Actually, most of the advice, tips, and people discussing what they've found works and doesn't work is probably more helpful than any of the theory that I've read.

If you really want a unified theory it needs to cover any game that exists.  Having a theory of RPGs that doesn't explain D&D is silly.

I'd start with the basics:

games have: challenge, reward
challenge can be: mental, physical, luck
reward can be:
* overcoming challenge (satisfaction)
* recognition (fame)
* prize (fortune)
* other enjoyable reward

greater reward = greater incentive to play
greater ability to manage challenge = greater incentive to play

I *think* that's basic enough to be true for any game or sport. If not, refine that until you can't disprove it with any examples of "games".

Then, the next step is thinking about RPGs (a type of game) more specifically within the broader context of games.

If the example above holds water it would be thinking about the challenges and rewards for RPGs, and methods to give people more ability to manage those challenges.

Keep refining it as you go.

I guess the difference is that GNS etc. looked at a handful of RPGs and tried to create a theory that was then applied more broadly than it could manage.  I'd approach it from the other direction.

Quote from: Levi KornelsenOkay.  What do you think a theory would be?

WTF?! :insane:

My point is Levi is that I'm saying that the whole attempt to generate a theory out of all this accumulated information is a mistake, a red herring, a blind alley, a waste of brain power. What we need is everyday chat and snappy journalism so that we can most usefully communicate the simple generalisations from experience whose insights can do what talking about rpg's is supposed to do: help us get more out of our games.

The only theory I'm prepared to concede has any place at all in talking about rpg's is probability and statistics, so that games designers understand the nuts and bolts of their random number generators inside out, backwards and any which way. Beyond that: bring any ideas you like to your table and to your talk; just don't use it to turn everyday insights into high-falutin' cod-academic pseudo-theoretic waffle.

Quote from: StuartIf you really want a unified theory it needs to cover any game that exists.  Having a theory of RPGs that doesn't explain D&D is silly.

Uh ... Levi's Many-Fold thingy explains a lot of D&D play I've seen.  For instance, I've seen people take a social approach to D&D, where the adventure and combat is a skeleton upon which to build a fun evening hanging out with the guys.  I've seen people take a challenge approach, where the goal is to "beat" the adventure.  I've probably seen some other stuff if I think about it.

Seems to map fine to D&D play for me.

Quote from: JMcL63My point is Levi is that I'm saying that the whole attempt to generate a theory out of all this accumulated information is a mistake, a red herring, a blind alley, a waste of brain power.

I, uh, don't agree.

But, hang on to the thought.  When the whole lot is up, tell me if it's a waste; if you end up thinking "the format is a waste", then tell me about how to put the whole thing into a format you'd find handier.  If it's still just a total write-off to you, then so be it.

Cool?

Quote from: TonyLBUh ... Levi's Many-Fold thingy explains a lot of D&D play I've seen.  For instance, I've seen people take a social approach to D&D, where the adventure and combat is a skeleton upon which to build a fun evening hanging out with the guys.  I've seen people take a challenge approach, where the goal is to "beat" the adventure.  I've probably seen some other stuff if I think about it.

Seems to map fine to D&D play for me.

It does, yes. As does much of Ron's voluminous glossary. If people thought I was saying otherwise I really must fess up and apologise. :imsorry:

The point is not that these insights are wrong. The point is that the conceit that what we need is to tie them all up into an academically credible theory is just plain wrong, because going in that direction renders this material unintelligble and therefore unfit for purpose.

QuoteUh ... Levi's Many-Fold thingy explains a lot of D&D play I've seen. For instance, I've seen people take a social approach to D&D, where the adventure and combat is a skeleton upon which to build a fun evening hanging out with the guys. I've seen people take a challenge approach, where the goal is to "beat" the adventure. I've probably seen some other stuff if I think about it.

As observations of some different ways that people play RPGs I think it's great.  I'm not disagreeing with that at all.  

I'm not sure the GNS+ approach is the right one though.  But like I said, I'm interested in seeing the rest of the theory, where I expect the real heart of it lies.

PART THREE: The healthy consensus

This is a long chunk of writing, make no mistake.  It's also where we start to hit craft, though mostly in a fairly light way - the next chunk after this is the real 'guts' of the piece.

1. Make Sure You've Got Your Head On Straight
If someone is simply not in a good headspace for actually sitting down at a table with other people and playing a game, then there's little chance of getting a healthy, working consensus.  So, here are a few bits of basic advice; a checklist to make sure you've got your head on straight.

• Come For A Good Time: If your primary goal at the table is something other than having an experience you enjoy, and that others can enjoy with you, you should be doing something else. This experience can be (indeed, often will be) fairly specific - crafting a satisfying story together, or having the experience of seeing things from the perspective of your character, or whatever, either in addition to or instead of classically fun stuff. But if what you want when you sit down at the table on any given night isn't enjoyable to you, or does not allow enjoyment for others, do not sit down at that table. Not gaming is better than bad gaming.
  
• This Is Your Gamespace, These Are Real People: Accept and understand that the players around you are real people that are also here to have fun. Nobody comes to the table to watch one player discuss their personal character's stuff with the GM when it could wait, or to watch two players crack inside jokes at each other and exclude everyone else. Nobody comes to the table to be treated to the personal aroma of another player, or to closely observe their food being chewed. Nobody hosts a game hoping for a marathon cleanup session at the end. Nobody comes to the table to be the ego-boosting kick-toy of anyone else. Never, ever, forget that you are playing the game with real people.
  
• Accept Responsibility: What you do at the gaming table is your responsibility, and you should accept this. What others do is their responsibility, and they should accept that, too. This absolutely includes what you decide that your character does. This absolutely includes the actions of the GM as world. If playing your character as written could very well interfere with the fun of others, you need to decide where to go with that – it's your call, though; excuses are lame. If you ruin the game by playing your character or the world 'correctly', then you still ruined the game.
  
• Be Ready To Share Control; Do So Clearly: No one person at the table has full control over what happens in the game. If someone does, you get some really boring shit. At the very least, a player generally controls most of one character in the game. There are an infinite number of little variants on how the GM and the players share control over who gets to put stuff in, and things work best once the group hits a level of input from each person at the table that they're comfortable with.  If the characters are in a scene described only as 'a crowded bar', can they just declare that they grab a bottle off the bar a take a swing at the guy that's bugging them?  Should they check if there's a bottle in reach first?  Would they prefer to?  Is is assumed that they bloody well brought their flashlight when they knew they were going underground, even if they didn't move it from the 'at home' part of their sheet to the 'on my person' part?  Find that level, those specific 'who can say what, and what is and isn't assumed' spots.
  
• Be Ready To Negotiate Honestly: If everyone has their head straight, and you still have a problem, then it's time to sort that out. Here's one, basic, standard saying that ties into this – it's usually a very bad idea to try and solve out-of-character problems with in-game events. That's dishonest, and doesn't generally work. Also, using the rules to 'punish' your players or 'get back' at your GM? Same thing.  Negotiate real things with real people.
  
• Learn To Speak The Same Language: This is an ongoing effort that every group needs to make together. Every single person thinks that different phrases and wordings imply slightly different things, and this is one of the biggest things that can knock down even an honest attempt at talking to other people. Your group, to communicate both well and quickly, will sometimes need to hash out things related to this; accept that it's going to happen and try not to get too serious about a problem until you're sure this isn't it.

2. Anticipate Other Approaches.
When players sit down at the table, they have approaches and goals. Things they think would be fun for them. Just the basic act of sitting down with a few friends and hanging out is one kind of fun, and it can certainly be enough to carry a night. But players can want different things - to get deep into character, to explore the setting in detail, to have their character make hard decisions that define them, to collaboratively create story with the game - all kinds of things. Most players want more than one thing, at different levels of intensity. And many people aren't that good at expressing what they want to get out of the game.  Recognize that this is the case.  Your group might decide to discuss their different approaches before gameplay even starts, or discover them in play, or whatever, but don't assume that everyone is coming at the game in the same way that you are.

3. Remember How Playstyles Form.
When a group starts putting all their goals together with the habits of the players, the text, and so on, they slowly create a style of play. This style of play is unique to the group, and changes over time. Two groups using the same game system will not play entirely the same way - even if they're composed of the same people playing a new campaign or the like.  Most playstyles emerge because the group has a leader - the GM - who runs the group and works to keep things smooth. Others form by unpsoken consensus - their goals and habits are similar enough that the group simply functions. Still others by contract - the group sits down and hashes things out. Others, yet, by aggregate; ideas get tossed around during play and added in, changing things as play goes on. A few are formed based almost solely on a consensus of text - everyone reads and follows the rulebook as written, as best they can.  And there are mixtures, blends, and other factors.

4. Know Your Approach, Listen To Others
Figure out what you want, from each game you play. If that matches what other people want, good. If someone has a name for it that fits, good. But don't hide behind any one set of terms. Describe your goals, the parts of the playstyle you want, as clearly as possible. Tell your group what makes gaming fun for you, and how to get it. Once you know what you want, and you're ready to put it out there to your group, you still need to listen to the other members of your group. They have goals, just as you do. Find out what they want, and don't discount it because it doesn't fit your mental model. If someone at your table is a "narrativist", it doesn't matter if you disagree with the framework that idea came from. This isn't about you. It's about them. But expect the same courtesy; if you decide to call yourself an "immersionist", they should be asking you what that means to you and how to serve it at the table.  The more the group knows about the goals of all the players, the more able it is to serve those goals. If Tom wants adventure, excitement, and really wild things from a given campaign, while Sam wants hard choices and character development, the group needs to sort that out. Maybe they'll end up playing a grim campaign of grey morals, where every choice means something. But if they don't know what both players want, the group won't have as much fun as they otherwise could.

5. Realize That You May Not Be Playing The Game You Thought.
Players and GMs have often realized partway into a game that they aren't playing or running the game that they thought they would be.  A common example (possibly more common as an example than as an actual event) is the D&D game that has slowly shifted over from social issues to brutal hackfests simply because the players latched onto the shiny fighting rules.  But be aware that when you discover that you aren't playing the game you thought, the change probably happened because people were having fun over here instead of over there where you anticipated.  Before you make any effort at all to drag them anywhere, seriously consider that the move happened so that people could enjoy themselves.  Work from there.

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Now, before I move on to the next part, comments or questions?

PART FOUR: Organizing a method.

This is the application, here, of what I've been going into before.  What I'm going to go into here are a bunch of techniques from the method I use, talking about them as if they were universal, and describing how they might be reoriented to fit different playstyles.  Chances are you don't use the same set of techniques, and some of these examples will be total nonsense to you as a result; hopefully there's enough shots at it that it'll make the jump.

How Will You Answer "Who are the characters?"
Not 'what is the answer', but 'how did you get that answer'.  Your engine, and any other books, inspirational novels, and so on, that you're using will have a lot to say on this end, on the actual process of building a character sheet.  But it's always possible to have a GM build pregenerated characters, for example, or simply even ask that players build City Guards for the town of Morovia, or 'young heroes', or 'adventurers that want adventure'.  It's also possible to have players build characters with built-in things to do right in their design – if I build a thief on the run from the law, then I'm pretty likely to be doing some thieving, and I wouldn't mind spending some time actually running from the law.  Right at character creation, it should be clear who gets to answer these questions, and to what degree they get to do so, and it's good if that process matches up well with the approach of the group or the individual approaches of the players.  Someone with a light approach probably doesn't want to bog down in details; someone with an immersive approach might very well revel in those same details, both for their own character and for others.  A decision as to where to strike the balance would need to be made if both players are in the same group.

How Will You Answer "What Do The Character Do?"
Your engine will answer "what do they do?" in a lot of places, usually by example and by providing rules for things to do.  But it's hardly the end-all of answering the question.  Many systems provide few examples of roleplaying in-character and no rules for it at all, but not because they don't expect you to do so – instead, they skip that stuff because it requires no rules.  Don't rely on a text to answer the question.  Again, there are a lot of ways to come at this for your game.  Here are four examples:

• The group can follow a series of techniques given by the game book.
• The GM can set up missions, and the characters can run those missions.
• The GM can create situations, and the players can do anything they like inside of that context.
• The players can create powerful built-in motives for their characters, and the GM can simply throw stuff that feeds those motives into their path.
• The players can create conflict for one another as they struggle with one another over pre-defined goals.

Now, some of those obviously don't suit some of the example approaches, while others fit neatly – and a GM that proposes, clearly, a specific way of answering this question can actually cause their players to switch approaches to match the game.  Difficulties here can come up when different players believe that their approach demands a specific way of answering the question, or when the techniques used to answer it are totally in conflict with the way that a player habitually approaches the game.  A player that comes at the game as a Sink-or-swim experience, and who sits down for a game where players are simply assumed to build their own motives and internal conflicts, is going to be in for a bit of a rough patch.  Likewise, the guy that built a strongly motivated character in advance, but is in a game where the GM is running from a plotted approach, and has set up missions-that-don't-look-like-missions.

Will You Use 'Culture Bits', And How?
A dead-common technique that I don't have a catchy name for is the 'culture bit'.  Let's say that in a game I'm running, the tribal people of the game wear armbands made of precious metals.  These are all about status, and often bear family markings, and so on – people wear anywhere from one simple brass one to a stack of golden ones.  You can tell a lot about someone from their armbands.  That's a culture bit, just barely fleshed out.  Now, imagine all of the following:

• A player character, about to go on a long journey, slips two of his armbands onto someone else, kisses them on the cheek, and whispers "carry my name until my return" in their ear.  This action and it's implications have never even been hinted at in the game.  Who defines them?  Is it cool for a player to take such an action?  Will implications be added as if they always existed, or will the GM just have the other character go "bwuh?"
  
• A player has their character utterly ignore such cues, for no in-character reason, but simply because they can't be arsed to worry about crap like that.
• A player constantly asks for detail on the armbands, and what they mean, and is clearly treating them as a not as a character cue, but as a way of 'reading' other characters, to get hints at 'tactical' information.

Now, all those actions are potentially obvious things to do depending on how the player is approaching the game.  

And All The Other Techniques?
My list of techniques isn't the same as yours.  Many of mine have fancy little names I made up or found to remember them by – pitch, hooks, spurs, nets, chains, cores, flags – to the point where it sounds like I'm carting this huge trunk or gear into a game.  Yours might just be 'how I get players interested fast', 'how I get characters involved in situations', and so on.  That doesn't matter.  What matters here is that each of those techniques serves different approaches, to different degrees, and that you can modify them to serve this and that.  I hope that it will be useful for us to look at different techniques and see how they help or block different approaches, how they can be modified to help multiple approaches, and so on.  

You Can Merge Approaches With Technique
Not every playstyle gets to this point, but a group can adapt their techniques until their preferences start to merge, where the idea of "we take turns giving each player their fun" starts to get subsumed by the style as a whole.  If Allan wants Immersion, and Billy wants tactics, and the group is performing, we might see Allan taking on the role of group tactician, but serving Billy by keeping things in-character. As a hypothetical:
   Combat begins. Allan looks over the map of the battle, strategising effective tactics. He speaks up, completely ignoring initiative (the group has started allowing in-character speech outside initiative). Having decided on a few things, he switches into character-voice and begins giving tactical commands regarding the field. The other players might or might not always follow his lead, but he feels secure that Billy's character will.  Billy, on the other side of the table, has noted that combat has started. He waits a moment, relaxed and partly in-character, and when he hears what Allan's character has to say, he follows the advice of the battle-hardened veteran that has taken him to victory before.
Allan is serving his own preferences and those of Billy in a way that has grown up naturally, and Billy is doing the same.  This can be done across the board; figure out how to do it with your group and their approaches, by adapting the techniques you have on hand, and you are golden.

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And there you have it.

Thoughts?

I like this.

1. It's extremely different from GNS in several profound ways: having more than three agendas is the first clear and serious digression. Not revolving around Narrativism is a second. It shares more, IMO, with Mike Holme's 3D model.

2. I think it qualifies as RPG theory simply because anything said about RPGs qualifies as RPG theory today. I think right now this is more in the fundamental category of excellent and clear advice.

I'd like to see this made more predictive and provide more of a model and hypothesis format.

3. It isn't clear from this how, if at all, System Does Matter. I mean, it's taken as a given that it does--and that some approach may be better served by some mechanics (I'd guess). However, for, say, the social approach, system might not matter all that much. For the narrative non-plotted approach some people might find mechanics all-important (and another group might not, depending on how they front-load situation).

-Marco

Quote from: Marco2. I think it qualifies as RPG theory simply because anything said about RPGs qualifies as RPG theory today. I think right now this is more in the fundamental category of excellent and clear advice.

I'd like to see this made more predictive and provide more of a model and hypothesis format.

Chances are, I'm going to first take it the other way - and turn it into a step-by-step method of "how I think you can refine your play".  

Quote from: Marco3. It isn't clear from this how, if at all, System Does Matter. I mean, it's taken as a given that it does--and that some approach may be better served by some mechanics (I'd guess). However, for, say, the social approach, system might not matter all that much. For the narrative non-plotted approach some people might find mechanics all-important (and another group might not, depending on how they front-load situation).

Many people find that different techniques block of facilitate their 'stuff'.

Beyond that, really, I think one needs to roll up sleeves and get down to cases.  I think.