This obviously doesn't belong in its parent thread.

Anyway, John Kim and I started to discuss the value of the "useless detail", as I've called it.

To define, the details important to this discussion are those not relevant to the story at hand - Little Red Riding Hood has a severe peanut allergy, for example, or an encyclopedic knowledge of the local psychotropic flora.

John poses that these details are valuable, because they have the potential for future utility, both in direct usage and also in informing play.

Jack Spencer and I both objected, on similar grounds:
There is a lot of emphasis, in a particular school of RPging (both design and play), on having everything "figured out".
This has two effects:
It creates a broad separation between creation and play.
It can create deprotagonized, 'irrelevant' characters.

Meanwhile, the technique of characters emerging through play has the opposite qualities:
Play is uninformed by the absence of detail.
On the other hand, it is free to create stuff,
and characters don't become deprotagonized through wastage of mechanical ability.

So, both the techniques have their benefits and drawbacks.

My question is, can they both be used in a game, simultaneously, without stepping on each others' toes?

Can I ask: Which thread was the parent to this?

Rob MacDougall wrote: Can I ask: Which thread was the parent to this?

four willows weeping wrote: Meanwhile, the technique of characters emerging through play has the opposite qualities:
Play is uninformed by the absence of detail.
On the other hand, it is free to create stuff,
and characters don't become deprotagonized through wastage of mechanical ability.

four willows weeping wrote: To define, the details important to this discussion are those not relevant to the story at hand - Little Red Riding Hood has a severe peanut allergy, for example, or an encyclopedic knowledge of the local psychotropic flora.

John poses that these details are valuable, because they have the potential for future utility, both in direct usage and also in informing play.

Jack Spencer and I both objected, on similar grounds:
There is a lot of emphasis, in a particular school of RPging (both design and play), on having everything "figured out".
This has two effects:
It creates a broad separation between creation and play.
It can create deprotagonized, 'irrelevant' characters.

four willows weeping wrote: Meanwhile, the technique of characters emerging through play has the opposite qualities:
Play is uninformed by the absence of detail.
On the other hand, it is free to create stuff, and characters don't become deprotagonized through wastage of mechanical ability.

So, both the techniques have their benefits and drawbacks. My question is, can they both be used in a game, simultaneously, without stepping on each others' toes?

John Kim wrote: I see this mainly as a player preference issue. On rgf.advocacy, we hashed out a while back that some players preferred "Design-At-Start", while others preferred "Develop-In-Play". There's nothing wrong with mixing these, and indeed there are some benefits. Design-At-Start characters provide strong hooks for early adventures, because they provide a lot of details. Develop-In-Play characters help the campaign run more smoothly later, because they will evolve to fit the nature of the campaign, and can fill in roles that would otherwise be lacking.

The thing about "extra detail" that always bothers me is that it is extra detail, not especially important of relavant. It also seemed like an almost despirate attempt to make things "work" in an RPG on some level. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it seems to be something like "we need to have something happen, here's this detail. maybe it will be useful later...maybe.

If it's used, then great. If not, then why have it?

Jack Spencer Jr wrote: If it's used, then great. If not, then why have it?

Hi.

What are we talking about? I have no idea what we're talking about. What is this useless detail we're talking about?

If Little Red Riding Hood has an alergy to peanuts, why, for it's-an-imporovised-story-goodness sake wouldn't the GM take advantage of that fact. The only way a detail could be usless is if it's ignored. Why ignore it?

The only way I can see a detail being useless is if the GM already knows what skills/traits/whatever will be useful before the start of play and hews only to those. Is this true? Am I getting this right? Wouldn't that be a kind of willful persnickitiness lacking all sense of fun of building a story with fellow players.

In improvisation, you are taught during the first ten minutes of class to say, "yes, and..." when a scene partner tosses a new detail into the improvisation. You never contradict a new fact, you never deny. You build on it.

I may be odd in this regard, but I've always done this with my players in RPG games. If a player adds an alergy to a PC, it means he wants me to confront his PC with the implications of the allergy. Why wouldn't I?

Again: unless I know everything that's going to happen already, why not pick up fun leads from the players. Is this, then, a matter of GM style and technique: the plotted-it-all-out-won't they have fun being run through my adventure GMs on one side, and the well, here-we-go bass player GMs on the other.

Cause if not, I don't understand at all what's being said here. Please, for God's sake, help me.

Christopher

four willows weeping wrote: My question is, can they both be used in a game, simultaneously, without stepping on each others' toes?

I think the problem with Useless Detail is not when it exists (read Egri; his dialectic method to character development for a play has you give a full physical, sociological, and psychological write-up), but when it has a cost in Currency. I think that just about anything paid for at character creation ought to be held to the "Loaded Gun Principle." If there's a loaded gun in the story, it should go off before the end. Does this put your typical Design-At-Start character generation methods, especially in a Sim game, at a disadvantage? Absolutely! I think the kitchen-sink method of developing a character's skills, as in say GURPS (where it strikes me as most severe), is just asking to make trouble - you've got all these capabilities saved up for a rainy day; the problem is, you paid for all of them and if one of them never gets used, the Currency is wasted!

Perhaps that's why I have a preference for games like Over the Edge and The Pool. Firstly, their "define your own stuff" categories escape the tedium of hundreds and hundreds of skill descriptions (again I turn to GURPS for an extreme example). But more than that, in a distinctly Nar game, I think the amount of Director stance that is appropriate goes a long way to ensuring that the character is useful, in that it takes the burden off only the GM's shoulders (it is likewise tedious to have to run everything so as to make certain that the player characters all use their capabilities).

I think it's a positive thing that game design is slowly moving away from the sort of roulette game that traditional Sim skill systems have you play with Currency: you're guessing, "Will this be useful, or am I just throwing points away?" That's a bizarre element of the metagame that I am personally more than glad to be rid of.

-Wayne

I think Christopher has hit the nail on the head here. Without wanting to turn this into a GNS discussion, I think that in both Nar and Sim games, an important part of the GM's job is to make use of whatever resources are available, and player-designed character detail is a crucial part of such resources. So if I design a character with a detailed background, I expect the GM to make it possible for me to draw on that background in play. (In Gamist play, one could perhaps argue that this is entirely the player's job, as a way of "beating" the scenario.)

Of course, it is also the player's job, no matter what the style, to try to draw on such detail to make the session more interesting and fun.

But Cadriel's point about Resources is essential as well. If I have to pay for my background, that encourages me either to spread myself thin (lots of things just in case) or to specialize wildly (I have a 100 in machine gun, but a 0 in breathing). I think, though, that there are really two different kinds of detail here: those paid for and those not, and both exist even in GURPS. For example, while I have to pay for my skill as a sharpshooter, I don't probably have to pay for having a brother who's in a wheelchair (I mean this not as a question of whether my brother is "powerful," but as an emotional issue for my character). The question is whether, having spent time thinking about my brother, I will ever see him enter the campaign, or whether he'll just remain entirely on my character background sheet. As to my sharpshooter skills, if I pay for them, the GM had better realize that I'm going to use them, like it or not.

Regardless of Resource expense, detail is "useless" when either (1) the GM makes it impossible to utilize in play, or (2) the player is uncreative about utilizing it. Both can occur, obviously. I was once in a campaign where everyone was told to develop detailed backgrounds, with lots of history and contacts and friends and whatnot, and then the GM took us to a foreign country with no links back home, and everything home-based in our backgrounds was simply irrelevant and couldn't be used. This sucked. But it sucked a good deal harder because we paid for this stuff. The effect was that players were rewarded for ignoring background and designing min/maxed skill monsters, while players who devoted a lot of effort to background (as requested) were simply weaker. Not that balance is always an important thing, but I think you can imagine that in a game where the GM doesn't care a damn about character background but makes you pay for it, roleplaying per se is often less important than skill numbers.

John Kim wrote: How can having a peanut allergy "deprotagonize" the character?

Hi All,

The comments about Currency cleared everything up for me.

At least in terms of mechanics. I still can't fathom why a GM would do the things to players described above, but that's a seperate issue.

I suppose, at this late stage of the game, where I can't imagine playing many of the types of games descibed above anyhow, why anyone *would* play such games when they seem to encourage such discord and potential frustration -- but, again, another issue.

Thanks for the replies,
Christopher

I totally agree with Greyorm.

Christopher Kubasik wrote: At least in terms of mechanics. I still can't fathom why a GM would do the things to players described above,...

Christopher Kubasik wrote: I suppose, at this late stage of the game, where I can't imagine playing many of the types of games descibed above anyhow, why anyone *would* play such games when they seem to encourage such discord and potential frustration...

Hi Andrew,

Yes. I even almost came back and edited my post to comment on this.

But I find I'm boggling boggling myself these days. This is a whole 'nother thread, but I'm getting really confused about this.

Back in the day, in High School using the three AD&D hardbacks and nothing else, we played a campaign that, apparently wasn't anything like most group's straightfoward style: I did think about why the monster were in the dungeon, the campaign was about a small village being threatened by the resurgance of an evil cult, as much time was spent in romance and intrigue in forest and towns as was spent crawling in dungeons, the story arc was these farm kids growining into heroes, the alignments (mostly good) encouraged tension in "what is the right thing to do?", PC dreams were interwoven with character bits created by the PC's players so they all felt the PCs were part of the fabric of a fantasy world -- in short, what I liked best, and what my players liked best, had almost nothing to do with what was in the rules, and certainly, apparently, not the way most people were playing the game.

Now, the rules were there, and we certainly weren't "rewarded" by the rules for this behavior.

Why did we play this way?

It seems to me I keep depending on some sort of aesthetic sensibility to carry the day (which, we all know doesn't make any sense, since System Does Matter). On the other hand, building the rules set that would Encourage GMs to Respond to Players Bits and all other items I think make a great session ad nauseum would be as clunky and patched at AD&D -- except with a Narrativist slant.

At some point isn't it on the heads of the players to have -- christ, I don't know what to call it -- Good Taste? Generosity? Creative Spirit?

I suppose this is where my concern about building a "game" slips away and I just want to hang out with fellow storytellers and go to town.

But I still think the question needs to be asked: Style and Technique counts for something, right? Do we need gerible feed as a reward for every choice. Or can we use words and action as players at the table to create more fun, more aesthetic pleasure, more generosity simply -- because we can?

Your in confusion,
Christopher

Christopher Kubasik wrote: Do we need gerible feed as a reward for every choice[?]

Damn, Christopher, that's a monumental post.

Should we take the question to another thread?

- Walt

Hi Reverand and Walt,

I'll need to get to the 3E thread and read it through before I can answer. But thanks for providing the prep work on this discussion. (As it stands, I've got to get some writing done and errands now. I'll check in later tonight.)

What's spinning around my head right now is this idea of fun -- and even pleasure.

Chleric has split the thread already. (He seems to have knack for doing this.) There he chose to follow up on the term "good taste" -- which often suggests a kind of intellectualized knowledge of what is good and bad.

But we might consider it in a blunt, reversed understanding: responding postively to that which tastes good. So, yes, greyorm, that which gives us pleasure is our own reward. But where do we go from here?

Apparently to the new thread on Good Taste.

Back later,
Christopher

Ok, I'll have to jump in on Good Taste in a bit, but on Currency costs:

This is part of my issue, certainly an important part, but I don't believe that Currency is the only thing that creates deprotagonized detail.

There is a cost in energy and attention associated with creating any detail. This is monumentally more important than Currency; Currency should be a representation of the flow of attention anyway. So the question is about focus of energy and attention: Who has to write around whom, and do they do so in a rewarding way? How can we help them do so?

I see now that the two options are mutually exclusive, but this thread has helped me see the problem more clearly, and cleared the path for a solution. Thanks, guys.

Hi Greyorm,

First, congrats on getting your mojo back in your gaming.

And second: well, there it is. Your games are not more fun beause of specific reward mechanics in the game that are rewarding certain behavior. As Ron correctly, I think, pointed out on your threads, you've dumped certain rules that move things out of certain Gamist and Simulationist agendas.

But certainly no Narrativist bennies are on the table in terms of concrete mechanics. Not that they're needed for it to be Narrativist play. As Ron pointed out on your Actual Play thread, protaganized, Story Now play is a big chunk of Narrativism, and that's what you're doing. None the less, something "good" is happening, everyone playing is responding to it. What is it?

I think it's this:

The rules of improvisation.

From everything you're doing you are using (whether you know it or not), several primary "rules" form improv.

* You are saying "Yes, and..." or "Yes, but..." to suggestions from your scene partners.

* You are not contradicting, denying or ignoring scene or character "truths" introduced during "play"

* You are not presuming to know what the scene/(story) is going to be about, be willing to discover as details are added on the fly.

These are rules. By applying them, you get gerbile bennies. What are the gerible bennies? Good scene work and story.

There's no metagame score keeping or whatnot. But there is an aesthetic reward. It is the pleasure of watching coherent patterns grow on the fly.

So, I'd offer:

1) there is a kind of system/game being played

2) this system/game you've added to your AD&D game is time tested and provides rewards

3) the rewards transcend metagame concerns and are aesthetic

4) these rules are very soft and the reward (aesthetic pleasure) nearly impossible to quantify, and so often dismissed/ignored/denegrated by those who want things quantified

5) you've stumbled into them by accident (ie: hanging around at the Forge and hearing a lot of Narrativist talk)

6) the rules for this system/game have absolutely nothing to do with what most people think of as system or game when they talk about RPGs -- but nonetheless folks often grasp after these aesthetic pleasures after encountering them by accident -- but almost always by reworking mechanical rules and quantifiable details (character personality trait lists with dependents and allergies that might never get into play) that they think will bring them back to what they got by accident, but, in fact, have nothing at all to do with the pleasure they seek -- for it, in fact, cannot be measured

That's what I've got so far.

Christopher

Oh, one more thing.

Ron's work on Sorcerer turns a lot of the Imrovisation rules into game rules. Kickers for example, start the story off and make everyone aware: "This is what the story is about; every scene builds off of this scene."

Compare this to other styles of play (whether to gain competative advantage or experience the world), where there's no need to stay focused on *adding* to what has come before. With a Kicker, you start with a situation, add to that situation scene by scene, and finally resolve it.

That's good improv. But, again, the reward mechanic is simply "pleasure"; a pleasure created by that weird human desire for good storytelling, which is a matter of taste.

Christopher

I don't know how much help this will be; but I think it's related to the question.

When we were developing Multiverser, we became more and more focused on getting characters as detailed as possible. After all, we were talking about a player representing himself, the person he had become, as a character, and real people are extremely complex with many and varied talents and abilities. We recognized that as they entered the worlds they would rely on things they knew, and couldn't really predict which things they knew would be relevant, even given knowledge of the worlds they entered.

As an example, we dropped three players into The Postman (the Costner film story). One of them, an engineer, couldn't avoid the draft, but once inside began using his skills to create an underground newspaper to undermine the authority of the command structure, until groundswell of opinion within the ranks tore the army apart. The second fell back on his skills as a hunter to stalk General Bethlehem and ultimately kill him, taking over the army from outside. The third used his diplomatic skills to organize townspeople in an effort to build a society strong enough to oppose the armed brigands who pretended to be government. Part of creating a world is presenting problems. Part of playing a character is figuring out how to use the abilities you do have to solve those problems.

However, character creation got rather complex and involving. Eventually we realized that we were overdoing it. We were working with conflicting objectives: streamline character creation and create detailed characters. Ultimately we went back to our roots, and devised an on-the-fly character creation system. In this, we ignored most of the spaces on the character sheet. That is, you've got so many attributes and any number of skills, but I really don't need to know that your character is of average strength and average agility and average intelligence when we start. Even if you're a bit above or below average, I don't have to worry about that. I don't need to know that you learned to ride a horse in summer camp, not right now. What I need to know is whether any aspect of your character is outstanding or extraordinary. Are you a genius? Are you a star athlete? Do you have professional level abilities in something? Did you study computer design, or genetic engineering, or astrophysics? Are you a blackbelt in some martial arts style, or a sharpshooter for the police force? Give me a list of the things that make you remarkable.

If during play you decide you have to swim across the river, and you didn't mention you could swim, that's not a problem. I'm quite willing to accept that you're an average swimmer if you say so. I'm even willing to accept that you're an above average swimmer if you earned your Red Cross Life Saving card or Boy Scout Swimming Merit Badge. What I'm not willing to do is allow you to win in a race against Mark Spitz because suddenly you happened to remember that you're an Olympic level swimmer who just didn't put it on his paper.

Of course, in this case we have an objective reality: we're assuming that the character can do everything the player could do at the start of play, plus anything learned during the game. The player becomes our reference template.

To do something similar in play, you'd need something of a character concept that has similar ramifications; you'd also need to be willing to explore those ramifications. For example, if the player wrote in background that the character spent summers on the farm, it's fair to assume that he's got a bunch of skills related to animals and plants. If such a character tried to ride a horse, I'd give it to him based on that farm background. Similarly, if he did a lot of camping in the mountains, I'd include such things as rope use and swimming and foraging as reasonably related to what he did. This means that you've got to create this sort of distinction between those primary skills at which the character is especially proficient, the ones listed on the sheet, and those secondary skills at which the character has limited but real ability, which are inferred from what is known about him. Such a system could do what you want, as I understand it: allow for both detailed pre-play character creation and creative expansion during play.

Is this what you're seeking?

--M. J. Young

Christopher Kubasik wrote: Oh, one more thing.

Ron's work on Sorcerer turns a lot of the Imrovisation rules into game rules. Kickers for example, start the story off and make everyone aware: "This is what the story is about; every scene builds off of this scene."

Compare this to other styles of play (whether to gain competative advantage or experience the world), where there's no need to stay focused on *adding* to what has come before. With a Kicker, you start with a situation, add to that situation scene by scene, and finally resolve it.

Christopher Kubasik wrote: Ron's work on Sorcerer turns a lot of the Imrovisation rules into game rules. Kickers for example, start the story off and make everyone aware: "This is what the story is about; every scene builds off of this scene."

On the other hand, building the rules set that would Encourage GMs to Respond to Players Bits and all other items I think make a great session ad nauseum would be as clunky and patched at AD&D -- except with a Narrativist slant.

My straightforward observation of the activity of role-playing is that many participants do not enjoy it very much. Most role-players I encounter are tired, bitter, and frustrated.

The tragedy is how widespread GNS-based degeneration really is. I have met dozens, perhaps over a hundred, very experienced role-players with this profile: a limited repertoire of games behind him and extremely defensive and turtle-like play tactics. Ask for a character background, and he resists, or if he gives you one, he never makes use of it or responds to cues about it. Ask for actions - he hunkers down and does nothing unless there's a totally unambiguous lead to follow or a foe to fight. His universal responses include "My guy doesn't want to," and, "I say nothing."

I have not, in over twenty years of role-playing, ever seen such a person have a good time role-playing. I have seen a lot of groups founder due to the presence of one such participant. Yet they really want to play. They prepare characters or settings, organize groups, and are bitterly disappointed with each fizzled attempt. They spend a lot of money on RPGs with lots of supplements and full-page ads in gaming magazines.

Listen guys,

I don't know if this is being treated as a "big deal."

I do know that I'm responding to Andrew Martin's post from the first page. There he suggests that the reason GMs might not know how to facilitate the kind of story the Players clearly wanted because of the rules didn't tell him how to do it, and because the GMs simply didn't know how to do it.

All I'm trying to do is tease out is how some GMs did it without being told, or, are doing it today after having picked up clues either from Ron's work or Sorcerer in general.

This bafflement and "Huff! What's the Big Deal?" response from folks like Ron and Jack seem especially strange since all one has to do is go look down at the recent Star Wars Actual Play threads and see plenty of people have no friggin' clue how to break out these idea and apply them to their play.

Am I after a whole new "Thing"? Um, no. I was doing it decades ago in High School. (Welcome to my club.). I'm simply trying to write about it from different perspective then is sometimes used here (using a different style of writing, a certain change in vocabulary) so that folks who may not have taken a logic class might still get a game closer to the style of play they want.

As far as I knew, we aren't scientists trying to get published first. We're trying to help each other play better. If I think that by being explicit about techniques borrowed from improvisation or writing will help a story go better for player who don't know these things yet, I'll do it. (Or, perhaps, in the future, not.)

Take care,
Chrstopher

Christopher Kubasik wrote: It seems to me I keep depending on some sort of aesthetic sensibility to carry the day (which, we all know doesn't make any sense, since System Does Matter).
Christopher