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So as not to clutter this cool glorantha thread

Quote from: Ron Edwards
Why is that such a "boink" insight for gamers, as opposed to the "duh"-obvious requirement for everyone else, for all the things they do? I have an answer for this question, but it's not going to make anyone happy.

I think the issue stems from the uncomfortable truth that a large percentage of the gamer population is drawn from socially excluded demographics.  People who don't "fit in" with the cool cliques and are branded as social misfits.

For such people one of the worst things they could do is turn somebody out of their gaming group.  They don't have that many people in their social circle to begin with and don't want to be guilty of casting out others the way they feel they've been cast out.

So groups tend to struggle on as mis-mashes of largley incompatable types joined together only by a loose association of being outcasts.  

Alot of the rules bloat and authoritarian GM technique that we see in games historically I think, is predicated on this situation being "normal" and thus rules and a strong central authority are required to act as referee between people who really don't get along all that well.

As soon people realize that gaming is much better when you have the courage to say "I don't want to game with that person, or that group" any more, and to go out and find players with whom you have better chemistry, they realize that most of those rules are entirely unnecessary...because they can trust the other players..."boink".  What a concept.

Just as a slight variant of Ralph's point, I think that the history of GM-authoritarianism sets up a situation in which the GM trusting the players is considered unnecessary or even problematic.  If we're running old-fashioned "hard" AD&D dungeon-crawls, the theory is that I don't have to trust the players: if they violate trust, they break the rules or they die.  But of course, this isn't what Peter means by "trust" at all: he trusts his players to play with the system.  If they do something totally unexpected, he trusts that the point isn't to undermine his authority or something, but to make a cool game.  Traditionally, "Making a cool game" was always thought to be 100% the GM's problem, so when other people joined in on it the GM might think this an attack on his authority.  See KoDT, for example.  As Ron points out, it's really sad that the idea of a player coming up with something cool and the GM trusting that he's trying to create something cool is an exciting, unusual thing; it should be a given goal, something we deplore when it doesn't happen.

Chris Lehrich

Some attention should be paid to the subject of trust among the game's participants in every single "What is Roleplaying" text ever. However, I've never seen any reference to it in any of the dozens and dozens of such texts I've read.

Oh, this is the Five geek social fallacies, right?

This is "My self image is that I Am A Gamer, I Must Game with whatever group I can find that will let me into it."

This is Al Bruno's RPG.net rants.

This is "They told me to get a life, but it turns out it clashes with my Synnibarr game."

This is "But this is how we've played since we were 15!" Dude... you're not 15 any more.

This is "But they're the only guys I can play with." - so stop playing. It's killing your self esteem, and probably innumerable brain cells, every time you swallow your pride to go play with them.

If your friend was on a basketball team, but every week the other team members picked on him and towel whipped him in the showers, you'd pressure him to quit, right?

If your friend came back from her writer's group every week bitching that it was just an ego-massage for a couple of members who pack-attacked any threat to their power structure, and any decent criticism was pure con-incidence... you'd want her to leave that group, right?

You'll notice the pattern... for the dominant members of the dysfunctional group, the group activity is secondary to the heirarchy of the group. Sound like any game groups you've been in?

Same for amateur dramatics, bridge, flower arranging, choirs, bands... if it was anything else, you could stand back and say "If it's so soul destroying, I'll stop doing it, at least with that group."

Why not with gaming? Because there's a 6th Geek Social Fallacy: those that share my interests are, ipso facto, my friends. Because my interests are minority interests, anyone else who shares my interests must by definition have enough in common with me for us to be already bonded on a personal level.

That means cat piss man is your friend. Moreso than your brother who stopped gaming ten years ago.

So does this mean you should ditch the attitude of any game at any price? Hell yes.

Does this mean you should take the attitude "it's only a game" and place it below all your other social commitments? Hell no. My favourite aphorism at work is "If it's worth me doing, it's worth you requesting it properly " ( I work in a tightly regulated industry). If gaming is worth my time, it's worth my time with folks who won't make me feel dirty cheap and used for satisfying my gaming jones.

After all, you don't tell the writing friend to stop writing, just don't go to that writing circle. You don't tell basketball guy to give up basketball, just that team. With the internet, the "only game in town" being dysfunctional (on every level) doesn't matter when the world is your town.

Otherwise you're like the crazy guy in the old joke... the one who was sitting on the bus, peeling bananas, puring salt on them and throwing them out the window... because, hey, nobody like to eat bananas covered in salt.

This has been a paid announcement from aphorisms for a better tomorrow.

Quote from: ethan_greerSome attention should be paid to the subject of trust among the game's participants in every single "What is Roleplaying" text ever. However, I've never seen any reference to it in any of the dozens and dozens of such texts I've read.

The closest I've seen to anything approaching a social contract discussion in those sections is "someone, usually the one who bought the rulebook, is appointed GameMaster," or similar wording.

Before I get jumped on, I know there's better advice scattered throughout many rulebooks, but the introductory passages tend to include so many assumptions, it's worrying.

Goddamn, we need a new introduction to roleplaying...

Gamers with trust problems need to play Universalis, and then they need to realize that their other games don't need to be the opposite of that.


I am not Ralph's publicist, but my character is.

I think part of the trust issue also has a lot to do with "That one cool thing!"

Typically what draws a gamer to any given game - the hook - is what they go "whoa, cool!" over.  Whether it is a fantastic mechanic, or a gorgeous setting, a character they want to play or a plot they want to run, it's why they came to the table.

Sometimes those things are fairly transparant (Doug wants to play a duel-wielding good Drow ranger), but often they aren't.  They are also almost never explicitly communicated beforehand.  

So we've got a bunch of people who all have cool things they want to do/see/experience, but nobody's told anyone about them.  Result?  Most of them don't happen, or don't happen "right".  If Driz'zt is your hero and you always wanted to play him, you'll get pretty pissed when your Driz'zt clone gets kakked by a random arrow.

So your cool thing doesn't happen, or worse, is actively prevented in some way by another person at the table, and consciously or not, you start to believe that the others at the table are not there to help produce that cool thing, they're there to prevent it.  And Trust goes down the toilet.

GM's who want their plot to run start railroading.  Players who want their 'cool hero' to live/win fudge dice rolls.  Players who aren't getting what they want/expect from the setting display the "bat-shit phenomenon".  Munchkins munch.

Gamers start with Trust, but it often goes away because we aren't honest and up-front with what we want from the game, or the other players.  Social Contract is ignored, or skimmed over.  Someone says "Let's play DnD" and everyone says "yeah!" when what's really happening is someone says "I have a great idea for a module" and everyone else says "Cool, I want to beat it!"  "I have a great idea for a paladin" "I love playing with fantasy worlds and seeing how they really work!"

James
$0.02

Hi folks,

I think that there's a few factors that play into dysfunction in groups, please note that these tendancies are not always this extreme, nor always in every game group, but happen to be fairly common amongst several dysfunctional groups I know of.

-Commitment

Most gamers would consider a group functional if it meets and plays regularly, for a long period of time(say, years).  This is the same as thinking just because a marriage has gone on for 20 years that its necesssarily healthy and functional.

Second, little support is given within the community on advice for healthy group selection or formation.  It becomes more important to play, and to keep playing than to ask if you're having fun.  Again, using the marriage analogy, if it's more important that you get married, than to who, or why you're getting married, expect problems.

-The Cult of personality

Often you can find the same tendancies that you'd see in cults, or in gangs, happening in many roleplaying groups.  You have a dominant personality, who is given more power than the other members, and often uses a combination of promises, threats, and out and out emotional domination to maintain coherency and control.  

What this results in, is conditioning for dysfunction.  You have people who are more concerned with being together without looking at why they're together(co-dependancy) and then add emotional dominance(abuse), and you end up with several results:

Players who are:
-Withdrawn(The apathetic player)
-Paranoid (The abused gamer)
-Rebellious (The "problem player", who may be actually arguing against the social contract of the group, just not knowing how to do so effectively)

And of course, since none of these people really lead to Fun Play(TM), the belief is that the answer is More Discipline, which, funny enough, led us to this very situation in the first place.

Sadly, this, for many people has become synonymous with roleplaying.  You need only look at the amount of written support in games and the community that pretty much anticipates problems, and attempts to resolve the conflict either through more rules or "better" suggestions at domination or manipulation.  Take a good look at Knights of the Dinner Table, and realize that people around the globe can recognize these issues, despite different genres, games, or systems.

Like Ralph points out, drop the assumption that play is more important than fun, and watch this all disappear.  

Chris

I have nothing to add, but this:

I would like very much to hear Ron's deep, dark, scary theory on the matter.

Christopher

Now that we're at it, I'd like to comment on something else Ron said on the message mentioned before:

Quote
It's just the same as you find in any social leisure activity, such as a basketball group or a quilting circle.

If anyone is demonstrably unable to be present, involved, or ready to participate, they are not welcome.

Umm, no, it's not the same, that's the problem.

In most hobbies the level of involvement required is considerably lower. Mostly it's not that bad if you miss a sports practise now and then. Mostly it doesn't matter if you are present but take it very slow because you have a hangover. In many hobbies a lot of uninvolved chitchat while doing it (what ever "it" is) is normal. In many hobbies it's okay to have some people just hanging around for the company. This is hardly unheard of in RPG-circles either.

Many people just don't really think about the fact that there are people who take RPG's very seriously. The need and will to minimize distractions and maximize involvement while roleplaying is not self-evident. This has to do with the fact that it's called a game, I think.

As for the trust issue, hell yes. About a hundred times I've seen people discuss some problem or another, wanting to break in and say "It's not a roleplaying problem, it's a trust problem". Then again, trust and communication could solve most problems in the world; waiting for that, other solutions are needed.

Hi Risto,

Actually the level of commitment is about the same for any hobby that is dependent upon group effort.  Some hobbies, such as collecting, building models, crocheting, etc. can be done alone, and social activity is simply an optional choice after that.  

Other hobbies, such as team sports, theatre, or music, DO require the group as a whole.  While one person may occassionally miss a practice, it is vital that the group as a whole work together for the whole thing to fly.

That's why the band analogy works very well, because rarely can a band really practice minus a member or two, and then, its really about how a band, as a whole, functions together.

The real issue is social engagement.  If the group as a whole is chitchating about other things, and it happens often enough, the group is still engaged.  If the group is doing one thing, and one or two members are not engaged at all, then you have an issue of disengagement.

Usually the side convesations/OT topics either are an indication that the game itself isn't engaging, or happens to be targeted as a reason "not enough gets done" when its usually a matter of pacing and playstyle.  The former is a bad sign, the latter sort is fine, but usually catches the blame for other issues.

Chris

I'm going to do my Clerich impersonation here... I thinks it's to do with establishing the ritual space.

It helps immeasurably to establish that this SIS is "invoked" (for want of a more neutral term) at THIS time, at THIS place, with THESE people every week.

Now, if you can get a stonger, but somehow more flexible, establishing ritual, and are playing a less strongly planned game, I think it can work with a "whoever comes, plays" attitude, but that's certainly not how most games establish the ritual space, relying on the ritual of time, space and people.

In fact... yep, that's my next challenge. Probably either over the summer break, or at the start of next academic year, open house to local gamers, as much info on the game in the public domain as I can, start at this time, in this location, with this music... with whoever's there.

Please note, this post was constructed while under the influence of designing a 10th anniversary no we're not gettig bloody married ceremony, ritual space is plaguing my mind...

Risto, I think I object from the other direction.

Pretty early in our gaming life (probably inside the first year) we came to terms with the problem that some players weren't going to be there as often as others. One of the key problems was that our games were not exactly scheduled--we got together just about every weekend, but whether we got together on Friday night, Saturday afternoon and night, just Saturday night, Sunday afternoon/evening, or any combination including all of the above wasn't really decided until someone called someone and said, Why don't you come over? Where we played was similarly decided on that informal basis, and what we played was generally decided sometime during the time we were together--we might play any of several different role playing games, or play board, card, trivia, or war games, or video games (this was when Atari and Intellivision were cutting edge), or pinball (one of our players bought his own pinball machine) or suddenly decide to go out and play miniature golf or bowling. Who was there sometimes influenced what we played, but we would often decide to play a role playing game with some of the "occasional" players absent, and fill them in on what they missed when they joined us.

So we had rules for this. We knew what your character was allowed to do and forbidden to do when you were not there, and we respected these, whatever they were.

So we welcomed a lot of people who came late, left early, didn't show, didn't know what was going on--we had a very low level of expectation in that regard.

Nothing like any of the bands I was in, where if I said we were practicing and you didn't show, I found out why and insisted that you either get there next time or consider whether you really wanted to be part of what we were doing.

Even little league coaches were tougher about the attendance of my kids than we were about players in a role playing game.

So I think commitment varies more than either of you recognize.

--M. J. Young

It sounds like M J Youngs group recognised there would be a problem (with expecting high attendance) looked at other options (a 'whoever turns up' policy), found they were acceptable and they worked from that.

Risto sounds like he needs it to be taken more seriously, for the SIS to maintain integrity. So looking at the other options, the one that worked for Mr Young can't be used (much like M J's band could not look at the option of people not turning up to practice).

It's strange how such meta game organisation is important to actually playing the game long term, yet typical RPG's don't aid this in the least. They do tell you how to hit an orc with a sword, but not how to recognise/discuss and arrange these things. The former is the tip, and the latter is the rest of the iceberg, IMO.

I might be drifting a little, but I will say...perhaps trust is important just a little too much. You need a large slice of it because many of the books don't help you arrange the play. The author probably thinks everyones just as organised as his group of friends is and thus doesn't cover a problem he hasn't experienced/hasn't experienced for years.

Or that it isn't the authors job to tell you how to arrange your friends... which may be a fair point. No-one writing a "play the guitar my way" book writes about how to get all of the band to turn up to practice. But they often mention playing in a band somewhere...

Ah well. Another section for the introduction to roleplaying.