I ignored D&D4E when it first came out.  I know from experience that the kind of play it encourages isn't what I want from a roleplaying game.  I didn't need to read the game to know that it wasn't for me. 

But then a friend of mine came over and offered to leave the books for me to read.  I thought "what's the harm?" and I was mildly curious about the game, so I thought I'd give it a look.  So I read the books, and I became obsessed.

This was during the time I lived in Japan, when I had very few opportunities for gaming.  I was also discovering a lot of new games online, and new ways of thinking about games.  The tension between being really excitied about gaming, but having very little opportunity to play resulted in me spending a lot of time reading games, and a lot of time posting on the internet about them.

So I read D&D4 obsessively.  Using images scanned from the books, I made a set of tokens for all the low-level monsters in the monster manual, and for a set of PCs.  I was really excited about building encounters for play.  One of the things I loved about the game was the mathematical precision of play.  I liked working out character builds, prepping encounters, planning adventures.  It was the same thing I liked about 3.5, in fact, the abilitiy to really master a complex set of rules, and to turn that mastery into exciting and fun play.

Finally I got a chance to actually play D&D4.  It was a few people new to gaming, and some others who weren't particularly jazzed about D&D.  We played, and it was reasonably fun.  The combat was, as promised, tactical and challenging and engaging.  A thing I noticed though is that one of the players, who hadn't roleplayed before, would basically shut down during all the sections of play that weren't combat, and then "come alive" for the combat part.  Roleplaying was something he didn't know how to do, but combat made sense to him.  It had concrete rules to follow, a clear objective, and no requirement for reference to a shared imagined space. 

On the other hand, another of the players who liked roleplaying but wasn't so excited about D&D would basically shut down during the combats, doing whatever was appropriate for the turn but not really engaging in the outcome.  But outside of combat, she came alive, talking to the NPCs, engaging with the "plot" of the adventure, and playing her character.

We played a couple of sessions over a long weekend, and there were moments of fun but a lot of disconnect and confusion.  The most fun bit was when me and two of the guys just put the tokens down on a gridmap, and I improvised a dungeon for them using the tokens I had prepared.  No story, no SIS, just tokens on the tabletop, dice, and tactics.  I'd add tactical challenges like bridges over chasms, narrow corridors, traps and so on, and a small amount of colour, but there was essentially no SIS.  Everything that affected anything people cared about was on the table, concrete, mechanical.

I wrote a little about this on my blog, here: http://simoncarryer.blogspot.com/2009/06/4e-and-fictional-causes.html

At the time I wrote that, my interest was how D&D4 related to the idea of "fictional causes" that Vincent had been talking about on his blog.  My angle now is a little different. 

D&D4 has no "fictional causes".  Everything that matters to the rules of the game happens in the "real world", rather than in the fiction.  What this does to play, I think is make it so people who care about beating challenges ignore the shared imagined space during combat, and that play outside of combat becomes an inconvenience.  When a shared imagined space happens in 4E, I think it is due to the players caring about things other than beating challenges.

I want to posit that Shared Imagined Space is a pretty fundamental part of roleplaying.  I think that what seperates games like D&D from games like "Descent" or "Warhammer Quest" or whatever is the degree to which play takes place in an imagined "space" - the degree to which we treat the events of the game as meaningful in and of themselves, rather than mattering just as a means to an end.  If you wanted to play a game that was purely about beating challenges, or about competition, you wouldn't play a roleplaying game.  The Shared Imagined Space is useless to you for beating challenges.  What are people playing for then?

I think that people play roleplaying games to explore something meaningful to them, where "explore" means experience and produce fiction, and "meaningful" means references human concerns, addresses a theme, or presents ethical choices.

I want to suggest that "challenge" is a technique, a technique that's enjoyable in of itself, but also one that's useful for developing theme in roleplaying games.  In the "right to dream" thread, I talked about games with phatic theme.  I suggested a few of these: "Can good triumph over evil?" "Can a few heroes, working together, change the world?" "What does it take to defeat evil?"

Notice that in these themes, the question is about the abilitiy of the protagonists to achieve a goal.  Play is not about questioning how the protagonists achieve their goal, or whether their goal is a worthwhile one.  It focuses on the capability of the protagonists in their goal.

I think that Challenge is a technique that's very useful in addressing these themes.  There is an obstacle to the characters' success, and we see, through play, whether and how they overcome it.  In some games this is an empty question.  We're not really interested in seeing the characters fail, so challenge is weakened, it's only the appearance of challenge.  But in other games, the ability of the protagonists to achieve their goal is a meaningful question.  Indeed, their success only has meaning to us if it's achieve against real opposition.  Challenge then is a technique that helps us achieve theme, rather than a goal in and of itself.

You're thinking "what about games where there ARE fictional causes?" Doesn't the SIS become the arena in which players display their mastery?

I think kind of yes, kind of no.

After playing D&D4, I got a hankering for older D&D, the kind where manipulating the shared imagined space is vital to your character's survival.  I played a lot of "Labyrinth Lord" which is a re-tooled Moldvay D&D. 

I think that yes, in these games the shared imagined space is vital to character survival.  But I also think that in these games challenge is less fundamentally the point of play.  Another way of putting this is that I think that people are less accepting of fictional causes as they're more invested in beating challenges.

Hi,

D&D4 has no "fictional causes".  Everything that matters to the rules of the game happens in the "real world", rather than in the fiction. What this does to play, I think is make it so people who care about beating challenges ignore the shared imagined space during combat

Callan,

Sorry, but I'm literally unable to discern a point in what you've written.  Can you rephrase?

I feel like this thread doesn't have any momentum right now, so I'll just throw in some AP, if you don't mind.

Currently, I'm playing in a weekly D&D4 game, through an online tool. If I'm prompted to describe it, I'd call it a miniature wargame, with some roleplaying elements.

We're playing some official adventure, which the GM customizes a bit. I'm playing for the challenge. I want to see if - and how well - we can beat encounters. I want to test how well the character I created can fulfill its party role. Considering the tactics during encounters, by default all that really matters is what's on the grid. No SIS if you will, just the game state.

The SIS comes into play when decision must be made "off the grid". For example, there's an infinite number of animated skeletons being summoned during an encounter. How do we stop that? Find an altar, pray to the correct god. Use clues to figure out which one. That's based on our understanding of the setting, what's in the books, what our characters know, what happened so far, what's been communicated... all components of Exploration. The SIS is like a distributed database in our heads that keeps expanding and synchronizing, just like our characters keep gaining levels. It's a tool, just like an attack modifier, both equally valid.

Outside of encounters, the SIS informs our decisions. Basically, what encounter to do next, and when, as well as a little "story". Personally I care very little about "story" here. It's totally predictable pulp, just window dressing for the encounters. And that's fine. We mostly use it to color what's happening. What our characters say, how they react to NPCs and monsters. It also colors our idle banter and what kind of jokes we make.

Here's a little anecdote.

I'm playing Piet, a dwarf fighter, who I decided is staunch and kills anything that threatens his civilization, period. Someone else plays Nallie, a halfling paladin. We're in the enemy keep, just slaughtered some goblins. We find a goblin stuck in a cell. Apparently, even other goblins didn't like this one. The goblin pleads to let him go, he'll be our slave and whatnot. Piet goes "it's a goblin, kill it". Nallie goes for talking, gets no useful info, then gives her word to protect the goblin and lets him out of the cell. Promptly, Piet kills the goblin, then gets smacked by Nallie. (Using the combat rules and stuff.)

The anecdote ends there, and didn't have any consequences for future events. It might've lead to some interesting theme, but we aren't in it for that theme, neither for intra-party conflict. It was just a little diversion, which was fun, as long as it didn't take too long.
(As an aside, I recognized the prisoner as a cliche comic foil planted in the adventure, and I hate those. Also, I like the GM for his challenges and not for his NPCs. All the more reason to kill it.)

I think that people play roleplaying games to explore something meaningful to them, where "explore" means experience and produce fiction, and "meaningful" means references human concerns, addresses a theme, or presents ethical choices.

Hi Jasper,

I'm not really interested in the question of what is or is not a roleplaying game.  What I'm interested in is the question of what is most useful for explaining what happens in roleplaying games.

I accept completely that for your play, challenge is by far the most important factor in explaining why you play the way you do.  For sure, it's the point of play for you.  What I'd like to suggest, however, is that I think it's very unlikely that it's the sole point of play, or that there are not other concerns that motivate you to be playing this game, this way.

If we assert that challenge is the only thing that matters to your play, we're left with a lot of questions:

What are the characters' personalities for?
What is a "comic foil" for?
What is the game's setting for?
What is the game's colour for? (i.e. why are you playing fantasy warriors, rather than just pieces on a board?)
What is the point of organising challenges into a string of encounters, rather than as isolated events?
What is the SIS for?

I think this last question deserves a little more attention. I briefly addressed it in my second post above, but I wasn't very clear.

You suggest (and I think maybe this was Callan's point as well?) that the Shared Imagined Space is also an arena for challenge - that you use things like knowledge of the setting, mastery of the rules, deductive logic and so on to solve problems in the game, and that this takes place in the shared imagined space. 

Granted.  I've seen this in play, and in fact this was a large factor in my Labyrinth Lord play, as I describe above.  I know what that kind of play looks like.  In his blog Vincent talks about "Unreliable Currency".  Unreliable currency what Vincent calls the kinds of advantage you get from manipulating the shared imagined space - where a judgement of the fiction is required to know if a certain rule applies. 

My experience is that as people get more invested in challenge, their willingness to accept unreliable currency is less.  In a game of chess, no one would accept a rule that you could only capture another piece if your piece was attacking from the higher ground.  It barely even makes sense in the context of chess. 

Things only enter the shared imagined space by the consent of the players in the game.  I'm suggesting that if challenge were the sole focus of the game, that no player would assent to things entering the shared imagined space that disadvantaged their character, unless the rules specifically dictated that thing.

Simon wrote: Sorry, but I'm literally unable to discern a point in what you've written.  Can you rephrase?

Simon wrote:
Callan,

Sorry, but I'm literally unable to discern a point in what you've written.  Can you rephrase?

My experience is that as people get more invested in challenge, their willingness to accept unreliable currency is less.

Simon,

Loking at your last post to Jasper, it looks like it's possible for a game to contain theme, but have things in it that the players find more important then that theme.

Given this, I feel like you're trying really hard to explain the Big Model to us. You've added theme as a way of selecting what's important to the Exploration of a given game.

I think this is cool, and I feel like you're on the verge of giving us some really good insight on how to use theme as a method of selecting what gets into the SIS.

-Daniel

The way I see it in big model terms theme is closely tied to color.  Color as one of the five elements of exploration is huge but it is still only one element and while some styles of play may emphasize it others may prefer system or characters or  some other combination  that makes sense to them.

I'm thinking that what you see with D&D4 (and much of the earlier edition play I was involved in) is emphasis on system at the expense of color.  There's no drop of the SIS they are still resolving the actions of the imaginary characters in situations but the players are engaged in the system that makes that happen rather than the characters or thematic material that is created.  I believe this also applies to the Right to Dream play in something like Gurps but in a slightly different fashion where the meaning of events may be less important than the development of characters over time and it's relationship to system.

Of course my definition of RPG is pretty broad and things like Descent or Warhammer quest are pretty close to being in.  They arent far off of what myself and a lot of people I knew back in the early 80's were doing with AD&D.  We'd make characters and send them off on the dangerous mission of the week.  Little in the way of personality, even less that had any meaningful expression in game, little in the way of motivations for the characters but plenty of imagining a group of characters wandering into a dungeon for an unknown purpose and seeing what happened.  That was our SIS, we were imagining these characters wandering around in a dungeon looking for any signs of monsters deciding when to attack and when to flee and what spell to use to help us defeat them or escape.  There is a very broad view of theme where all these characters have made an ethical choice to go and kill monsters and loot dungeons but I dont see that informing play very much save that you know you need to make dungeons, populate it with monsters and stick some treasure in there. 

Simon,

Re: your 6 questions to Jasper:

I've often found myself asking those to some friends who roleplay much as Caldis describes (lotsa system-contact, little color).  "Why aren't you guys just playing a boardgame?"  (Which they often did!)  The answer, as best I can recall from observing:

You know how when you almost lose a boardgame, but stay in, there's a moment of "Yeah!  Thank God!  Whew!"?  And you know how when you win a teamwork boardgame, you all high-five each other?  Acting those moments out in-character with Dying as the "near-loss" and Cool New Toys as "winning" is fun.  Your imagination lends a sense of epic-ness to the experience that moving pieces around a board usually doesn't.

As far as I can tell, the kind of challenge that lends vitality to conflict in support of theme can exist in all sorts of play.  But the big "C" Challenge of true Gamist play means you can play with as much theme as a boardgame.

Ps,
-David

Perhaps I am just being obtuse, but allow me to rephrase my question.  The title of this essay, as well as the one before (What is Right to Dream for) seem to suggest a reinterpretation of these two creative agendas.  Your point seems to be "While in the GNS model Step on Up is treated as a qualitatively different method of play than Story Now, play that would be classified as Step on Up is fundamentally about theme and premise."  I interpret this as a narrowed argument of a larger point, "For a game to be roleplaying, it must contain theme or premise."  Simon, is that at least close to what you are saying?

I'll share a bit of D&D 4E actual play that I enjoyed just last weekend:

The characters had infiltrated an enemy fortress by means of an old sewer pipe, and had found themselves in a little area enclosed by boxes and crates.  Someone rolled a decent Perception check and goblins could be heard nearby.

I noticed my character could speak Goblin, so I had him grunt "Hey, get over here" from behind the boxes.  So a few goblins wandered over and the battle was joined.

It's the sort of thing I see all the time in Step On Up play -- this use of player knowledge ("goblins are fairly dumb and also cowardly") to gain a tactical advantage to be exploited.  There might be a roll -- see if you can Bluff these guys into falling for that, or something -- or there might not, but it's all pretty ad hoc, consensus-based, let's Step Right On Up play.  Of course goblins are dumb and cowardly.  No one needs to look into the rulebooks to check that out.

So we're fighting away in there and a swarm of centipedes amorphously swarms through the boxes and crates and starts laying waste to the party from behind.  I doubt there was anything explicitly written down in the encounter about whether they could do that, but there was no need -- of course they could do that.  Everyone's in consensus about that sort of thing.  And if there is a player in that sort of situation who does complain about it, that guy is likely to get the most grief and social-contract-enforcement from the most serious Step On Up players.

A bit later on my guy climbed up on some boxes and performed a diving Death From Above charge on a goblin.  Nothing explicitly covered by the rules.  But everyone thought it was great, and great within that Step On Up agenda.  To be clear about this -- they thought the attempt was great.  The actual result has very little bearing on the appreciation of it -- indeed, it seems half the time spectacular failure is even more cherished.  He happened to do some damage to the goblin, and to himself, and that was also great, but that wasn't the most important part of it.

How do other players know I'm the hardcore Step On Up guy at the table?  Because I also typically self-appoint into a co-DM role.  Pretty much every encounter, I'll remind the DM, hey, that monster over there didn't attack anyone, or hey wait, I forgot to take that ongoing damage, didn't I, and that sort of thing.  And that sometimes confuses some of the other players a bit, and mildly chagrins a few more, but that confusion isn't among the other Step On Up players.  They know sometimes to need to call your own fouls.

As has been pointed out, it's about challenge.  Challenge and honor.  There's no honor in succeeding in a battle because the DM forgot to use Reach 2 half the time.  Intentionally neglecting ("forgetting") to take ongoing damage isn't even conceivable.  Of course Step On Up players are going to metagame against their own characters.  It's one of the easiest ways to spot them. 

I know I risk being horribly misquoted and misunderstood here, but I'll tell you exactly what comes to mind:  "Let me win, but if I can not win, let me be brave in the attempt."  That covers just about everything I've felt and seen in the best of Step On Up play.

Cheers,
Roger

Sorry to double-post, but I just remembered another event that seems relevant to this line of inquiry.

We were getting near the end of the adventure, so we'd been playing for about three hours solid, and the DM set up the last battlemat and described the scene.  He was using generic monster counters, numbered, instead of miniatures.

After three rounds of combat, I finally noticed -- hey, you never told us what we're actually fighting!  Laughter and chagrin all around.  Oh, it's goblins, like we were fighting before.  Okay.

Motipha,

Not quite.  Whether a roleplaying game must have a shared imagined space to be considered such is not my focus.  What I'm saying is that, where a roleplaying game does have a shared imagined space, theme and premise and such are a useful way of understanding what motivates a lot of that play. That contradicts GNS (but not the rest of the Big Model) because I assert that the difference between games is one of degree, not category.  Really though, that contradiction is less interesting than what can be gained by looking at games in this way.

David,

I pretty much agree.  But! Why is acting out moments winning after nearly losing in-character fun? What makes that meaningful? I think there's some theme sneaking in there.  As much theme as a boardgame? Maybe.  But I think it's possible not all boardgames are devoid of theme.  They have colour, and that's gotta be for some reason, right?

I think the theory in the past has tended to start with the premise "we're playing a roleplaying game, and roleplaying games have these features, now, why are we playing this game?" I think what I'm doing is taking a step back, and saying "given a group of people who are looking for this experience, why are they playing a roleplaying game? What makes a roleplaying game the perfect vehicle for experiencing that?

Roger,

That's a good example of what's been described as Step on Up play.  I think that last post also neatly demonstrates the point I was making.  To Step on Up to the challenge, you don't need a shared imagined space.  My questions for you are the same as those I asked Jasper.  I'll ask a few more.

Would it bother you if the game's setting changed radically between sessions? Why?
If the GM made your character do something that you didn't want them to, because it led to a neat challenge, is that ok?
What do you think the GM's motivation is in this kind of play? Is it the same as the other players?
Are there "good guys" and "bad guys" in your game (i.e. people it's ok to kill, and people it's not)? How do you know which is which? Would it bother you if this changed session-to-session?

Some interesting questions here; I'll try to address them as best I can. 

Simon wrote: Would it bother you if the game's setting changed radically between sessions? Why?

If the GM made your character do something that you didn't want them to, because it led to a neat challenge, is that ok?

What do you think the GM's motivation is in this kind of play? Is it the same as the other players?

Are there "good guys" and "bad guys" in your game (i.e. people it's ok to kill, and people it's not)?

How do you know which is which? Would it bother you if this changed session-to-session?

What are the characters' personalities for?

What is a "comic foil" for?

What is the game's setting for?

What is the game's colour for? (i.e. why are you playing fantasy warriors, rather than just pieces on a board?)

What is the point of organising challenges into a string of encounters, rather than as isolated events?

What is the SIS for?

Cool.  Roger, thanks for answering those questions.  Your answers make sense to me, and they sound like a coherant style of play.  It's not a style of play that I personally am very familiar with, but I think I've played close to that.

I have two more questions:

First, would it be fair to characterise your responses as generally indicating that the shared imagined space, the things like setting, colour, characters, and so on, as well as in some ways contributing to the challenge (situational awareness, displaying mastery of setting information etc.) also in some way contribute towards making the victories more satisfying? Like, it's pretty fun to win at an abstact boardgame, but when you're winning at killing orcs to save orphans, that is somehow more fun?

Second, how much does your play vary about your answers to these questions? Can you imagine a style of play where you're a little more invested in the fiction of play, and a little less invested in challenge? Have you played that way? Does it vary between players? Do you see those things as competing agendas (non-jargon sense)? What I'm trying to get at is whether it'd be fair to call this type of play one end of a continuum, with "no investment in challenge" at the other end.

Simon wrote: First, would it be fair to characterise your responses as generally indicating that the shared imagined space, the things like setting, colour, characters, and so on, as well as in some ways contributing to the challenge (situational awareness, displaying mastery of setting information etc.) also in some way contribute towards making the victories more satisfying? Like, it's pretty fun to win at an abstact boardgame, but when you're winning at killing orcs to save orphans, that is somehow more fun?

Second, how much does your play vary about your answers to these questions? Can you imagine a style of play where you're a little more invested in the fiction of play, and a little less invested in challenge?

Have you played that way? Does it vary between players? Do you see those things as competing agendas (non-jargon sense)? What I'm trying to get at is whether it'd be fair to call this type of play one end of a continuum, with "no investment in challenge" at the other end.

Roger,

Those are some interesting insights. Your characterisation strikes me as pretty accurate to a particular style of play.  Your point about how pre-packaged motivations aren't generally accepted (i.e. you don't start play with a character who actually kinda likes orcs, and conversely you're not particularly motivated by whatever pretext you have for killing orcs), but during play you will actually care about things that aren't strictly Challenge-related (you get a hate-on for a particular NPC).  Does that sound right?

I like your description of "agenda frequency" and "agenda intensity", because that fits with my understanding of play as well.  Some parts of play are more meaningful than others, and not all parts of play are meaningful for the same reasons. But I suspect that it's not entirely consistent with how GNS is imagined in the Big Model.  That's why I don't think it's a useful way of describing play.

I'd be interested to read an Actual Play post about your gaming.

I have one more question for you (and anyone else reading):

Imagine that you sit down to start a new game, and the GM says to you "Hey, let's play a game about a team of brothers who fight together.  You can all make up a brother, and the game will be about tracking down your father, who's gone missing.  You've got clues as to his wherabouts, but that'll lead you through some of the most dangerous places in the world. You'll meet other family members along the way who might be allies or enemies."

Is this:

a) Cool
b) Crappy
c) Irrelevant

Can you explain why you chose your answer?

The problem with Agenda Frequency and Intensity is that CA doesnt look at the minute to minute play, it doesnt care how intense the Agenda is in any particular moment it's an understanding of what the group is gathered to do.  So yeah you can have intense moments caused by overcoming obstacles in a game that dont signal a Step on Up CA. 

As to your last question I think it's hard to say with the material given so I'd mostly say it's irrelevant.  Sounds sort of like Supernatural so maybe it could be a good game but it also has a bit of that lame railroaded plot feel to it.  Hard to  tell much based on that description.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I owe you (and everyone else) a half-decent Actual Play writeup by now, instead of these little tiny contextless scenes; I'll spin up an AP thread when I have the chance.

Simon wrote: Imagine that you sit down to start a new game, and the GM says to you "Hey, let's play a game about a team of brothers who fight together.  You can all make up a brother, and the game will be about tracking down your father, who's gone missing.  You've got clues as to his wherabouts, but that'll lead you through some of the most dangerous places in the world. You'll meet other family members along the way who might be allies or enemies."

Simon,

Good point that boardgames have color too.  Conflict and human concerns and themes aren't completely out of the picture, but I think they play a different role in boardgame play than in most roleplay.

In a typical (for me) RPG, the in-fiction events will (1) immediately make human sense in themselves, and then (2) resonate outward to impact my real self with an impression that I might describe as "thematic".  Example: my character executes a prisoner.  I then go, "Whoa, not sure how I feel about that.  Executing Prisoners is fraught."

In a typical game of Monopoly, the game actions will (1) be purely mechanical in themselves, and then (2) acquire human sense with reference to the game's color.  Example: I trade in some paper for some green plastic near-cubes, and put them on my board square.  Then I say, "Big investment in a new hotel!  You land there, you'll owe me big-time, sucker!"

Maybe this is the same distinction between "engaging theme" and "phatic theme" that you made in the Right to Dream thread.  But it seems at least possible to me that Monopoly is effectively "color that never becomes theme", adn that this might be characteristic of some Step On Up roleplay too.

Ps,
-David

P.S. Not related to this post, but related to other parts of this thread:  For an earlier take on where boardgaming meets rolelaying, see my old thread on the Swashbuckler boardgame.

Sorry I let this thread slip for a bit.  Real life.

Roger,

Am I right in thinking that it's a red flag because it signals that there might be content that conflicts with what you enjoy most about the game? Like, you never want there to be a question of whether you should kill somebody, just whether you can kill them, right? The ninja formulation avoids that because there's no connection to family, right?

Imagine that the pitch came from someone who you trust "gets it" about what you want.  The family thing would just be about adding intensity to the challenge, like, you're not just working as a team, you're working as a family.  Is that less alarming? More alarming? Less relevant?

If the brothers thing is totally irrelevant, I'm thinking that I'm at least partly wrong in thinking that theme is relevant to all play.  Not sure though.

David,

Yeah, I basically agree.

Hi Simon,

Chiming in a bit late here, I’ve been really busy all week. I would like to comment on a few points, even though the thread has moved on a bit and I certainly don’t want to derail it.

My experience is that as people get more invested in challenge, their willingness to accept unreliable currency is less. 

Simon wrote: Am I right in thinking that it's a red flag because it signals that there might be content that conflicts with what you enjoy most about the game? Like, you never want there to be a question of whether you should kill somebody, just whether you can kill them, right? The ninja formulation avoids that because there's no connection to family, right?

Imagine that the pitch came from someone who you trust "gets it" about what you want.  The family thing would just be about adding intensity to the challenge, like, you're not just working as a team, you're working as a family.  Is that less alarming? More alarming? Less relevant?