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November 28, 2005
Developing Stories Through Play
In that giant comment thread down below, Landon Darkwood writes:
Here's the reason why I'm so curious about the kind of mostly-DIP Narrativism Ginger's talking about - it strikes me that in order for it to work, lots of things have to happen purely by instinct or "feel" with little real grounding in procedural technique. The GM of such a game has to "just know" what kinds of decisions are going to be considered low-pressure for those characters from the perspective of Premise, because I'm assuming that the initial content of a game like this has something slightly more engaging than roleplaying their trips to the supermarket. The player has to "just get" those initial decisions as existing more for discovery than for Premise-addressing. The GM has to "just know" when a character is ripe for a hard thematic decision and push. All participants have to deal with what happens when the characters reach that state of "ripeness" at different times.
It's actually fairly straightforward to run these games, and you don't need to "just know" anything, any more than is normal in playing an RPG.
The best way I know to describe how to do this comes from Keith Johnstone's guide to storytelling in his book Impro. His model of stories is incredibly simple, consisting of exactly two pieces: breaking routines and reincorporation. (ObPlug: Pete Darby's Daedalus article on Johnstone.)
A moment of dramatic action in a story happens when some routine of action or pre-existing equilibrium gets broken. Hamlet opens with Hamlet in a pattern of brooding and grieving, which gets disrupted when the old king's ghost shows up and demands that his son take vengeance for his murder. Boom! A familiar situation is destabilized and thrown into chaos. Each time you break a routine, you raise the level of dramatic tension because something that shouldn't have happened, did happen, and the consequences of that are going to be unexpected and interesting. Now, you keep going, and soon you find yourself in a new routine -- a new equilibrium -- which you can break again. Keep doing this and you keep raising the level of dramatic tension.
Now, if you just keep breaking the routines that get successively established, sooner or later you're going to build up a ludicrous pile of messiness, like in the later seasons of The X-Files. This brings us to the other technique, reincorporation. Breaking routines creates dramatic tension, and you can resolve that tension when you take hold of some stuff you've created before, and aren't currently using, and put it back into play to resolve the current disruption. This links what's happening now with what happened before, which creates the unity of action which causes dramatic closure. And when everything used so far has been used up in re-establishing disrupted routines or creating new ones, you've finished the story.
Think of this as kind of an empirical application of Chekhov's rule: if you improvise a gun in the first scene, hold off on firing it until a) it's no longer in the forefront of anyone's imagination, and b) it solves a problem that is in the forefront. Then everyone will go a-ha! and the narrative will seem far more organic and planned than it "really" is.
I think that KJ actually cheats just a little; there are actually three techniques the players need to do. The third thing is establishing routines, so that they can get broken later. And like everything else, you can improvise this, too -- just keep doing the "same" things. And when it comes time to break a routine, you can even look back at what you've done and retroactively identify what the sameness you're disrupting is.
This very neatly describes Jim's experience with Mo. He started with a character who had taken a dramatic action: leaving the NFL to find himself on Al Amarja. Then, stuff happened. This stuff wasn't directly pointed at Mo's dramatic necessities, but that's okay -- it was establishing a routine, each bit of which was presumably saying something like "Mo messes with occult weirdos". And then, when Jim has Mo talk to the girl and articulate to himself that all the magicians he's dealt with claim special knowledge but still act exactly like the same old self-interested blowhards and posers he's found everywhere else, Jim realizes he's done two very important things. First, the routine of seeking after transcendence has been disrupted by that realization, and second, because he re-incorporates all the magic with the idea that none of it fundamentally matters, Mo's story is done -- he doesn't care about any of the magic whatsits anymore, and the rest of the action is denouement.
Observe that you don't need to know what the premise is ahead of time, as long as the structure and the pacing of the action is good. The routine-breaking/reincorporation rhythym gives you a heartbeat or to your play, which is fun on its own, and actually creates lots more "stuff" than you can possibly ever hope to use up and bring closure to. But when you find your premise, you realize what stuff is and isn't important, and then you can take action which brings closure to everything important. This ties in to the idea of story-as-picaresque: lots of stuff happens, and the story is learning to see what is and isn't important, and doing something about it.
When Ginger, Jim or Bruce say they want to start the game off slowly, and wanting to spend some discovering the characters and the setting, what I read them as saying is that they want to establish some routines and give them some substance and heft through play before they start breaking them. That's a completely reasonable thing to want: it won't seem amazing to give a hobbit the One Ring unless you've already established that they're a race of three-foot tall Chestertonian Little Englanders.
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You've got game. You've got players. And you're looking for the DIP (develop in play) content that will steer the game forward. What is signal and what is color? Players throw off a... [Read More]
Tracked on Nov 30, 2005 9:20:27 PM
Comments
Jesus, Neel. What was that word that was considered bad form on usenet? "Ditto"? Cause, ditto. You've articulated it far better than I could've, not least because when I went looking for Johnstone last weekend Borders didn't have him.
But yeah. I suppose the "trick" is knowing, at the individual and group level, just when it's time to reincorporate. This is just another kind of esthetic training, though, I think - it's a kind of criticism IOW. We're starting to get into the other Topic A in gamebloggery these days, which is the need for formal resolution systems for the important bits, but briefly, what concerns me about a lot of such talk is that it seems to amount to asking engineering to do the work of criticism.
BTW, you've well stated what I hinted at regarding Mo's epiphany. In fact, just before later killing Arthur Compton (in preemptive self-defense, you know!) he said, more or less in direct quote, "You're like the really rich version of some stoner white boy from New Jersey with his Ozzie posters and sh;t."
Posted by: Jim Henley at Nov 28, 2005 11:29:49 PM
When Ginger, Jim or Bruce say they want to start the game off slowly, and wanting to spend some discovering the characters and the setting, what I read them as saying is that they want to establish some routines and give them some substance and heft through play before they start breaking them.
Yup yup me too yup! —He said, alacritously.
...it seems to amount to asking engineering to do the work of criticism.
Yup yessir oh indeedy! —He said, impetuously.
And that’s pretty much all I got at the moment. But thanks.
(After several fruitless attempts to post: TypePad appears to have blacklisted me URL again. Maybe it's the dust and cobwebs they object to?)
Posted by: Kip Manley at Nov 29, 2005 12:54:19 AM
Neel, can I have your bab^H^H^Hcharacters?
This exactly nails the Orinda case. Over time we have a pattern of Orinda building a trusting relationship with Gerard, and a feeling of responsibility toward the citizenry of Amber. Then, shockingly, Gerard violates the bond on a level she can't get past. He's bad for Amber. What does she do now?
The big problem I have with constructing Kickers is that they presume routine to violate. Until I see what the routine is, I can't know I broke it. Telling what the routine is doesn't satisfy: I've seen too many characters who tell one thing and in play, show another. Showing the routine is the only way I know to establish it and make the establishment authentic enough to achieve satisfyingly Premised play when it breaks.
My husband and I were talking about how to do something that I can now identify as "establishing routine" mechanically with tricks stolen from other games, like a diceless version of Pendragon's Passions or awarding traits at the table a la PTA's Fan Mail. Those mechanical systems won't help you with the aesthetic part, but they might be able to help with establishing routines and baselines.
Posted by: Ginger Stampley at Nov 29, 2005 2:31:14 AM
I wonder if the establishing routine/breaking routine/reincorporation cycle can be grafted into a definition of functional narrativism?
Posted by: Fred Wolke at Nov 29, 2005 6:37:18 AM
...it seems to amount to asking engineering to do the work of criticism.
Hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm. I have an entire trick bag full of tricks that I used to use to break down and understand written narrative forms. They're rusty, because I've been engineering software since I got my English degree, but I have them.
It may be time to play "What does this button do?" with them.
Neel, Jim, you've broken my routine. Thanks.
Posted by: Michael at Nov 29, 2005 7:54:10 AM
I wonder if the establishing routine/breaking routine/reincorporation cycle can be grafted into a definition of functional narrativism?
It might be possible, Fred. I was just thinking that all the above can harmonize with the Mike Holmes standard rant against deep character backgrounds, which boiled down to "Save the interesting stuff for play!" The DIP player is agreeing, and saying, tacitly elsewhere and explicitly here, that this includes making the routine to be broken part of play.
I suspect that a long-term "aerobic nar" game like House of Cards is one long propagating wavefront of routine, break, reincorporation, new routine, break.
I'm also wondering if you can't indeed sort of design for this by filling your Amber or Everway or knutepunkt-style freeform rules text with a lot of procedural advice about impro paradigms. Such a game would look different on the surface from the obtrusively mechanical designs the Forge designers tend to serve up, but it would be informed by the "gaming on purpose" principles I find to be the Forge's most valuable contribution to the hobby.
Posted by: Jim Henley at Nov 29, 2005 8:14:48 AM
See? There are actual techniques and methods that can be formalized.
What this discussion seems to be missing, though, is the need for signalling and detection methods. How can a player signal that they are ready for a break to happen? How can a GM detect appropriate opportunities to introduce conflict? The bon mot above is "asking engineering to do the work of criticism" - but criticism, aesthetic judgment, implicitly relies on a socially constructed matrix of meaning and value. If you want to make aesthetic judgments the principal tool for playing these games, you need to identify a particular aesthetic standard - or your games will founder in the swamp of individual tastes more often than not.
Groups traditionally do this through an informal process of cultural accretion, canon-making, and social pressure. Is there room to come up with a critical language for talking about content in RPGs? How would such a critical framework need to differ from literary or filmic models (as 2 examples)?
Posted by: Mark W at Nov 29, 2005 10:08:58 AM
Hello, Mark. Yes, this is the other side of the discussion we were having at John Kim's blog. Actually, I worry that I threadjacked Neel's post in some ways: Neel, would you like us to start a new topic or do you think it's connected enough to stay here?
The bon mot above is "asking engineering to do the work of criticism" - but criticism, aesthetic judgment, implicitly relies on a socially constructed matrix of meaning and value. If you want to make aesthetic judgments the principal tool for playing these games, you need to identify a particular aesthetic standard - or your games will founder in the swamp of individual tastes more often than not.
I completely agree that this is the risk. I think what you're saying is that the goal is to have rules for how to construct a matrix of meaning and value rather than rules that construct it? If so, I THINK you're right.
I actually think that The Big Model from the Forge is a good start on this, and that the work now is to figure out how to "design for skewers" - skewer being the term that people use for how a given way of playing "pierces" all the way from the social-contract layer through what they call ephemera, right? My thing is, the theory is generally applicable. It's just that the existing community of designers around it is designing for skewers that, um, don't pierce the meat of my gaming desires? as it were. For the most part.
I think the reason that Ginger and Michael and I are jazzed about having formalized a term like "aerobic nar" is that it gives us a handle on a skewer (probably a set of them) we'd like to "design for," where "design for" means minimizing some of the risks you've identified on John's blog, and that Landon and Thomas brought up in the DIP & DAS thread, and maximizing the rewards we find in that kind of play (as opposed to substituting a different set of rewards).
Posted by: Jim Henley at Nov 29, 2005 10:34:29 AM
Jim, I'll have something out next year that does that, with advice rather than rules.
Neel, I love "reincorporation". You've enriched my thought. Thanks!
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Nov 29, 2005 12:18:32 PM
Establishing the status quo before introducing the event that kicks off the premise of a story is pretty standard fare in writing dramatic fiction (see, e.g., James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel). Therefore, it shouldn't be surprising that premise-focused play can be enriched by establishing the status quo first. Make people care about the characters and their situation, then bang them up.
I think Dogs in the Vineyard is great in that regard. As in a novel, where even the status quo introduction needs a conflict to grip the reader, you have the initiation--it not only shows you an important, formative moment in the character's life, it also does it in a conflictual, exciting way. And then you move on to the actual playing out of the premise.
I think these kinds of pre-premise scenes have a lot of potential for future narrativist games.
Posted by: xenopulse at Nov 29, 2005 1:58:04 PM
When I think about the more Narr character storylines in House of Cards (there are some that aren't--it's a big game), the wavefront model covers them very well. There's also an art to making the characters' arcs intertwine and bounce off each other by incorporating things from one arc into another.
I spent the weekend talking to Michael and Arref about some of the ways we signal back and forth to meet that standard in our circle, even when we're not talking explicitly about it. There are times when it fails--and boy, those can be ugly--but we're beginning to be able to talk about the language and even a little bit about the reinforcing mechanics.
Posted by: Ginger Stampley at Nov 29, 2005 4:42:26 PM
There's a longer post coming, but some really quick food for thought while momentum is good:
We can classify a lot of these DAS stats that we've been talking about as doing the job of "establishing routine" or "giving you a broken routine before you've established one" by Johnstone's vocab. I think it's safe to say, too, that these stats often tie right into the reward system: you get rewards for responding to Bangs and "resolving" traits, which then sets you up to resolve new and different Bangs. That's a little oversimplified on purpose, but bear with me.
Consider the simple shift of moving the process of choosing those traits to an in-game event as opposed to a pre-game one. Instead of writing a Kicker out before starting, you play until you get to some defined point where the breaking of a routine gets you to go, "Yeah. That's my Kicker. Right there. That moves me." And you write that down on your sheet. Now you can tie into the reward system, pushing for reincorporation. Do that, get the reward, start over.
That way, you get all the benefits of "choosing your reward criteria" that games like TSOY advertise, along with all the benefits of building routines in play. The difference is the mindfulness about the process and the degree to which that can aid the establishment of a communal understanding at the table about this cycle, a shared beat. It'd still be a thoroughly Narrativist construction - choosing your Kicker/Key/Issue/Aspect mid-flight depends completely on a player signaling his own thematic interest.
Play would take place in two definitive "phases", if you would - playing to build to the point where you can connect to the reward system and then playing for the reward. Any player can be in any "stage" of this at any time with no need to regulate it. Long-term play gets supported because routines are getting created constantly, and it's the breaking of them that signals choosing a trait in the first place. There's a minimal need to "grok" other social cues - there's no obligation to "embrace" a broken routine as one of your Kickers. There's also a lot of room to interweave material from one person's cycle to another's.
What do you think? A possible way to design for that skewer? I've been pondering a game design called Threads for a long time that went halfway to some of these ideas, and I've been floundering because it's been feeling too derivative of other works. This suggests a possible breath of fresh air for it.
Thoughts?
Posted by: Landon Darkwood at Nov 29, 2005 8:47:11 PM
Impressed with this whole thread. I'm looking forward to more.
Posted by: Arref at Nov 29, 2005 10:28:08 PM
Hi Landon,
The thing that's actually important, and which isn't visible from a single look at a character sheet, is the dramatic action. Character is revealed through action, and that means that a static description of character traits is not what you need to focus on.
IMO, the best idea in Clinton's idea of Keys is the notion of Buyoff: a concrete mechanic that says, "You lose this Key when you do X". The way Keys work is that you get points for playing to the Key, and establishing a routine, and then they also give you the Buyoff, which says, "Okay, here's how you can break this routine." And when you do, your character sheet changes. It's the change in the character sheet over time that shows you the character's arc. So if you want to do this in a DIP-supporting way, what you need to do is to find some way of letting the player record what has happened on his or her character sheet, and then give them a way to subsequently identify the common patterns and then transforming them.
Off the top of my head: let's start with a DitV-like game, where each conflict gives you Fallout -- traits you can write down on your sheet about the lasting consequences of each conflict, and then use in subsequent conflicts somehow. So a bloody-minded Dog might pick up Traits like "Suffer not a witch to live", "God will know His own", "I have no (living) enemies", and and so on. And yeah, he can roll them in the conflicts he gets into. So the Traits, over time, will accumulate and tell you what this guy has done.
Now, let's throw in an Epiphany mechanic. It works like this: when you're in a conflict, you can show a set of traits which all suggest some fact about your character to the other players, and then do the opposite. Mark those traits off your sheet, and write down a new trait reflecting that. So our hypothetical Dog would be in a conflict, and all his history -- his Traits -- suggest that the cemetary's going to need another grave for the other fellow. And you decide that he wants to let the other guy live, because there's just been too much death in your guy's life. That's breaking a routine; it's a moment of dramatic action. And so you takes all three of those deadly-wrath traits and erase them from your PC's sheet. Or maybe his player thinks his guy is just having a crisis of faith. You tell the other players says that your PC is still a killer, but he's doubting his religious justification. So you get rid of "Suffer not a witch to live" and "God will know His own", but keeps "I have no (living) enemies."
The idea is that you write down what you find interesting about your character, and then later on you can find the common thread that identifies the routine that you want to break. You don't need to decide that up-front.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Nov 30, 2005 12:04:24 AM
JOhnstone footnote: in "Impro for storytellers", he talks about establishing routines in terms of "platforms", and breaking routines in forms of "tilts". "Tilts" are pretty much a one to one mapping for Ron Edwards' "Bangs".
Posted by: Pete Darby at Nov 30, 2005 7:11:41 AM
Neel - Yeah, I was assuming that the cycle and focus of play would be choosing those "story" traits, changing/resolving them through play, and then picking new ones. I never intended the traits to remain static, and one of the models I looked at was fairly similar to what you just delineated. In the original version of the system, though, starting Threads were up-front DAS traits much like a Fate aspect, except that their use in play was a little less defined from the outset. Now I'm thinking about a model where choosing the Threads themselves is a part of the cycle.
The core mechanical dynamic uses an a system of escalating values to mirror the progress of a story - basically, as soon as you have the Thread and use it, you get a bonus applied, but it also gives the GM currency to screw up your life. If the GM spends enough currency, the bonus you get from that Thread goes up, which subsequently raises the currency the GM gets when you use it. This escalates to a max point or Buyoff, whichever comes first, after which you're cleared for a new/different Thread. In one version of this, the Thread is actually a group of sub-traits that shift around more dynamically, conflict-to-conflict, like in your example.
Anyway, lots of food for thought. It may be time to go back to lurking now until I can post again with a draft of the game, but I'm interested in further thoughts if the basic idea is striking a chord with anyone.
Posted by: Landon Darkwood at Nov 30, 2005 2:10:29 PM
Hi, Ginger,
My husband and I were talking about how to do something that I can now identify as "establishing routine" mechanically with tricks ... like ... awarding traits at the table a la PTA's Fan Mail.
Doesn't PtA already establish routine via Screen Presence? It even tells you in advance when you can expect it to be broken (your character's Spotlight Episode).
Posted by: Rob Farquhar at Dec 1, 2005 5:08:49 AM
Rob: yes, but what I was thinking about was more like awarding you Fan Mail to determine your Issue, sort of in the way that you get Artha in Burning Wheel. Instead of defining your Issue in character creation (DAS), the group figures it out in play (DIP).
Posted by: Ginger Stampley at Dec 1, 2005 11:05:29 AM
Defining Issue by group collaboration. Very nice idea.
Posted by: Arref at Dec 1, 2005 3:14:05 PM
Hmm.
Group collaboration and during play.
Hmm.
I am very interested in seeing your ideas/designs. If you don't mind indulging me, I have another question or two, but rather than drift the thread I'll scribble up an e-mail later today.
Posted by: Rob Farquhar at Dec 1, 2005 9:02:33 PM
Landon, should have said earlier that your design idea seems like it should work. It helps me see how my mind works differently from, apparently, many gamers too. You place a lot of emphasis on "the reward system kick[ing] in," which for me is very much an afterthought. It's a cliche to say, "My reward is the play itself," but it kind of is. I think of that last session of OTE and in fact, Mo did buy an advancement right before it, a new 3-die trait called "Nobody's Burger." Considered dispassionately, this trait probably violates the canon-OTE advancement rules, being very broad for a side trait, and could be seen as, in OTE terms, even munchkin-y. The GM liked it, though, and Mo did get to use it once. The pleasure for me, though, was in being able to settle on a trait that itself helped tell Mo's story.
Now the thing is, as in most of our group's campaigns, 100% of experience is showing up. Nate handed out one experience die per session, period, regardless of what went on during the session or what anyone did. I believe this is exactly per the game rules. There was no formal mechanical reward for "engaging issues" or whatever. Engaging issues is what I game for in the first place, you know? (In a highly-colored, richly textured imaginative context, I mean, You know.) You'd have to pay me NOT to do it. There are external rewards, but they too are social: that validation that comes when the GM looks surprised and pleased and the other players perk up and suchlike. I don't know if I got any kind of bonus die for Mo's "stoner white boy" speech just before Arthur Compton's death, but I got to MAKE the speech, and I got to hear my fellow players say, "That was really good."
So what interests me about your Threads idea is less the reward system part than the signalling part - the communication assurance value of adding and subtracting the traits as you go along. But that does seem like a very workable approach.
Posted by: Jim Henley at Dec 2, 2005 10:23:49 AM
That's the value of an explicit, intentional reward cycle, though. It points out to players and GM alike - THIS is what kind of play will get rewarded. Imagine how different your experience with Mo might have been if you didn't have the assurance that you'd get that social reinforcement. Would you have been as willing to take an unconventional, unpredicted turn with your portrayal of the character if you had no way to know whether it would be perceived as creative and cool or instead dismissed or rejected?
Posted by: Mark W at Dec 2, 2005 12:31:00 PM
I guess I'm not seeing it, Mark. Part of it has to do with recent discussions of how system does and doesn't matter. (Does: Act as an attractor for people looking for a certain play experience and certain values. Doesn't: Reliably produce any given kind of enjoyable play.) But it's mostly, if there's a formal reward system that gives me X, say, experience points, for doing Y, is the idea that I'll do Y so I can accrue my X? Because what is it about X that makes it worth having, necessarily? Chances are the function of X is to make me more effective yet at doing Y, right? (It has to do something.) So if I wouldn't be inclined to do Y in the first place, why would I do it just to get X so I can do Y even more? (Or even better.)
Take "classic" D&D. If I kill things and take their stuff, I get experience points. Which will make me better at killing things and taking their stuff. IF I want to kill things and take their stuff in the first place, I'm good. But if not, not.
So, turn it back to my man Mo. (Boy, am I livin' the dream or what? I'm getting away with going on and on about my character in a roleplaying game! <G>) My rewards for the unconventional, unpredicted turn were, first, considerable internal satisfaction. If nobody else enjoyed it, I'd have been miffed, but I'd KNOW, myself for sure, that I'd made something good. Second, the appreciation of Nate and Mark and Bill, whose esteem means a lot to me. Onto that you COULD layer an explicit, intentional mechanical reward but, like they say in the Taco Bell commercials, "I'm full!"
I'm not done yet; stay with me please.
Let's subtract Nate and Bill and Mark's respect and attention and swap in, oh, extra experience dice. Not a fair trade! Does that mean the mechanical reward is completely useless? Not quite. It's useful as an attractor. It's an effective advertisement, basically. It's a signalling device to people THINNKING about the game that the game wants to attract players with a certain set of interests. That's not valueless. But it's something that every other component of system also does. (In a well-designed game.) in a well-designed game the entire system is a reward system.
The most important "reward system" in OTE, as far as structuring play, is the bonus/penalty die mechanic, e.g. the bonus for "good description." But what happens here, and I think it's all that can happen with any mechanic, is that it becomes a site for explicit or implicit negotiation ("What counts as a COOL description?") IOW, the mechanic is a big sign that reads "SOCIAL CONTRACT GOES HERE." It can be a useful way to structure social-contract understandings, but I'm not sure it can be more (or at least more reliable) than that.
Did I lose the thread there? I think that I've just argued, with whatever degree of success, that formal reward systems are not, in fact, all that and a bag of chips. And I think I've said why I think that. But I may have dropped a step or two.
Posted by: Jim Henley at Dec 2, 2005 1:44:53 PM
I'm in two different gaming groups (one of them Jim's--I'm the Bill whose esteem he apparently values so much). In one group (Jim's), the cool, narrative stuff happens whether you reward it or not. Reward systems might be nice, but they run the risk of unintended consequences (e.g., in Primetime Adventures I found myself thinking about each thing Jim was doing and evaluating it as to whether or not to give him Fan Mail instead of just sitting back and letting it all roll over me and then just sliding all of the Fan Mail over at the *really*cool* part of the session when he killed my character's connection in cold blood).
In the other group, the cool, narrative stuff just doesn't happen, regardless of reward system. We've played games with explicit in-game rewards for doing stuff like that and eventually, they either make do without the rewards or you have to "grade on the curve" so much that it makes the rewards meaningless.
So, in my experience, they're not so useful.
Posted by: Bill at Dec 2, 2005 5:36:30 PM
Closing my stinkin' tag, I hope.
Thanks, Bill. Yeah. On the other side, if I want to kill things and take their stuff, why not just make me really effective at that in the first place? Why make me have to earn the "right" to do well what I bought your game for? This is probably why so many actual existing D&D campaigns start at 3rd or 8th or whatever level instead of first.
Posted by: Jim Henley at Dec 2, 2005 5:57:37 PM
Jim, you blew my mind with the passage starting with "In a well-designed game..." up to "SOCIAL CONTRACT GOES HERE". I'm tempted to start a new entry on my LJ on Rewards, mechanical and otherwise, but maybe it'd be a better new topic here as things are already drifting in that direction.
Plus, we're still in italics-land down here.
Posted by: Elliot Wilen at Dec 2, 2005 6:46:42 PM
One of our delightful mods fixed the problem. I'll promote the system/reward stuff to top-level tonight. Good idea.
Posted by: Jim Henley at Dec 2, 2005 7:10:11 PM
Jim - I'm in agreement with you, with the caveat that I don't think you can discount the importance of a reward system that's tuned into your game's Creative Agenda support. No reward system in an RPG really provides sufficient incentive for any style of play on its own. Obviously, there was Narrativism before the Forge, and people were doing it for the sake of the Theme payoff long before there were reward mechanics for that kind of play.
The real use for it is as a social signal to the participants. The reward itself is somewhat immaterial - what matters about it is that it advertises the kind of play that makes the game coherent. If you like Narrativism, and the game you're reading rewards creating Theme with the ability to connect more deeply with the setting and therefore create more/better Theme, you'll probably like it. Would you be doing that anyway with no techniques? Sure, but the systemic support is nice. And for people on the fence with CA preferences, it can help naturally guide play to a certain priority.
I find very often that newbie gamers playing indie designs really grok this, playing Gamist when that's what gets rewarded, and playing Nar when that's what gets rewarded, as is particular to the design of the game. It's refreshing to watch, because there are no preconceptions in it: people quickly learn how you have to play D&D to be effective, how you have to play HeroQuest to be effective. The differences get chalked up to, "Well, that's D&D and that's HeroQuest," like saying, "Well, that's Scrabble and that's Monopoly." There's a lesson for this hobby somewhere in there.
Posted by: Landon Darkwood at Dec 2, 2005 9:38:30 PM
Landon, I think you skipped a bit over something Bill said, and that I agree with: sometimes even a reward system that directly and fully supports exactly what I want to do can distract me from doing it. This is a matter of preference about system that runs deeper than what it is the system is doing, sometimes.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Dec 2, 2005 10:50:32 PM
Bruce - And that kind of preference will trump any design feature of any system regardless, which is why I see it as kind of a red herring. It doesn't take away the obligation of the designer to communicate a clear vision with his game's mechanics, and mindful attention to a reward system can be a part of that. I'm obviously of the mind that System Does Matter (tm) for functional play a little more than some folks, but the bottom line is that people set in their preferences are going to drift as they please anyway. You can't do anything about that. Also, talking about a "reward system" in the embryonic stages of a game's design isn't the same thing as what the players are going to notice during play. Open talk about reward cycles in design doesn't immediately mean the creation of this mechanical construct that people are hyperconscious of at the table.
What's really interesting about the Threads concept to me, so far, is what Jim said: the degree to which the interaction of the Threads is useful as a signalling device, clarifying communication and (hopefully) aiding the story-making process between the participants by identifying that which is worth adding value to. There is a cycle in there - you make a Thread, follow that Thread, resolve it, change it, and do it all over again with the new Thread. And there is a reward in there - follow the cycle, consciously or not, and your game will hopefully fire on all cylinders and kick ass.
Does that mean that, in the final draft, I'm going to have a section that says "check out this cool reward cycle", or that doing the above is going to give you Coolness Points, or some such? Maybe, and maybe not. Only time, playtesting, and multiple drafts of the game will tell what's best and what "skewer" of preferences will best serve as a target for the design.
Posted by: Landon Darkwood at Dec 6, 2005 6:32:24 PM
Um. That sounds awfully dismissive, Landon. Among other things, it lets out designers having visions that aren't so directed or directing, which has often been the case for me - it looks to me like smuggling in the assumption that a game less compactly focused than the Forge style is badly designed, as opposed to being differently designed. Certainly I see room for a discussion of working through issues of reward and reinforcement outside mechanics.
In fact, I wrote up such a thing at some length in the character creation chapter for Dark Ages: Vampire, talking about what's possible in the rules and suitable for some part of the setting and yet unsuitable for the chronicle at hand. (I remain pleased that developer Phil Boulle let me say "Don't be a jerk about this.") There are no numbers in that section, but it's often been cited in discussions among players as a help in thinking out loud and explicitly about their wishes, needs, and goals for a chronicle. Unsurprisingly, most of it was the distillation of my own experiences, good and bad, supplemented by reflecting on others' ups and downs and what kinds of troubleshooting I and others had beenc alled upon to provide in the past.
But then I've said before that I prefer my mechanics impure and adjustable, and deeply love making rules that can be tuned for a variety of purposes and advice on tuning them and then having players tell me about things they've done that make me say "Hey! I never thought of that, but that totally fits!" I appreciate lasers, but I also appreciate foggers, and other kinds of tools, and have actually been pondering how to incorporate more of what Ginger and others have brought up here in my current project.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Dec 6, 2005 8:40:29 PM
I'm not dismissing the notion that reward and reinforcement structures can happen outside the realm of mechanics. In other words, I consider a clearly written advice chapter about how to get people's preferences on the table and socially reinforce each other to potentially function just as well as a mechanical approach. It's all part of system, whether there are numbers involved or not, and it can communicate a vision. Green Ronin's True20 system loses nothing for having "level up when the GM feels like it" as the only way to advance characters, for example, the only weakness being a lack of any text to the effect of what I just described.
Mainly, my concerns about reward systems (mechanical or otherwise) are wholly tied into making the game accessible for a group of complete newbies who pick up the game and decide to play it. Highly unlikely, I know, but I hold it as an ideal goal regardless. Most RPGs I've read don't really provide that kind of immediate accessibility, and I think a lack of clarity about issues of reward and reinforcement contributes greatly to that - you need a player who's already familiar with the medium to fill you in on that. No other type of game has that problem to the degree that RPGs do - I can pick up the rules of Clue and know what it's about, how to do it well, and what's supposed to be fun about it before I even start playing. Whether I find that fun when I play is another matter entirely, but there's no ambiguity about it up front. There's no reason for an RPG text not to communicate on the same level, even if the clear thrust of the text is "make your own fun from these tools".
Of course, people who've been playing RPGs a while tend to know what they want and how to get it, and perhaps they aren't as dependent on system for it. For them, I think system is greatly a chance to learn and ponder new techniques, to add to the repertoire. And certainly, those people aren't *hurt* by that clarity, either - it's no big deal for a vet to go, "Yeah, I hate this XP system, so we're just going to level when the GM feels like it." Is that efficient? Well, no. But it's what gamers habitually do.
At any rate, you guys have given me a lot of food for thought at this point, for which I'm grateful. It's time to stop speculating and go write.
Posted by: Landon Darkwood at Dec 7, 2005 2:15:35 PM
Well, if the new player is more like Ginger or Jim, building in the mechanical rewards will make the game less accessible, not more.
The more I play with folks and get to learn their histories, likes, and dislikes, though, the less I believe that trying to do anything except define your terms clearly actually reliably helps people new to gaming. Set out your assumptions and expectations, and they will work for some folks and not work for others, and that's about all there is to it. Psychologies are complex and lumpy and shifting things.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Dec 7, 2005 4:43:08 PM
