Hello,

I've chosen to begin a new thread using one of Markus' final posts in Can someone explain the true reason behind "traits" (PTA-style) to me? as the starting point. All of the following words are Markus'.

(4) Ron, this 'positioning' stuff is so crucial I can't believe it does not appear in every other thread here (but in retrospect, maybe it does, under the cover of other stuff). It's also a bit frustrating for me: I seem to be close to grasp something new, but I'm also sure I'm not quite there yet. I *think* I understood positioning in general terms; but in my head, the new concepts perfectly 'lock-in' with my original questions, to the point of reinforcing them. Specifically, you said:

In this game, there are many detailed features of a character, in addition to the basic attributes and skills: Clan identity, Advantages, Disadvantages, and a list of 20 questions. My point is that most of them are very easily identifiable as Positioning, but that I am also choosing to regard all of them as Positioning, even indirectly.

On casual or raw inspection, that particular advantage is Effectiveness, but I have chosen to regard Effectiveness and Resources as expressions and reinforcements of Positioning - I took pains to make Positioning central even though the various rules of L5R are a bit of a mess in helping to focus on it, and, if I really had to pin it down numerically, tend toward Effectiveness as where most of character-building effort lies.

In my understanding, you (and, very importantly, all the people playing with you) had a clear creative agenda in mind, and according to this, you used whatever tool the system gave you to make it happen, even if the tool itself wasn't probably the best to do that, and even if the tool turned a simple thing into a complex one. Yes, you can eat a pork chop with a spoon, if you want. Which makes me wonder, isn't this an exemplary case of system drift?

Now, if the above is true, one alternative way of describe what you did could perhaps be the following. You read the L5R rulebook, which was your sole medium through which you could learn what this game was. The text was completely silent in how to support your crateive agenda, but you saw how that system could be used toward that end nonetheless. And now the crucial point that's giving me hedaches: in my opinion, even if you then played L5R completely by-the-book (re: the system mechanics), you *added* a meaning that wasn't originally there, by functionally drifting the system. So, in my current way of seeing things, you didn't play *the* L5R game; the text vagueness renders it impossible to state whether the way you played is the one that its author envisioned, or not.

Now, I'm finding strong analogies between what you described for L5R and what you suggested I should consider for ThePool. I can see the merit of your suggestions, and they'll help me a lot in my future sessions. But, given the reasoning above, did't you basically suggested me something very close to drifting the system? I mean, with ThePool it's a way more subtle and small drift wrt that you needed to do with L5R, but isn't it system drifting nonetheless? I ask this because I still cannot tell how my way of communicating/playing ThePool was less "by the book" than yours (prior to my "patch"); BUT, I can see that mine was a *much less functional* drift given my Story Now CA.

What was the specific system portion drifted? The traits rules. Why? Because The Pool, I literally mean the written text, leaves me in the dark re: how to use this technique in my games. I was in a position in which I *needed* to add something to the system; and that something I added was probably not the best solution. Now I can see it.

Hi Markus, and welcome to our new thread.

You are finally returning the ideas-based discussion here at the Forge to what it used to be: pure and powerful intellectual discourse. In this case, you're demanding a full and complete review of the concept of Drift, and I'll be the first to say that I didn't even realize it needed review until you posted these questions. RPG Theory is alive and well again, I'm happy to say, as I hoped when re-directing its content to Actual Play. What follows is my current thinking about Drift.

As defined in the Glossary, Drift concerns Creative Agenda - either shifting from one to another, or more likely, finding and strengthening one from a state of relative incoherence.

To be Drift, Drift does not require altering textual rules. In many threads, we've often said "Drift the rules," but on reflection that was shorthand, and in discourse terms, sloppy, more often than not. To be so precise as to approximate legalistic prose, the best way to put it would be, "Arriving at a preferred Creative Agenda through altering the System, to the extent of ignoring or changing the written rules into new rules; whether deliberate or opportunistic, whether realized or unrealized, and whether negotiated or arbitrary (i.e. imposed by one person) does not matter." Only the first ten words are the Drift part. The rest of that phrasing would be a means to that end.

The game author's intent is actually irrelevant. You will find in general that "intentions" play no role in the Big Model at all, or more accurately, intentions are never invoked as a unique causal factor. Drift refers to what the play-group is doing, with no reference to the game author whatsoever.

This brings up the fascinating question, so far unconsidered, of what the group may be Drifting from. On the one hand, and most obviously, they'd be Drifting from their own play that happened to be another Agenda, or from a state of incoherence in their own play. Or on the other hand, their Drift is expressed from the outset of play, relative to the instructions they're trying to follow - either a textual Agenda of a given type (which may or may not have anything to do with the author's state of mind), or from a textual state of incoherence. I'll try to examine it in the following three cases.

1. When the group Drifts relative to a given text which has an extremely powerful CA embedded or implicated in its current rules, direct and obvious rules-changes are often necessary. Often they're even modular, pure subtraction or addition, and it's very likely the changes are aimed at the reward mechanics.

My D&D3 game from a couple of years ago presents a perfect example: we utterly abandoned the issue of leveling-up. We'd found during preparation, using non-jargon language, that everyone wanted a Narrativist experience, and the result in practice was to cut the whole Experience Point and level issue free from the rest of the system. Interestingly, this wasn't a planned rules-shift but a gradual and logical result during play. I did spend a little time and energy tracking Experience Points (carelessly, sometimes to the aggrieved horror of folks reading the threads), but as it happens, no one cared. After a couple of sessions, we stopped thinking about it much. They even should have gone to 4th level for the final session, and we simply didn't bother. No one cared about how many points anyone gained for a given encounter. That whole aspect of the system just ... Drifted away.

2. When the group Drifts relative to a given text which is kind of a CA kitchen sink (contradictory and muddled and the rules go every which-way), the Drift feels less like a change from A to B than focusing on A "after all." The rules-changes tend to be more about diminishing certain sections to the point of ignoring them, bringing certain ones "closer to the fore" than their representation in the rules, and inventing new rules to cover what feel like gaps. At its most minimal, this sort of Drift may not involve altering any rules at all.

The L5R game I talked about in the parent thread is an excellent example of the most minimal form, closes to the purest definition of Drift. Yes, we did Drift, but it's not accurate to say we Drifted the rules. We "altered focus" on them a bit in terms of which rules were most relevant to play, and arguably, for a game like that, a group must to this in order to play anything but Zilchplay. Again, this doesn't have anything to do with the game author's intentions.

Champions in its first three editions and Amber offer yet more excellent examples. I'd sure like to see some Actual Play threads which pick up those up from this thread.

3. When the group Drifts relative to a given text which is essentially silent about CA and whose rules don't seem to gel in any CA-specific way, well, it's hard to call this Drift so much as simply arriving at CA, period, without any useful guidance from the text in doing so. Rules-changes may or may not be involved. This is probably the source of some of the sloppiness in using the term Drift, as a group might begin playing such a game, mess with the rules little by little as they go along to focus more and more on a given CA, and end up with what is essentially their own fairly radical individualized version of play. So the discourse tends to focus on the rules-changes and call that the Drift.

I think nearly all the really messy late-80s style fantasy games, and their later imitators, ended up being played like that - AD&D2, and pretty much anything like it. It seems to describe the essence of "kitbashing" held up as a golden ideal of gaming. It also seems to be the origin story of many, even most of the Fantasy Heartbreakers listed in my two essays, especially explaining why most of them present quite easily identifiable CAs in their combinations of rules and prose.

This #3 topic relates to an ongoing and often difficult conversation about what a game text is supposed to do regarding Creative Agenda, and whether silence is better than explicit explanation, and for what audience. Ralph Mazza and I often take opposing views on that matter, but I confess I'm not a fanatic for my usual side in that argument. In practice, Ralph already won, because I wrote Spione to be as explicit about the goals of play as possible, including explaining how the rules serve that end, and I'm re-writing Trollbabe the same way.

Now let's talk about The Pool, which is actually none of the above cases, and it's unfair to treat it as if it were. That's because it is not a finished game text, but rather an idea and a draft, and most importantly, it makes most sense as part of a dialogue in 2001-2002, much as Emily describes in Conversations.

I do not mean this as an apologist but rather as a clarifier. The active members of the Forge in early 2002 were all trying games like Soap, Wuthering Heights, the early version of InSpectres, Elfs, the first drafts of Universalis (God help us), and others, as well as enthusiastically reflecting on everything we'd played so far. To those of us engaged in that conversation, "Try The Pool!" carried with it the implication of using certain non-problematic elements (to us) in their most functional and relevant way relative to the nifty-new part, specifically the rules for dialogue and (to a lesser extent) content based on a player resource and player-decided risk. Certain "absent" elements did cause problems, most often the issue of whether a successful roll was related to the character's aims in the conflict (I said yes, Mike Holmes said no). But for whatever reason, in the history of that dialogue, no one had trouble instantly identifying Traits as a Positioning device, perhaps not central to the thematic potential of play, but at least not disruptive to it.

That doesn't mean that the absence, even pitfall, doesn't exist - as you demonstrate quite fairly, it does. And if The Pool were a finished game, then it'd be like my case #3. But it's not, which is to say, the 2001-2002 conversation isn't over, for which, Markus, I thank you. However, that also means that, to me, there is no point and in fact no fairness in indicting The Pool as some kind of inadequate excuse for a system. No one ever claimed that its text was a fully-realized game (for that, see The Questing Beast, which I do think is a fully-written and well-written game). Even more importantly, no one ever claimed it was some kind of magic Perfect Play This item that would not only deliver the instantly non-problematic play-experience, but also cosmic enlightenment about game theory, a clean kitchen, or the ultimate orgasm.

For us at that time, The Pool was an exceptionally significant door into new ways of thinking about play, and it can still play that role today. However, in the relatively feverish "indie scene excitement" that burgeoned in 2005-2006, some of which I did not regard very highly in technical-critical terms, I think that many of the titles which were very powerful in that early conversation, as well as some subsequent ones like PTA, were wrongly proffered as Ultimate Game Magic Pills.

Best, Ron

P.S. Side note: One jarring thought occurred to me last night - is arriving at a Creative Agenda at all, ever, in fact Drift? At first that seemed like a nifty idea, but then I decided not. A group may already be greatly-oriented toward a particular Agenda in a particular case, and so there isn't any "movement" in hitting that Agenda from the first moments of play onwards. And since that actually does apply to many of my experiences, for instance using Tunnels & Trolls (Gamist) and Sorcerer (Narrativist), then OK, Drift isn't intrinsic to focused-CA play.

edited to fix link format - RE

Ron wrote:
But for whatever reason, in the history of that dialogue, no one had trouble instantly identifying Traits as a Positioning device, perhaps not central to the thematic potential of play, but at least not disruptive to it.

Hi Simon,

You wrote, including my quote,

"Positioning: A Character Component. Behavioral, social, and contextual statements about a character. Formerly (and confusingly) called Metagame. See also Currency."

So are you saying that you understood traits as statements about the character, but not how traits should be written to support what the players want from the game?

To address the issue a little more, especially your final note, would you say that all (most?) successful play requires a period of "settling in" to a system, working out how to use the game, if not "as intended" (which I agree is a red herring) then in a way that works for that group? Most game rules give you quite a bit of scope for how particular mechanics are employed, and, especially in groups that play the same game a lot, idiosyncratic play styles develop. I would argue that some of the best games facilitate this process rather than fight it.

I guess what I'm asking is, is there ever not Drift, in the sense of using a set of rules to achieve a goal? That's obviously a useless way to define Drift, because it's everywhere, all the time. But could you call Drift the amount of work you have to do to get to the kind of play you want from the rules as written?

The idea of how much you, as a designer, should make explicit the goals of the game in terms of how it should be played is really interesting to me in that respect. Should a good game obviate the need for such an explicit statement? Given that the author's intent is irrelevant, why make that clear in the game at all?

So, there's "techniques", there's "rules", and there's a whole bunch of other things that go together into what gets called "system".  I guess what I'm saying is that what emerges as play at the table is the product of system, and system is built from a whole lotta things, only some of which are provided by the text of the game, and even in cases where the game text provides a heck of a lot of direction in terms of technique and so on, system is still "constructed" at the table.

The best example I can think of this is something like The Mountain Witch, which I think provides a heck of a lot of direction in terms of how to use the game text to produce a system.  Tim goes out of his way to describe not just the mechanics, but how those mechanics are used at the table, why they're in the book, and what effect the produce in play.  But when I sat down to play The Mountain Witch there was still a large amount of work making all those things come together into coherant (in the non-jargon sense) system.  Specifically, things like "The Mountain Witch Trick" take a lot of learning to use in an enjoyable fashion.  The first few times I did it, the players were kind of stumped and looking at each other blankly.  Over time, I learned how to phrase these questions better, and the players got better at using those opportunities to reveal their Fates.  I would argue though, that the process begins anew with each group.  What I was doing was not learning how to play the game, but learning how to apply these mechanics with this group.  Some groups, most groups even, get very adept at turning new mechanics into coherant (non-jargon again) system (or turning new mechanics into something very much like the old system), but they're still constructing, they're still adapting.

What I'm arguing, I guess, is that what you call "learning", I would call "adapting". There is no "platonic ideal" game of The Mountain Witch, towards which all play aspires.  I think we're always constructing system, and that the concept of "Drift" is about creating an artificial line between some kinds of adaptation, and others.  To me, it's always a quantitative, rather than qualitative difference.  There is a qualitative shift when your construction of system explicitly ignores written advice in the game's rules, but I think the concept of Drift has been extended past that, perhaps unwisely.

(I should mention here that I'm drawing on a background in Structuralist and Post-Structuralist theory that makes the concept of "constructed" system very appealing to me.)

Now, as for the question of authorial intent versus explanation of "how to play", I think I agree.  There is of course a whole lot of system that's built on how you're supposed to use a mechanic, rather than how you can use it.  I think Sorcerer is a very good example of that, in that there are lots of ways to play the game that follow the letter of the mechanics perfectly, but ignore a lot of the other advice about using those mechanics, and produce objectively less fun as a result.  In fact, I think almost the whole game of Sorcerer is about how the mechanics are employed, rather than the mechanics themselves, which is maybe why a lot of people, me included, found Sorcerer very difficult to play straight out of the book - we're used to slotting the mechanics into our usual procedures for play (is there a jargon term for that?).  Sorcerer's mechanics on their own don't "force" you into a notably unique style of play the way, say, MLWM does.

I think that's reasonably uncontroversial, and perhaps a bit of a diversion from what is the point of this thread.  Questions of how best to communicate "how to play" are always going to plague design, I think, but I think it's pretty well accepted that a lot of that communication happens outside of the plain mechanics of the game.  How much of that is straight up instruction, and how much is just advertising is hard to know, but I'm not sure it's super important.

Hi Simon,

I'm OK with the Structural/Post-Structural thing, and you can probably see it in how I distinguish between System (how we play) vs. rules (what a book says to do). One of the problems with this whole family of Traits threads is that those two issues are getting confounded. 

Your point about "adapting" is valid, although I'm pretty comfortable with calling that "learning." Perhaps I'm a bit pre-post-modern in thinking that a given rules set may well (a) teach a particular set of routines to play and (b) the users arrive at enjoyment of play via emergent properties in those routines, to a degree which they did not anticipate or fully appreciate before. This may be a fuddy-duddy attitude, but as it happens, that describes what occurs with plenty of things called games that are not RPGs.

Anyway, the whole point of this thread is to see whether the term Drift needs to get a total overhaul. My thinking is yes. Taking your points into account, here are some of the diverse notions that the term tends to get used for.

- arriving at CA by putting rules into practice (your "adapting") to get System and presumably a functioning CA
- playing by CA 1, shifting to CA 2 (rules changes or no rules changes)
- using rules which nicely facilitate "adapting" to CA 1, finding them unsatisfactory (i.e. never actually playing CA 1), and making new rules which then facilitate the preferred CA 2
- using rules which are a mess, facilitating no CA, finding them unsatisfactory, and making new rules which then facilitate a CA of choice
- and as a separate subject, "changing rules" ranges from the kind of fade-back and bring-forward I described with our L5R game, all the way to altering the written rules so drastically that you have genuinely made a brand-new game

Basically, that's way too many ideas and nuances to get subsumed under a single term. Time to roll up our sleeves about it.

Best, Ron

Thanks for that restatement Ron, I think it's a great refocusing of a thread that was in danger of drifting off into etherial "theory land" without reference to what's actually important or useful.  With those things more or less understood, let's move on to the actual meat of the question.

A few questions:

Is Drift always about a change in CA? Is houseruling your game to make it "more realistic" or faster or so that Katanas are more awesome an example of Drift?

Is Drift something that is either present or not, or is it a matter of degree?

Then there's the biggest question, which I think will underpin how any others get answered:

What is the concept of Drift useful for? Are we using it to identify when a group is going "off the reservation" with a game, such that normal successful practices for playing that game may not be successful for them? Are we using it to more successfully describe techniques for changing CA within a given rules set?  What's the most useful definition of Drift?

Ron wrote: The game author's intent is actually irrelevant. You will find in general that "intentions" play no role in the Big Model at all, or more accurately, intentions are never invoked as a unique causal factor. Drift refers to what the play-group is doing, with no reference to the game author whatsoever.

Whew! Not a simple topic. I should start by saying again that my goal here is say, "Drift as currently defined and used is not sufficient," as opposed to "Here I clarify what Drift has been established to mean." In other words, I don't want to contort an inadequate term into multiple and new shapes; I want to find out what is happening so maybe we can create a better taxonomy.

Hey Simon, you wrote,

Is Drift always about a change in CA? Is houseruling your game to make it "more realistic" or faster or so that Katanas are more awesome an example of Drift?

Is Drift something that is either present or not, or is it a matter of degree?

... What is the concept of Drift useful for? Are we using it to identify when a group is going "off the reservation" with a game, such that normal successful practices for playing that game may not be successful for them? Are we using it to more successfully describe techniques for changing CA within a given rules set? What's the most useful definition of Drift?

What about the intentions of the author of that drift? The one person who (successfully) directs that drift? (that includes whether they know it or not that they directed it)

I'm not sure it detaches from the game authors intention when it's just a matter of someone at the table taking over the authorship position (probably the GM/person who owns the book).

Mind you, I'm skeptical how creative agenda apparently just kinda...forms out of social contract, in the big model. I rather think creative agenda is decided outside of social contract by one individual (ie, the big arrow starts earlier than the social contract). ...

Any social mechanisms by which CA forms are actually acknowledged in the model

Just a footnote: If it wouldn't be called creative agenda at a stage before the social mechanism, that's okay. What I'm getting at if the guy offers narrativist meat next saturday and you get a narrativist CA on saturday, if he hadn't offered any, what CA would have shown up? Certainly if they wouldn't have gamed at all, his initial thoughts (which are outside the social mechanism) are pivotal in whether a nar or any CA forms at all.

And if they gamed but no one offered any meat (hey, I own a book, turn up on saturday and we'll read it!), what does the text inspire in the people at the table/what meat is in the text, in terms of CA?

Callan, we may or may not be hitting an impasse. Let me know.

My thinking is that whether someone decides "we'll play Narrativist" before the group sits down together is not relevant. Even if every single person in that group nods, smiles, follows that guy's lead, and proceeds to play accordingly, it's still a group dynamic that actually produces the CA. I'm not sure why you're focusing so hard on whether "it" exists before that point. I may not be understanding what events in real life regarding a real game that you're talking about.

I do think it's a relevant inquiry, because one of the issues we're driving at in this thread is arriving at a CA in two cases: (a) a text which is very helpful, directive, and consistent, even if not explicit about goals; and (b) a text which, if followed, results in massive confusion about goals. So yeah, talking about where CA "comes from" (and I don't mean motivation, I mean actual inter-personal dynamics) is key.

Thanks for your attention to this series of threads. Full disclosure: more than once, I've become aggravated by your posts in them, then stepped back to wonder why (because I rarely react emotionally to internet posting), to find that you were bringing up stuff that was absolutely relevant, just not what I felt like talking about myself. Which is bogus on my part. I went back over all of them to look over where you're coming from and what you've said.

Best, Ron

Darn, looks like an impasse! My understanding of the forge term drift was that it occured in your point #2, because the text/rules didn't really push any particular kind of fun. I'd taken drift to mean that with the one text, I'd think it was gamist, while the guy over there takes it in a sim or nar direction. Drift was more like a description of how some people or whole groups can use the same text yet be so far away in terms of play - they got there by drifting there. It explaned alot to me about why people at the same table could be on such different wavelengths. On reflection I think I just invented this meaning for drift.

Invention or not, while I understand drift in #2, I don't entirely understand the example in #1. Here's probably one of those annoying questions: Why did you all take a supposedly strong gamist text like 3E and go nar with it? Why take a wrench and use it like a hammer? To further complicate that question, I'm not sure 3E actually is a strong gamist text. Everyone goes 'Oh, of course it is' and leaves it at that...but where's any actual evidence or critical method for determining that? Perhaps as a text its still in much in the same position as #1? That's my second annoying question, sadly. Anyway I'll leave it at that.

I have to say, this thread has me scratching my head a bit.  I won't say that Drift isn't due for a thorough going-over, but I'm equally unsure of whether or not the term is as unclear as you are all making it out to be.

If I remember correctly, the concept of drift arose out of a need to describe one aspect of functional and dysfunctional play.  This necessarily implicates Creative Agenda, which is a core concept of functional play.  Specifically, Drift has always been about shifting from one CA to another as a function of actual play.  Any misuse of the term to mean simply changing the rules of a game (without changing CA) is a red herring insofar as arriving at an working definition is concerned.  In other words, it is very possible to change the rules of a game without shifting its CA.  This isn't Drift, it's just an expression of preference within a given CA.

The question of what a group Drifts from is an interesting one.  I have always taken it to mean, "Drift from the objective CA of a game as defined by what the text encourages."  This is not a reflection of author intent, much in the same way that the theme of a book or movie has nothing to do with the author's intent.  It is defined only by what appears in the finished product.

I think Drift is also strong enough to encompass the shift from the CA that a group begins playing with to another CA during play.  In other words, you have to pick a starting point, but that starting point isn't as important as the shift itself -- at least not for purposes of defining Drift.

To go through Ron's list:*

- arriving at CA by putting rules into practice (your "adapting") to get System and presumably a functioning CA

This is certainly not Drift as I've defined it.  Learning a game is learning a game.  You can't Drift if you don't have a CA to Drift from.  To me, this is an entirely different phenomenon.

- playing by CA 1, shifting to CA 2 (rules changes or no rules changes)
- using rules which nicely facilitate "adapting" to CA 1, finding them unsatisfactory (i.e. never actually playing CA 1), and making new rules which then facilitate the preferred CA 2

These are both clearly covered.

- using rules which are a mess, facilitating no CA, finding them unsatisfactory, and making new rules which then facilitate a CA of choice

This is the most interesting example to me.  At first, it appears similar to just learning the game.  But I suspect it's something closer to this:  We tried to learn the game.  That didn't work.  So we had to change things to make it work.

But is it really drift if there isn't an effective starting point?  The game text doesn't support one CA or another.  The group didn't start out with a coherent CA.  Therefore, intellectually, I tend to say "No Drift," even as I am aware that I've used to term to mean just that.

- and as a separate subject, "changing rules" ranges from the kind of fade-back and bring-forward I described with our L5R game, all the way to altering the written rules so drastically that you have genuinely made a brand-new game

Could be Drift.  Could simply be changing the rules.  It all depends on the change's effect on the current CA.  Creating a genuinely new game is a side-effect, but not an indication of Drift.

What I would add to the list of questions is this scenario:  Each player begins the game with a different CA in mind.  In play, we see each player attempt to push his own ideas about CA (dysfunctional play).  But then as the game proceeds, the group arrives at a common CA.  This may or may not involve rule changes.  Is that Drift?

*I realize, Ron, that you didn't mean your list as some sort of test.  So I apologize for the re-purposing.

Hey guys, I apologize for taking so long to get back to this. All the points required some reflection time.

Callan, you wrote,

My understanding of the forge term drift was that it occured in your point #2, because the text/rules didn't really push any particular kind of fun. I'd taken drift to mean that with the one text, I'd think it was gamist, while the guy over there takes it in a sim or nar direction. Drift was more like a description of how some people or whole groups can use the same text yet be so far away in terms of play - they got there by drifting there. It explaned alot to me about why people at the same table could be on such different wavelengths. On reflection I think I just invented this meaning for drift.

Here's probably one of those annoying questions: Why did you all take a supposedly strong gamist text like 3E and go nar with it? Why take a wrench and use it like a hammer? To further complicate that question, I'm not sure 3E actually is a strong gamist text. Everyone goes 'Oh, of course it is' and leaves it at that...but where's any actual evidence or critical method for determining that? Perhaps as a text its still in much in the same position as #1? That's my second annoying question, sadly.

If I remember correctly, the concept of drift arose out of a need to describe one aspect of functional and dysfunctional play.  This necessarily implicates Creative Agenda, which is a core concept of functional play.  Specifically, Drift has always been about shifting from one CA to another as a function of actual play.  Any misuse of the term to mean simply changing the rules of a game (without changing CA) is a red herring insofar as arriving at an working definition is concerned.  In other words, it is very possible to change the rules of a game without shifting its CA.  This isn't Drift, it's just an expression of preference within a given CA.

The question of what a group Drifts from is an interesting one.  I have always taken it to mean, "Drift from the objective CA of a game as defined by what the text encourages."  This is not a reflection of author intent, much in the same way that the theme of a book or movie has nothing to do with the author's intent.  It is defined only by what appears in the finished product.

I think Drift is also strong enough to encompass the shift from the CA that a group begins playing with to another CA during play.  In other words, you have to pick a starting point, but that starting point isn't as important as the shift itself -- at least not for purposes of defining Drift.

- arriving at CA by putting rules into practice (your "adapting") to get System and presumably a functioning CA

This is certainly not Drift as I've defined it. Learning a game is learning a game. You can't Drift if you don't have a CA to Drift from. To me, this is an entirely different phenomenon.

...  But I suspect it's something closer to this:  We tried to learn the game.  That didn't work.  So we had to change things to make it work.

But is it really drift if there isn't an effective starting point?  The game text doesn't support one CA or another.  The group didn't start out with a coherent CA.  Therefore, intellectually, I tend to say "No Drift," even as I am aware that I've used to term to mean just that.

What I would add to the list of questions is this scenario:  Each player begins the game with a different CA in mind.  In play, we see each player attempt to push his own ideas about CA (dysfunctional play).  But then as the game proceeds, the group arrives at a common CA.  This may or may not involve rule changes.  Is that Drift?

Yeah, that concept is about the same as Incoherence, in reference both to the text and to subsequent play, rather than Drift. Drift might be a response to that situation, though.

Not much to say here. I asked Dan and Chris what they wanted, and they told me. Granted, I articulated the Narrativist option clearly rather than decreeing "This be Gamist, yarrr, let's go!" The reason I did that at all is because I know that the pure color and cultural mind-share of D&D often spark interest in Narrativist play, and I suspected that might be the case for these two.

Hi Callan,

I've thought about that and related questions quite a bit.  I have speculated about given individuals, but over time, I've decided to let each person's history and reasoning be his or her own business. "Individual people display aesthetic preferences due to hundreds if not thousands of long-term and short-term circumstances" - not exactly a scintillating answer, but I think it's better to leave it to personal reflection and Actual Play posting.

It might be that your question is more general: why humans are consistently committed to, for instance, social competition, imaginative modeling, and communication through fiction. If so, then we're moving into an area of discussion that is out of the Forge's scope. I think it's a great and fascinating topic, but due to my deep distrust of the internet's effect on discourse, I'll discuss such things in person only.

"Drift to Incoherence" is a very powerful topic. The most definite example would be the common issue of Zilchplay - basically a group which sticks together and plays in a desultory if consistent fashion, "having fun" as long as "fun" means continuing to get together periodically, and getting a little bit of time in for one's character (and one's original if dwindling play-goals) once in a while. I'm also interested in whether and how Zilchplay is involved in the cross-group or no-group phenomenon, basically people who self-identify as gamers, participate in no consistent group, and who play briefly and occasionally in public meet-ups and as a guest presence in other groups.

Do people (groups/individuals) gravitate toward playing Zilch? The answer is empirically yes. What is that process? Does it have analogies in other small-a artistic social groupings? Do we even call it Drift?

And all of that should be distinguished from the other (original in discussion terms) meaning of Incoherence: clash of Agendas or desired Agendas. If Zilchplay is the outcome of, among other things, reduction of Agenda-desires to the individual level (such that getting a whiff every year or so is supposed to be enough), then Incoherence as originally described, which perhaps needs a name of its own, is the ongoing struggle to establish a given Agenda in the presence of conflicting desires. I'm not sure that a person or group arrives at this, because it's not so much a form of play as a condition in which play may, or unfortunately may not, occur. But who knows? Even a dynamic clash might become a "way" if it persists or occurs in a consistent enough fashion.

Let's call that kind of Incoherence "the storm" for fun, because that's what it looks like, complete with warning signs and unpredictable flare-ups. Do people (groups/individuals) gravitate toward the storm, or is it like a ditch on the side of the road that they can fall into? Do we even call that Drift? My original thinking is not, but like I say, all my thinking on this topic is getting aired out from the beginning now.

For clarity's sake: this thread is stuffed full of questions, and that's how it should be. However, I hope that it will serve as a basis for people to examine instances of play in new threads, toward the end of clarifying and maybe answering a given question.

Best, Ron

Ron wrote:
I'm also interested in whether and how Zilchplay is involved in the cross-group or no-group phenomenon, basically people who self-identify as gamers, participate in no consistent group, and who play briefly and occasionally in public meet-ups and as a guest presence in other groups.

Hi Ron,

That's still just a description of situation. I probably didn't describe my question well. Basically there were atleast two options, if not considerably more. One was to describe nar and gamism to them, etc as you did. The other was to simply start playing as as you said, it'll become fun when they step on up (and if they don't have any inclination there, you'd play something else or watch a movie). What was your reason for taking the first option instead of the second option of just playing it?

Hi Callan,

Your second option is repugnant to me and has failed to deliver a fun times more often in my own role-playing history and in the histories of others than I can count. I can't think of it working for any social, leisure activity. Most such activities have their "CA" (i.e. the point of doing this) already pretty well established, culturally, and if they don't, people know the signals to figure it out quickly. Role-playing doesn't. Without specifying why we're doing this, we may well be in the situation of one person bringing their gussied-up show pig, one person bringing their pig for slaughter and barbecue, and one person bringing their sex-partner pig complete with lubricant ... and each one expecting everyone to contribute to and participate in the expected activity.

The whole point of my System Does Matter essay and subsequent work here is founded on the idea that simply "arriving" at CA from unconstructed play itself is a very low-success enterprise.

All of which is a fancy way of saying "Because doing that sucks."

Bring this line of questioning back to the topic of Drift, please. I am confident that it is linked somehow to your point of Drifting from or to incoherent play and would like to have that connection made clear.

Best, Ron

Hi

Ron asked me to post about my group's use of the Pool rules here, after some discussion about markusian traits (sorry, couldn't resist! doesn't sound too bad though), especially the questions of "before" and "after" (working terms).

I have no idea how this can relate to Drift, but I understand Ron has something to say about it.

My understanding of the Pool rules used to be very different to Ron's. I'm going to wax technical, but there are two old AP that represent that period: PoolScape and Call of Poolhu (yeah, puns... sue me).

Basically, our Monologues of Victory granted Narrational and Content Authority (perhaps even Situation, I can't recall clearly enough to tell), whereas Ron leaves Content Authority in the GM's hands at all times (see Silent Railroading and the Intersection of Scenario Prep & Player Authorship) and as far as I can recall, we used to put resolution just after Intention (see Vincent Baker's explanation of Intent, Initiation, Execution, Effect). I'm not quite sure where Ron puts it.

This allows for some wacky goals: "looking for a deeply burrowed megalithical construction" in a situation where no megalithical constructions had been mentioned, just a forest with plain old trees in it. Since we rolled just after that, not actually describing how the character went about to do that before the mechanical outcome is decided, the narrator had a lot of leeway in deciding how the character looked in the fiction. In that case, I got the MoV and decided that after brushing away some plants from a stone, my character realizes that it's part of some Stonehenge-like construction from ages immemorial. Had I missed my roll, the GM could just as well have said "the thought [the goal] is quickly forgotten as your investigator's eye catches on a peculiar detail" and gone a completely different route.
With Execution before the roll (for example), my character would have been groping around in the mud for nothing.
To be honest, we most probably mangled the IIEE sequence quite regularly, retconning when necessary. But for simplicity's sake, let's consider it this way (and that's okay I think, since being able to backtrack to before Initiation if necessary catches up any "spills" into Execution).

Ok, so that's one point I wanted to raise: is Content Authority "safer" depending on when in the IIEE process resolution is invoked?

Now, that Pool period is still considered today as one of our high points in absurd comedy. To the point where we've kind of had enough of it (we might very well play like that again, but only if we really want that kind of play.)

The second point I want to make is about how Traits are handled. I suspect that it depends (among other things) on where in the IIEE process we stuff the dice roll.
Consider my example in the thread from which I've been sent:

Player: "I want to pass this guard." (Player's intention, probably the character's as well, we usually hardly describe anything before rolling.)
GM: "Okay, roll for it, what Trait?"
Player: "Killer instinct"
Roll proceeds, narrator includes "Killer instinct" in IEE, after the mechanical resolution. (...), "Killer Instinct" could be seen as not yet expressed but obvious once mentioned: the history and definition of my character makes it obvious that he's going to kill yet again (at least try, as my choice for the Trait implies). If the GM ends up as the narrator, he could decide, since we don't even do Initiation before the roll, that just as my character was about to draw his dagger, he sees into the guard's eyes and suddenly takes pity on him, and asks the guard if he can get in: "Why yes of course!"
However, this would be "after" in the sense that the mechanical choice of involving the Trait "Killer instinct" entails a constraint on the fiction that will essentially be produced after that choice, (...)

Hi Christoph,

I find myself attracted to the term "markusian traits." It would at least save us having to say "as defined in this series of threads blah blah" over and over.

]Basically, our Monologues of Victory granted Narrational and Content Authority (perhaps even Situation, I can't recall clearly enough to tell), whereas Ron leaves Content Authority in the GM's hands at all times (see Silent Railroading and the Intersection of Scenario Prep & Player Authorship) and as far as I can recall, we used to put resolution just after Intention (see Vincent Baker's explanation of Intent, Initiation, Execution, Effect). I'm not quite sure where Ron puts it.

Ok, so that's one point I wanted to raise: is Content Authority "safer" depending on when in the IIEE process resolution is invoked?

However, this would be "after" in the sense that the mechanical choice of involving the Trait "Killer instinct" entails a constraint on the fiction that will essentially be produced after that choice, (...)
(BTW, if either Misha or Ron can show me how "Partial Invocation" could beneficially replace "before", I'd be grateful, I don't think I get it yet.)

I'm wondering if the Pool would similarly crash if played with resolution after Execution (I think Vincent used to abbreviate that IIE*E) and an "after" interpretation of rules. I'm thinking yes, because it'd be much harder to integrate the trait into the fiction in just the execution (and even then, it would be so much smoother to just mention the Trait in the Execution so as to make a nice introduction for the Execution narration).

I'll just clarify on the before and after traits, as the other thread has been closed. It's a logistics error.

If my 'after' trait use MUST be taken into account in someone elses narration, then if they attempt to use an 'after' trait which would naturally involve narration that does not take that first 'after' trait use into account, then this traits use is in violation of the rules. Therefore the only correct useage of this 'after' trait is one that fits into the prior narration. In practical terms, this makes it identical to a 'before' trait. It has been completely neutered as an 'after' trait.

I'd almost call it the impossible trait use before breakfast.

To get past the impossibleness, the correct wording would be that when an after trait is used, it MUST be taken into account in narration. BUT further uses of 'after' traits are an exception. These do not have to fit into the narration at all (the user may choose to use ones that fit, but he does NOT have to and that is valid, within the rules system use).

And that's it.

Just for backgrounds sake, the raw use, no exemptions use of 'has' in "whoever narrates what happens, has to take my character's XXX into account" either has rather strong, unexpected implications, or the users flip flop with each trait, seemingly at random either recognising a narration must fit, or 'forgetting', ignoring the subtle yet powerful implication seemingly at will yet without acknowledgement of choice ("It just makes sense!")*. Which for me, might to a degree explain about fifteen years of personal "WTF????" on seeing that nigh random flip flop being stated as 'it makes sense'. To me it makes sense about as much as wrestling is real - ie, as much as you decide to believe in it and not an iota more. But I'm really just venting now.

Probably most just see this as semantics. I'd say this is an incredible cornerstone discovered and that will become increasingly apparent over time.

* This probably ties into this thread as strong source of drift.

Ron, my distinction between "Something distracts you and you never find out" and "You grub around in the mud and don't find anything" is purely stylistic. My aesthetic preferences have me prefer the former over the latter in the general case (I don't want to play no mud-covered idiot, I want to give a good image of my character!)
At the time, we were grappling with the problematic descriptions some systems incited:
Player: "I swing my sword at the orc and lope off his head!"
Missed roll.
GM: "Erm, actually no. The sword hits... the wall behind him..."

I realize that the IIEE breakdown we used was inappropriate and that we could have found something way more adapted, leading to smoother narration (one effective method is to let the player do the narration: he'll guarantee his character's credibility way better than the wall-hitting example). The breakdown I presented has probably more to do with the way we learnt to deal with the interface between resolution and narration than a fundamental phenomenon.

So when I talk about "safe" use of Content Authority in MoVs, it has to do about a certain discipline of narrating the various aspects of IIEE in accordance with the resolution system. I always hated having to come back and say "actually no, instead this...", I was all for seamless, system-constrained, narration.
Of course, Polaris has those magical key phrases which make the very fact of narrating the most drastic Effects part of effectual conflict negotiation, so, that was another revolution for me, but perhaps beside the point.

Hmm, this has probably some cultural origin too. French roleplaying is huge on investigation. I'd say that about 90% of the internet discourse on scenario creation and "what roleplaying is" somehow leads up to the discussion of how it's important to prepare a good framework for investigations. Actually, most paper-published scenarios are some form of investigation too. The only other solution is mission oriented solving of problems (be it cleaning a dungeon or infiltrating a mega-corp.), but this is obviously much too tactical and basic to be true roleplaying (although from time to time everyone enjoys it of course). Problem is that you need a good GM to prepare it and good players to figure out the preparation.
(There's a lot of sarcasm in that last paragraph, don't take it as a literal view of the French roleplaying scene.)
This was perhaps one of the reasons why we wanted investigations to give a greater importance to player creativity and so we made the assumption that Content was part of the deal with MoVs.

Hey, when I came to the Forge (in... 2004?) this was supposed to be the site where all the wacky designers talked about their funky designs, of course MoVs couldn't just be about Outcome Authority! there had to be something that would topple our conception of roleplaying over its head! and that's what the Pool did, in practice, although not quite the way James V. West had designed it apparently.

Hello Callan, I'd appreciate some actual play examples, because I'm not understanding anything you describe in terms of my own actual play. Your alleviation of the "impossibility" for "after" traits seem to me to be superfluous, in the sense that otherwise we're not talking about "after" traits in the first place (it's either "before" or just plain wrong play by the guy who doesn't take it into account at all, or another one).
Also, I don't see the use of traits on such a long time-scale. I've understood this discussion of "after" and "before" to be purely based on the immediate conflictual situation. Of course, my "Killer Instinct" trait example would be "before" if we took the whole history of play into account, but then we wouldn't be distinguishing between "has already been mentioned (or is obvious when pointed out) in the situation leading to the resolution of the present conflict" and "will be used once mechanical resolution of the present conflict is done, as part of the narrational resolution of the present conflict". Then again I could be wrong.
I also don't understand the "flip flop" you're referring to.

Also, how is any of this related to Drift (I don't mean this as a challenge, I just don't get it)? As a matter of fact, I don't even see how my example could be part of the discussion of Drift, so perhaps Ron can weigh in here too. Oh, perhaps our group's particular adoption of the Pool was a Drift to get something coherent in our aim of "doing Cthulhu and PlaneScape like we want it to be" (since using the classical system proved to be quite random in it's outcomes).

Hi Ron,

On the topic of drift, I dunno! If just following a certain procedure is repugnant unless you also do X (have that talk, in this case), to me that still doesn't make X part of the procedure. I think treating X as if it's part of the procedure is either drift or important to the topic of drift. I think the narrativist shift was further drift on top of that.