Ferro’s General Theory of Role-Playing

Version 1.02

1
The /idea/ of /published-style role-playing games/ (RPGS) is a meaningful genre, expressed negentropically. That idea causes the hobby worth of specific games to tend toward specific common forms, described herein. “Meaningful genre”, and “negentropically” are defined in the text as needed.

2
A meaningful genre, means an intelligible /intent/ of the fantasy world in which the game is played. To be intelligible, this intent must be a real intent in the real universe, meaning it must be /sovereign/, rather than collective. This intention thus inclines toward inhering in a single /Gamemaster/ (GM).

3
The GM establishes his intent in that sense, and produces two things. First, he produces materials, as specific, separate /intentions/ existing within the fantasy world. From these intentions he derives paraphernalia such as maps, props, histories, scenario outlines, and game mechanics.

4
Second, he produces a system. The system serves as a /metaphor/ for the fantasy interaction to take place in the game. It is thus the language of the game, combining the participants’ primary spoken language, the idiosyncratic culture of their fellowship, and the specific game-lingo employed.

5
The superior GM strives to refine his game’s system, to do the maximum work of evoking the material in the minds of the players, using the minimum of administrative action. This has nothing to do with mechanical complexity or processing time. Complex mechanics may be far more efficient than simple ones.

6
The GM cannot express the genre negentropically, or tending toward increasing organisation, while alone, because he consumes his own experience of the genre. Unless he imports new experience from outside himself, he experiences diminishing returns, and so expresses the genre /entropically/, heading toward exhaustion. The most efficient method of importing experience is to invite /players/ into the game.

7
A player, as a sovereign intention in the real universe, adopts at least one personality in the game termed his /Player-Character/ (PC). Within the bounds of the system, the players and the GM dialog to reconcile genre intent, to the inverse degree of their compatibility and skill.

8
The superior player strives to develop his character to be the best possible, qualitatively specific reflection of the genre. That is, to use the minimum of material to generate the maximum action of PC intent.

9
Together, the PCs form a manifold that reflects the GM’s fantasy world in which they play. The GM can import this /changed/, new experience, by interacting with the PCs, while in the guise of an NPC. The interface of PC and NPC, where the GM regenerates within himself the intent of the PCs, increases the GM’s experience of the genre, and lets him improve the system, besides producing new material.

10
Although any non-genre intent run by the GM, technically qualifies as a /non-player character/ (NPC), these intentions’ purpose of interfacing with the PCs, inclines them toward taking the form of individual humans, cosmetics notwithstanding.

11
To be meaningful, the ongoing play implies both /irreversible change/ and /fellowship/. The former comes from the need for intelligibility. To be intelligible, it must be rational, and rationality prescribes a /characteristic curvature/ for any given intention. That is, any process needs a reason for being that way and not another; this reason generates the direction of time. Reversible change deletes such reason, and collapses meaning.

12
The directionality of time naturally motivates PCs into a /mission-orientation/. Specifically, an operation conducted to spend a given time so as to accomplish a particular end. This is precisely the mirror of the fellowship of the participants in their aim at expressing genre, and inclines toward a replication of that fellowship within the game, namely as a dedicated team of some kind, on a /campaign/.

13
“Multiple sovereigns, all equal” in administering the genre, is thus a corruption. Any attempt to use the system to render a mere game /of the system itself/, or to get the group’s intent to compose a story /as a mere story rather than a campaign/, is a corruption.

14
The one GM, many players model is thus the most natural form of RPG. In general, that model gives the highest potential of efficiently, negentropically expressing a meaningful genre, and retains its popularity for that reason.

15
Published-style RPGs (tabletop, LARPS, postal, email) differ from ecstatic rites (voodoo, Pentecostalism, counterculture concerts, BDSM), and stand-up routines (flirting, improv comedy), precisely because of RPGs’ motivation toward /campaigns/.

Hey, CF, why did you use the term "published-style"? What would be a non-published style RPG (if you think that would help)? I'm trying to discern the overall point here.

Mike

Dear Mr. Holmes:

"Published-style" distinguishes what we on this forum think of as "you know, /real/ RPGs", from other activities which rather resemble them, like criminal rehabilitation role-play conducted by therapists, voodoo, BDSM, etc..(cf. paragraph 15). The piece above suggests that our intuition is right, that there really /is/ a difference between the /idea/ of published-style RPGs, and other forms.



Cpl Ferro

Cpl Ferro,

Thanks for the clarification.

The use of slashes is a tad confusing. Is there some sort of notiation that it denotes, or is it merely for emphasis? Or to annote terms that are being used in a specific "jargony" way?

Just trying to decipher your dialect, here.

Mike

It would have been better if it had been substantially footnoted. A huge amount of that seems presupposed on common knowledge that isn't.

Its an interesting angle. So if I drill down part of the point here is a challenge to the concept of gm-full games and argue for the re-crowning of the GM-player dynamic. Right?

Would you be willing to exchange "corruption" for "mutation" or similar? And does it matter in any way?

I'd be interested if you could expand on the generation of time, which is something I've gnawed on a little, such things as curvature - of what and where?

I see a circle.

single vision = meaning = power centered in one person = single vision

... without any particular grounding. Arguments that rely on the term "natural" and which utilize the concept of "what we all think of" as a definition are particularly uninteresting from my standpoint.

The specifics (rather than the rhetorical underpinning) of what you've presented are familiar to most people here. In Forge terms, you're talking about Illusionist role-playing with a strong setting-based justification for group-mission scenarios.

It's a viable way to play, as long as you set aside the potential for one or more of the players getting uppity and wanting, perhaps, to have some meaning-based input into what's going on as well. It's also prone to the creep of more and more railroading, overstepping the bounds of one another's expectations regarding who controls (or has input into) which aspects of play. And finally, such play may suffer from "exhaustion escalation," in which the game-world crises become larger and larger scale, in inverse proportion to the players' diminishing emotional commitment to dealing with them.

Given those limitations or potential problems, more power to you. However, you haven't defined role-playing, you've described a preference for a particular mode or brand of it, and provided a great example of synecdoche for us to refer to in future threads.

Best,
Ron

CplFerro wrote:
1
The /idea/ of /published-style role-playing games/ (RPGS) is a meaningful genre, expressed negentropically. That idea causes the hobby worth of specific games to tend toward specific common forms, described herein. “Meaningful genre”, and “negentropically” are defined in the text as needed.

2
A meaningful genre, means an intelligible /intent/ of the fantasy world in which the game is played. To be intelligible, this intent must be a real intent in the real universe, meaning it must be /sovereign/, rather than collective. This intention thus inclines toward inhering in a single /Gamemaster/ (GM).

3
The GM establishes his intent in that sense, and produces two things. First, he produces materials, as specific, separate /intentions/ existing within the fantasy world. From these intentions he derives paraphernalia such as maps, props, histories, scenario outlines, and game mechanics.

4
Second, he produces a system. The system serves as a /metaphor/ for the fantasy interaction to take place in the game. It is thus the language of the game, combining the participants’ primary spoken language, the idiosyncratic culture of their fellowship, and the specific game-lingo employed.

5
The superior GM strives to refine his game’s system, to do the maximum work of evoking the material in the minds of the players, using the minimum of administrative action. This has nothing to do with mechanical complexity or processing time. Complex mechanics may be far more efficient than simple ones.

6
The GM cannot express the genre negentropically, or tending toward increasing organisation, while alone, because he consumes his own experience of the genre. Unless he imports new experience from outside himself, he experiences diminishing returns, and so expresses the genre /entropically/, heading toward exhaustion. The most efficient method of importing experience is to invite /players/ into the game.

7
A player, as a sovereign intention in the real universe, adopts at least one personality in the game termed his /Player-Character/ (PC). Within the bounds of the system, the players and the GM dialog to reconcile genre intent, to the inverse degree of their compatibility and skill.

8
The superior player strives to develop his character to be the best possible, qualitatively specific reflection of the genre. That is, to use the minimum of material to generate the maximum action of PC intent.

9
Together, the PCs form a manifold that reflects the GM’s fantasy world in which they play. The GM can import this /changed/, new experience, by interacting with the PCs, while in the guise of an NPC. The interface of PC and NPC, where the GM regenerates within himself the intent of the PCs, increases the GM’s experience of the genre, and lets him improve the system, besides producing new material.

10
Although any non-genre intent run by the GM, technically qualifies as a /non-player character/ (NPC), these intentions’ purpose of interfacing with the PCs, inclines them toward taking the form of individual humans, cosmetics notwithstanding.

11
To be meaningful, the ongoing play implies both /irreversible change/ and /fellowship/. The former comes from the need for intelligibility. To be intelligible, it must be rational, and rationality prescribes a /characteristic curvature/ for any given intention. That is, any process needs a reason for being that way and not another; this reason generates the direction of time. Reversible change deletes such reason, and collapses meaning.

12
The directionality of time naturally motivates PCs into a /mission-orientation/. Specifically, an operation conducted to spend a given time so as to accomplish a particular end. This is precisely the mirror of the fellowship of the participants in their aim at expressing genre, and inclines toward a replication of that fellowship within the game, namely as a dedicated team of some kind, on a /campaign/.

13
“Multiple sovereigns, all equal” in administering the genre, is thus a corruption. Any attempt to use the system to render a mere game /of the system itself/, or to get the group’s intent to compose a story /as a mere story rather than a campaign/, is a corruption.

14
The one GM, many players model is thus the most natural form of RPG. In general, that model gives the highest potential of efficiently, negentropically expressing a meaningful genre, and retains its popularity for that reason.

15
Published-style RPGs (tabletop, LARPS, postal, email) differ from ecstatic rites (voodoo, Pentecostalism, counterculture concerts, BDSM), and stand-up routines (flirting, improv comedy), precisely because of RPGs’ motivation toward /campaigns/.

Dear Mr. Holmes:

Slashes indicate italics for folks too lazy to apply HTML. Eyestrain plays a part, as I see I overlooked the italics button in the submission page.

I find the concepts here difficult to express without italics, similar to how hard it is to express subtleties without commas.



Cpl Ferro

Dear Mr. Mazza:

Re:1
The world not only gets more specific and structured, it does so by getting outside the head of the GM.

Re:2
The question is not “collective vision” versus “single vision”, but of the natural tendency of organisation by which the idea of an RPG is intelligible. In the real world, all physical principles are singular. Example: Cognition, which is always subjective; it can know truth, but only because it can recreate the /intent/ of that truth (that physical principle) inside its owner’s mind. Thus when we say a game has an /intent/, that intent tends toward being realised by a single person. The interaction alters the quality of that intent, not the tendency (see 6).

Re: 3
The GM decides what distinct principles (intentions) exist in his world. Example: Each major NPC, at least, will be his own intention, his own principle of action in the game. Every NPC might be such. A special tree might be a principle, as might a vehicle, or a storm. He roleplays these intentions like personalities, in the sense that they do not have to obey axioms (fixed rules), but are qualitatively unique. The genre/vision is the overall principle that breaks logjams, so to speak.

Re: 4
Metaphor is indispensable. Metaphor is what a system /is/, insofar as we play RPGs and not axiomatic games like Monopoly, in the same way that all Classical science and art are founded on metaphor. It is thus the gestalt of the group’s interactive methods, and is refined as such. It’s not just “information transfer”, it’s refinement of the group’s private method of /suggestion of genre/.

Re: 5
A GM who does not strive to refine the system, defined above, isn’t improving himself as a GM. He does this by making his material the most evocative, using the least work. He /economises/ in other words, a subset of which is the /bookkeeping/ needed to run an effective campaign. (Though, here, economy is to bookkeeping what physics is to arithmetic).

Re: 6
Analogy: Science and art. The GM embodies the principle of /leadership/ behind successful principled ventures in writing, statecraft, science, art, entrepreneurship, even training a puppy. Science refers to the endeavour of discovering new principles relating to man’s mastery over the universe (abiotic, biotic). Art refers to discovering principles relating to man’s ability to disseminate principles throughout society (cognitive). Here, the specific genre is akin to a scientific principle that the GM has discovered. The system is akin to an artistic one. The GM seeks to develop the system (“art”) that allows the dissemination of the genre (“science”). The paradox arises because the genre is not /real/, and so is fundamentally entropic, even though it can /ape/ actual negentropy. That actual aping needs players.

Re: 7
What is meant: system lets the participants reconcile their differing interpretations of genre. The more skilful they are, and the more compatible their personalities, the less time is spent making sure everyone agrees with the way the game is going, genre-wise.

Re: 8
A character is developed in a real sense, to the degree that the player acquires a sense of “who the PC really is, inside”. That is, not a collection of devices, but a gestalt personality. Anyone who “gets” that personality can recreate the character’s likely actions in any given circumstance, without recourse to notes. So the superior player shoots for that, rather than “collecting objects” of any kind, and does so by crafting a character who “fits” within the genre, as a unique entity. That PC will reflect the genre, just as Indiana Jones reflects Pulp.

Re: 9
By reflecting the genre (see 8), the PCs change and improve it. By interacting as NPCs, with these reflections of the genre, the GM recreates these jewels within his mind, in the proper context. This is how the GM “gets inside his own head”, so to speak. The question isn’t of being “static” or “dynamic”.

Re: 10
The tendency of NPCs to be human helps describe the normal form of RPGs. That is, there is no other way for RPGs to /tend/ to be, except as tending to make NPCs costumed humans.

Re: 11
Since the genre is /not real/, it’s /not true/ either, and thus is subject to revision. This revision tends to ape, but is not the same as, the progress of science and art, in which new principles are discovered which clarify old ones (which remain true). /Irreversibility/ refers to in-context time as a resource, the expenditure of which risks consequences. The more reversible game history is, the less intelligible the genre, and the more it resembles a video-game (cyclical time).

Re: 12
Missions are not /necessary/ per se, they are merely part of the overall tendency of RPGs. The linearity of in-game time, inclines toward campaigns, the same way Christian civilisation inclines toward going to the Moon. That is, humans as social creatures, appreciating their individual lives as an exhaustible resource within linear time, in a rational universe, are oriented toward /progress/. That type of progress gets us to the Moon in 500 years, whereas aeons of cyclical time do not. RPGs’ analogous condition, thus inclines the /PCs/ toward such missions. The best example of this pattern is seen in The Lord of the Rings, essentially a Christian fantasy, in this sense. (The format is to encourage browsing; it’s a rational argument, not a logical one.)

Re: 13
Campaigns do not define roleplaying, but rather define /published-style RPGs/ as an idea distinct from other types of roleplaying. Otherwise, it’s just voodoo with dice. Don’t mistake “corruption” as a statement that “RPGs are evil”, but rather in the sense of deviating from the ideal, the /idea/ that makes RPGs, RPGs.

Re: 14
“Nature” again, as “idea”. People who only see red flags aren’t going to grasp the idea; i.e., “modern thought” itself is merely a corrupt tradition. I’m working from the basis of the idea of RPGs, as being a kind of parody of Classical Christian thought, which did not and could not arise as a coherent subculture at any other time or place in history (but that’s another essay). It relates to the Maximum-Minimum principle of Nicolaus of Cusa, as God (maximum) relates to Man (minimum), as Man efficiently furthers his own mastery of the universe, as a negentropic process. Without this, I say, no RPGs; thus it’s the most natural place for me to start.

Re: 15
Clarify in one’s mind, “mission-orientation”, akin to Frodo’s Ringquest, or the Moon Race, in their appropriate contexts, referenced earlier. This mission-orientation, expressed by campaigns where long-term goals are pursued by a group of PCs, is the key. Voodoo /itself/ may have a mission, but it does not have one /as such a campaign/. The goal of voodoo is the same as the goal of the participants; there is no campaign within a Secondary World (Tolkien), that is recognised /as being/ a secondary world. Voodoo is intended to be /real/. Recognising this lets us better define RPGs; it does not make moral demands.

Cpl Ferro

Dear Mr. Edwards:

Language is being able to “jog the minds” of the people one talks to. You know what I mean, when I say “what we all think of as RPGs” – D&D, LARPS, and so on – and trying to explain it further begs the question.

That there are many methods of play practised, is akin to there being many conceptions of time. Just as only linear time is rationally intelligible, so only the idea defined above can distinguish published-style RPGs from voodoo /in principle/.

Cpl Ferro

Dear contracycle:

Sussing the unclear bits is why it was posted.

You’re right about the re-crowning, in a sense. In my last endeavour in this vein I got off-track by trying to account for every possible manner of roleplaying; I realised that to define published-style RPGs as distinct from everything else, I needed to hypothesise it as a distinct idea, which all such games take as their pattern. “Corruption” seems as good a word as “mutation”, but without the materialist-Darwinist suggestion of plastic forms springing forth from one another. As a dead worm corrupts by rotting; it may transform into something else (dirt, plant), but in doing so it becomes less and less “worm”.

As to time, take “curvature”. By this is not meant any sensible thing, only an intelligible thing. Take Cusa’s Maximum-Minimum principle: A circle is a metaphor for this principle, in which the maximum work (area) is done by the minimum action (perimeter). The drawn circle is /not/ the principle; it is a /metaphor/ for the principle. That is, there is an irony in the circle being the shape with the maximum area and the minimum perimeter; one uses that as a springboard to realise the principle (the ramifications of which are not relevant here, nor fully understood by me).

Now, to understand linear time we (ironically) have to destroy simple linearity. Take Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason: Everything needs a reason to be the way it is, and not another way. So this relates to Einstein’s concept of /curved space-time/, in which space is not merely empty, linear extension. Rather, each volume of space, no matter how tiny, is /qualitatively different/ from all other volumes of space. Try and relate this to the idea of metaphor, shown above, so you see that curvature here is not a visible or sensible curve. Drawing curved lined to show a gravity well, is a metaphorical depiction. People are not used to thinking scientifically in terms of metaphor; hence the difficulty in grasping Einstein.

Apply this now, to time. If we have a circle, or a straight line, then each segment of that no matter how small, is interchangeable with any other segment. Thus, in a straight line, a segment can be delimited near the beginning, and swapped with a segment of the same length delimited near the end, and no one will be the wiser. This violates Sufficient Reason, because there is no /reason/ to put segment A in place A, and segment B in place B, rather than vice versa. Thus, there can be no true linearity in the universe, nor any true circularity (The Maximum-Minimum principle escapes this by being a metaphor, just as “linear time” is a metaphor).

Time, rather, is linear, in the manner of self-similar spiral action. Imagine (or draw out) a spiral like the coil of a spring, with the radius of the coil increasing with each pass of the wire or line. Each segment, no matter how small, is thus /unique/ and /necessary/ to the generation of the spiral. Combine this with curved space, and you have Einstein’s curved space-time in germ.

Thus, every principle in the universe has a “characteristic curvature” that describes its unique way of acting; for example, the orbit of the Earth, which cannot be expressed arithmetically as the sum of influences measured by Newtonian laws. Rather, its orbit is a unique /intention/ in the universe.

Cpl Ferro

Negentropically? Gestalt? Sussing? Delimited? No wonder your wife doesn't understand you. I suddenly feel like I'm reading an article submitted for peer review in a journal, instead of a discussion forum about game design on the Internet.

Like Ralph and Ron, I, too, have the feeling you're trying to argue that very narrow examples of role playing are the only legitimate ones; and I think you're mistaken.

Running Multiverser involves running players in many different worlds, and if there's one thing it's taught me about different worlds, it's that they're different.

Sometimes that world is clearly and completely described and defined in a book somewhere, and it's a matter of getting that description to the players; even without the book, sometimes those exact details are in the referee's mind and merely must be conveyed.

At other times, there is much less detail provided or decided by the referee in advance, and it springs up in play. There are many times in play that the players invent details, even though they don't realize it. As an example, on one occasion someone in The Dancing Princess broke into the vacated room of the missing girls and asked for a description of the room. When told there was a fireplace, he asked what was on the mantel. I hadn't said there was a mantel, but I immediately created a batch of things on the mantel, and he took some of them with him as he left the room. To a significant degree, that was mutual creation.

Similarly, I've been in many games in which players have asked whether a specific object or kind of object is in sight. Sometimes the answer is obviously yes or no even if such a thing isn't on the page (are there clothes hanging in the closet in the bedroom?); other times Multiverser gives me a die roll to determine whether things are as the player wishes. If he asks to look for it, in a real sense he has created it.

The game even has moments in which the referee will say to the player, "you tell me what's there". Those moments are more common in other games.

I've also been in games in which the referee would bring a player character into a new world, and have absolutely no idea what sort of world it was. E. R. Jones did this often, setting up a rather generic stage (forest, modern city, caves, desert, inside of building) and watching what the player did in response. He would then have the world form entirely in response to what the player decided to do, answering questions either by fiat or by die roll until there was enough form to the world that he could start imagining the rest. It's a wonderful way to start a new chapter in play, as it almost always creates something original and unexpected.

Multiverser does maintain the single referee model, and I like it that way; but I don't think that interactive play which apportions more credibility to "players" even to the point of eliminating the special role of one as "referee" can be said not to be role playing. There are plenty of examples of play without a referee (including many LARPs and much Freeform, but other kinds of games as well). I don't see anything in your presentation that invalidates them.

Of course, obfuscation by excessive application of obscure verbiage may have undermined my ability to incisively parse the communicated information into its intended meaning values; but there's nothing I can do about that but wait for you to explain it more clearly.

--M. J. Young

Dear Mr. Young:

The variations you describe inevitably arise from published-style RPGs existing as a subset of the rock-drugs-sex counterculture. They’re something I sometimes term “Swedish roleplaying experiments” (a take-off on the idea of “Swedish social experiments”).

My purpose is not to define what is legitimate or not, only to define what distinguishes published-style RPGs as a singular idea, from all other forms of roleplaying (e.g. flirting). Thus all the forms you describe are not only roleplaying, they are /published-style roleplaying/, the latter by virtue of their descent from the original conception of RPGs, such as D&D. This is not mere “X influenced Y”, but rather, those games exist within the same /spirit/, or partake of the same /idea/, even if their specifics are different.

Perhaps the best example is the human form itself. Leonardo Da Vinci showed that the human form expressed “the golden section”, a ratio of self-similar growth characteristic of living forms. Typically, it is the ratio of the distance from the top of the head to the navel, to the navel to the soles of the feet. Or, a mathematically perfect way of finding it is the ratio of the length of one side of a pentagon, to the distance between the farthest angles of two adjacent sides.

All living humans are going to express this ratio, by virtue of life. My analogy is that, most humans will also fit into the Golden Section proportions, with deviations here and there. Some humans might only barely fit. Still, the tendency is there. So with these RPGs; they have this central idea that they tend to popularly go into, /because/ that is what defines them from other pastimes. They may have variations, which stretch away from this idea, without ceasing to partake of it. “Legitimate” is not the issue.

Cpl Ferro

To contracycle, again:

A response to elsewhere, here: “Corruption” is too harsh a word to apply to an idea like RPGs. The sense that I was struggling toward is, I think, best expressed by the term “distortion”. That word non-biologically implies the deformation of a field, rather that the rotting of a body.

Cpl Ferro