, an oldie but a goodie, is to say, "Dice? Those don't count in the Dream. Please do not look at them." That's baseline normal behavior, which is why I was asking about diceless games. Other games, like some of the stuff Eero and Jonathan mentioned, say, "Dice? Those are your character's magic special dice. When you character rolls those, he changes the nature of the universe, because he's wicked wicked cool." And so on. But these are devices for dealing with a basic problem: the mechanics are external to the Dream.

Is that clear?

A base principle in Sim is that a mechanic that says something like, "In this kind of situation, things should happen this way because it's cooler and more fun than that way," which is to say a strictly aesthetic mechanic, is not strictly speaking necessary; it's an option. In Nar, this is not an option: if it isn't Story Now, it isn't Nar. If it isn't Step On Up, it isn't Gam. The point about Sim is that the fundamental principle is Right To Dream, and you can add any damn rules you want as long as you don't violate that.

In talking system, I'm talking about stuff like this:
Ron, 'Simulationism: The Right To Dream' wrote: what matters is that within the system, causality is clear, handled without metagame intrusion and without confusion on anyone's part. That's why it's often referred to as "the engine," and unlike other modes of play, the engine, upon being activated and further employed by players and GM, is expected to be the authoritative motive force for the game to "go."

The game engine, whatever it might be, is not to be messed with. It is causality among the five elements of play. Whether everyone has to get the engine in terms of its functions varies among games and among groups, but recognizing its authority as the causal agent is a big part of play.


John wrote: I think in some respects that rgfa Simulationism is based on principles like this, though I'm not sure GNS Simulationism is. rgfa Simulationism is based on rejection of meta-game input, which is inherently impossible. i.e. The meta-game will always affect the in-game. However, those who use it feel that the effort of trying to reject it produces interesting and fun results.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with fun, and based on your account this is not something that differentiates GNS Sim from RGFA Sim. They don't like meta-game. But it sounds like RGFA Sim takes this as an aesthetic principle, while GNS Sim says that meta-game is an option but not a necessity nor a taboo.

The point is what I've highlighted above. Of course it's impossible. Yes, as you say, it's interesting and fun and worth doing. All I'm interested in here is how Sim designers and theorists have tried to get around the point that a basic principle of their gaming style is impossible.

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On 9/28/2004 at 3:03am, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hello,

Doink! Chris, I am sure you've read The Beeg Horseshoe Theory by the inestimable Jared Sorensen. Check it out again - if I'm reading you right, it's close to what you're saying.

Jared's Horseshoe: there is no Sim. There is a circle with a big gap which has a name for some reason. Attempts to play Simulationist end up being denial of other stuff without achieving any coherent new stuff.

And which, at the time, I agreed with. Later I decided so many folks insisting on it as a desirable aesthetic must be talking about something anyway.

And which, as well, is 100% the opposite of what Mike Holmes calls the Beeg Horseshoe.

Mike's Horseshoe: Sim sats at the branch which forks into Gamism and Narrativism and may be thought of as an independent dial.

All of the foregoing may be considered (a) impossibly sketchy and unqualified, according to the respective authors; and (b) biased by me in some way, according to anyone who doesn't like my summary.

But anyway, if anyone hasn't read that thread, they should. Very meaty initial post, even though the thread geeked out later. You can see the Mike Holmes stew boiling over right then, destined to hiss later, loudly, sometime last year. And check the dates, too, just to keep some perspective.

Best,
Ron

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On 9/28/2004 at 3:29am, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Yes, Ron, I've read the Beeg Horseshoe thread. I don't particularly agree with Jared, if that's what you're asking, though I find the idea interesting.

I'm sorry, but what is it you think I'm "saying"? I thought I was asking for some suggestions on where to look for interesting ideas about how Sim games that don't use dice work around a basic logical and practical problem. This has now become a fascinating discussion, which I hope will continue, but please don't saddle yourself with the illusion that this is some sort of weird argument I'm making about how GNS and the Big Model really work. It isn't. It's a request for suggestions about a theoretical problem I find interesting for quite different reasons.

If you care, my interests have to do with Sim as a mode of social interaction not entirely unlike mythology --- but if somebody wants to pick up that particular football please do it elsewhere.

Anyway, back to this nifty discussion that seems to have emerged....

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On 9/28/2004 at 11:55am, Sean wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

FWIW I think Chris' idea is different from the 'beeg horseshoe'. I think the idea of the 'beeg horseshoe' emerges because 95+% of real-life Sim play uses some low-intensity Gamism or Narrativism to keep things moving along to drive a Simulationist CA; Step on Up or Story as a peg on which to hang hard-core Exploration. But I also think there's such a thing as 'pure' Simulationist play, though it's very rare in practice, so neither Jared's nor Mike's BH hold any attraction for me. We've had lots of threads on that already though, so I'd tend to agree with Chris that this is not the place for more.

Chris, I think where I'm sitting with respect to Ron's previous disagreement with you is to regard it as a difference in ontology, if you like. Ron is most of the time a resolute social realist about the SIS - it's the transations between people that constitute it for him, I think. So he doesn't see mechanics as outside it in a fundamental way. Whereas I think you are tending to see the SIS in terms of what might be called the participant-perspective - how individuals are reacting to those transactions, processing them subjectively in their minds, visualizing things, etc.

I think that you're talking about the same thing in different ways - these are both valid approaches to shared imagined space IMO. But here's the interesting thing - mechanics are unproblematically part of that in Ron's sense, but only problematically so in yours.

That is, if you're playing Gamist or Narrativist, you want to do something with the SIS. Mechanics that help you do that thing are good, others are bad.

But if you're playing Simulationist, as you rightly indicate, what you want to 'do' with the SIS is just get into (certain elements of) it more, to explore it more and more deeply. Now where I agree with Ron is that there's no reason mechanics can't help you do this, for particular kinds of exploration. But where I think you're really on to something is to point out that the actual time spent handling that mechanic, as a real-world interaction, does cut against actual participation time in the SIS for the Simulationist. That's what I was suggesting with the 'schizophrenic' bit above.

I can think of some partial exceptions besides the postmodern one - frex, resolving combats with boffers, playing in costume, etc. Also, if you're just playing to find out what a system can do - pervy Sim - then the mechanics are what you're exploring. But still, I think you're on to something here in general. Most mechanics require real-world consciousness to process and the material of those mechanics are not part of where the FOCUSED exploration is occurring in the SIS. So if your CA is Sim then with virtually all mechanics ever devised, someone has to spend thought time away from the parts of the SIS you're focusing your exploration on to process them. As a general observation, that holds for Nar and Gam too, but the difference there is that it's OK to take a break from one focused part of exploration for the sake of what you're trying to do with that exploration.

If that's what you're saying, I think it's right, and very interesting. And not the same as Beeg Horseshoe.

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On 9/28/2004 at 7:27pm, John Kim wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

clehrich wrote:
John Kim wrote: I don't agree with this parallel. In most RPGs, I would say that negotiation is purely social, with no parallel to an arbitration system. A typical in-game mechanic is not an arbitration system at all -- it is a tool which produces a result. In Forge jargon, it doesn't assign credibility to a particular player, and thus it doesn't resolve disputes.

Mechanics are exterior to the SIS. Got it?

Mechanics. Like dice. Which are arbitrary. Because nobody controls them. And are external. Because they don't exist in the game-world.

OK, counter-rant here.

There is a distinction of "meta-game mechanics" and "in-game mechanics" which you are completely missing. Now, obviously, in-game mechanics are not as themselves parts of an imaginary space. However, they can be representational. A representational mechanic is just like any other representational element of the game. For example, a player speaking in-character is a representation of character speech. The player's speech is not itself imaginary. Rolling dice or speaking in-character are both meta-game actions which represent in-game actions. A representational mechanic may form part of the players' understanding of the game world -- even if it is not explicitly invoked.

In contrast, a meta-game mechanic is not representational. Ron defines them as "Techniques which do not require justification using in-game cause, in many cases including Author and Director Stances."

clehrich wrote: Are dice exterior to the game-world, i.e. the Dream? Well, at base, so are all mechanics.

Sim calls for perfect arbitrariness -- perfect causality and authority handed to that --

...and for perfect interiority -- no need ever to leap out of the Dream.

I'm willing to debate the rest with you, John included, because that's about exactly what Sim is and how it works and what the limits of arbitrariness are and all that.

OK, so how did you get that Sim calls for perfect interiority? Because what you're saying is that perfect Sim means dreaming by yourself in a sensory deprivation tank. i.e. No interruptions from anything external like player speech, dice, or mechanics.


clehrich wrote: I am interested in how Sim games do this. One easy way, an oldie but a goodie, is to say, "Dice? Those don't count in the Dream. Please do not look at them." That's baseline normal behavior, which is why I was asking about diceless games. Other games, like some of the stuff Eero and Jonathan mentioned, say, "Dice? Those are your character's magic special dice. When you character rolls those, he changes the nature of the universe, because he's wicked wicked cool." And so on. But these are devices for dealing with a basic problem: the mechanics are external to the Dream.

Is that clear?

OK, you need to explain your vision here better. Because you're saying that input from the GM or other players or anything else in the world is a "problem". I don't think that's true even as an extreme ideal of Sim.

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On 9/29/2004 at 1:58am, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Count me in with John, except I'm kind of puzzled and plaintive-looking.

Best,
Ron

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On 9/29/2004 at 2:04am, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

I'm going to assume that everyone has read M.J.'s rather fast-moving thread Splitting Simulationism?. If you haven't, please do so now. 'Kay?

Okay, let me restate some things from the top, and then I'll make specific replies.

Point 1. There is no argument, for me, embedded within what has been going on here. None. If I am misunderstanding Sim, that's interesting to me, because that complicates matters, but I have no agenda. I have no axe to grind... at the moment. When I do, believe me, you all will be the first to know. So if you are looking to demonstrate that my argument is wrong or misguided, you are beating the wrong set of bushes.

Point 2. What I mean about mechanics, and all I mean about mechanics, is that you and I, here and now, are capable of making a rough-and-ready distinction between mechanics and the Dream, i.e. the stuff that happens in SIS.

Point 3. Assuming we've gotten that far together, I note the following issue about CA's. Here on my left are Nar and Gam, for which the goal/ agenda/ shtick /interest /etc. is Story Now or Step On Up, respectively. The goal/agenda...../etc. for each has nothing directly to do with the Dream. Not the point at all. Now here on my right is Sim, for which the goal/agenda....etc. is the Dream, or at least, The Right To Dream. Got me?

Point 4 Now mechanics are a BIG part of how we keep the Dream going. In fact, a part of the Lumpley Principle is that System is exactly what keeps the Dream going, more or less. So in that sense, and in that sense alone, at the very least, system is outside the Dream. Right? See point 2 if you're still lost.

Point 5 If the CA is totally focused on Dream, or, hypothetically, if the CA were totally focused on mechanics/system, then you would start to move into a kind of recursive loop. If the CA has nothing to do with either, at base, then it doesn't matter. To put it familiarly, "rules-lite" doesn't make a game Nar, and "rules-heavy" doesn't make it Sim (or Gam, depending on the stereotype). But in Right To Dream, it matters very much indeed what sort of mechanics you use, because they influence how you are capable of interacting with and in fact thinking about the Dream.

Point 6 Which is not to say that Sim hates mechanics. Nor that Sim mechanics are weird. Nor that Sim can only use certain mechanics. It's simply to say that Sim has a necessary ambivalence toward mechanics. This manifests, incidentally, in such ideas as "no meta-game," or "speak only in character, that's how real gaming works," or the like.

I'm sorry, but wasn't this sort of embedded in your essay, Ron? I know you don't put it in quite these terms, but is anything here new? If so, what? Because I thought this was all long since decided.

----

Now, assuming Ron's answer is, "Yeah, pretty much," and given that I am NOT covering all that Sim is or is about....

This Sim ambivalence provokes Sim game-writers to construct rules (mechanics, system, pick your favorite) in such a way as to keep the ambivalence from rising up and getting in the way.

What strategies do they use? When it's not dice, and they can't gesture to tradition ("well, that's how we always did it, so there"), how do they do it? That is and was my question.

Forge Reference Links:
Topic 12860

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On 9/29/2004 at 2:25am, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Sean,

You're right, I don't think there's a fundamental disagreement with Ron. I certainly didn't intend there to be one. If you want to look at it as an ontological issue, that's fine with me.

But if you're playing Simulationist, as you rightly indicate, what you want to 'do' with the SIS is just get into (certain elements of) it more, to explore it more and more deeply. Now where I agree with Ron is that there's no reason mechanics can't help you do this, for particular kinds of exploration. But where I think you're really on to something is to point out that the actual time spent handling that mechanic, as a real-world interaction, does cut against actual participation time in the SIS for the Simulationist. That's what I was suggesting with the 'schizophrenic' bit above.
Yes, this is handling-time. The more time you spend on handling, the more potential there is for mechanics' getting in the way of the Dream. And I agree, SIS is of course constructed by mechanics; that's the Lumpley Principle.

And further, the style of mechanics can support or get in the way. This is why some of the examples cited by Jonathan and Eero and Ron are mechanics that are in some way included in the game. My own Shadows in the Fog plays with this, in that the Tarot cards have some sort of analogue within the SIS. And so on.

My interest is in these strategies. How do you downplay the potential rupture caused by mechanics?

Your point about "real-world processing" hits the nail on the head. The more of this you have to do, the less "SIS-processing", as it were, you can do. It's as simple as that.

I'm delighted that you think this is "on to something," but maybe I was over-reading Ron. Isn't this essentially explicit in "Simulationism: The Right To Dream"?

---

John,

The distinction between meta-game and in-game mechanics makes no difference, as far as I can tell. I do see the difference, but I don't see what it has to do with this set of issues. In-game mechanics are not, as you say, part of the SIS. They may be representational, and that is an interesting move toward the analogy between in-game and out-of-game, but I think we can all agree -- I hope -- that in-game mechanics are still at some level not part of the SIS. That's all I'm saying. What interests me is how some mechanics try to downplay the rupture.

What I mean by "perfect interiority" is simply that the ideal of "pure" Sim is one in which all mechanics are in-game, and all in-game mechanics are so deeply woven into the Dream that you can think them through your character and the Dream-world. That would be nice. That's sort of why Sim is ambivalent about mechanics, especially meta-game mechanics: they'd really rather not step out. Of course nobody much plays like this, because (a) it's impossible, and (b) they have other goals, i.e. aren't playing "pure" Sim but have other notions.

Let me take Ron's famous Star Trek example. One sense, at least, of "pure" Sim would be one in which you are Star Fleet officers in the Star Trek universe, and causality happens, just "as it really would." This is often called realism [cf. Hyphz's recent Actual Play thread about a GM who's into "realism" in D&D]. In that kind of Sim, you're not allowed to decide, as a player, to do X instead of Y because X would make a cooler story, because "he wouldn't do that." Thus all the various rantings and ravings about "my guy syndrome" and the like. I think that over time, more and more Sim players have added the Star Trek show to their sense of what is to be simulated, so that you can choose X over Y if it would make a more Star Trek-like story, but there are still story-types that can't happen because they're not how Star Trek "really goes." Do you see?

I do think that Ron periodically wants to stress this as a deal-breaker between Nar and Sim. If you say, "We're playing Star Trek, and it's just like the show, because everything happens just as it really would and we always get a really amazing story," this is bordering on the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast. When it's not that, what it probably is is Nar: your goal is Story Now, and you do it within the Star Trek universe.

As to sensory deprivation and whatnot, no. Absolutely not. There is a clear recognition that the SIS is not the real world, I think, and I don't know that anyone's claimed otherwise. You want a powerful experience within the Dream, but that doesn't mean you want actually to live within it as such. You want to imagine it with minimal filters.

Out of interest, do you suppose that every gamer who went to see The Lord Of The Rings, and I suspect just about every gamer went, did so simply for the story? How many also wanted to project themselves into the fantasy world? Is that really so odd? Isn't this why it's called "escapist literature"?

---

I really think some folks here are over-thinking this. You're convinced that I'm making some kind of very subtle distinction or challenge. If I am, I'm not aware of it. My sense is that Ron and I are on the same page, although we have different opinions about the implications. If I've said something new, could you all please point it out to me? Because I really don't think I have.

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On 9/29/2004 at 2:28am, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Whoops, x-posted with Ron.

Ron, am I being clearer now? Am I actually getting something flat wrong here? My plan was simply to deal with what you said in your essay, but if I've gone way off the rails I'd like to hear about it.

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On 9/29/2004 at 4:06am, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hello,

Well, either you escaped from the mother ship and killed the alien who was impersonating you ... or you altered what you were saying ... or I just grabbed a clue.

I still think the pack of us needs to keep thrashing it out, but we're getting somewhere. A thread about Simulationist play that accomplishes something? Let's hope!

Best,
Ron

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On 9/29/2004 at 4:16am, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Ron,

Can you follow up on that? I mean, can you sort of explicate a little bit what you thought we were all confused about or something? I'm genuinely lost as to what all of this is about, since as I say, I didn't think I was saying anything whatsoever that was new.

Am I?

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On 9/29/2004 at 5:03am, C. Edwards wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hey Chris,

I've been dredging my memory in an attempt to recall any games (not just Sim facilitating) that don't use dice. Most of the ones that I'm familiar with have already been mentioned. I'll just add Soap and Active Exploits to the list. As far as I know, Active Exploits is still a free PDF. Soap isn't free any longer, but it's way cheap.

On another note, it strikes me that learning a new resolution system mirrors in a way being a toddler in the in-game environment in regards to how much effort and thought you must put towards the (game imposed) physics of the world in order to accomplish what you want to do. In the case of a toddler, that is often just walking without falling. And, like the toddler, the longer we are exposed to that particular physics the more natural its use.

While the "invisible engine" is likely an impossibility, between finding a resolution method that draws from and enhances the SIS and the eventual transparency of use, I think that it's possible to get as close as one can get to that ideal with the tools currently at hand.

-Chris

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On 9/29/2004 at 8:39am, Jonathan Walton wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Maybe we can clarify this a bit by talking about what Exploration of System is like in Chris' Ideal Sim Game?

So, Exploration of Character, Setting, Situation, Color and the like aren't a problem in Chris' Ideal Sim Game. They are all easily retconned into the Dream with no real awkwardness. Even the communication stuff that John was talking about (which is part of System), players interrupting and discussing what's happening, all works to facilitate the Dream, since the point is NOT to Dream by yourself, but to share the Dream (and control of the Dream) with others.

However, what Chris is saying, I think, (and my own experience agrees with him here), is that, sometimes, Exploration of System seems not to be the kind of Exploration demanded by Story Now. You don't want to explore that particular area of System. You find it tedioius and uninteresting and it doesn't support the Dream at all. But in order to play the game as written, or as determined by the Social Contract, you find yourself pushed into handling bits of System. This is a subjective aesthetic ideal here, but I agree that it's common enough to be worth talking about. There are so many games designed to handle just this problem. Fudge, particularly, stands out to me as being particularly verbal about this.

Fudge looks at numbers and sees System that it doesn't want to deal with. But it looks at Singing: Excellent and sees System worth Exploring. It looks at dice rolls that give a boolean fail/succeed result and sees System is doesn't like. But it looks at a result like "Good" or "Terrible" and sees something that's much easier to keep the Dream moving forward in an mostly unbroken fashion. It even standardizes the number of dice rolled, so nobody has to even think about what mechanics might be required.

There is, then, an effort it some branches of purist Sim design to not ever have to think about OOC issues at all. You dream a deep Dream, much like the heavy Immersionist tactics of our Nordic neighbors, and this Dream is somehow supported by an (impossible?) invisible system, which handles everything in a rational manner but doesn't require anyone to think about metagame issues.

Chris, am I close?

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On 9/29/2004 at 1:48pm, Sean wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

'Ontological' was probably the wrong word - Heidegger flashback there. But I think what I was getting at was clear enough from context.

I sort of think Chris' central point got clarified, and it might be time to move on towards examples.

John Kim suggested that some resolution systems can be 'representational' in the same way that e.g. roleplaying is 'representational'. This is a powerful idea and exactly what would be needed to overcome the very real (IMO) phenomenon Chris is pointing to.

However, I'm not seeing very many good examples except to some degree the traditional ones where you invest things with color (special dice, costumes, whatever) so that even while you're spending time on mechanics you've at least got dream-evoking stuff in the background as support.

Here's one that might work: if you've got a game with magic scrolls, you hand out actual scrolls to characters, with spells, curses, maps, etc. on them, prepared in advance. Then opening the scroll itself activates the curse, gets you the new spell, whatever. That's a pretty minor one, but it does seem to qualify as a trick that would count as representational a la John and would not break the dream as per Chris. But such methods are relatively few and far between, it seems to me.

I note with some amusement that all four U of C vets are heavily represented in this thread. Maybe we should take it over to Jimmy's?

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On 9/29/2004 at 2:08pm, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Chris Edwards wrote: On another note, it strikes me that learning a new resolution system mirrors in a way being a toddler in the in-game environment in regards to how much effort and thought you must put towards the (game imposed) physics of the world in order to accomplish what you want to do. In the case of a toddler, that is often just walking without falling. And, like the toddler, the longer we are exposed to that particular physics the more natural its use.
Nice analogy! I like that. It's a nice complement to my notion of this as tradition. I think both are at work at once. For example, when someone new to RPGs is put into a traditional die-based game, he may find the mechanics system difficult and annoying because it is new -- like a toddler, he hasn't really mastered the techniques required. If that same new gamer asks others at the table, "Why dice?" I think that a fair number of gamers would tend to reply, "Because that's how it's done," particularly in the old days before Drama and Karma systems became more common; this is in effect saying, "It's traditional; that's why."

Jonathan Walton wrote: So, Exploration of Character, Setting, Situation, Color and the like aren't a problem in Chris' Ideal Sim Game. They are all easily retconned into the Dream with no real awkwardness. Even the communication stuff that John was talking about (which is part of System), players interrupting and discussing what's happening, all works to facilitate the Dream, since the point is NOT to Dream by yourself, but to share the Dream (and control of the Dream) with others.
I was never very clear on these sub-types of Exploration, but this sounds right.
However, what Chris is saying, I think, (and my own experience agrees with him here), is that, sometimes, Exploration of System seems not to be the kind of Exploration demanded by Story Now.
Did you mean Right To Dream? My sense is that Right To Dream has a tendency toward ambivalence about mechanics, I guess about Exploration of System, whereas I don't think that's particularly true of Story Now or Step On Up.
You don't want to explore that particular area of System. You find it tedioius and uninteresting and it doesn't support the Dream at all. But in order to play the game as written, or as determined by the Social Contract, you find yourself pushed into handling bits of System. This is a subjective aesthetic ideal here, but I agree that it's common enough to be worth talking about. There are so many games designed to handle just this problem. Fudge, particularly, stands out to me as being particularly verbal about this.
Thanks for providing a nice concrete example. I've only glanced at Fudge, but yes, I think that's the point precisely. The whole idea is to create a mechanical system that won't get in the way, which necessarily means that for that set of game designers and players, mechanics often do get in the way.
.... It even standardizes the number of dice rolled, so nobody has to even think about what mechanics might be required.
Yes: "nobody has to even think about" mechanics is precisely the point.
There is, then, an effort it some branches of purist Sim design to not ever have to think about OOC issues at all. You dream a deep Dream, much like the heavy Immersionist tactics of our Nordic neighbors, and this Dream is somehow supported by an (impossible?) invisible system, which handles everything in a rational manner but doesn't require anyone to think about metagame issues.
By pointing to Deep Immersion, I think you're hitting the nail on the head. I don't think that Deep Immersion is a necessity in Sim, by any means, but it is I think true that Sim lends itself to that goal more readily. One reason for this is that Sim does tend to want to avoid OOC mechanics, and if you want Deep Immersion that's the way to go.
Chris, am I close?
Oh yeah, definitely.

Think for a sec about all those assumptions that newcomers to the Forge, ones who have mostly played Sim-type games (coherent or incoherent), tend to bring with them.

• Immersion
• Emphasis on IC vs. OOC
• Deterministic mechanics
• Realism
• Meta-game stuff, particularly Director Stance narration, is cheating
• ... and so on

I find it interesting that this complex is relatively consistent. I think, in fact, that this is part of what Sim is about. Not that these things are inflexible or required in Sim, but that they are implied by the concepts built into its very core. And I think one of the things people find so exciting and liberating about Nar and Gam play is that these same things are absolutely not required.

Consider how many folks first approach GNS and think, "Gamism? That's being a munchkin weenie, I hate that." But then, quite commonly, they learn that they don't have to feel that way, and can in fact let their hair down and play with the system and try to win and generally Step On Up. And that's very exciting and liberating, because they've previously thought this was inherently a bad thing.

Again, how many see Nar the first time and think, "Wait, you're going to do something your character wouldn't do just to make a story?" And it can take quite a long time to see that "something my guy wouldn't do" isn't necessary, that Story Now and meta-mechanics (which aren't the same thing) don't necessarily violate character. But why the dread of violating character? Who said that the character was inviolable?

I think these things come from the nature of Sim, not from incoherence or confused traditions of Heartbreakers. I do think that this means that Sim is intrinsically a little incoherent (not in Ron's technical sense), but that the incoherence just drives people to build new systems and new techniques for getting around the issues.

What Ron's looking for in Nar and Gam, I think, is an efficient, clean way to produce exactly what you want, no messing about. And in Nar and Gam, he's right: you can do this, and do it well. See all those wonderful examples around here. Notice that in InSpectres, for example, the mechanics do not get in the way, not just because they're simple but because they're not at issue in the basic goals. Same in Sorcerer and MLwM and so forth.

In Sim, however, I don't think you can win this battle. What you can do is defer the issues, come up with strategies to make yourself not focus on them in play. And these strategies work by hiding the mechanics, making them deterministic, and flinging the player as deeply into the Dream as possible (not Immersion, necessarily, but deep).

From this basic strategic problem, one can in effect predict:

• Very detailed settings
• Mechanics that are called "realistic"
• Discussions of mechanics that explain why they are the best ever
• Explanations of gaming that say it is completely natural, a built-in human behavior
• One True Way-ism
• Heartbreakers
• Concern about "cheating"
• Focus on non-violation of character
• Focus on IC-Now, as it were
• Interest in Immersion
• Assertion that all this produces great stories
• Assertion that manipulating System is munchkinism
• The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast

And we could come up with more, of course.

What interests me is how Sim naturally lends itself to all these things, whereas Gam and Nar really do not. Not that Sim is bad, but that these things arise from the nature of Sim, not from people being caught up in "bad old days" gaming.

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On 9/29/2004 at 2:16pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hello,

In the last two or three posts, Chris, you have effectively shown me that I did manage to say what I wanted to say in the three supportive essays. Yes, we are agreeing, or rather, you are agreeing with the author of those essays in full. (Hats, remember. Trying to be clear.)

Now, all of my confusions and objections earlier in the thread, especially as they accorded with Sean's and John's posts, stand as posted ... but that's earlier in the thread, not now, and not toward your last two posts.

Best,
Ron

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On 9/29/2004 at 2:58pm, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Well, I'm glad we're on the same page again. I don't think I shifted ground here, but maybe I wasn't putting things clearly before. I was beginning to wonder if I had my head up an orifice!

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On 10/1/2004 at 3:58am, M. J. Young wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Thank you, Chris, for calling attention to my other thread; I needed to get that resolved sufficiently to consider this.

In part, I think I disagree with your premise; but that's not a fatal objection to the discussion, which I think is quite viable. What I think you're noting is the degree to which an immersive experience is desired as part of play. Disruptive mechanics break that immersive experience, and so efforts to create immersive games must find ways to avoid such disruptions. Where I disagree primarily is the equating of immersive play with simulationism; and I disagree in both directions. Thus, as you note, there is simulationist play in which immersion is completely irrelevant and thus in which any complexity of mechanical rules is quite acceptable to the degree that it better confirms the input through the output (if I am correctly using Ron's phrase). I would also suggest that highly immersive narrativist play occurs (Marco's contention of his own play, which I think correct), as well as highly immersive gamist play (I've been in such games). Thus your interest lies not so much in simulationism as in immersive techniques, and the desire to design systems such that they do not disrupt immersion.

At least, that's how I understand it.

I think it's been at least hinted already that familiarity supports immersion, even with mechanics that seem rather disruptive. There are systems in which the players quickly grasp the meanings of die rolls, knowing what rolls are good or bad without thinking about them. In Multiverser's referee's hints, we call attention to the fact that in ongoing play a referee should be able to spot whether four out of five rolls are pass or fail without crunching any numbers at all, because only about twenty percent are going to be close enough to check. Similarly, when I roll a 3d10 general effects roll, I know the means, the extremes, and a couple of points between these. Thus for example if I roll 12 (low is good) I know that the chart says "Good enough"; and if I roll a 10, I might not know what the chart actually says, but I know it's a bit better than that. In a sense, we teach ourselves the language of the game mechanics. D&D players speak of rolling a natural twenty, and that has meaning to them. Multiverser players will talk about the time they had the GE 3, or say they got a GE 25 or something, as part of the language of the game.

This sort of thing is disruptive to the degree that you need to break from the game world to the real world to understand it. My contention, however, is that the numbers generated by the dice are themselves part of the game world, as the players understand it--as are the probabilities of success. Thus "You have a 68% chance of hitting him" is the answer to the question "How good is this guy at defending himself?" and "You're down to five hit points" is the answer to "How badly hurt am I?"

In my ADR's and Surv's materials, I provide information for pre-3E D&D games that explains how to calculate your best weapons, taking into account adjustments to hit, damage, and number of attacks. Some people think that kind of approach takes the fun out of play. I don't. I think that being able to say that I will do an average of 4.53 points of damage per round to this opponent with my sword versus 5.68 with my bow at short range makes up for the fact that I can't actually see the opponent or feel how easy or difficult it is to fight with the imagined weapons. These numbers are in a very real sense properties of the weapons known to my character translated into a language that conveys to me what I need to know.

If you play a video game, you're looking at a screen that presents an image. The computer or console doesn't really know what that image looks like the same way that you do. It has a mathematical model telling it the color and position of each pixel, how they move in relation to each other, and what impact those movements have on other pixels on the screen. In a very similar way, the mechanics of the game are a mathematical model of the game world which reproduces in the minds of the players certain aspects of the nature thereof that are not so easily described without the use of numbers. I think many gamers expect this and are accustomed to it. The numbers define the world for them. The Onion's old gag about Bill Gates granting himself a 19 charisma demonstrates that within our gamer culture we're quite accustomed to defining the world numerically and grasping what that means, and this without seriously disrupting our feeling of being there, often rather enhancing that feeling because having the numbers in our minds we have a more precise conception of what it is we have agreed to imagine.

A lot of gamers do not like Fudge because of the descriptors. The impression I have is that these gamers think that "good" is fuzzy, and does not adequately inform their imaginations to the same degree as "14 on 3d6". The latter is a practiced familiarity with a specific language, but the former is an effort to make established general terms function as specific ones.

Thus the trick in all this is to work out what is disruptive and to whom.

--M. J. Young

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On 10/1/2004 at 10:01am, contracycle wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

I'm a bit ambivalent about the ambivalence.

Lets imagine the perfect sim game according to the claim that the utilisation of resolution systems, dice, challenge the Dream. This perfect game then would have all its "rules" invisibly embedded in the setting. They would be inherent to the setting as it exists. They would then appear as true physics in the SIS, I think: they would be the rules governing the way the game space moves and acts.

But then, if you were to immerse into this game space with physics-like rules, how would you distinguish between this game world and the real world? I don't think you could - if the mechanisms really were that invisible. But given the content of most SIS's and the dramatic conventions that require a pile of bodies by final curtain, this SIS may well be absolutely terrifying.

In that light I feel the externality of the resolution systems to the game space serves a function, makes the game space safe. It is precisely becuase the game space exists as a consensual construction that denies its objective reality, and thus its capacity to terrify or injure. We can, instead, explore these topics from safe persepctive, even when undergoing immersion to a substantial degree.

It occure to me now that I'm making an argument here somewhat like that of the safewords in gaming thread; I'm suggesting that the control system, whether that be dice-and-charsheet or mouse-and-monitor, serves to bound the game space and project it out of reality.

A perfect simulation game would be so perfect that I don't think we could experience it as a game; we would only experience it as a reality. And while I think that a Trek-style holodeck might be a perfect vehicle for the exploration of sundry subject matter, I think it would be much less a game and rather unlike RPG as we know it.

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On 10/1/2004 at 1:32pm, Vaxalon wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

What was that movie, I think Martin Sheen was in it, where he signed on for some freaky entertainment thing that involved him getting chased around in the real world?

I don't want my sim THAT sim, thanks...

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On 10/1/2004 at 4:37pm, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Please note that this is a very long post!

References:
why immersion is a tar baby
immersion and story
The Provisional Glossary on “Immersion”

M.J.,

When I read your post, my first thought was, “No, this isn’t about immersion.” But after reading back over these threads, I think actually it is. The problem is that most of us are using “immersion” in a relatively narrow sense, whereas these threads listed work toward a much broader notion. I’m not quite sure which you mean, so I’m going to be guessing a bit here.

To my mind, immersion is first of all negatively defined: it’s not artifice. John Kim follows up on this in the second thread above to focus on “plausibility” and “consistency.” Extending outward, you could read the Sim emphasis on causality as an emphasis on immersion, because the point is to avoid violating plausibility or consistency, which artifice tends to do because in our normal experience of the world such artifice is extremely abnormal (hand of God and so on).

But for some reason, my mind rebels against seeing immersion this way; for me, immersion means a fairly extreme “in the moment” kind of thing, supported by absolute IC perspective and the like. If I recall correctly, the Turku (sp.?) manifesto is about this kind of immersion. It’s also, incidentally, something quite big in the Performance Studies/Ritual Studies literature dominated by Richard Schechner and Ronald Grimes; I happen to think it has nothing to do with ritual, but for those interested I mention them as potentially interesting.

In order to continue intelligently here, I’m going to refer to this extreme form of “in the moment” “in the character” immersion as Immersion, with a capital I. If I seem to be totally off the rails in what follows, check to be sure we’re using Immersion the same way; if we are, then I may well be off the rails.

I don’t think Sim is necessarily about Immersion. I don’t think it’s an uncommon goal, and I do think it’s particularly common in Sim, but it’s definitely a subset of the broader type. I am interested in why it’s so common as a Sim goal, but that’s subsidiary to my main interest. And I think your objection here is that you think I’m saying that Sim is normally pushing toward Immersion, which is contrary to your experience. If I get them right, contracycle and Fred (Vaxalon) have the same objection.

So let me clarify. This is going to be pretty provisional, because it starts touching on what I’m working on, not what I’ve been posting thus far. I do think that the thread has moved in this direction, so it’s not drift (besides, I started this thread), but if others think this belongs as its own thread I’m amenable.

- - -
The Dream, which is at base the point of Sim, is something we all have to work together to keep afloat. Because it’s something we create primarily in our imaginations, it can be violated and broken quite easily. Lots of techniques of various kinds are used to help us keep it going; more importantly, such techniques are used to strengthen and support the Dream, to make it a more powerful Dream for everyone at the table.

But “powerful Dream” doesn’t necessarily mean one in which we Immerse. What it means is one in which we can explore freely, without constantly feeling the interference of the various necessary artifices that keep the thing going. To use an analogy, we’re exploring an exciting and vibrant new world, and we don’t want to turn in the wrong direction and suddenly realize that the thing is like an old Hollywood set, all façades with nothing behind them; we don’t want to go through the wrong door and find a back lot and a sign saying, “Pardon our dust! Under construction. We apologize for the inconvenience.” That breaks the Dream, because it forces us to admit very powerfully that the whole thing is artificial. We know that, of course, but we don’t really want our noses rubbed in it.

Now one way to avoid this experience is to Immerse, trusting always that the GM has built a complete set and that he’s going to keep the cameramen out of our line of vision. That’s fine, of course, but it’s not the only way.

Another way is to decide, in advance, that certain things are invisible. So long as these aren’t huge, this isn’t a problem. We can decide that if we catch sight of a sound boom for just a second, it’s not going to “count.” And because we decided that in advance, it’s not a problem.

Another way is to decide, in advance, certain things we’re not going to do. We know that only five buildings in the set are complete, and that the rest are façades, so we agree in advance that we’re not going to go into any but those five buildings.

Now all of this is analogy, but I hope it’s reasonably clear. Let’s get back to gaming and just use the analogy for clarification.

The first point is the distinction between player and character. The player can decide not to notice things, but in Sim that’s difficult for the character, because the character lives in a causal and consistent universe. So when my character walks into the saloon in the Wild West town, the character actually encounters a living saloon; the player knows that there isn’t anything through that back door, and won’t be anything unless and until the character walks through it, but the character doesn’t know this. This is the point about the Dream being a shared experience: until what’s behind the back door enters the shared space (SIS), it isn’t there. But the character does not know this. The character assumes that there is something back there, and simply decides whether it matters or not to his current situation.

The next point is something I talked about long ago in my Not Lectures on Theory thread. When there is a disjuncture between what the player expects and what the character encounters, there is some potential for Dream-breaking, but there is also a lot of potential for Dream-supporting. That sounds paradoxical, but here’s how it works. When Doc, the Wild West gunslinger, walks up to the bar, the player may be thinking, “Okay, Wild West saloon, got it, so there’s this fat sweaty guy behind the bar, so I’ll talk to him and get a shot of rye.” But when the player says something about this, the GM says, “Nope, the bartender is a young, pretty woman in a gingham dress. She smiles at you. ‘Get you something, stranger?’” Now there is a conflict between what the player expected and what the character encountered. The character didn’t have this problem: he saw the lady when he walked in. But the player has just had his expectations challenged. The thing is, so long as the challenge isn’t so strong as to break the Dream, this actually strengthens the Dream; very simply, you might say that by adding a lot of color and detail to the setting, this little change has fleshed out the saloon as not just a stock location but as a specific, real place. If the challenge to expectation is really strong, that’s a problem: in a reasonably normal Wild West game, for example, if the bartender turns out to be a 60-foot giant robot, the Dream starts to shatter. (If you care, I talked about this previously in terms of semiotic logic, as abduction and deduction.)

Okay, so what does all this have to do with mechanics?

What I’m saying is that there are a lot of mechanics, in a very broad sense of the word (see also the current discussion of play and design), by which we players work out how not to notice things, how to avoid violating the Dream. In Sim, this is critically important, because your character cannot be the one to make these decisions: the character must live in a causal, consistent universe. So there are these strategies Sim designers and players use to ensure that the conflicts that necessarily occur between player expectation and character experience produce a stronger Dream rather than shattering it.

One important aspect of these strategies is to keep handling-time down. The more time the player has to spend dealing with issues outside the character’s experience, the harder it is to maintain that clear sense of what the character is experiencing.

Another aspect is to keep the mechanics focused on what’s going on within the character’s experience. As you say, M.J., a die roll that says, “This is whether the character spots the guy in the corner drawing the gun” is a nice efficient way to do this. But a die roll that says, “This is whether this scene is going to be a gunfight or a love story” isn’t, because it’s not a character question but rather a player one. In Nar, for example, you could do exactly that, no problem, because the point is Story Now, not Dream. But in Sim, this would be a problem.

One strategy you can take is to have the mechanics colored by the character’s world. The dice are magic bones, you use karma in a world like Amber, and so on. All those examples people mentioned. This is helpful because it makes the mechanics slide toward being part of the Dream.

Here’s why I was asking about diceless systems, though. Let’s suppose Doc is in that saloon chatting up the pretty bartender. The GM announces, “You know, I think this is boring, I think a gunfight would be a better story. So forget the bartender, okay? This guy behind you draws a gun, and you just catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye. What do you do?” My point is that this is a violation of Sim principles, although it isn’t necessarily of Nar or Gam (it’s a pretty extreme way to do things, but it’s plausible).

In Sim, this imposes a strong artifice that the player cannot ignore, because the reason for this artifice is an external aesthetic principle, not internal causality of the Dream. If the GM says, “Roll dice. Good roll! Okay, you see out of the corner of your eye that the big lug in the corner is going for his gun,” there’s no basic problem. The presumption is that there is some reason for this behavior, and probably it’s going to emerge later on what this is all about. Maybe the guy in the corner is in love with the bartender, maybe he’s the brother of some guy Doc killed, maybe it’s a case of mistaken identity, whatever. But there is cause and effect here: this isn’t just a random event that happened because we’ve decided in advance that gunfights are cooler than chatting.

To come full circle and wind up this exceedingly long post, I think dice are often used mechanically for a few reasons:

• They’re completely arbitrary, not determined by an exterior principle
• They’re potentially quick, clear, and determinate
• They’re traditional, so we’re used to ignoring them as artifice

What I’m interested in is how Sim designers strategically produce these same effects without the benefit of tradition, and in fact try to improve on them. So for example, I think one of the reasons some Sim games announce that their diceless system is better than dice-using systems is because, they claim, you don’t have to ignore them the way you do dice. This isn’t exactly true, but the claim is that without dice the Dream is purer and there is less potential for handling violations. And from there, you start saying that without dice and with your mechanics colored in a way that fits the universe of the Dream, your system is The Best Way. And so on.

Ultimately this projects a hypothetical “pure” Sim, never in practice achievable, in which the mechanics are completely arbitrary, fully determinate, and 100% built into the Dream universe. That really does probably lend itself to Immersionist manifestoes, which is probably why Immersion is so much more common as a goal for Sim games.

Last but not least, I’m interested in the fact that such a “pure” Sim is not actually achievable, whereas an ideal of Nar or Gam actually is achievable. This produces all these strategies to get around the problem, and I’m interested in what those are and how and why they arise.

Contracycle mentions that an actually achieved “pure” Sim like this would in fact be indistinguishable from reality. True – that’s why it’s not achievable. To go farther, contracycle mentions that this is really a sort of scary goal, because it has the capacity to hurt us in a way that we probably don’t want; Fred emphasizes this strongly. I agree, actually. But I think that the edge of possibility, in which the capacity to hurt gets damn close to real, in which the capacity to hurt emotionally is very real, is one of the most powerful and exciting things about Sim. It makes playing risky, but the potential rewards increase.

Does that clarify matters? Sorry to go on so long, but there’s a lot in your posts (here and on your other thread) to deal with.

Forge Reference Links:
Topic 4640
Topic 8022
Topic 10283
Topic 12906

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On 10/1/2004 at 6:53pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hiya,

Chris, what do you think of this idea:

1. Achieving Sim play just as you describe, and as we can see over and over in game designs which purport to be "transparent" only through reducing handling time. Fudge is a great, great example. Usually associated with phrases like "storytelling" or "getting to the story" or "not letting system get in the way."

2. Achieving Sim play by focusing more on representative mechanics, rather than less, and aiming for an elegance of among-mechanics causes. This elegance is intended to act as a tool among the participants for the keeping the Dream afloat, because it "works" in the sense of a set of imaginary physics. (Note: I use the term "physics" loosely, because the mechanics can be about anything.) Best example that comes to mind at the moment is Pocket Universe, although EABA can certainly go this way.

My claim is that #2 is indeed the same overriding aesthetic goal as #1, but wants to get there through embracing representative tools, whereas #2 finds those tools distracting.

Best,
Ron

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On 10/1/2004 at 7:46pm, Marco wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Ron Edwards wrote: Hiya,

Chris, what do you think of this idea:

1. Achieving Sim play just as you describe, and as we can see over and over in game designs which purport to be "transparent" only through reducing handling time. Fudge is a great, great example. Usually associated with phrases like "storytelling" or "getting to the story" or "not letting system get in the way."

2. Achieving Sim play by focusing more on representative mechanics, rather than less, and aiming for an elegance of among-mechanics causes. This elegance is intended to act as a tool among the participants for the keeping the Dream afloat, because it "works" in the sense of a set of imaginary physics. (Note: I use the term "physics" loosely, because the mechanics can be about anything.) Best example that comes to mind at the moment is Pocket Universe, although EABA can certainly go this way.

My claim is that #2 is indeed the same overriding aesthetic goal as #1, but wants to get there through embracing representative tools, whereas #2 finds those tools distracting.

Best,
Ron


I'm not Chris--but one of my longest standing observations (especially wrt GNS Sim) has been that I think The Window or Theatrix (for example) and GURPS (for example, I don't know EABA or Pocket Universe) have extremely different "aesthetic goals."

Although I may not know preciselywhat you mean by an aesthetic goal, I think that the play of these games, the mindset of the players and the reasons for choosing one over the other are extremely and distinctly different.

-Marco

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On 10/2/2004 at 5:34pm, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Ron,

Let me be sure I've got this right. #1 is "transparency" as an approach. #2 is "representative mechanics" as an approach.

My claim is that #2 is indeed the same overriding aesthetic goal as #1, but wants to get there through embracing representative tools, whereas #2 finds those tools distracting.
So "representative" has the same goal as "transparent", but wants to achieve is through representative tools, whereas "transparent" finds those distracting.

I'm assuming, by the way, that the last #2 is supposed to be #1; if not, I have honestly no idea what you're saying.

Okay, assuming that, I'm still confused. You started by asking me what I think of "this idea." Which? The division into "transparency" and "representative" as ways of achieving Sim goals? The particular relationship between these two points? I'm not trying to be pissy or something, but I genuinely do not know what you're getting at.

I'm also not sure why these two things aren't both claims to transparency, but maybe that was your point?

Sorry, I think my brain is running slow at the moment.

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On 10/4/2004 at 2:09am, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hello,

Couple posts to respond to.

1. Marco, quick clarifier: I do not suggest that either The Window or Theatrix is any sort of Sim exemplar in game design at all. Far from it. I tried to explain how both, in my view, go all kerflooey in actual play. That's about all I can say about either in GNS terms. In line with Mike Holmes' correct and all-too-rarely heard points, all-kerflooey play is not Sim.

2. Chris, I think I did get the #1-#2 mixed up. Anyway, I was hopin' that my post would be easy and fun, but my impression now is that nothing in this thread is going to be either.

What I'm driving at is that I get your point about Sim play being an unreachable ideal if "system" is intended to produce raw experiential contact with the Dream.

However, I am now looking at the common and well-known attempt to construct the Dream using "system" composed of representations of its causal bits. This bit is about (um) range modifiers of one's likelihood to hit a target. This other bit is about, oh, how many years one must age one's character to represent a stint as a merchant marine. And so on.

My claim, which I have no doubt will raise cries of rage from those who really like one or the other, is that these ways to play have a lot in common and will suffer from the same crisis (the one you're describing).

They sure as hell don't look the same. On the one hand, you have the whole "immersive" thing goin' on, quite likely with in-character hats (real ones) and accents and so on. On the other, you have these engineer-lookin' guys who have painstakingly worked out just how a phaser functions.

So yeah, that was my point: they are both attempts at "transparency," so-called, and oriented toward making the Dream "happen," which is to say, doomed. I am currently under the impression that you and I are agreeing.

(As techniques on their own, they are not doomed, but might be enjoyed for what they are, or put in service of some other CA. That's a whole 'nother issue.)

Best,
Ron

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On 10/4/2004 at 2:46am, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Ron,

Oh, I get it! Yes yes yes yes yes. We are totally in agreement. Sorry, we clearly just think about this in such different ways that we can't even tell when we're on the same page.

Ron wrote: Anyway, I was hopin' that my post would be easy and fun, but my impression now is that nothing in this thread is going to be either.
No fair. You swapped the numbers so I got all lost. Besides, I'm having fun. Easy, well, no, but I tend not to connect fun with easy -- kind of like a hooker is easy but not as much fun as.... Sorry. Anyway.

Yes. I'm having a lot of trouble expressing what we are in agreement about, because it always seems to come out like I'm talking about a problem with hard-core immersion. But as you just pointed out in your post, it's not about immersion; it's about Sim.

Furthermore, the "problem" here should not -- but might well -- "raise cries of rage from those who really like one or the other." This problem seems to me an exciting source of tension and power in Sim, not something that makes it suck. But I do find fascinating the fact that it is the Sim crowd who are most insistent that what they are doing is coherent. You don't hear a lot of that in Nar, because it's about cool stories. In Gam, it's about really elegant design and balance and rocking fights and stuff. But the Sim gang want to stress that their way is somehow more cohesive and comprehensive, thus all that tedious crap about "one true way" and so on.

Anyway, yes. Totally. M.J., if you're out there, is Ron making this clear? I'm not, I realize, because I'm thinking about too many things at once, but is he?

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On 10/4/2004 at 12:40pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hello,

Got three things!

1. High five for Chris, and also to Neel (neelk) - I just re-read the whole thread and discovered his brilliant gem phase: "artifice to artifact."

I'm thinking that one of these approaches were discussing is best understood as "ignore the artifice, because as long as we keep our gaze fixed on the desired artifact, it'll happen." The other approach might be "keep tuning the artifice, because when we finally get it right, the artifact will emerge." Sort of the New Ager vs. the Engineer, both wanting the same thing.

Whereas in my experience anyway, Sim play works nicely when the participants embrace a certain metagame responsibility for what they're up to, instead of idealizing some forrm of "emergence" to come. H'm ... empowerment seminars for Sim, anyone?

2. In the hopes of staying on-topic for the thread, I suggest investigating the rich tradition of Amber play, especially the sort which borders on LARP and focuses tightly on very colorful characters with very elaborate relationships to canonical characters and setting elements. I'm also interested in quite a bit of Cthulhu play, especially at conventions with highly experienced GMs, in which I suspect the dice do absolutely nothing relevant to play except make rattling noises on the table.

3. Forgot #3.

[ah! editing in a bit later, after I remembered: anyone who is interested in the problematic issues of the Simulationist Creative Agenda, for any medium, needs to read Dream Sequence, which is one of the collections from the comic Finder, by Carla Speed McNeil. This is fundamental reading for the topic, although I didn't discover it until last year.]

Best,
Ron

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On 10/4/2004 at 11:35pm, M. J. Young wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Chris asked if I was getting it. I think so.

There is Group I Simulationists, whom we might dare call immersionists or virtualists, who want to find a way to escape the interruptions caused by mechanics as much as possible so that they can experience the dream with a minimum of "reality interference".

There is Group II Simulationists, who are dedicated to increasingly complex rules systems that attempt to emulate every nuance of the world, in the hope that when the system is working perfectly the dream will flow without any interruption; it would seem to me that the sort of interruption feared here is that someone would not know what to do, and would make something up that didn't feel right, so the answer is to be certain that the system answers everything and no one is ever left floundering for an answer.

There is still at least Group III Simulationists, for whom mechanics are a tool for crafting the world and the characters, who aren't particularly worried about whether they "get in the way of the experience" because to some degree they are part of the experience--like being able to watch the puppet show from behind the curtain, and see how the puppets work.

I think.

Sorry I don't have time to think about it too much more. Got to be somewhere soon.

--M. J. Young

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On 10/11/2004 at 11:13am, contracycle wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

clehrich wrote:
My interest is in these strategies. How do you downplay the potential rupture caused by mechanics?

Your point about "real-world processing" hits the nail on the head. The more of this you have to do, the less "SIS-processing", as it were, you can do. It's as simple as that.


I don't think thats necessarily true. I think there is much potential for actually supportive mechanisms.

The representative systems that we have at present are flawed in their strict adherence to causality within the game space. What they need is to break out of the conventions of depiction in a manner analogous to the advent of impressionism.

My angle of attack here is that many performing arts exploit "tricks" of perception to create a particular effect that supports the piece. Say for example, the use of long cloths to create a sea effect of roiling waves on stage. Nobody is fooled into thinking they are actually seeing water - but the effect of the motion in the peripheral vision or whatever can create a satisfying impression of the sea. Satisfying enough to contextualise and dramatise a scene or speech.

Similarly, masks are suprisingly compelling in their false but strong depiction of human facial expressions. It would be an interesting experiment to play an RPG with all the players wearing masks all the time.
If someone is wearing a mask that strongly expresses an emotion, and yet their voice or other body language conveys a contradictory emotion, most people would experience some degree of cognitive dissonance reconciling the two. I think that the contradiction between mechanical representations and the Dream is a similar kind of dissonance.

But the key is that both are signals equally, and so if the two signals can by synthesised, reinforce one another, then the message to be conveyed will also be reinforced. IMO the problems with representaqtive systems like GURPS are that they tell rather than show; that is, to understand a strength rating, you first have to translate out of the game world into numbers before comprehending the message about the game world the number is trying to convey. They "represent" the game space via a symbol set that is itself divorced from the game space.

It is my contention that an "impressionistic" approach in which the mechanisms are designed at the procedural level to imitate an appropriate contextual "feel" are not just unintrusive in terms of the dream but can be actually helpful in its creation and maintenance. I suppose I am proposing a "designed cognitive resonance" between the subject matter and the techniques employed in the exploitation of that subject systematically. In that light I disagree that there is a necessary and universal antagonism between the dream and its mechanical realisation.

A crude example of the two approaches from computer gaming. In Civilisation, you could play through the feudal period, but it would feel nothing like fuedalism subjectively. You just move armies around etc in bog standard wargaming fashion. In medieval total war, you still move armies around but there is a whole mechanical layer dealing with the personal loyalties, aptitudes and predelictions of your vassals and officials. Neither can be said to truly represent feudalism, but the latter is much less disruptive to the illusion than Civ's raw and remote abstraction. There is a certain purposeful similarity between the subject being represented and the mechanism used to actually represent it.

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On 10/11/2004 at 6:51pm, Arref wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

It is my contention that an "impressionistic" approach in which the mechanisms are designed at the procedural level to imitate an appropriate contextual "feel" are not just unintrusive in terms of the dream but can be actually helpful in its creation and maintenance.

That's very nicely said.
Are there some good existing RPG examples of this?

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On 10/11/2004 at 7:43pm, John Kim wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

contracycle wrote: The representative systems that we have at present are flawed in their strict adherence to causality within the game space. What they need is to break out of the conventions of depiction in a manner analogous to the advent of impressionism.

I'm rather appalled at the analogy here -- since your implication is that pre-impressionist art is "flawed" by its representative approach, and that impressionism thus "fixed" the problem of constrained artists from Michaelangelo to Sargent. While RPG causality isn't the only possibility, I don't think that it is inherently inferior to non-causality.

contracycle wrote: My angle of attack here is that many performing arts exploit "tricks" of perception to create a particular effect that supports the piece. Say for example, the use of long cloths to create a sea effect of roiling waves on stage. Nobody is fooled into thinking they are actually seeing water - but the effect of the motion in the peripheral vision or whatever can create a satisfying impression of the sea. Satisfying enough to contextualise and dramatise a scene or speech.

This example seems to me to be strictly representational. It's making the set look like what it is supposed to represent. In the same way, people in the audience are not fooled into thinking that there is an actual house on-stage. They know that it is a set, since they can see the curtains and edges and such. But the set designers try to make it look as much like a house as they can, to aid the audience's suspension of disbelief.

contracycle wrote: But the key is that both are signals equally, and so if the two signals can by synthesised, reinforce one another, then the message to be conveyed will also be reinforced. IMO the problems with representaqtive systems like GURPS are that they tell rather than show; that is, to understand a strength rating, you first have to translate out of the game world into numbers before comprehending the message about the game world the number is trying to convey. They "represent" the game space via a symbol set that is itself divorced from the game space.

Actually, one of the design goals of GURPS was to reduce "game-speak" compared to prior systems. Thus, rather than using "hexes" or scale "inches", GURPS uses yards as it's measure of distance. It's combat turn is exactly one second, so that is a real-world measure as well. There remains a lot of game-speak, of course, but the amount and the effect of it was certainly considered as part of the design philosophy.

On the other hand, I think that a symbol set divorced from the game space can also be highly useful in representation. This is the equivalent of narration in books, plays, or films -- i.e. words that are not spoken in-character but rather a description of events.

While you give examples from computer games and theater, it isn't clear to me what you're talking about in terms of tabletop RPGs. What are the mechanisms that you are picturing here?

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On 10/11/2004 at 11:29pm, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

contracycle wrote:
clehrich wrote: Your point about "real-world processing" hits the nail on the head. The more of this you have to do, the less "SIS-processing", as it were, you can do. It's as simple as that.
....
The representative systems that we have at present are flawed in their strict adherence to causality within the game space. What they need is to break out of the conventions of depiction in a manner analogous to the advent of impressionism.
Just for clarification here, I think you're saying that the impressionist approach was a challenge to and moving beyond pure representation, which impressionists saw as flawed, not that such representation is inherently flawed, right? This is where I think John misunderstood, so I want to be certain.

I need to think about the rest of your very complex post for a bit. Back with you in a day or so....

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On 10/12/2004 at 2:55pm, contracycle wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

John Kim wrote:
I'm rather appalled at the analogy here -- since your implication is that pre-impressionist art is "flawed" by its representative approach, and that impressionism thus "fixed" the problem of constrained artists from Michaelangelo to Sargent. While RPG causality isn't the only possibility, I don't think that it is inherently inferior to non-causality.


Theres no need to read the simile that deeply. In fact I think that game mechanics are, umm, more flawed as it were by reliance on strict literalism than the case in the art world.

I'm not at all sympathetic to much of the debate that occurs withing art; I really have no position critical or otherwise toward most art, or forms, or whatever. So I dio not mean to imply any criticism of pre-imprssionist work whatsoever.


This example seems to me to be strictly representational. It's making the set look like what it is supposed to represent. In the same way, people in the audience are not fooled into thinking that there is an actual house on-stage. They know that it is a set, since they can see the curtains and edges and such. But the set designers try to make it look as much like a house as they can, to aid the audience's suspension of disbelief.


Its possible I have used the term poorly, but you are describing what I regard as virtuous rather than what I regard as problematic. My argument is that most RPG mechanics do not aid suspension of disbelief, and that they should do so more. One might say I think most mechanics are constructed in defiance of the dream, giving a mechanistically objective description from the players perspective, and thus aggravating the need to transition in and out of the dream in actual play.

But your point on gamespeak was almost diametrically opposed to what I am saying. I am not saying that game speak should be minimised, if anything I'm saying it should be used more, but should also be designed to support the content of the dream, in both form and function. I actually really dislike the GURPS use of $, for example, as universal currency. This chops off part of the game space from exploration, I feel. It also distorts the description, requiring that the actuall material be framed in terms of this convention rather than in terms of conveying the SIS.

So I was asked for some examples, I'll provide what I can although they are pretty thin on the ground.

Riddle of Steel's initiative system is much enjoyed. I think its not just that this is a better mechanic than most initiative systems, but also it is appropriately synchronised with the game content the mechanical action describes. Thus, the tension the character feels in the game space is communicated to the player in real space, and people tend to find it more "enagaging" and "real" - much more so than the alternatives such as "action in reverse order of announcement".

Hmm, actually an honourable mention is deserved by HOL and its "Anguish Equivalency Table". So sure, not a wholly serious mechanism, but a bit more visceral than blow to region X, Y points damage, bleeding on table Z.

I think that Pendragon has a similar effect in its explicit representation of the chivalric virtues, although this is not implemented in quite the way I mean. But its a lot better than most.


On the other hand, I think that a symbol set divorced from the game space can also be highly useful in representation. This is the equivalent of narration in books, plays, or films -- i.e. words that are not spoken in-character but rather a description of events.


No, the narrator is a character. If it were theatre, the narrator would be played by an actor. The narrator is just one more dramatic device, IMO.

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On 10/13/2004 at 7:02am, John Kim wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

contracycle wrote:
John Kim wrote: On the other hand, I think that a symbol set divorced from the game space can also be highly useful in representation. This is the equivalent of narration in books, plays, or films -- i.e. words that are not spoken in-character but rather a description of events.

No, the narrator is a character. If it were theatre, the narrator would be played by an actor. The narrator is just one more dramatic device, IMO.

You've lost me. I agree that a narrator would be played by an actor and is a dramatic device. However, it is still usually separate from the imaginary space of the play. (There are sometimes narrators who are also characters perhaps narrating their past, but here I'm talking about narrators separate from the story.)

By comparison, consider the GM in a role-playing game. This role is also played by a real person, and she narrates in-game events. Does this make the GM a character? I would say no. The GM is an important part of the experience of the game, but not a character within the Shared Imaginary Space (SIS), aka the diegesis.

There's an interesting article, "A Semiotic View on Diegesis Construction", in the Beyond Role and Play from last year's Solmukohta convention. It uses a semiotic model of signs: which can be indexical (i.e. literal meaning), iconic (i.e. meaning by similarity), or symbolic (i.e. meaning by habit or convention). You seem to be pushing more iconic signs: i.e. not literally what is in the game-world (like a LARP set in modern-day), and not meaning purely assigned by convention (like many tabletop mechanics). I think iconic signs are an important part of the arsenal but not the only or best choice.

contracycle wrote: My argument is that most RPG mechanics do not aid suspension of disbelief, and that they should do so more. One might say I think most mechanics are constructed in defiance of the dream, giving a mechanistically objective description from the players perspective, and thus aggravating the need to transition in and out of the dream in actual play.

OK, so I'm pondering this and your examples of suspension-of-disbelief aiding mechanics (TROS initiative, HOL's anguish table, and Pendragon's personality traits). I'm willing to believe that these are the only mechanics which you find help suspend your disbelief, but I also think suspension of disbelief is a personal thing. I think your analogy of art is apt -- i.e. some people are thrilled by impressionism and are put off by the sameness of realistic perspective and detail; while others feel the reverse. In RPGs, I wonder if having been a physicist, I don't find objective mechanics as distracting as you do.

I agree that an RPG system is a set of symbols that represent the game-world. But I disagree that using those symbols inherently draws one out of the narrative. A system needs to be learned, but in principle once it is learned then it becomes a part of communication. For example, I found the basics of RuneQuest were an excellent symbol set for my Vikings and Skraelings game. My impression is that TROS is fine for Renaissance duellists circling each other, but RQ is to me much better for the fatalistic and gory combat of the viking sagas.

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On 10/13/2004 at 8:24am, contracycle wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

John Kim wrote:
OK, so I'm pondering this and your examples of suspension-of-disbelief aiding mechanics (TROS initiative, HOL's anguish table, and Pendragon's personality traits). I'm willing to believe that these are the only mechanics which you find help suspend your disbelief, but I also think suspension of disbelief is a personal thing. I think your analogy of art is apt -- i.e. some people are thrilled by impressionism and are put off by the sameness of realistic perspective and detail; while others feel the reverse. In RPGs, I wonder if having been a physicist, I don't find objective mechanics as distracting as you do.


I doubt thats the case, given that I'm a dialectical materialist and trained as an engineer. I alslo think "tastes differ" is almost always a useless observation.

A system needs to be learned, but in principle once it is learned then it becomes a part of communication. For example, I found the basics of RuneQuest were an excellent symbol set for my Vikings and Skraelings game. My impression is that TROS is fine for Renaissance duellists circling each other, but RQ is to me much better for the fatalistic and gory combat of the viking sagas.


RQ may well produce OUTPUTS you find suitable, but the process in which you engage to generate them is much less like the acitivity described than is the case with the TROS initiative mechanic. And while I don't necessarily disagree that a system of code can be used for communication, this does not seem to me to be an adequate counterpoint to the suggestion that the closer the code accords to the process described the more useful it can be.

I'm not sure what this post was meant to say; just that you don't need the help? That may or may not be true, but its irrelevant to whether or not the idea makes any sense. I find RQ to have many of the same inadequacies as GURPS, but let me say this: the fact that RQ includes hit locations is an improvement, in the lights of my argument, over abstracted universal HP, because it is more like the described action than simple HP attrition was.

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On 10/13/2004 at 3:40pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

Hello,

I'm pretty sure this discussion needs to get split into separate threads, but I don't want to presume others' priorities by making the splits myself.

Can folks take distinct topics into new threads on their own, please?

Best,
Ron

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On 10/15/2004 at 2:55am, clehrich wrote:
RE: Sim-Diceless thread search

After considerable thought, I've concluded that actually this conversation jumped threads a long, long time ago. John and contracycle have now started it in an interesting direction, and one which follows up very much my deeper interests, so I'm calling the thread closed and suggesting we all move over to John's Thread.

Many thanks for all the suggestions and ideas!

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Topic 13058

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