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.

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

Trevis

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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?

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...

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

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?

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."

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

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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."

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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....

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

Best,
Ron

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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?

'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?

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.

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.

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.

.... 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?

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

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!

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

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!