Quote from: Phillip;459290No, it is hostile specifically to pretentious presentation of fatuous ideas.

If you first have sound ideas that actually demand it, then you are welcome to wheel out batteries of jargon. Beware, though, of words that help you to hide from yourself how little you grasp. Translating brief stereotyped passages into the longer forms that "plain English" requires is at once a good test and good exercise.

It is a warning flag when the version loaded with jargon is longer.

I'm not going to ask you to be polite, because I know how satisfying it is to call down some rhetorical  whoop-ass on the uninformed, but I think you're fundamentally mistaken. I think these issues are more complex and more nuanced than you seem to think, and while I am willing to be proven wrong about these things, your brag and bluster aren't doing the job.
 

Quote from: Phillip;459292No.

The Pool is concerned with distributing narrative control in order (surprise, surprise) to control a narrative.

That is a very different different thing from the experience of a person in a world!

I've never actually played The Pool, so you'll forgive me if I rely on third-hand accounts of what playing the game is like. From the description I read here, it seems as if the "Monologue of Victory" is an optional narrative device, a tool for characterization in many cases, and that in most instances what you're doing as a player is using your (admittedly free-form) traits and in-game actions to pursue your in-game goals, much as in PanzerBlitz you'd use good fire-and-maneuver to achieve your in-game objectives, and much as you'd try to use your attributes and powers to make your way successfully through the dungeon in D&D.

So I'm going to suggest that it's possible to engage as a player in all of these games in fundamentally the same way, even if there is enormous variation among players ("between subjects," to use a piece of jargon gratuitously) rather than across games. Because all of them involve the representation of an imagined world. You're allowed to disagree with me, but I have hitherto not been impressed with your ability to formulate a cogent position why.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;459287Okay, so you saw my post. Again, I've been skimming, and your posts in particular aren't very easy to take in at a glance because you've made some outside references without summarizing (as far as I can tell). So I may not be entirely on-track. But if you go back to my livejournal and click the "immersion" tag, you'll find references to some things that Chris Lehrich wrote about the gap between "total immersion [total in-character perspective]" and what's really going on at the table. In plain terms I don't think it's much different from "playing pretend" whether in kiddie-LARP format or sitting around a table. But the key here is "assuming a role" and "pretending" (a rather mystical word) to be that role.

The space between the player and the character seems to me to be central to understanding role-playing as a fictional form; the concept of "immersion" in all its ambiguity, complexity, and polysemy -- quagmire indeed -- is inextricably bound up in that. What Salen and Zimmerman call the "double consciousness" of play is that much more pointed in role-playing, since both "I am my character" and "I am not my character" are true statements. I think it's true that "playing pretend" is the heart of it, but the artlessness of childhood pretending is not there to the same degree; as players we are more self-conscious about our play than are children. Mikhail Bakhtin says that the difference between art and play is that play lacks an audience while art requires it, and it may be the case that in role-playing, as Markus Montola puts it, the players are a "first-person audience."

QuoteAs an aside which may be pertinent, I think that "pretending" is a natural trait of humans, and possibly of other animals, too. If you've ever seen cats pretend to stalk each other (or their owners), or dogs pretending to fight, that's what I'm getting at. OTOH "games" in general are also a kind of pretend, but they don't necessarily have the mimetic quality, and I can't guarantee that cats & dogs in more of a mimetic mind or (shall we say) abstract  mind when they play.

Yes. There is a book I'm trying to read right now called Mimesis and Make-Believe that tries to argue (or at least proceeds from the assumption) that all (representational?) art is at root a kind of let's-pretend play. He's able to get away with that because of the universality of that kind of play. I'm not able to speak to what's going on when animals play-fight or play-hunt or play more generally, but certainly others have pointed to animal play as another indication of the ubiquity and therefore value (consequentiality) of play.

Quote from: Bill White;459296I'm not going to ask you to be polite, because I know how satisfying it is to call down some rhetorical  whoop-ass on the uninformed, but I think you're fundamentally mistaken. I think these issues are more complex and more nuanced than you seem to think, and while I am willing to proven wrong about these things, your brag and bluster aren't doing the job.

It's 'impolite' to challenge your unsupported assertions? Hello? This is theRPGSite!

About what do you think I have bragged -- or is that just another example of your cavalier regard for the actual meanings of words?
 

QuoteI've never actually played The Pool, so you'll forgive me if I rely on third-hand accounts of what playing the game is like.

The actual rules are here: The Pool
 

QuoteSo I'm going to suggest that it's possible to engage as a player in all of these games in fundamentally the same way, even if there is enormous variation among players ("between subjects," to use a piece of jargon gratuitously) rather than across games. Because all of them involve the representation of an imagined world. You're allowed to disagree with me, but I have hitherto not been impressed with your ability to formulate a cogent position why.

What set is "all these games"?

Which particular "same way" works just the same? On what basis do you think that some kind of argument against distinguishing "story games"?

You can read up in this very thread to get up to speed, if you want to avoid offering an argument already disposed of perhaps 100 times.

The rules of the The Pool are available for free from the author's website.

Monologue of Victory, or rather choosing to use a MoV vs. taking a die into your Pool, is a dissociated mechanic (in Justin Alexander's terminology): it doesn't represent anything, but it lets you have more narrative control (actually it lets you trade off types of narrative control as well as their timing & certainty). The mechanics of the game as a whole (for example, gambling more or less dice on a roll) are primarily designed to mediate narrative control, with a few tips of the hat to story elements (traits) designed to create coherence and continuity.

Comparing this to Panzerblitz is like calling Armor Class a story mechanic. There may be a level of comparability, but I think you'd have to invoke a great deal more than individual mechanics or even the rules of the game as a whole. In other words, you'd have to create equivalences between socially-determined interpretations on one hand, and mechanical-textual rules on the other, and I think the need to translate across media (as it were) would itself demonstrate how different the games are.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;459287Okay, so you saw my post. Again, I've been skimming, and your posts in particular aren't very easy to take in at a glance because you've made some outside references without summarizing (as far as I can tell). So I may not be entirely on-track. But if you go back to my livejournal and click the "immersion" tag, you'll find references to some things that Chris Lehrich wrote about the gap between "total immersion [total in-character perspective]" and what's really going on at the table. In plain terms I don't think it's much different from "playing pretend" whether in kiddie-LARP format or sitting around a table. But the key here is "assuming a role" and "pretending" (a rather mystical word) to be that role.

I almost forgot; another thing that I've seen a lot in the scholarly literature on RPGs that's emerged in the past ten years or so is a lot of use of Erving Goffman, the sociologist who was concerned with how people enacted identity in interaction. The concept of the "frame" is taken up quite extensively, so that a lot of people talk about switching between "the fictional frame," "the game frame," "the social frame," and so forth; I think you can see that in MacKay's book ("A New Performing Art"). But Goffman is useful to RPG scholarship because you can read him as saying that we're all pretending all the time--there is no "authentic identity," just lines that we take in social situations that we are more or less able to redeem if challenged. In most cases it doesn't come to that, though. As a way of getting deeper into what it means to self-consciously "take on a role" in a game, Goffman is worth taking a look at; Strategic Interaction is an engaging read at the very least. Also, Bernard Suits' talks about pretend play at the end of The Grasshopper in a way that's directly relevant to role-playing, even if Suits had probably never heard of it when he was writing the book in the late 70s.

In any event, the implication of Goffman is that if you define the in-game social situation adequately, you go a long way toward enabling "immersion" in the sense of successful adoption of an in-game role.

Quote from: Bill White;459304I think it's true that "playing pretend" is the heart of it, but the artlessness of childhood pretending is not there to the same degree; as players we are more self-conscious about our play than are children. Mikhail Bakhtin says that the difference between art and play is that play lacks an audience while art requires it, and it may be the case that in role-playing, as Markus Montola puts it, the players are a "first-person audience."

These seem like unnecessary assumptions and/or begging the question. Are we sure we're more self-conscious about our play than children? Are there degrees of self-consciousness? Etc.

I never knew there was a 1st person- 3rd Person divide.

Normally I write in very informal first person but I tried something different with Tough Justice with 3rd Person.

I find a lot of the idiots that are suspicious of RPGs are the sort that think it involves insane levels of immersion. By having my sample group talk in third person about their Characters helped clarify that the players were not nutjobs who thought they really were 18th Century Lawyers and dubious associates!

Quote from: Phillip;459308It's 'impolite' to challenge your unsupported assertions? Hello? This is theRPGSite!

About what do you think I have bragged -- or is that just another example of your cavalier regard for the actual meanings of words?

Now you're just being unpleasant. "Brag and bluster" is a figure of speech that means "talking like a blowhard." Its meaning is only unclear is you're trying to be willfully obtuse. And I have tried hard to support my assertions and respond to your objections, to the extent that they are substantive and not mere kicking.

Not literal kicking. Figurative kicking.

QuoteThe actual rules are here: The Pool

Have you played it? What was your experience like?
 

QuoteWhat set is "all these games"?

Um. PanzerBlitz, the Pool, and D&D. The three games I mentioned.

QuoteWhich particular "same way" works just the same?

Um. The representation of a fictional world, and a player's engagement with that fictional world; the thing that you and I have been talking about over the last few posts. Or I guess more accurately the thing that I have been asking you about and you have been refusing to answer.
 

QuoteOn what basis do you think that some kind of argument against distinguishing "story games"?

I didn't know that I was making an argument about that; I hadn't gotten there yet. I was just saying that drawing the line on the basis of traditional RPGs being "immersively" first-person doesn't hold up because of the immersive fallacy. All RPGs (conceived of broadly) employ some kind of representational techniques that play with the distinction between player and character, and different people find different techniques to be effective or ineffective ("game-breaking") based on those individual variations in preference that everyone here seems willing to admit into evidence. One person's narrative control is another person's power-up.

As to whether or not that's an argument against the existence of a category called "story-games" as conceived of here, I couldn't say. I suspect that it's probably actually a smaller set than seems to be generally believed.

QuoteYou can read up in this very thread to get up to speed, if you want to avoid offering an argument already disposed of perhaps 100 times.

This is just snark. But I understand better now what your damage is; you were anticipating an argument that I wasn't making yet.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;459311These seem like unnecessary assumptions and/or begging the question. Are we sure we're more self-conscious about our play than children? Are there degrees of self-consciousness? Etc.

I want to play with you, cowboy.

Quote from: Bill White;459304The space between the player and the character seems to me to be central to understanding role-playing as a fictional form; the concept of "immersion" in all its ambiguity, complexity, and polysemy -- quagmire indeed -- is inextricably bound up in that. What Salen and Zimmerman call the "double consciousness" of play is that much more pointed in role-playing, since both "I am my character" and "I am not my character" are true statements. I think it's true that "playing pretend" is the heart of it, but the artlessness of childhood pretending is not there to the same degree; as players we are more self-conscious about our play than are children. Mikhail Bakhtin says that the difference between art and play is that play lacks an audience while art requires it, and it may be the case that in role-playing, as Markus Montola puts it, the players are a "first-person audience."

Bakhtin was a literary critic. He said things about things, as human beings are wont to do. If he ever said anything about RPGs, did he know what he was talking about? Would it be the "correct" view because he was a literary critic?

Children play RPGs, so why do you exclude them from your "we"?

Have you never seen even younger children than those serving as audiences for themselves or others at play? Do you believe that play then ceases to be play? Why should we care?

Quote from: Bill WhiteUm. The representation of a fictional world, and a player's engagement with that fictional world; the thing that you and I have been talking about over the last few posts.

Way to avoid answering the question, Bill. You pegged that old vagueness meter again.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;459309The rules of the The Pool are available for free from the author's website.

Monologue of Victory, or rather choosing to use a MoV vs. taking a die into your Pool, is a dissociated mechanic (in Justin Alexander's terminology): it doesn't represent anything, but it lets you have more narrative control (actually it lets you trade off types of narrative control as well as their timing & certainty). The mechanics of the game as a whole (for example, gambling more or less dice on a roll) are primarily designed to mediate narrative control, with a few tips of the hat to story elements (traits) designed to create coherence and continuity.

Comparing this to Panzerblitz is like calling Armor Class a story mechanic. There may be a level of comparability, but I think you'd have to invoke a great deal more than individual mechanics or even the rules of the game as a whole. In other words, you'd have to create equivalences between socially-determined interpretations on one hand, and mechanical-textual rules on the other, and I think the need to translate across media (as it were) would itself demonstrate how different the games are.

You missed my point too. I can argue that my engagement with PanzerBlitz is similar to my engagement with D&D -- I haven't played the Pool -- because they both involve my participation in a fictional world. Note that I am using fictional in the sense of "imagined" or "make-believe." In both instances I have resources that I deploy to achieve in-game objectives that can be expressed in fictional as well as game-mechanical terms; in both I "experience" in-game events ("I destroyed that tank!" "I be hacking those goblins all up!") through the medium of game mechanics.

(But note that I'm not arguing that PanzerBlitz is an RPG; it's clearly a wargame. But the genealogical connection of wargames and RPGs can't be denied, and it is possible to envision a version of PanzerBlitz where I imagined myself to be the commander of this tank, and my opponent took control of everything else. "But a tank isn't a character!" you might say. To which I might reply that on the Eastern Front the type of tank I'm commanding is really all that matters about me, in the scheme of things. My point is that there's a similarity in how I as a player engage with these games. You can say "Bill, that's fucking weird," but the thing that seems to be generally accepted in this discussion is that different people find different kinds of representations to be effective in producing a fictional experience. I personally don't find chess to be particularly evocative in that way, but there are folks for whom its connection to medieval warfare is strikingly effective, as the existence of at least a small class of chess-themed fiction suggests.)

In any case, it's been asserted on this thread that the mere presence of dissociative mechanics isn't enough to dispositively classify something as a "story game"; it's possible to have an RPG with (some) narrative or metagame mechanics, or so I've been told.

So the question about "where's the line" seems to lose its cogency the more one thinks about it, especially given the way that it can be used as a means of making invidious distinctions between "games I like" and "games I don't." Conceivably, there are communities of play -- and individual play groups -- that draw the line in different places, based on the degree to which different sets of techniques allow them to pursue their immersion-like ideal.

As for whether AC is a "story" mechanic--why shouldn't mechanics that represent the fictional reality be regarded as oriented toward "story" in the simplest sense, and the dissociative mechanics that you seem to be down on be called "metagame" mechanics? That probably wouldn't work around here, given how "story" is regarded as a bad word, but Jason's point about the fictional work that in-game attributes can be made to do is well taken; his argument is actually similar to Daniel Punday's piece in Poetics Today (IIRC), which talked about RPGs as building [fictional] "worlds made of objects."

Okay, you've lost me in fractal wrongness.

From my perspective, Panzerblitz is more like D&D than either is like a story game. ("The Pool", for the sake of having some specificity.) Panzerblitz provides an experience of commanding a battalion (give or take) made up of platoons & companies (not individual tanks), rather than telling a story about a battle. It was imperfect of course, and later designs in the same family situated the player more clearly in the commander role by introducing limited control over units (representing morale, training, and difficulties of communication). Other games introduced hidden units (representing, obviously, limited intelligence). However even at this early date, and actually for pretty much anything that called itself a wargame--the player's resources were limited to concrete capabilities directly analogous to those of the forces in the field: movement rates, defense factors, attack factors, weapon ranges.

You further lose me by assuming prejudice ("bad word", etc.). So you'll have to start over if you're going to regain my attention.

Quote from: estar;459167I understand where you are coming from and your points about player motivations. And yes I have refereed players who think of their character story as part of how they decide to do things in the game.

However you have to understand to a referee it is a meaningless distinction. Players come up all kinds of reasons for acting the way they do in the game. Ranging from deep immersion, pursuing an interesting situation, developing an interesting story, or just doing little better than roleplaying a version of themselves in the setting.

I will explain further.

The examples you give happen, back 30 years ago I even told a player that myself a few time and left them dissatisfied. A good referee learns to talk with his players before the campaign and learn what they are interested in. What their goals are for their character(s). If the setting plausibly doesn't have a Prince, there is likely an equivalent. A Duke, or a the son of a great Merchant Captain, or even the son of the tribal chief if it is that kind of setting.

Regardless of the details, what important is that the referee works with the player and together find a starting point for what the player wants to do with her character.

The reason distinctions you make are of no practical use is because a good referee does the above regardless of what motivates the players. What changes are the details of the result. A talk with a players interested in combat is going to result in the referee incorporating certain details while the talk with the player that is, as you call it, a story gamer is going to result in a different set of details.

Gamers are diverse in their interests as individuals. So diverse you just can't make quick assumption and expect them to work for that player. Nothing substitute for specific knowledge about what the player interested in.

The category of story-gamer is just as useless as the category of gun-bunny, power gamer, munchkin, narrativist,and the dozens of other little labels we came up with over the years. Nothing substitute for getting to know your player and what they are interested in.

Furthermore, it is off point for this thread which Benoist is been trying to explain to you. The OP is about what the line between Story GAMES and Role-playing GAMES. Not about the players but about the game. What makes a game design turn from being about players roleplaying a character first to one that about creating a story first.

With the above and this

It seem what you are saying that a game is a story game if players playing it are story gamers and treat it as a story game.

Which is silly as claiming Monopoloy is about roleplaying  being a real-estate agent or playing Third Reich is about roleplaying being Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, or Roosevelt. You could try it with those games


It is the player blocking the lady's goal of marrying the prince, not his character Sir Roundalot. And that the distinction between a game focused on story as opposed to roleplaying a character. That there meta-mechanics designed to allow the group to resolve conflicting views about the story. Or even make a competitive game out of it like "Once a Upon Time". These meta-mechanics are used by the PLAYERS not their CHARACTERS.

There is no meta-mechanic in GURPS that allow you as a player to block another player's goal of marrying the prince. The only method have is to have your character do something that results in the marriage not taking place.

Where it gets gray is that you can add meta-mechanics to a roleplaying game, and you can had character specific mechanics to a game focused on collaboratively creating a story. And so we have debates on which games fall on what side of the line.

My opinion is that meta-mechanics are a poor fit for roleplaying games. Things like Pendragon's virtues, Fate aspects, largely distract from roleplaying a character. That the way to promote better roleplaying is not through mechanics but good advice that present well-written techniques. That due to the diversity of interests among players and referee that there is never going to be a "best" way only various methods that work for various situations and goals.


As I said above, the details of what you, as a referee, will incorporate into the campaign will differ, but the method of getting those details are the same regardless what the players is interested in.

And what not been said is even after the referee for a roleplaying game done this, the story gamer, as you defined, would be limited to what their characters can do. And this is the mechanic of RPGs that drive some gamers to play and develop story games.

.Everything you describe is what a die-hard roleplayer does and what I do as a player. In tabletop and LARPs I am noted for immersing myself into my characters. And I do the funny voices to boot.

In addition I had players like this in my Majestic Wilderlands campaigns and they were very happy with the game I ran. The reason is that I worked them to incorporate what they are interested into the campaign.

The thing that I have to drive home to players that immerse themselves into their characters is that they will have to live with the consequences of the decisions they make as their characters both good and bad. That while I will work with them to fill in gaps as they come up, they can't use this to pull a rabbit out of the hat and save the day. It works because I make sure the good consequences happens while some referee only seem to focus on making the bad consequences happen.

very nice reply here...bravo!
:worship:

Quote from: Bill White;459258S&Z are indeed mainly concerned with videogames, and they are skeptical of approaches that see more powerful simulation--flashier graphics and so forth--as the key to producing better play. A game's quality as a game is not necessarily connected to how good its graphics are, just like a movie's quality as a movie is not necessarily connected to how good its special effects are. Understanding the graphics or the SFX as the point of the thing misses the point of why you're creating it in the first place. Arguably, those things should be deployed in the service of a better game or a better story. At least, that's S&Z's position. You can disagree, and say that better graphics are just better, period, but their reasoning is clear, and the position that fancy graphics do not make a game good is actually rather a commonplace.

There's a general principle in this ("good graphics" != "good gameplay") which is pretty much undeniably true. But I find the application of the principle flawed because it ignores the complex reality of how people appreciate media.

This touches on something I mentioned earlier in the thread: People come to roleplaying games with all kinds of agendas -- roleplaying, socializing, world-building, story-creation, tactical mastery, problem solving, and so forth. It's why roleplaying games can successfully incorporate dissociated mechanics that serve agendas other than pure roleplaying and still be successful games. (Because most people are not rabid purists.)

Similarly, people certainly do appreciate good gameplay when it comes to video games. It's probably (but not necessarily) the primary reason they play video games.

But people also play video games for lots of other reasons. And "spectacle" (in the form of better graphics among other things) is almost self-evidently one of those reasons.

Those who think that "better graphics" are the be-all and end-all of game design are making a mistake. But, OTOH, those who think that "better gameplay" is the be-all and end-all of game design are also making a mistake.

Quote from: CRKrueger;459205The immersive fallacy as applied to Game Theory really doesn't apply as much to a traditional RPG.  The fallacy basically concerns itself with immersion being the most important design goal, when in a "game", the goals themselves should be the design goal.

There is the actual thing being simulated, and then there is the game.  Game design should concern itself with "the gap", what lies between the perfect object and the simulation.

The term "immersion" has become almost meaningless in game design discussions because the definition has been completely smeared out. But in this case I believe it's being used to mean "achieving a simulation of reality so perfect that people are fooled by it".

With that in mind, I think there is a similar phenomenon that can manifest in tabletop games. It was probably most prevalent in the '80s, I think, when you look at all those games that just try to generically simulate reality.

What's interesting about those systems is that I do find them useful because they can be so broadly applied. But without the other half of the equation -- without the structure of play -- it's like having a hammer with no nails.

This is something that gets overlooked a lot in RPG design: One of the things that made D&D so accessible to new players (no matter how complicated its rules got) was that it had a default structure of play (the dungeoncrawl).

I've seen STGs end up in the same problem from a different angle: They give you all these marvelous tools for narrative control but... well... what do you do with them?

Of course, one of the interesting things about RPGs is that this structure can be created and modified on the fly by the GM (which is why so many games do, in fact, get away without providing a basic game structure). But the flip side of this is that many GMs seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that these game structures exist. (Which is how you can get GMs who think that hexcrawls are actually open-ended simulations of reality, as opposed to a very specific game structure which can be effective for certain types of play and horribly ineffective for other types of play in the same game world and even in the same campaign).