Quote from: two_fishes;420011Why does it have to be a question of what is superior or inferior? Sometimes difference for the sake of variety is enjoyable. It is, after all, the spice of life.

Well, when I'm eating a steady diet of fresh food and suddenly eat processed stuff out of a box, it's not exactly the "spice of life," if you see what I mean...

Quote from: CRKrueger;419817Ok, so lets say I stipulate that players do have narrative authority, they do grant that authority to the GM, RPGs can create stories.

Now what?

um...a bunch of really crappy fanfic gets written based on games?

Okay, a bit snarky but honestly, I have no problem at all with Story Games. Heck, Once Upon a Time is one of my favourite card games of all time, and I've had hilarious fun with Baron Munchausen. But that's just not the experience I want from an RPG.

Quote from: CRKrueger;419817Ok, so lets say I stipulate that players do have narrative authority, they do grant that authority to the GM, RPGs can create stories.

Now what?

Quote from: John Morrow;419821

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF--

http://z0r.de/1352

Not again!

Quote from: two_fishes;420011Why does it have to be a question of what is superior or inferior? Sometimes difference for the sake of variety is enjoyable. It is, after all, the spice of life.

To my thinking, the extent to which someone values difference in their gaming systems determines whether simply being different is a good thing and how good a thing it is. For someone who really valued diversity, different models might be interesting on that basis alone.

I'm not particularly interested in trying different gaming models -- I'm very happy with the traditional one, and would rather put my energy into running and playing games rather than learning new systems.

But that's just me, and I wouldn't be surprised to see someone who values system diversity coming to a different conclusion than I do.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: CRKrueger;420015I created this thread so you could continue what you started in the other one.  It seemed like once we agreed on definitions, you had somewhere to go with it, so I'm letting the definitions go, so where did you want to take the thread?

Quote from: Benoist;420020Agreed. I'd like to understand what the whole fucking point of this is. Let's say RPGs create stories. There is shared narrative authority, some of it granted to the GM.

Oh, wow. I was so caught up arguing in the other thread that I didn't quite realize the value of this one. (Although the other one has gotten less pointlessly contentious in the meantime).

One point: It was never my intention to argue that RPGs create stories. I guess I'd lean toward the idea that they do, in a fashion, but that's not of particular interest to me.

So.

Mostly I was responding to John Morrow's claim that players have no narrative authority in traditional games, and that seems like a misreading to what RPGs are, to me. That particular language turned out to be quite fraught with controversy, as it happened, but I think it's valid.

As I was writing in the other thread, without narrative authority, however you distribute it from table to table, you have no role-playing game.

Quote from: -E.;420046But that's just me, and I wouldn't be surprised to see someone who values system diversity coming to a different conclusion than I do.

That's me, man. I love a weird new set of rules. As long as they work.

Quote from: BWA;420047As I was writing in the other thread, without narrative authority, however you distribute it from table to table, you have no role-playing game.

That statement is true only if you want some sort of built-in rules protection from the GM.  99% of the time, the GM doesn't countermand the player's statement of intent, he merely uses the rules and his judgement to determine the outcome of that intent.

However, in a traditional RPG GM/player relationship, the GM does have complete and total power, including over everyone's characters.  Due to magic/psionics/alien biology, whatever, the GM can tell you what you do, what you say, what you feel, what you think.

If he is countermanding you control of your character for purposes of keeping the world emulation intact, then he is doing his job.
 - You're affected by Dragon Fear, you run.
 - The psychotopic Black IC has left you with a fear of hacking Mitsuhama systems.
 - Your character has the trait "Respect for Authority", I don't think he's going to be thundering at the King."
All those are perfectly legitimate uses of GM authority.

A traditional RPG assumes that the GM is competent and not an asshole.  If the GM is incompetent and/or an asshole, then you don't fix that with rules handcuffing the GM.  You find a new GM.

Quote from: BWA;420047As I was writing in the other thread, without narrative authority, however you distribute it from table to table, you have no role-playing game.

Oh wow. So you have to have "narrative authority" to have an RPG, in your mind.

It's even more of a communication breakdown than I thought.

Quote from: CRKrueger;420052If he is countermanding you control of your character for purposes of keeping the world emulation intact, then he is doing his job.

I'm not talking about that stuff. I accept that as totally legit. We agree!

I'm talking about normal gameplay. You say what happens in the world around us, I say what my character does.

The theory you are advancing doesn't just say "If he is countermanding your control of your character for purposes of keeping the world emulation intact, then he is doing his job." By definition, it says "If he is countermanding your control of your character for any reason at all, that is his right." It may be dick-ish, and you may have to leave the game, but that's the breaks, because that's what Total Narrative Authority means.

Yes, in practice, this doesn't come up much. But if it did? We'd understand it to be bullshit. Because we, the players, would have lost our authority.

Understand, this isn't some sort of "Fear of GM Power" nonsense. I've always been a GM, and when I haven't been, I've played with mostly great GMs. I'm not trying to CHANGE your games, I'm talking abut how I think they work.

* * *

These two threads are converging quite a bit. It seems like we should pick one or the other, if anyone is still interested in the conversation.

Well, the way I see it, players have no authority at all.  If the GM can countermand your stated action, then you have no authority.  The GM is the one with authority.

I wouldn't think that GM was bullshit because I lost my authority, I would think that GM was bullshit because he's being an ass.  

You have no right to your character any more then I have a right not to be hit by a car.

The characters belong to you, but as long as you are playing in a setting, the characters belong to the world, and the world belongs to the person from whose mind it sprang, the GM.

However, all of this is again predicated on a moronic GM who's being a dick.  Yeah he can be a dick, yeah you can walk away.  That's it.

Quote from: BWA;420069These two threads are converging quite a bit. It seems like we should pick one or the other, if anyone is still interested in the conversation.

Should probably stick to this one in Other Games. At some point we'll move into how actual shared authority could possibly work and then Pundit will dump the thread into Other Games anyway.  

Q still unanswered:
BWA, why do you love Kitsch so much?

Quote from: BWA;420047Oh, wow. I was so caught up arguing in the other thread that I didn't quite realize the value of this one. (Although the other one has gotten less pointlessly contentious in the meantime).

One point: It was never my intention to argue that RPGs create stories. I guess I'd lean toward the idea that they do, in a fashion, but that's not of particular interest to me.

So.

Mostly I was responding to John Morrow's claim that players have no narrative authority in traditional games, and that seems like a misreading to what RPGs are, to me. That particular language turned out to be quite fraught with controversy, as it happened, but I think it's valid.

As I was writing in the other thread, without narrative authority, however you distribute it from table to table, you have no role-playing game.

So basically, you're saying "that was my whole point"? You just want to try to get the unwashed masses to admit to your private delusion? You haven't even got some other further meaningful development of your point beside "Hah Hah made you look"?

RPGPundit

On the slightly linked theme of authority, which i think is different to using narrative, the GM often cedes authority to dice.  They do this as part of the general mill of play such as in combats or morale checks etc but they also do it from a plot perspective with wandering monsters or other dice driven in world events.

When you try to take that awy such as in Amber, you get accused of not playing properly just as if you gave the authority to the player, although by a different subset of people.

So why is it okay to yeild authority to the dice and not to a PC is it becuase the dice are impartial?
And I know that some GMS will override the dice, which makes be begger the question why roll them at all

Quote from: Settembrini;420013Okay, enough agreement for the medium: So why would anyone want to force a narrative into a game?

Why turn something that supposedly is about "the human condition" (the NARR mindset) willfully into schlock & kitsch?

You'd never want to force a narrative into a game. "Narrative authority" as I've described it here doesn't have anything to do with whether the play of a game conforms to someone's pre-conceived plotline; it's just the idea that players (and GMs) play by "narrating" (i.e., describing, introducing) events into the game-world. It's neutral--you might say agnostic--with respect to plot.

It is the case, however, that what the term "narrative authority" presumes is that narrative is the currency of human experience. The definition of narrative in this instance is rather minimalistic; it amounts to a character encountering a situation and taking action in it. Three elements: character, situation, action.

So, for example, this is the beginning of a narrative:

"So there I was minding my own business [character], when this guy comes up and starts giving me a hard time [situation]..."

It's important to recognize that how the character takes action in his or her given circumstance tells us something about the character. For example,  consider these alternate resolutions to the beginning of the narrative given above:

(a) "...So I just walked away."

versus

(b) "...So I hauled off and clocked him in the mouth."

In each case, we know something about the guy who would do each of those things; we can make judgments about him. Note that the "character" in this case is the same as the "narrator"--that's often but not always true, even in everyday speech, but regardless we can also make judgments about the narrator based on the stories he or she tells, whether in the first person or the third.

From this perspective, narrative emerges organically from (role-)play, which becomes a way of playing with stories--scholars of role-playing like Mackay, Hendricks, and Bowman have noted the extent to which the play of RPGs involves pop-cultural references and allusions, particularly to well-known fantasy and science fiction tropes: "My guy is like Neo," e.g.

Note that this is entirely distinct from GNS "Narrativism," which privileges "addressing Premise" as a particularly worthy mode of engaging in play. I am not talking about that at all. Rather, I'm saying that the currency of RPGs is the introduction of events in the fictional world of the game. The precise means through which those events are vouchsafed involve the game mechanics as well as the social-level dynamics at the table: who can say what, and how that utterance is treated.

I recognize that for those folks who say that "there is no story" in (their) role-playing games, my position will come across as a challenge, although I believe what they are talking about is big-S literary "Story" rather than little-s stuff of everyday talk "story." Regardless, I can see someone arguing that the fundamental act of role-playing is not the introduction of events into the game-world, but rather the description of a character's sense-experience, in aid of immersion in the setting. That position is not consistent with my own experience of play, in which characters taking action rather than merely receiving impressions looms large, but I am capable of being convinced.

All of that was in response to Settembrini's question about "forcing" narrative into a game: the short answer is that you don't force narrative into a game, it emerges naturally in the give-and-take of description, reaction, and consequence that characterizes RPG play. To which someone might say, "But that's not a story! It's just a sequence of events without any larger pattern or plan!" To which I would say, "Exactly."

More expansively, I believe that big-S "Story" only emerges from narration (the stuff of play) when it becomes available for reflection and examination from the outside. When you're playing, you're just playing; it doesn't "mean anything" in the sense of having larger significance until you are also willing to and capable of seeing it as an observer. One of the defining aspects of play, according to Huizinga's Homo Ludens, is its ephemerality--you stop playing and poof! it's gone. Note that this insulates much play from Settembrini's charge of kitsch--it can't be bad art if it's not intended as art.

Now, the question of RPGs as art is one that I'm interested in, and the claim that most self-consciously "artistic" RPG play is kitsch is one that I wouldn't dispute. But that's a separate question, so I'll table it for now.